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- Here Are The Winners Of The One-Sentence Pitch Competition
- Buffer Has Scheduled 10M Social Updates And Signed Up 180K Users
- A Closer Look: Facebook’s Operating Margins Decline With Growing Headcount, International Growth
- Google Outs Google Drive On Its French Blog: Here Are All The Details
- With $1.5M From Adecco, Path.To Wants To Be The EHarmony For Jobs In Silicon Valley And Beyond
- Google Opens New ‘Devices’ Section In The Google Play Store To Sell The Unlocked Galaxy Nexus
- Pencil Us In: Details On TC’s NYC Mini Meet-Up And A Thanks To Our Sponsors
- The Rise Of Instagram: Tracking The App’s Spread Worldwide
- Shared Task List Maker Asana Gets A New Pose For Big Groups, Adds Premium Workspaces
- AT&T’s Q1 By The Numbers: $31.8 Billion In Revenue, 5.5 Million Smartphones Sold
- DG Buys AdTech Player Peer39 For $15.5M After Peer39 Raised Nearly $30M In Its Lifetime
- Fly Or Die: HTC One S
- The GDrive Plot Thickens: Google Docs Users Now Have 5GB Of Space
- Wild Berry Report: Chinese iPhones Smell Of Pineapple, Mango, And Apple
- Skype Video Calling Comes To The Playstation Vita
- Yammer Updates iOS And Android Apps, Adds Universal Search And More To Enterprise Social Network
- Travora Media Acquires Local Travel Planning Platform NileGuide
- Fwix Becomes Radius, A Tool For Salespeople Targeting Local Businesses
- With $1.3M From Voyager & More, Chirpify Brings Direct Music, Ticket Sales To Twitter
- Forrester: 760M Tablets In Use By 2016, Apple ‘Clear Leader’, Frames Also Enter The Frame
| Here Are The Winners Of The One-Sentence Pitch Competition Posted: 24 Apr 2012 09:15 AM PDT  Over the weekend, we hosted a fun contest from the Founder Institute, where entrepreneurs posted a one-sentence pitch for their companies. We received more than 450 pitches, of which 421 followed the designated format (“My company, _(insert name of company)_, is developing _(a defined offering)_ to help _(a defined audience)_ _(solve a problem)_ with _(secret sauce)_”). Now, Adeo Ressi and his team have spent 15 hours to go through all of the entries, and they’ve chosen their winners. You can see the winning pitches, as well as Ressi’s commentary, below. If you’re a winner or a runner up, use this contact form to claim your prizes (a Founder Institute scholarship and a table at the Founder Showcase for the winner, a VIP pass to the showcase for the runners up). The event will be held in San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center starting from 1pm to 8pm today, which means that it starts in … a little less than four hours. (Why yes, this was incredibly well-planned, why do you ask?) So you probably want to claim your prize now. WINNER - This idea will resonate with every business traveler, especially if it is executed in an easy to use way. When you spend over 15% of your life on an airplane, it starts to matter who you sit next to: Jeff Clavier en route to Singapore or… This could have a real impact on the displeasure of travel. 5 RUNNERS UP: - The idea is excellent. We made some edits to improve the pitch, which cost the pitch the winning slow. Inspiring the community to help ensure education is a noble goal. “My company, LintinZone, is developing a social shipping network to help customers buy stuff from all over the world without worrying about the cost and availability of international shipping and travelers earn extra money during their trips.” - This is a very original idea. It seems perfect for the growing reality of global commerce and youth travel. Who knows if it will work, but major applause for originality. “My company, GiftWoo, is developing a gift recommendation engine to help men foster better relationships through periodic and thoughtful romantic gestures, utilizing behavioral science, models of preference and social trends.” - Most men probably need this. The demographic is too broad, but the need is real. The simplicity of the pitch works. “My company, Bragnation, is developing a virtual stock market to help startups reach their target audience by allowing them to virtually trade shares with their friends and the community.” - The idea for a virtual stock market is interesting. Everything else is being measured. Why not measure the potential of a new startup, and then reward that potential with real beta users. “My company, Zoot Interactive, is developing a mobile app to help college students find free food on campus in partnerships with organizations to increase traffic at their events.” - This seems so logical. Companies want access to youth. Students want free stuff, particularly decent food. Voila! TOP ALTERNATIVES: “My company, Aspird.com, is developing a mobile app to help public restroom users check-in and share their aspirations and wishes while having a bowel movement with – the secret sauce – an instant community feedback system supported by an interest and location based ads aggregator.” - Hold on, I’ll be right back… Yes, it’s with secret sauce. “My company, CartCliq, is developing a mobile app that will help roommates and couples quickly create and auto-merge their shopping lists into one master list that can be updated between them in real time, thereby eliminating the need for said shoppers to utter the words, ‘but I’m already at the checkout.’, ‘Dude, can you watch my cart while I run to the back of the store for soy butter?’ or ‘No, I didn’t see your text… yes, I’ll turn the car around and get more Red Bull.’ ever again.” - Duuuuuude! “My company, Dropdock, is developing a cross-platform software to help anyone.” - Awesome!
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| Buffer Has Scheduled 10M Social Updates And Signed Up 180K Users Posted: 24 Apr 2012 08:50 AM PDT  When we last covered Buffer, a service for scheduling your social media sharing, the startup had just raised $400,000, and its founders were relocating from San Francisco to Hong Kong due to expiring visas. It sounds like the immigration situation hasn’t been entirely resolved, and most of the team is still in Hong Kong — but on the bright side, Buffer’s growth has continued. Buffer is designed for marketers and other folks who want to maintain an active social media presence without actually spending every second of their day on Facebook and Twitter. You can load the service up with content that you want to share, then it automatically gets posted throughout the day. Co-founder Leonhard Widrich tells me that on Monday, Buffer posted its 10 millionth update. The service is now posting one update every second. “To put things into perspective, it took us over 5 months to reach an overall of 100,000 updates sent – which we are now sending out every day,” he says. That means the content shared on Buffer has doubled since January, when it hit the 5 million update mark. Widrich says that there are two big factors driving Buffer’s growth — the integration of the Buffer sharing button across more than 10,000 sites, and also integration with mobile apps like Pocket (the rebranded version of Read It Later). Buffer now has 180,000 registered users, Widrich says. As for returning to the US, Widrich says the team plans to make the move back in July.
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| A Closer Look: Facebook’s Operating Margins Decline With Growing Headcount, International Growth Posted: 24 Apr 2012 08:23 AM PDT  One thing that has been remarkable about Facebook is its willingness to expand in developing markets that many other consumer Internet companies would otherwise write off because they’re hard to monetize. But that growth abroad plus the company’s increasing headcount and share-based compensation expenses are eating into its operating margins, according to yesterday’s earnings numbers from a revised IPO filing. Facebook made $381 million in operating income (or 36 percent of its $1.06 billion in revenue) in the first quarter of this year. That’s down from $388 million in operating income (or 53 percent of its $731 million in revenue) from a year ago. Net income is actually down 12 percent year-over-year to $205 million from $233 million a year ago. What gives? A couple of things: 1) Share-based compensation is a huge part of it. These expenses came in at $103 million for the first quarter, up from $7 million a year earlier. If you take it out, operating margins are still down year-over-year, but not by as much. Net income would actually increase overall from $240 million a year ago to $308 million. This isn’t necessarily a one-off though. Below is what Facebook expects to pay in share-based compensation expenses for the next several years in the hypothetical case that the IPO happened on March 31. After that, Facebook will have to find ways of continuing to attract and incentivize the best technical talent if there is no longer as much as upside to its equity. That will be expensive, considering the options that the best engineers have at growing companies across Silicon Valley. If Facebook can’t lure them away from other startups with stock, it will have to bump up the cash component of compensation. 2) Growth is happening in emerging markets, where revenue per user is lower than it is in mature markets like the U.S. Overall, Facebook’s average revenue per user (or ARPU) climbed 6 percent year-over-year to $1.21 in the first quarter, but that pace was weighed by growth in developing countries. Facebook says, “The sequential decline in ARPU in the first quarter of 2012 was affected by the fact that our user growth was higher in geographies with relatively lower ARPU.” Is this a bad thing? It depends on how you’re thinking about it. In online advertising, the spoils will go to those who have scale. As a platform reaching 900 million users with very targeted data about pretty much all of them, Facebook is becoming a must-have for any online display advertising campaign (if it isn’t already). Furthermore, the key markets Facebook is growing in happen to be some of the largest, fastest-growing economies in the world. Facebook had 45 million monthly actives in Brazil last month, up 180 percent from a year earlier. That gives them a penetration rate of about 30 to 40 percent in the country, according to the filing. Facebook is also growing in India, where it had 51 million monthly actives last month or more than double what it was a year earlier. That may not sound like that much in a country of 1.2 billion people, but keep in mind that India has low Internet penetration. Plus, many of these users experience Facebook solely through their mobile phones, which the company hasn’t completely figured out how to monetize yet. Facebook estimated that about 83 million of its monthly actives globally use the service only through their phones last month. Facebook also thinks of itself as a mission-driven company, which exists to connect everyone in the world. You can debate the sincerity of those intentions, but getting every person on the planet connected to the network is what the company intends to do. 3) Overall growth in headcount. Even if you take out share-based compensation, Facebook’s costs for building and maintaining data centers and then hiring extra sales employees and engineers are rising at a faster pace than revenue is growing. Cost of revenues is up 66 percent year-over-year, mostly because of data center costs. If you look at marketing and sales costs, those are double what they were a year ago excluding share-based compensation. Frankly, this is the less scalable part of the business. Facebook needs to hire more sales and customer service employees as it adds offices around the world. Research and development, or engineering, is also growing at a faster pace than revenues. But not by as much as other departments are if you take out share-based compensation expenses. Engineering is the jewel of the company. The company prides itself on having about 1 million users per engineer if not more, so like I said above, it will have to spend to attract the best especially after upside is fully priced into Facebook shares after the IPO. 4) Lastly, declining margins are natural as a company matures: Facebook actually says this in the filing.
Advertising revenue is scaling pretty much proportionally to user growth: They’re up 37 percent year-over-year to $872 million. Guess what’s also up by about that much? Monthly active usage, which also grew 32 percent year-over-year to 901 million. To grow advertising revenues, Facebook needs to do one of two things. It either needs to get more users. Or it needs to get its current users more addicted (I mean, “engaged”) and exposed to more ads that are better-targeted. Right now, sheer growth in the user base is compensating for slow growth in revenue per user. Facebook said the average price per ad for the first quarter of 2012 was unchanged compared to a year earlier, although it increased in key markets like the U.S. and Canada. It actually declined in Europe because of a weak local economy there. It’s not a great sign that ad prices are actually declining in mature markets like Europe. But Facebook also has some remarkable cards up its sleeves. With ”like” buttons and more scattered about the web, Facebook could launch a web-wide display advertising network. The company has never confirmed this, but it’s a painfully obvious opportunity. Payments revenue is maturing for gaming apps, so the question is where will it grow next? While payments and other fees revenue is almost double what it was a year ago at $186 million in the first quarter, it’s not really clear that how much this can climb unless Facebook pushes Credits for other types of apps. Payments and fees revenue is flat on the quarter. Because I hear about the exact same seasonal trends in revenue for apps on the iOS and Android platforms, that by itself isn’t that worrying. What is concerning is that revenues for casual games on the Facebook canvas are maturing. You can see a very visible quarter-over-quarter slowdown in Zynga bookings, but I also hear about it anecdotally from many second and third-tier developers who frankly don’t find the Facebook canvas as attractive a place to be anymore. There are only a handful of sizable gaming companies that are making noticeable investments Facebook canvas games like Germany’s Wooga, King.com and midcore developers like Kixeye. Many others are simply moving off toward iOS or Android. The easy days of high virality and fat profit margins are over for Facebook game developers. It’s becoming more about making real, high-quality games. Growth will either come from non-casual games like the ones made by Kixeye, or it will have to come from other kinds of non-gaming apps. Facebook acknowledges this, saying, “We may seek to extend the use of Payments to other types of apps in the future.” Since Facebook made Credits mandatory for canvas games last July, It would be ideal if Facebook could start a big push for payments in other types of apps around the same time this year. That way the company can show favorable year-over-year growth.
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| Google Outs Google Drive On Its French Blog: Here Are All The Details Posted: 24 Apr 2012 08:14 AM PDT  After years of rumors, it looks like the Google Drive has finally arrived. While we are still waiting for official word from Google, but earlier today, the company apparently mistakenly posted the French translation of its announcement to its French blog (and quickly deleted it, of course). Thankfully, intrepid Google+ user François Bacconnet made a copy and shared it on Google’s social network. Assuming the post is genuine – and we have no reason to believe it is not – here is what we now know about Google Drive:
Here is the full post courtesy of Google+ user Gerwin Sturm and Google Translate (you can find the French original here):
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| With $1.5M From Adecco, Path.To Wants To Be The EHarmony For Jobs In Silicon Valley And Beyond Posted: 24 Apr 2012 08:03 AM PDT  The job-hunting market today is getting a little more social: Path.to, a kind of About.me-meets-LinkedIn service that lets people create image-filled, sleek professional profiles for themselves online, is today relaunching itself as a network to connect those professionals with job openings. And taking a pro-tip from the matchmaking site eHarmony, Path.to has developed an algorithm to create “compatibility” scores between job seekers and job vacancies using data from social media sites as part of the mix. It says it is the first online job service to offer this feature. It is also today announcing a $1.5 million round of strategic funding from HR giant Adecco to help it along the way. Started in August 2011 by Cliqset founder Darren Bounds, Path.to went dark in March in preparation for this newest version of itself. It is kicking off its service targeting Silicon Valley and a hiring quandary specific to the tech industry: a high demand for interactive designers, software engineers and others skilled in IT, and plans to extend that to Chicago and New York later this year. The first wave of jobs features openings from more than 100 companies, including Eventbrite, Evernote, Lytro and Uber. And Bounds notes that Adecco will soon also be posting jobs on the site, too. The service is free to use for job-seekers. For employers, it is free for the first 90 days. After that it will be a pay-per-post model with discounts for volume. Each job is live for 30 days. To find compatibility, Path.to will offer users a “Path.to score”, a ranking system for both the applicants and the companies in question. The Path.to score is not based just on a person’s previous employment background, but a number of other factors where the social element really kicks in. They include a user’s social graph — based on Twitter and Facebook activity; and a person’s contributions to and general reputation on sites like Behance, Dribbble, Forrst and Github. The site is also trying to add more human elements into the mix: Path.to says it will incorporate “information about what is important to the user in their next position such as dress code, benefits and culture to better pair applicants with companies that closely match their ideal place to work.” And on the subject of past employment history, Path.to is putting emphasis on endorsements from others on top of the basic fact of having worked somewhere. There is an obvious opportunity to extend Path.to to other markets outside of the Bay Area, but if you think about it, even focusing on the single vertical of tech could open Path.to to be used elsewhere: London startups, for example, also lament about the difficulty of finding talent to fill out their teams. Check out the interview below that my colleague Leena did with Darren, covering things like the working of the site itself; what makes Path.to different from would-be competitors like LinkedIn or BranchOut; how “marquee” startups like Evernote deal with the huge wave of applications that they get for job openings; and how a company like Path.to can help with that issue.
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| Google Opens New ‘Devices’ Section In The Google Play Store To Sell The Unlocked Galaxy Nexus Posted: 24 Apr 2012 08:01 AM PDT  And just like that, Google is selling smartphones again. Andy Rubin, Google’s SVP of Mobile and Digital Content, just officially pulled back the curtains on a new section in the Google Play Store where Google will offer hardware directly to customers. The first device to go on sale is the unlocked GSM version of Samsung’s venerable Galaxy Nexus, which will sell for $399 but only in the U.S. (for now, anyway). Google has been down this path before when they began selling the unlocked, unsubsidized Nexus One back in 2010. The plan, as you may already know, didn’t work out so well. When it came time to launch the Nexus S, Google and Samsung decided to take a more traditional approach to handset sales by offering it exclusively at Best Buy stores across the country. For what it’s worth, Google seems to have learned from the missteps made back when the Nexus One was the Android handset to beat — with Google, HTC, and T-Mobile fingerprints all over the original Nexus, the question for some customers was about who they should turn to for support. Rubin notes that the company has “implemented new customer support services to improve the purchasing experience on Google Play,” but by selling a device with an unlocked pentaband GSM radio, users will have to deal directly with carriers for service and provisioning. With a new section in the Google Play Store meant specifically for hardware now open, it’s hard not to think of recent rumors that Google will soon be offering a slew of co-branded tablets directly to consumers. It seems unlikely to me that Google would carve out a space in the Google Play Store if their intentions were to simply sell an unlocked Galaxy Nexus and nothing more — after all, it’s called the Devices section. Google representatives were understandably tight-lipped about what sort of hardware would eventually find its way to the Devices section, though it’s easy to see how tablets would be a good fit. While the Galaxy Nexus is a great device (my Verizon unit accompanies me everywhere), phones only represent one aspect of the Google/Android ecosystem. Tablets, after all, provide a distinctly different user experience and their bigger screens would lend themselves well to some of the content types Google offers in the Google Play store. I can’t imagine that Google wouldn’t want to offer a tablet or two to capitalize on the strength of their media environment down the road, but for now we’ll just have to make do with a wonderful Android handset.
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| Pencil Us In: Details On TC’s NYC Mini Meet-Up And A Thanks To Our Sponsors Posted: 24 Apr 2012 07:30 AM PDT  That was quick. Sponsorship positions for the TechCrunch Mini Meet-Up in NYC are officially filled, and boy is this thing going to be awesome! If you aren’t already aware (and shame on you, if you aren’t), we’re having a little get-together for the tech/startup industry here in the Big Apple on May 8. It’ll be held at Bar13 on University Pl. and 13th St. from 6pm-10pm and we expect 500 people there at the very least. Even more awesome, you guys aren’t the only ones who are stoked to get in on the action — we’ll have even more TC staff here than expected. Along with John Biggs and myself, Chris Velazco, Matt Burns, Eric Eldon, Peter Ha, Josh Zelman and possibly Alexia Tsotsis will be in attendance. In fact, we may even get Arianna Huffington herself to come check out the festivities. Very exciting. If ever there was a great way to network your arse off while drinking beer and potentially singing a little Karaoke, this would be it. So if you haven’t already RSVP’d, head on over to our PlanCast page and get yourself on the list. We need a headcount. You know, for the beer. We’d also like to thank our wonderful sponsors for making this entire thing possible:
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| The Rise Of Instagram: Tracking The App’s Spread Worldwide Posted: 24 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT  The industry just can’t stop analyzing the Instagram success story, and this month, it’s app store analytics firm Distimo’s turn to take a crack at it. The company, which typically releases reports revealing notable mobile app and app marketplace trends, has turned its focus to the rise of Instagram. In its latest report, Distimo looked at how Instagram became successful, how it spread across the world, how the app’s usage compares to the number of downloads it received and more. Instagram was launched about a year and a half ago, in October 2010. At the time, Distimo says the app was seeing under 10,000 downloads per day in the U.S. However, by April 2012, Instagram was generating well over 100,000 downloads per day in the iTunes App Store in the U.S. Using data from real-time photo search engine Skylines in conjunction with its own, Distimo charted the app download increases from May 2011 to April of this year, and found that the cumulative downloads of Instagram were about 7 times higher in March 2012 than in May 2011. Instagram shares on Twitter had also increased more than 12 times – a metric that matters even more than downloads to some extent, because it points to active users and the average number of shares per user increasing. After the release of the Android app and the Facebook acquisition, Instagram downloads increased to become around eight times higher than in May 2011. Shares also spiked to increase more than 20 times over May 2011. Distimo then examined how the app fared outside the U.S. by analyzing trends in the top non-U.S. markets: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea and the U.K. Combined with the U.S., which alone accounts for 25% of the free downloads in the App Store for iPhone, these countries generate around 72% of the free app downloads. Interestingly enough, Instagram is not equally successful in all these markets. It took Instagram only one day to reach the number one position in the Photography category in the App Store for iPhone in the U.S., but it took it over a year and a half in Korea and nearly two months in China. The reason for the slower rise is that these markets showed a preference for apps like Instagram, but that allowed sharing to local networks like Sina, QQ Space and me2day. Instagram never reached the Top 300 apps list one day post-launch in China and Korea, and in Germany it only made it to position #288 one day post-launch, then disappeared off the top 300 list for a week. In English-speaking countries, however, the app followed the same general course as it did in the U.S. It rose in popularity during the first month, dipped in December 2010, then rose again gradually during 2011, eventually becoming the most popular app in the whole iTunes App Store. During March and April 2012, Instagram has never been ranked lower than the top 35 overall app in English-speaking countries. In Australia, the U.S. and Canada, it never dropped out of the top 25 during the same time. Meanwhile, in Italy, Instagram followed the same general pattern as in the U.S. over the past year, but in France, Germany, China and Korea, it lagged behind in popularity when compared with the U.S. Instagram has been fairly popular through the entire period in Japan, but its popularity grew less there over the year than it did elsewhere, with its average monthly rank between 35 and 85. In Japan, Italy and Australia, Instagram became a top 10 app within a month of its launch. In Germany, the U.S. and Canada, it took around 350 days. The moment it reached that spot coincided with when Instagram announced it reached 10 million users. Twitter sharing had also increased, with over 200,000 pictures posted to the network in one day via Instagram – 14% more than a week prior. In China, Instagram never made it into the top 10 position. The highest it has been there is #12, which it reached on April 11, 2012. While most of Distimo’s report looks into iTunes trends, Instagram did launch on Android on April 3, 2012. When Google’s algorithm began ranking the app a few days post-launch, it was already a huge success. By April 6, it was #3 in the U.S. Google Play store. Similar to iPhone trends, the app was most popular in the U.S. and less popular in Korea and China. It never made the top 300 in Korea and ranked #48 in China. In all English-speaking countries and Italy, Instagram reached the #1 spot in days and in France, the Android version became more popular than the iPhone version, reaching spot #9. In Germany, however, Instagram only reached #51. The industry, media, pundits, and critics alike have been analyzing Instagram’s phenomenal rise over the past months, and debating whether it was worth the $1 billion price tag Facebook paid. Distimo says Instagram certainly “made its mark on the app market,” noting also that Instagram is a new kind of social network – one built entirely from an app. That alone was reason enough for Facebook to take interest, we’d say. Adds Distimo: “Instagram definitely proved the app store economy is something everybody should keep an eye on as the next big thing might just come from an app store.”
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| Shared Task List Maker Asana Gets A New Pose For Big Groups, Adds Premium Workspaces Posted: 24 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT  Asana has been slowly sleeping across TechCrunch lately, and the low-key but ambitious company revealed last week that it has been doing the same elsewhere – Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Airbnb are some of the other workplaces it’s been showing up. And today, the shared task-list maker is rolling out the next part of its enterprise plan. It will now be officially available to teams of more than 30 people, via a monthly membership fee. Prices start at $300 per month for up to 50 teammates, with 75 and 100-person groups running higher. Those who subscribe will be able to use project-level permissions, which co-founder Justin Rosenstein tells me is one of the more sought-after features so far. It’s a smart one to charge for, as large groups can typically afford the cost, and have use cases that require it. People in these Premium Workspaces plans will also get priority support; the product may be simple, but when you get into a big organization, someone is bound to have questions. The product will otherwise stay free for teams under 30, although they can also pay $100 a month for project permissions and support. The big picture, as Josh wrote last week, is about building a centralized tool that naturally fits into any project you’re trying to get done. Instead of trying to build a fancy superstructure of features like older enterprise software companies, it has focused on the humble task list as the the most important feature to help people organize and complete their work more quickly. Rosenstein and co-founder Dustin Moskovitz hope to one day offer a work graph. It’d be like Facebook’s social graph, but for any type of task that you need to get done with anyone else — a way for people get their work out of email and into something they can actually keep track of. And, customizable via the developer platform it just introduced last week. If it wasn’t obvious already, the founders’ background building Facebook in the early days made its mark, and now Asana is on its way to taking on the world, becoming the Facebook of work.
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| AT&T’s Q1 By The Numbers: $31.8 Billion In Revenue, 5.5 Million Smartphones Sold Posted: 24 Apr 2012 06:57 AM PDT  We’re in the thick of earnings season now, and earlier today telecom titan AT&T jumped into the fray with their Q1 2012 financials. AT&T posted a profit of $0.60 per share on revenues of $31.8 billion — a 1.8% leap year over year — beating analyst expectations. Of that $31.8 billion total, AT&T reports that over half ($16.1 billion, specifically) was generated by their wireless business. The nation’s second largest wireless carrier also posted a net gain of 726,000 subscribers in Q1 — a staggering drop from the record-setting 2.8 million subs that inked deals with AT&T last quarter, though those numbers are skewed a bit because of the big holiday buying push. Meanwhile, rival Verizon managed to pull ahead this quarter by reported a net gain of 734,000 subs. AT&T also sold 5.5 million smartphones during the quarter — a new first quarter record for the carrier — and activated 4.3 million iPhones. While I’m sure AT&T is pleased with their strong smartphone sales, the benefit of moving all those devices extends beyond just new records and increased wireless data revenue (which increased nearly 20% year-over-year to $6.1 billion). What AT&T is really excited about is that their rate of wireless churn (how many people end their service with the company) has slowed a bit — AT&T is sitting at 1.1%, their lowest in a full seven quarters. The company pegs much of this on their strong performance with smartphones, as they note that the churn rate among their smartphone customers is significantly lower than for other contracted customers. Oh, and AT&T’s wireline business? Things were a little less impressive, as the company reported total wireline revenues of $14.9 billion, down .08% year-over-year. Voice revenues were down, but that was countered by growth in the business and consumer services areas — in addition to reporting solid growth in their business data revenues, AT&T managed to grow their U-Verse subscriber base by 200,000 TV customers and 103,000 wireline broadband connections.
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| DG Buys AdTech Player Peer39 For $15.5M After Peer39 Raised Nearly $30M In Its Lifetime Posted: 24 Apr 2012 06:53 AM PDT  We are seeing a lot of activity in the world of advertising technology — from funding rounds to new product launches — but it’s not all good news, and inevitably consolidation is coming, too: Peer39, an adtech provider based in New York and Israel, is getting bought by offline and online ad management and ad distribution company DG. The price: $15.5 million — roughly about half of what Peer39 had raised from investors over the course of six years. The cash-and-stock deal will see DG pay $10 million in cash, with the rest in shares, as well as a $2.3 million earn out payment, the companies noted in a statement. The acquisition will see the CEO of Peer39, Andy Ellenthal, become EVP for DG’s global sales and operations. Peer39 will become part of DG’s digital division, MediaMind, another Israeli company that DG bought in June 2011 for shares totaling $517 million. Its webpage-level data analysis, which works without the use of cookies, will be added to MediaMind’s real-time bidding offering. Although there were customers for the product, the purchase underscores the fact that there may not be as much business in this space at the moment to justify the investment being made in it — or, to paraphrase AdAge, businesses that are actually just products or features. Or it could be that the market has still not become mature enough to have room for this new wave of advertising technology. Investors including Canaan Partners, Dawntreader Ventures, Highbridge Capital, Evergreen Venture Partners, JP Morgan’s SVB Financial Group and Dan Ciporen and John Medved had put at least $27.4 million into Peer39 (the Israeli newspaper Globes puts total investment at $30 million). DG also noted that it expects its Q1 revenues, which will be reported on May 9, to be $92.7 million, with a good performance in its traditional TV business helping it slightly exceed expectations.
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| Posted: 24 Apr 2012 06:36 AM PDT  The One S is the middle child in HTC’s new line of hero devices, not quite as badass as the One X, but a bit bigger than baby brother One V. As is the case with any middle child, it’s a bit easy to overlook. But John and I decided to give it some attention anyway, and like usual, we didn’t find much common ground. See, the One S has some excellent hardware. I would argue that to the ground. Its slim aluminum unibody casing is a sight to behold, and it feels light and premium to boot. But at the end of the day, this is yet another Android phone. Sure, it’s got a pretty new version of Sense laid on top of Android 4.0, but there’s no real wow factor. Even so, HTC has built out a nice little ecosystem with the help of Dropbox and Beats by Dre, which brings some added value to the $200 handset. You certainly win some and you lose some with this guy, which may explain the division between John and I.
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| The GDrive Plot Thickens: Google Docs Users Now Have 5GB Of Space Posted: 24 Apr 2012 06:31 AM PDT  User Hariprasanth sent us a strange missive: it seems that if you upload something to Google Docs today, your storage space immediately increases from 1GB to 5GB. I didn’t believe him at first – it said 1GB as I was uploading – but immediately after the upload finished it read 5GB. Given everything we know about GDrive so far, including that it should launch with 5GB free storage and that the original Docs accounts were capped at 1GB, things look pretty good for an immanent release. As you recall, we have a copy of the GDrive app that was floating around and it still won’t work with our current accounts. An ex-Googler tried the app and found he wasn’t able to run it on his machine. If all of this is correct, services like Dropbox and Sugarsync had better batten the hatches.
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| Wild Berry Report: Chinese iPhones Smell Of Pineapple, Mango, And Apple Posted: 24 Apr 2012 06:30 AM PDT  Go plug in your iPhone, wait a few minutes and then take a big whiff over the headphone jack. Smell anything? Well, there are widespread reports in China that their phones smell like fruit. Seriously. Owners are stating that their Apple iPhones actually smell like apples. As M.I.C. Gadget reports, it’s a popular topic on China’s Sina Weibo microblogging social network. Owners claim that during the charging process they can smell the sweet fragrance of pineapple, mango, peach and apple. It seems to be most prevalent around the headphone jack but others state that they can smell it around the volume controls, as well. Apparently some of the organic solvents used in the manufacturing process could be the source. While the iPhone is charging, the internals heat up, causing some of the residue to heat up and emit the smell. One Apple China rep suggested that the smell is from the internal components and advised not to inhale too hard. Oh, another real possibility is that China is trolling the rest of the world, and are currently sitting back, completely satisfied knowing that right now there are millions of iPhone owners innocently smelling their phones.
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| Skype Video Calling Comes To The Playstation Vita Posted: 24 Apr 2012 06:18 AM PDT  A while ago, people opined that the PS Vita – despite horrible battery life and a dearth of compelling game titles – could become a sort of “gamers iPad,” a tool that ends up being more than just a console. That dream is coming closer to fruition with the announcement of Skype for Vita. The Vita can now make voice and video calls and you can even receive calls in the background while playing games. Skype credit allows you to call out to landline phones. While the addition of the Skype app doesn’t make the Vita a fully-fledged cellphone, the app does support Wi-Fi and 3G WLAN calls and essentially makes the device the N-Gage everyone always wanted. The app will be available for download in the Vita app store tomorrow. It will be free.
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| Yammer Updates iOS And Android Apps, Adds Universal Search And More To Enterprise Social Network Posted: 24 Apr 2012 06:08 AM PDT  Fresh off its first acquisition and $85 million in new funding, Yammer is debuting a number of product improvements in a new release for its social network for enterprises. The company has added universal search, premium groups, official content, Yammer embed, a new Office 365 integration, and updated mobile apps. Yammer is also announcing that it has surpassed five million corporate users and increased headcount to more than 300 employees As you may know, Yammer has evolved into a more comprehensive, Facebook-like platform for social networking within the enterprise. Beyond being just a communications platform, Yammer now includes applications such as polls, chat, events, links, topics, Q&A, ideas and more. An activity feed aggregates stories about co-worker actions within all of their enterprise apps (both on and off Yammer) and allows users to follow content. The next step of this evolution is adding actual business functionality such as editing and file syncing to the platform. Universal Search allows business data from any enterprise application to be accessed in Yammer's search engine. The feature uses Yammer's existing Activity Stream API, so third-party content from any activity stream integrations automatically appears in search. As we’ve reported, Salesforce.com, SAP and Microsoft SharePoint data can all be added into Yammer’s activity stream, and now is searchable. Selection of a third-party record in search seamlessly opens that system in a separate tab. The API contains features to respect the permissions of the underlying applications, so only employees authorized to view a record can find it. And search results are type-ahead based on a relevance algorithm individualized to each user and categorized into People, Groups, Files, Pages, Topics and Applications. Additionally, files, pages and conversations are full-text searchable. Another new feature in this release includes an upgrade to premium groups, with increased file storage limits and advanced admin controls. Admins can change group privacy settings, mark content as official and read-only, make group announcements, or delete any member's messages, files and Pages. A new tier of Premium Groups offers teams and departments the ability to upgrade their Yammer group without paying for the whole company. Previously Yammer only offered admin functionality at the network level. Yammer is ramping up content sharing with a new Share button, which allows conversations, files and Pages to be cross-posted from one group to another or to start a private message about a file, Page or conversation. A new Email File button enables employees to email third-parties such as customers and partners a secure, one-time URL to view a file or Page. The link cookies the recipient's browser and can only be used once to ensure that only the intended recipient can view the content. Viewing rights can be revoked at any time. Embeds are now turned on for every Yammer group. Appearing next to every group feed, a embed code can be copied and pasted to add a Yammer feed widget inside any business application. Only logged-in users logged can view the embedded feed; otherwise, they are prompted to log in. The embed widget automatically sizes to fit the available space. A new webpart for Microsoft Office 365 allows users to embed their Yammer feed directly into Office 365. And Yammer is launching a new connecter for Microsoft Access. Yammer is also updating its iPhone and Android with slide-out navigation and an improved UI with in-line file thumbnails, access to more file types and a cleaner design. CEO and co-founder David Sacks tells us that while this release is comprehensive, the summer release will have twice as many new features, including OneDrop integration. He adds that this is thanks to the rapid hiring of engineers.
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| Travora Media Acquires Local Travel Planning Platform NileGuide Posted: 24 Apr 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Travel ad platform Travora Media is acquiring The Nile Project, the parent company of one-stop travel planning site NileGuide, local recommendations platform 10Best.com, and mobile, local travel guide Localyte. Financial terms of the acquisition were not released. Founded in 2006, NileGuide allows you to create customized trip itineraries; and aims to be the go-to guide for all local travel planning (meaning where to stay, eat, visit etc.). NileGuide has received $13 million in funding from investors including Draper Richards, KPG Ventures, Austin Ventures, and Tenaya Capital. NileGuide made a number of acquisitions along the way. First, the startup acquired local travel site Localyte to add local expert advice to its platform. Last year, NileGuide bought 10Best.com, an online travel guide that provides recommendations for the most popular attractions, hotels, restaurants, events and more in hundreds of cities around the world. The combined platforms add over a million new travelers to Travora’s travel-focused ad network, which currently reaches more than 26 million travel consumers.
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| Fwix Becomes Radius, A Tool For Salespeople Targeting Local Businesses Posted: 24 Apr 2012 05:42 AM PDT  Remember how most companies don’t sell practically overnight for $1 billion and it actually takes years before a startup finds its “Aha!” moment and narrows in on a working business model? Yes, we have one of those stories today. Fwix, which started out as a hyperlocal news aggregator, is metamorphosing into an enterprise-facing company called Radius that gives salespeople the tools and data they need to scout local businesses. It’s a big bet. While Radius had some early success making in the “low millions” of dollars per year selling access to its content to media companies, its chief executive Darian Shirazi saw a much bigger market opportunity in targeting companies that sell services to small businesses. “I’ve always wanted to build a large sustainable company and it turns out that this is very hard to do,” he said. Shirazi is somewhat known for being precociously involved in the early wave of Web 2.0 companies. He was 17 when he joined Facebook, but left two years later when his parents made him go to college. (Yes, really.) After leaving college, he had the urge to do something on his own and the idea for Fwix grew out of his traveling experiences. “I was basically dying to think of how I could organize the web’s information around location,” he said. That turned into a hyperlocal news aggregator complete with an API for real-time local news. But the media industry — as us bloggers know way too well — is an extremely difficult, penny-pinching target market. Fwix remarkably had some success in spite of this, but it wasn’t a big enough market opportunity. Now the new product takes all of the hyperlocal data Fwix used to pull together from Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Localeze, Acxiom and CityGrid and turns it into a dashboard that a salesforce can use to keep tabs on successful local shops. If you look at a local business profile (see below), you’ll see news, tweets, reviews and events tied to the place. This data can also be fed into Salesforce, where companies can keep track of leads and follow-though on potential opportunities. Shirazi says customers like daily deals sites are willing to pay for this because they need to understand which local businesses are actually popular with the community. ”You have to try to treat the business like a creditor would,” he said. “You have to go after businesses that are doing well.” Discovering this opportunity wasn’t actually that difficult, he added. Several customers, in fact, kept asking for a product that fed location data into Salesforce. The hard part was deciding to sunset the company’s other products to focus entirely on this problem. Shirazi says his clients now include companies that have about 40,000 salespeople between them and that the majority of these employees should be on Radius by year-end. ”We’ve only had the product operational for two months and we’ve had customers go from trial into full deployment,” he said. “We know it’s working.” Shirazi says there are 10 million people who sell to small businesses in the U.S. and even if he grabs a small slice of that market by charging $39 per month per seat, it’s a billion dollar opportunity. He says the Radius’ main competitor Dun & Bradstreet doesn’t provide all of this context from user-generated content sites. And for the record, Dun & Bradstreet has a $3.7 billion market capitalization, so yes, this is a bigger opportunity. He says that what Radius does is a much harder technical problem to solve than it appears at surface-level. A business like San Francisco’s Hog & Rocks might be called “Hog and Rocks” in one directory but “Hog & Rocks” in another. Or there might be several coffee shops called “Java Cafe” in one city. “We have to go and correlate all the data. The hardest part of the problem isn’t the data collection. It’s the matching,” he said. Shirazi said all of Fwix’s employees stayed on with the company through the transition process and that he’s just hired his 20th employee. The company has raised $6.75 million in funding from Comcast Ventures and BlueRun Ventures. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes. But that’s how you have to be as an entrepreneur,” he said. “As long as you keep trying, you will eventually stumble upon something that works.”
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| With $1.3M From Voyager & More, Chirpify Brings Direct Music, Ticket Sales To Twitter Posted: 24 Apr 2012 04:42 AM PDT  When you think Twitter, you may think realtime news, or CRM, or brand marketing, or maybe even Justin Bieber, but “eCommerce”? Probably not. In the social network landscape, Facebook is generally seen as the most eCommerce-inclined, what with its “F-Commerce,” but up to this point, consumers really haven’t fallen in love with the idea of brands replicating their storefronts on Facebook. Meanwhile, Twitter’s priorities lie elsewhere, so, in spite of its growth, the social network has yet to leverage its own eCommerce potential. That’s why Portland-based Chirpify has developed a platform that transforms Twitter from a broadcast platform into a transactional one. In February, Chirpify rebranded from SellSimp.ly and launched a Twitter commerce platform that allowed brands and consumers to buy, sell, donate and transact through tweets without leaving the comfort of Twitter. Since launch, Chirpify has seen growing traction, thanks in part to a promotional campaign launched at SXSW, called “Tweet-a-Beer,” which used the startup’s API to allow people to buy each other a pint over Twitter. The campaign resulted in a huge boost of traffic for Chirpify, with two new users signing up every second — activity that Chirpify Founder Chris Teso tells us continued for several weeks after SXSW. Although it’s slowed down a bit since, the campaign proved that direct commerce over Twitter was not only possible, it was so easy a tweet could do it. Today, the startup’s direct sales model for Twitter is officially getting further validation — this time in the form of capital — as the startup announced that it has secured $1.3 million in series A financing. The new round of investment, which adds to the $50K in seed it raised from its incubator Upstart Labs, was led by Voyager Capital, with participation from Geoff Entress, BuddyTV CEO Andy Liu, former Facebook exec Rudy Gadre, Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, and TiE Oregon Angels. Just in case there’s any confusion in terms of how Chirpify works, put simply, when users sign up for Chirpify, they connect their Twitter and PayPal accounts to the platform. Merchants upload whatever they want to sell to their dashboard, and tweet the link. Consumers simply reply to the tweet and include “buy.” Boom, Chirpify sends you a secure download over DM, the cost is deducted from your PayPal account, the funds instantly transferred to the merchant’s account, at which point they get a receipt. Anyone can sell, buy, or donate on Chirpify. Even if the process sounds complicated, it’s not. So, the more one considers the fact that the platform offers a simple way to turn tweets into transactions, and seeing as people already use Twitter to follow their favorite brands, musicians, and other people they care about, why not let users buy the latest product or download the latest song by tweet? Well, in addition to its funding announcement, Chirpify is today launching Twitter Commerce for Digital Content, which enables musicians to sell songs and concert tickets directly to fans on Twitter (with the by-product being increased control of their own distribution). While Chirpify is working with musicians and music labels, at first, the goal Teso says is for this to work for any brand, event, product, or service. (Next, Chirpify plans to work with eBooks vendors, for example.) That’s because the cool thing about Chirpify is it that it works wherever Twitter is, on mobile, desktop, or tablets, and this direct commerce even applies to re-tweets — which has the potential for some serious amplification by allowing for-sale items to reach more streams and thus more eyeballs. But what if your brand or band is already using a storefront to manage transactions? Chirpify also offers integration with existing eCommerce storefronts (like Magento, for example) so that brands can leverage back-end fulfillment, listing, and transaction management. Merchants just click the “list on Twitter” button when creating a listing for sale, either in their eCommerce or Chirpify dashboard, and can then set the price, quantity, shipping price, and shipping timing. Chirpify’s solution starts off free, with the startup taking a 4 percent commission on each transaction, but for those merchants looking to conduct more frequent business using Chirpify, the platform offers an enterprise plan, which is priced on a case-by-case basis. The pricing generally starts at around $500 a month, but removes 4 percent Chirpify commission and adds eCommerce platform integration, priority support, co-branding, etc. For now, Chirpify’s sole payment system is PayPal, but Teso says that they’ve had interest from just about every payment solution out there, and the team plans to add additional payment options in the near future. But for now, Teso says that the company is focused on scaling and will be using its new capital to ramp up hiring, with additional specific forms of digital content (like eBooks) to come later. The solo founder has already had conversations with reps from Twitter, who are following the startup’s progress with interest. Although he wouldn’t comment on any specifics, if Chirpify can sign continue to sign on big brands (HP and Nestle are already using the platform) and get back to that two-new-users-a-second kind of traction, my guess is that those conversations with Twitter would change in tone. Hard not to see Chirpify as being serious acquisition bait down the line. For more on Chirpify, check ‘em out at home here.
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| Forrester: 760M Tablets In Use By 2016, Apple ‘Clear Leader’, Frames Also Enter The Frame Posted: 24 Apr 2012 04:28 AM PDT  Chalk another one up for the mobile revolution: There were 56 million tablets purchased worldwide in 2011, but a new report from Forrester Research predicts that number will explode in the years ahead: its researchers say that there will be 375 million tablets sold by 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of 46 percent, and that by 2016 there will be 760 million tablets in use overall. That will still put tablets a ways behind PCs — there will be 2 billion PCs in use in 2016. But combined with new products like frames (essentially docks for tablets to amp up their functionality), Forrester says that tablets will gradually become the computing device of choice among consumers — especially among those in emerging markets, whose first home computing device will more likely be a tablet than a desktop or laptop PC. Apple, which effectively created the tablet market with the launch of its iPad two years ago, and has been setting the bar for what to make ever since, has seen some reduction in its tablet market share over the last year or two as more competitors have launched products. But Forrester predicts it will manage to hold on to its lead going forward as the market’s “clear leader”, in the words of Forrester researcher Frank Gillett, who also penned a blog post summarizing some of the bigger points in the report. Part of Apple’s strategy to stay on top will be to target newer markets like the enterprise segment — which will represent one third of all tablet buyers by 2016 — and consumers in countries like China. Meanwhile, Android will actually see a net decline in its installed base of tablets by 2015, with Microsoft also gaining ground in the process. (Indeed, another analyst firm, IDC, in March predicted that by 2016 Android tablet shipments will outnumber those of iPad shipments. Shipments are not necessarily sales, however, and does not take into account the size of the installed base.) In particular, Forrester says Google’s network of Android device makers and the ecosystem around them “will struggle” to keep up with Apple in the premium-priced range. Furthermore, Forrester doesn’t see the various issues that have surrounded Android up to now — among them device fragmentation, software support and a variety of Android flavors — improving in the years ahead. (What’s interesting is that Forrester doesn’t seem to think that these same factors will affect the installed base of Android smartphones, which will continue to grow.) The other big challenge for Android, Forrester notes, is the proliferation of forked Android device makers. While we still have no news of Amazon launching a Kindle Fire product outside the U.S., Forrester is very bullish on how it, and others making forked Android tablets, will fare. While Forrester says that Samsung and low-priced tablet makers will “stay the course” with Android, we will increasingly see others turn to Microsoft’s new tablet OS, Windows 8, for their tablet ambitions. However, that will not really begin in earnest until 2014 because it will take “most of 2013 for the Microsoft ecosystem to create a fully capable Windows Metro experience for customers.” Once it gets going, “Microsoft will be a significant player, but one chasing a leader with a multi-year head start.” Although tablets, by and large, are not as functional as the average PC, Forrester says that we will see a new class of consumer electronics emerge that will fill that gap: “frames” (effectively docks), which Forrester predicts will become a common way to give tablets more features, more power and link them up to other devices, like TVs, to use them to consume content. “Frames will become a new form of stationary PC, rising in volume even as laptop growth decays, redefining the desktop PC market as the stationary PC market,” Gillett writes.
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