The Latest from TechCrunch

Internet M&A Deals Down 55% Year-Over-Year, Thanks To Tech IPO Boom
News Discovery Site Prismatic Gets More Social With User Profiles
Path CEO Dave Morin Joins Eventbrite Board
The Junkman’s Dilemma: How The Internet Has Changed How We See History
Mobile Payments Startup Jumio Takes On Card.io With Credit Card Scanning Toolkit For App Developers
Review: Samson Carbon 49 USB MIDI Controller
Here’s A Video Of Samsung’s Galaxy S III In The Wild
Thirst Aims To Slake Your Hunger For Relevant Twitter Content
Contactually’s Lightweight CRM Makes Public Debut With Tons Of New Features, $500K In Angel Funding
Social Syndication Startup Mass Relevance Raises $3.3M
Social Media Gurus Push Conversations Over Kudos, And Fail
HTC One X And EVO 4G LTE Held Up In U.S. Customs, Sprint Pushes Back EVO Release Date
Apple And China Mobile Are Talking iPhone, Might Not Reach An Agreement This Year
Workplace Social Network Convo Adds An Android App And Group Chat
Nielsen: U.S. Consumers Avg App Downloads Up 28% To 41; 4 Of 5 Most Popular Belong To Google
Social Travel Service Gogobot Passes 1 Million Registered Users
Want To Reach Light TV Viewers? Put Ads On YouTube, Says YouTube
As Earlybird Lands LinkedIn Co-Founder, Euro VCs Look To The Valley
Wave Accounting Raises $12M from Social+Capital Partnership, Charles River Ventures & OMERS Ventures
Fotopedia Is On A Roll: Now Gets 200M Image Views Per Month, Launches Morocco App

Internet M&A Deals Down 55% Year-Over-Year, Thanks To Tech IPO Boom

Posted: 16 May 2012 09:19 AM PDT

Facebook’s eight year history is famously speckled with a number of buyout offers from the likes of Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. But each time, founder Mark Zuckerberg opted to keep his company independent — against the advice of many. Now, with Facebook gearing up to hold an initial public offering that will value the company at some $100 billion, it’s pretty apparent that Zuckerberg was right all along.

And according to new data out of global accounting powerhouse PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), others are opting to go the same route. Merger and acquisition (M&A) deals are taking a backseat at the moment, as more web companies are setting their sights on the possibility of an IPO.

Tech M&A Dips, Web M&A Dives

There were just nine M&A deals in the Internet sector during the first three months of 2012, compared to the 20 M&A deals that the sector saw during the first quarter of 2011, according to PwC’s latest U.S. technology M&A Insights report. Internet M&A deals also dipped on a sequential quarterly basis, as the sector saw 10 deals in the fourth quarter of 2011.

The larger technology sector overall, which in PwC’s report includes hardware, software, semiconductor, IT services and Internet companies, saw a dip in M&A deal volume as well. There were 64 tech M&A deals during Q1 2012, down ten percent from the 76 tech M&A deals that occurred in Q1 2011. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, deal volume declined by seven percent from the 69 deals that closed in Q4 2011.

Quantity Down, But Per-Deal Price Tags High

It’s also important to note that while the number of M&A deals is down, the cumulative transaction value is up — indicating that the companies who do opt for M&A transactions are seeing higher price tags. Cumulatively, Q1 2012′s tech M&A deals were worth $28.9 billion, an increase over Q1 2011 which saw $25.1 billion in deals.

Since deal volume was so low, the average deal value for Q1 2012 was $452 million, up significantly from Q1 2011 when average deal value was $330 million. There were nine billion dollar-plus tech M&A deals during Q1 2012, which PwC said represents the second highest volume of quarterly “mega deals” since 2008.

IPOs Up — Driving Valuations Up

Meanwhile, tech IPO activity is surging. There were 13 tech IPOs and 14 IPO registrations during the first quarter of 2012, continuing the trend from 2011 which saw 65 tech IPO listings overall, which itself was a 27 percent boost over 2010.

That public market frothiness is what’s mostly driving up M&A deal prices, PwC said in its report, which read in part: “Lofty IPO valuations have many companies pursuing a dual track to liquidity, preparing for both a sale and IPO, with attendant increases in valuation expectations.” With Facebook’s blockbuster IPO, which is widely expected to occur later this week, it looks like the current trends in tech M&A will only intensify — perhaps with Facebook itself emerging more as another low volume, big money acquirer.

Here are some key graphs from PwC’s latest tech M&A report (click on images to enlarge):

News Discovery Site Prismatic Gets More Social With User Profiles

Posted: 16 May 2012 09:14 AM PDT

Startup Prismatic claims to show you news related to “what you’re actually interested in.” Starting today, users can to reveal those interests to others with newly launched profiles.

When I first heard about Prismatic, my kneejerk reaction was, “Oh God, another Flipboard competitor.” Making matters worse, the company is building a website first and doesn’t have a smartphone or tablet app yet, which is awfully unsexy. But co-founder and CEO Bradford Cross says the company’s is pursuing a genuinely new approach to the problem, which is why it’s sticking to the Web for now and remains invite-only.

So what does the bit about “actually interested in” mean? Cross says that if you look at Flipboard and the hordes of competitors, they’re mostly showing you content that’s already in your social stream — on Twitter, that means you’re just seeing headlines from people and publications that you already follow. Some startups claim to take a broader view, but Cross says that if you look at the content that gets highlighted, it’s still stuff from your Twitter feed. (I haven’t taken a close enough look at other apps to back this up, but I can say that the content usually isn’t different enough or better enough to lure me away from Flipboard.) In large part, he says that’s because they’re trying to bolt social discovery onto existing products. Prismatic’s technology, on the other hand, is more topic-based — it looks at what you’ve been sharing on social networks to determine your interests, then recommends topics and publications for you to follow. Hopefully, you’ll start finding content that you would have missed otherwise.

The new profiles provide a way to share and find that content. Each profile includes a visualization of all your different interests. You can see co-founder Aria’s visualization Haghighi above — the more you interact with a topic, the larger the bubble. There’s also a stream of stories showing the news that you’ve interacted with recently.

This creates a more social way to find new interests to follow and stories to read. It can also tell you something new about your friends. For example, Haghighi and I were acquaintances back when we were both undergraduates at Stanford, but his Prismatic profile was almost a revelation. Given his interest in science fiction and comic books, including a giant profile image of Batman and highlighting content about author China Mieville, I realized that we should totally be best friends. (I’m not sure about that whole computer science thing though.) Some of this information could probably be inferred via Facebook profile and likes, but Prismatic is putting interest information and news-sharing front-and-center — which should also make you feel more comfortable sharing news in a context where you don’t have to worry about annoying your friends.

Prismatic profiles have just gone live for every user with more than 10 interests (so I need a few more interests to activate mine).

The company has raised $1.2 million in funding from Battery Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, and undisclosed angels. You can request an invite here.

Path CEO Dave Morin Joins Eventbrite Board

Posted: 16 May 2012 09:00 AM PDT

Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin is joining the board of the event ticketing startup Eventbrite, the company is announcing today. The news of the appointment follows what has been, so far, quite a busy year for the startup, which has now sold 60 million tickets, and is expanding globally with websites in eight different languages.

Morin, whose background includes time as the former head of the Facebook Platform and several years at Apple, will bring his knowledge of social to the ticketing company, says Eventbrite.

Morin joins Barry McCarthy, former CFO of Netflix, Sean Moriarty, former CEO of Ticketmaster, Roelof Botha, former CFO of PayPal and Partner at Sequoia Capital, among others serving on Eventbrite’s Board of Directors.

“Eventbrite has long been a believer in the impact of the social graph, and the work that Dave did while at Facebook has had a profound impact on our business,” Kevin Hatz, CEO of Eventbrite says. “Our integration with Facebook Connect in 2008 predicated an exponential increase in traffic and engagement among event attendees,” he added.

Eventbrite is heavily benefitting from Facebook integration. In 2011, the company reported that every time an event was shared on Facebook, it generated an additional $2.52 on average in ticket sales for event organizers and 11 clicks back to the Eventbrite page. And this was before the launch of Facebook’s Open Graph in early 2012, and the introduction of “actions” like “bought,” or “want” or “watch,” etc.

Notably, Eventbrite was one of the Facebook Open Graph launch partners, but it’s not yet using “actions.” According to Tamara Mendelsohn, VP of Marketing at Eventbrite, however, they’re “working on something now” on that front, and we should see the results of that soon.

Facebook is also the number one driver of Eventbrite’s traffic, says Mendelsohn, but the company won’t share how much.

As for engagement levels, you can see in the chart below what the impact of Facebook integrations have already had on the company’s business. With Morin’s guidance on deeper integrations, those numbers should jump yet again.

Outside of social integrations and global expansion, the company has also been pushing itself forward in the mobile payments space. In March, Eventbrite launched a complimentary credit card reader to go along with its iPad ticketing app “Eventbrite at the Door,” which attaches to the iPad’s dock connector, allowing users to swipe credit cards. Just prior to this, the company had announced a product called “Endurance,” specifically for selling tickets to races and walks, like marathons and fundraising events. And only last week, Eventbrite announced integrations with SponsorHub for connecting event organizers with sponsors.

"Eventbrite is fundamentally changing the way people create, promote and find events and gatherings in their local communities," said Morin in a statement. "I've been more than impressed by their level of innovation, their commitment to their users, and by their long term focus. The decision to join the board as they forge into making event discovery more mobile and social was an easy one. At the end of the day, we all live for great events."

Eventbrite has been making a huge push towards reaching $1 billion in gross ticket sales this year, about doubling the number of events on the platform in 2011 (458,207 events in 2011) and tickets sold (20,798,509 tickets in 2011). In 2011, Eventbrite sold $400 million worth of tickets, up from $207 million in 2010.

The Junkman’s Dilemma: How The Internet Has Changed How We See History

Posted: 16 May 2012 08:44 AM PDT

Amazing-Stories-Gather-Ye-Acorns-Jonathan-2

Back in in 1999, just as Ebay was coming into bloom, William Gibson wrote a piece on his experiences buying expensive watches online. He called the article My Obsession and it details his youth as a picker in the 1970s.

He writes:

When I was a young man, traversing the ’70s in whatever post-hippie, pre-slacker mode I could manage, I made a substantial part of my living, such as it was, in a myriad of minuscule supply-and-demand gaps that have now largely closed. I was what antique dealers call a “picker,” a semi-savvy haunter of Salvation Army thrift shops, from which I would extract objects of obscure desire that I knew were up-marketable to specialist dealers, who sold in turn to collectors.

This “job,” if it can be called a job, is all but dead these days because of some of the basic properties of the new market. Barring those folks on American Pickers who find items that will eventually hang in a TGI Friday’s, the potential for making a lucrative trade in a post-Internet world by finding and selling odd items is nearly nil. First, a picker depends on arbitrage. Arbitrage depends on incomplete information on someone’s part or, in the case of collectable, desire.

Second, a picker is facing down an army of folks who, in a sense, refuse to allow their items to be picked for fear that somewhere, somehow they will find out that their Garbage Pail Kid collection is worth something. After all, a listing on eBay is nearly free and a listing on Craigslist is free. The cost, then, in finding someone to take your items off of your hands at a premium price is only time. And obviously no one has any of that. So the cards moulder and the old watches sit in drawers and the Beanie Babies slump over themselves like rotten potatoes and pickers are stuck sifting through detritus at best.

The golden geek example of this impetus is the Mile High Comics story. In 1977, a friend called the owner of Mile High Comics to explain that a realtor had contacted him about getting rid of some junk at the home of Edgar Church in Boulder. After a bit of back and forth, the owner went to see the comics and found a trove – literally a house full – of old books, posters, magazines, and comics that spanned back to the birth of Superman and the Golden Age of comics. In short, he picked his way into a long and happy career.

All that is gone now, and there is definitely a side effect that, for better or worse. The Internet is changing the way we look at nostalgia and history. Take for example the recent efforts by George Mason University professor T. Mills Kelly’s class, Lying About The Past. Kelly and his students essentially propagate hoaxes, using the tools of social media to spread lies about history. They have, in fact, successfully posted fake listings in Wikipedia and by faking primary material they were able to fool a number of people over the years.

Kelly and his class recently tried to fool Reddit with some fake newspaper clippings about murders in New York, suggesting that Jack the Ripper visited New York to do his dirty work. The resulting post – bolstered by some ginned up newspaper clippings and a short backstory, was quickly dismantled. The same impetus to hunt for the best price for a piece of nostalgia has been reversed here to slam the lid on a piece of flim-flammery.

Rob Beschizza notes on BoingBoing that Reddit is specifically tuned to sense when information is, perhaps, too good. He wrote:

Superficially weighty evidence doesn’t trick an audience exquisitely tuned to the forensic texture of information; the site’s machinery heaps attention on anything interesting; and the social milieu makes it hard for would-be hoaxers to avoid adopting a pattern of behavior (“karma whore”) that threatens their credibility from the outset.On the other hand, Wikipedia is easy to deceive because it’s easy to accumulate low-profile, cross-referenced edits, and the site has a rigid, exclusionary culture that is easy to exploit once it is understood.

They are, in a way, like collectors who can see through a 20th century Chinese reproduction of a Spanish conquistador sword simply based on immersion in the market. They are intrinsically skeptical and, as such, can’t be taken easily.

Sure, things slip through just as they might at an antiques shop where a rare painting is hanging next to a mangy deer’s head or when an entire crate of early Archie comics lies next to a box of romance novels at a yard sale. But the Internet has killed the casual picker and created a new breed of meta-curators – folks who are able to see through and comment upon the collections of others without, often, having first hand experience on the topic. Some would call them trolls and others would call them obsessives. I’d just call them Internet users.

Harnessing this instinct is what all of these social creation sites are about. A market cannot exist without a group of people interested in selling and an equal number – or more – interested in buying. Sites like Reddit are the last refuge of the intellectual picker and, while there is no way for us to find a #1 issue of Mad Magazine at the thrift shop anymore, there is a way to separate the intellectual wheat from the chaff using the picker’s instinct online.

Mobile Payments Startup Jumio Takes On Card.io With Credit Card Scanning Toolkit For App Developers

Posted: 16 May 2012 08:42 AM PDT

Mobile payments and identity verification company Jumio is introducing its Netswipe Mobile SDK today, which allows developers to add credit card scanning functionality to their mobile applications. The SDK (software development kit), is available now for iOS, but an Android version is coming soon, the company says.

To jump-start usage, Jumio is also waiving transaction fees for the SDK’s first users for a temporary period of time.

The company is calling this a “$5 million fund,” but it’s not really a fund – it’s a just a discount to developers who choose to implement the solution. They’ll be able to try out the Jumio SDK in their apps before committing to paying the extra cost of doing so. Jumio says it will cover the cost of the first 1,000 scans every month, but did not announce an end date for this promotion just yet. (Until the $5M runs out, it seems).

The SDK allows developers to integrate the card-scanning technology into their app, which means users can hold up a credit card to their smartphone’s camera in order to have the card “read” by the app and the numbers automatically entered into the correct fields. To confirm the purchase, the 3-digit CVV still has to be entered, however.

The technology is similar to what a lesser-funded competitor Card.io already has in place. In fact, while both companies have operated in the same space – “computer vision” for speeding up mobile payments – they’ve been coming at it from different angles. While Card.io started with SDKs for iOS and Android, then moved into web support for e-commerce sites, Jumio has been going the opposite direction. As of March, Card.io already had some 200 developers using its SDK.

The Jumio SDK for iOS is available for download here.

Review: Samson Carbon 49 USB MIDI Controller

Posted: 16 May 2012 08:39 AM PDT

If you are looking for Piano or Rhodes-like feel for serious playing, Samson’s Carbon 49 USB MIDI Controller may not be right for you.

However, if you need a keyboard for some light playing or sample triggering, why not keep the expensive Kronos at home and bring the Carbon 49 out for the dangerous outdoor gigs that require expendable equipment? (I have seen many an expensive keyboard dragged end over end behind a golf cart after a show, or dropped or had beer spilled all over it while it was being underutilized at a gig as a mere MIDI controller).

Don’t get me wrong, the Carbon 49 — originally announced at NAMM but available May 15 — is a decently constructed keyboard controller and it comes complete with the usual on-board tools of the MIDI trade (modulation wheel, pitch wheel, data knob). Most importantly, it’s fairly portable and can use a laptop or even an iPad (not included) for both its MIDI brain and complete power supply (which makes for light travel). That’s a pretty great feature actually!

The thing about the Carbon 49 I like the best is the price point. At $89 it’s inexpensive and I think it plays pretty well for that price range!

Pros

Price – $89
Integrated iPad stand
Dedicated Transpose and Octave buttons, classic Pitch Bend and Modulation wheels
Velocity-sensitive keys
Shift key adjusts up to 14 performance-related control parameters
Features traditional MIDI out, sustain-pedal input and USB connections

Cons

Not trully weighted keys, which could make it hard for more serious or sensitive playing
49 keys…you would have to balance portability with your playing needs
iPad Camera Kit connector not included

Bottom Line

I liked it. It’s inexpensive and worked right out of the box for me with both my MacBook and my iPad. It’s a decent option for playing or sample triggering.

More info at http://www.samsontech.com/

Here’s A Video Of Samsung’s Galaxy S III In The Wild

Posted: 16 May 2012 08:29 AM PDT

The Galaxy S III is likely the most anticipated Android phone in existence. At least, today it is.

Samsung is the king of Android hardware, the Galaxy S II is its most successful phone to date, and a third iteration is only expected to follow in its predecessor’s footsteps.

Plus, we weren’t even comforted by the usual pre-announcement leakapalooza — Samsung reportedly kept early units locked in test boxes, which only made that glorious moment of unveiling all the more wonderful.

But we’re still waiting and wondering about a potential U.S. release date for what is sure to be Samsung’s most popular phone yet, meaning that getting a peek of the device in the wild is near to impossible until “later this summer”. But as is the case with almost any phone, someone has gotten their hands on a unit of the S III and set up the good ol’ handy cam for our viewing pleasure.

Without further ado, check out this unboxing of the Galaxy S III alongside some of its biggest competitors.

If you can’t tell from all the Italian, a full list of cameos in this video includes the Samsung Galaxy Note, the HTC One X, the HTC One S, and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. You’ll notice that the Galaxy S III is running pre-release software, so things should look a bit more refined come launch day.

Unfortunately, there’s no telling how long we’ll be waiting before the GSIII hits stores shelves. It could be in June, or it could be at the end of August to compete with the next iPhone. Luckily, that soothing soundtrack and Italian stallion narration should soothe your anticipatory twitch until launch day, or at least for the next 7 minutes and 34 seconds.

Thirst Aims To Slake Your Hunger For Relevant Twitter Content

Posted: 16 May 2012 08:02 AM PDT

Is the Twitter platform about to get a second wind of dedicated apps?

In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a handful products that are starting out by filtering out the most relevant news stories, videos and photos from people’s personal streams. Thirst is one of them and it’s coming out with an iPad app today. The company is backed by nearly $1 million from investors including BlueRun Ventures, former Powerset chief operating officer Steve Newcomb and DCM general partner Jason Krikorian. It was started by two recent Berkeley graduates, Anuj Verma and Kunal Modi.

Although Thirst is starting out on the Twitter platform, the company is really more about natural language processing technology. The Twitter iPad app is more of a proof of concept around whether its NLP processor works well. Verma says that it’s really difficult to keep up with information shared through Twitter and there has to be a better way of surfacing the most important news. Thirst uses a custom natural language processor to pick out the most important stories around different keywords or subjects like ‘gay marriage’ (because of this past week’s big announcement from President Barack Obama in support of it).

The issue though, is how big any individual company like this can become. The biggest exits that the Twitter platform has spawned to date are, well, relatively small. Tweetdeck went to Twitter for between $40 to 50 million. Contrast that to the biggest iOS acquisition to date, which is Instagram, or Zynga, the most successful Facebook platform company to date. You could argue that recent M&A deals like Instagram and OMGPOP owe something to the Twitter platform because the social network was a growth channel for both apps, but it’s hard to say how much of their success was derived from the Twitter platform. There are also plenty of iPad-based news readers like Flipboard, Pulse and News.me that serve as competition for Thirst.

Again, Verma says Twitter is just a start. And there are plenty of other places that Thirst could go.

Thirst for Twitter from Thirst on Vimeo.

Contactually’s Lightweight CRM Makes Public Debut With Tons Of New Features, $500K In Angel Funding

Posted: 16 May 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Contactually, the lightweight CRM solution for email users which launched into private beta at the beginning of this year, is today announcing its public debut with a number of new features in tow, as well as $500,000 in angel funding from YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, co-founder of CapLinked Chris Grey, and a re-up from previous investor, 500 Startups.

As for the new features, there are quite a few, but the major ones include the launch of “Contactually for Teams,” Microsoft Exchange support, a Gmail plugin, and additional integrations with other services and CRM systems.

Before delving into the details of what’s new, a little refresher on how Contactually works. When you sign up for the service, it pulls in information from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Klout, Quora, Flickr, Foursquare, Tumblr, Skype, and dozens of others, and integrates those into your new online address book. The address book tracks how often you and your contacts correspond and their priority. Another key part to the service are “Actions” – which are reminders to follow up with your contacts. These appear on the online dashboard and are sent out via email.

Prior to today, Contactually only supported IMAP-connected email accounts like Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, and AOL, but with its public launch, the service now adds much-needed support for Microsoft Exchange (2007+). Gmail users get an update, too, with the new Gmail plugin which shows reminders and lets you quickly categorize people. (Oh, and I checked – it works alongside Rapportive’s plugin, in case you hate to give that up).

Team sharing is another new feature that allows users to see who on their team last contacted someone and see their contacts. It’s an interesting concept in making email less of a closed box, private to only the one person with access. Instead, users of the Teams product can share contacts and collaborate on follow-ups with each other.

Contactually is also rolling out more integrations, including support for messaging and contact import from LinkedIn, integration with SugarCRM, and plans to add CapsuleCRM, Producteev, and MailChimp in the next month. (Highrise and Salesforce are already supported).

Company co-founder Tony Cappaert tells us that the service now has 6,000 users, a “large chunk” of whom are paying, as well as a couple of enterprise deals of a couple thousand seats or so.

Interested users can sign up here. The private beta period will end at 12 PM ET, allowing anyone to sign up.

Contactually was founded by Zvi Band, Tony Cappaert, and Jeff Carbonella, and is based in Washington, DC. In addition to the $50K in seed funding from 500 Startups, Contactually's previous angel round of $165K included investors Sean Glass and David Steinberg.

Social Syndication Startup Mass Relevance Raises $3.3M

Posted: 16 May 2012 07:37 AM PDT

Mass Relevance, a startup that helps media companies and brands tap into this crazy Twitter thing, has raised $3.3 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Austin Ventures, with money from Battery Ventures, Floodgate, Allegro Venture Partners, and Metamorphic Ventures. The startup previously raised $2.2 million in seed funding from most of the same backers — Battery is the only addition.

Mass Relevance pulls content from Twitter and other social networks (it announced a tweet syndication deal with Twitter last year), filters the updates according to a customer’s needs, then creates visualizations that can be embedded on a website or displayed on pretty much any screen, including TVs, billboards, and in-store signs. Founder and CEO Sam Decker says that the company started out doing custom work for each customer, but it has “productized” that work into standard visualizations showing trends, conversations, maps, polls, Q&As, and more.

The company says its clients have included the Big Four television networks, seven of the top 10 cable networks, Target, Cisco, Ford, Pepsi, and Victoria’s Secret. Mass Relevance first caught on with media companies who wanted to pull content from Twitter, Decker says, but brands and advertising agencies are getting interested too. That interest can provide monetization opportunities for publishers (say if a brand wants to sponsor Mass Relevance content on a publisher’s site), but it also a reflects growing brand interest in running social network content on their own properties — for example, the company is helping Pepsi display tweets related to its “Live For Now” campaign.

Decker says one of the main goals for the funding is to “lean in to the demand we’ve experienced from brands and agencies” by building more products designed for their needs. He plans to continue growing the company in Austin, while also hiring a few people in other cities, especially New York.

Social Media Gurus Push Conversations Over Kudos, And Fail

Posted: 16 May 2012 07:20 AM PDT

This is a guest post by Roger Warner of Content and Motion.

Here’s classic example of how badly some companies are screwing up on social media. Back in February this year Coca-Cola Australia invited its fans to some ‘banter’ or chat. Fans obliged. Much fun ensued. Coca-Cola looked stupid.

What's happening here? Coca Cola has invested tirelessly in its brand for the past 50 years. Now some bright social media spark is conducting inane 'little experiments' for social media 'engagement' that seem hellbent on killing it. Exactly the same thing can happen when young startups try to engage on social networks and think they have to “engage”.

Sadly, Coca Cola's approach to engagement is not the exception, it's the rule. It's the "Hi, how was your weekend?" approach to brand communications on Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Plenty of tech companies find themselves in this trap, not just consumer brands.

This is classic conversational, open and 'authentic' dialogue that seems to satisfy the pervasive ethos of social media (make nice) but at the same time totally messes with any concept of a brand. It can vastly over estimate the average person's appetite for holding conversations with the products and services they use and follow on Facebook.

Startups, companies and brands that are following this path are getting it very wrong indeed.

• People don't use Facebook in order to forge a relationship with Coca-Cola (or any other brand). They use it to create and enhance relationships with other people and to tell their own life stories (via sharing).

• People believe in brands. Some folks buy the Burberry label instead of Wallmart own brand and are very happy with the price tag. Bland conversations and banter undermine the strength of a brand (and price) because they're reductive: they strip out the magic and create a level playing field. Any brand can play the 'authenticity' game.

• Whichever way you look at it – entertainment, engagement, acquisition, etc – brand to fan conversations don't scale well (whereas fan to fan conversations do). Resource runs thin and they revert to standard types. "Hi, how was your weekend?"

• People are tuning out from mundane 'experiments' and boring, self-serving brand 'conversations'. They simply don't compete in a news stream that includes raunchy pictures from Friday's drinks at the office. Further, it's more fun to sabotage them than to play along.

So what else should you be doing on Facebook?

Great ‘social brands’ enhance the ‘personal brands’ of their fans. Put bluntly: You make them look better.

They transform the average stuff of life into something more valuable and meaningful. They create stories to share by giving people great content and experiences that makes them feel smarter, cooler, more generous and generally more heroic. The will to empower creates the will to share.

The winners in this game know that any given Facebook play must be geared to creating (relative) fame and/or thanks for others. And they understand that if they can do this, then good things will follow: shares, Likes, comments and, in turn, brand awareness, traffic and referrals.

In the near term future, these brands will flourish in the Social sphere – they'll generate a tangible benefit from their spend and their Social Media teams will earn more respect, industry awards and money.

Their work will evolve around a firm but basic understanding of what people really want from their time on Social Media – kudos. They'll be able to extend the brand in new engaging ways by creating lots of very personal missions on new platforms and devices, in all kinds of day-to-day environments that they don't currently enjoy a presence – from the breakfast table to desk to couch and back again.

Success – and a more powerful Social brand – comes via an understanding of how, why and where a brand can generate personal kudos in amongst the flux of daily life and leveraging the best technology available to make it easy and support the cause.

Here are some great examples:

• Create an email intervention in the workplace? Sure. I'm a smart working hero, I'm in.

• Deliver a can of personalised chicken soup to a flu-bound spouse? I'm a progressive, caring husband with a sense of humour. Show me how.

• Wage a war against over priced, over specced shave tech (and Roger Federer)? I've always thought seven blades was pointless. Where do I sign?

And, for those still bouncing around with the banter, here's three closing tips for the immediate future:

• Rewire for social. Your biggest ideas must be about them, not you.

• Start trying to make your fans' life stories more heroic.

• The will to empower creates the will to share.

Do this and you will win on Facebook and most other Social Media channels… and I guarantee it's a hell of a lot more 'engaging' than banter.

HTC One X And EVO 4G LTE Held Up In U.S. Customs, Sprint Pushes Back EVO Release Date

Posted: 16 May 2012 06:41 AM PDT

Here’s hoping that you already managed to get your hands on an HTC One X, because it may be a while before they appear on store shelves again.

According to a release put out by HTC last night, U.S. Customs has blocked shipments of AT&T’s HTC One X and Sprint’s EVO 4G LTE thanks to an ITC ruling handed down last year.

The news may come as an especially large bummer for Sprint customers looking to upgrade to the new EVO, as a new report from the Wall Street Journal indicates that device will miss its original May 18 launch date. Sprint has since scrubbed their website of references to the device’s forthcoming launch, and there’s still no word on a revised launch window.

To get a firmer grasp on why this is happening, we have to flash back to 2011. After HTC was originally slammed with allegations that they infringed ten of Apple’s patents with their “personal data and mobile communications devices.” International Trade Commission Judge Carl Charneski ruled in Apple’s favor on two of those claims (which just so happened to stem from the same patent, No. 5,946,647) in July. After a smattering of delays, the ITC handed down their limited exclusion order in December, which prohibited the importation of devices that violate the ’647 patent.

And what are the offending bits? The big one in this case deals with a minor UI feature, namely the ability for users to touch a phone number displayed in an email or a webpage in order to fire up the phone’s dialer.

The import ban didn’t go into effect until April 19 (the ITC wanted to give HTC some time to make the appropriate fixes), but the company apparently didn’t make thoughtful use of their time. HTC now claims to have fixed that “small UI experience”, and noted in their release that they are “working closely with Customs to secure approval” for the devices to be released. The ITC’s order does allow for refurbished handsets to enter the country in order to replace faulty devices, though both devices in question are brand spanking new (one of them hasn’t even been released yet) so that little loophole will likely go unused.

Even so, we’re left with little clue as to when shipments of devices will be permitted once again. Sprint and AT&T can’t be too pleased with this turn of events — I’ve reached out to both carriers for comment, but haven’t heard back at time of writing.

Apple And China Mobile Are Talking iPhone, Might Not Reach An Agreement This Year

Posted: 16 May 2012 06:21 AM PDT

The iPhone might be coming to the world’s largest mobile carrier, China Mobile. The world comes from Bloomberg quoting China Mobile’s chairman. The report also details that the phone might not hit the carrier’s 655 million subscribers yet this year. But the two sides are talking. That’s a start. Apple needs China Mobile and China Mobile needs Apple.

"China Mobile and Apple both have the will to strengthen cooperation," Xi said. "When there is more specific news, we will disclose it."

As Bloomberg notes, one of the sticking points has to do with China Mobile’s proprietary network that’s not friendly with the iPhone’s mobile radios. China Mobile is currently rolling out 4G service but only in six cities so far; three more cities are slated to get it this year. The rollout kicks into high gear next year with plans to expand the 4G base stations from 900 units to 200,000.

Although China Mobile is the country’s, and the world’s, largest mobile carrier, its 3G network is starting to show its age relative to newer, faster 4G networks. A 4G iPhone is exactly what China Mobile needs to keep up with the times.

The iPhone is already a hit in China even without China Mobile. Apple revenue in China is up threefold year-over-year for Apple. In fact, Apple has reported more revenue in China so far this year than it did all of last. Getting the iPhone on China Mobile is likely a top priority of Cook and Co.

Cook said in the October 2011 earnings call: "For China — the sky's the limit there. I've never seen so many people rise into the middle class who aspire to buy Apple products."

Workplace Social Network Convo Adds An Android App And Group Chat

Posted: 16 May 2012 06:14 AM PDT

When it comes to business social networking products, Convo, created by Scrybe Labs, probably doesn’t have the name recognition (or the funding) of Yammer. But judging from the demonstration I saw recently, it has a compelling product, and it’s announcing some nice additions today.

CEO Faizan Buzdar came by the TechCrunch office last week to demonstrate Convo and its new features. It was the first time I’d seen the product, and even though the TechCrunch team pretty much lives in Yammer, I was impressed. When you first open the website or the desktop app, it looks pretty similar to other enterprise social networks — a stream of conversations and shared content from your coworkers.

What’s really compelling, however, is the quality of the integration between the conversation and the documents (or other content). You can highlight items in presentations, for example, and a thumbnail of what you’ve highlighted will show up in the conversation stream. When someone clicks on that image, they’ll be taken to that exact point in the presentation. You can do the same thing for live websites, which is useful, for example, for tech blogging customers like The Next Web. This isn’t Convo’s only feature, but it’s the one that makes the best case that the service isn’t just “a stream of chitchat,” as Buzdar puts it.

As for the new features, Convo is launching an Android app today. The company already has an iPhone app, and Buzdar says the Android functionality is pretty similar. Both mobile apps are designed around letting people keep up with the conversations in Convo, rather than porting all of the desktop version’s features onto the phone. The next step in the company’s mobile plans is an iPad app, which should come much closer to the desktop experience, except with a touch interface.

Buzdar also plans to launch a group chat feature later this month, where users can start a conversation with select coworkers in a private room. What’s appealing, especially for anyone who’s ever had a “Wait, who said what where?” moment of being overwhelmed by all of a company’s different conversation channels, is the fact that these group conversations can eventually be shared (perhaps with some light editing, if some of the conversation isn’t always polite about your coworkers) with everyone else in the workplace, and they can be marked up like any other piece of content.

We last wrote about Convo about a year ago, when it was known as Convofy.

Nielsen: U.S. Consumers Avg App Downloads Up 28% To 41; 4 Of 5 Most Popular Belong To Google

Posted: 16 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT

With smartphone penetration now at 50 percent in the U.S., the world of apps is seeing a knock-on effect in their popularity: according to a new report from Nielsen, mobile consumers are downloading more apps than ever before, with the average number of apps owned by a smartphone user now at 41 — a rise of 28 percent on the 32 apps owned on average last year.

But at the same time, there are hints of people possibly approaching a limit to how much they might use them: despite the rise in app numbers, the amount of time that people are spending in apps has remained essentially flat: collectively, they are being used for 39 minutes per day today, compared to 37 minutes in 2011.

Nielsen also notes that apps seem to be taking a bit of time away from mobile web usage (perhaps this is where the extra two minutes comes from…): it says that users are using apps 10 percent more than the mobile web, compared to last year.

As for why users are spending no more time on apps than they were before: Nielsen doesn’t really explore that issue, but it does note that privacy has slightly increased as an issue for U.S. consumers: some 73 percent note personal data collection as a concern (compared to 70 percent a year ago), with 55 percent saying they are wary of sharing information. It could be that this privacy concern is actually keeping at least some people away from engaging in apps more.

Going back to the increase in app downloads noted by Nielsen, this is something that has been pointed out by the app store owners in a different way: Google says it has now passed 15 billion downloads announced this month, and Apple noted 25 billion downloads in March 2012.

This morning, Gartner released some figures that pointed to even more consolidation among the top handset makers and the top platforms — with Samsung and Apple accounting for 49.3 percent of all smartphones sold in Q1 2012 (compared to just under 30 percent a year ago).

Nielsen’s app figures seem to point to a similar trend: Android and iOS owners accounted for 88 percent of all apps that were downloaded in the past 30 days, it says (up from 74 percent last year). That may partly be to do with their own market share size in the U.S., where Android and Apple’s iOS dominate the smartphone landscape with respectively 38 million and 84 million users — but it also seems to imply that those users are also actively engaging with their respective app stores.

The other significant consolidation trend that Nielsen has picked up on is around what apps are actually getting the most traffic: even as app stores have grown, and our own collections of them have grown, we continue to fixate most on the exact same five apps this year as we did last year: they are Facebook, YouTube, Android Market, Google Search, and Gmail.

Yes, that’s right: you can slam Google, Android and Android fragmentation all you want, but four of the five most popular apps today, as they were last year, are owned by the company, and that’s partly thanks to the popularity of three of them on iOS.

Ironically, that concentration at the top is also being met with growth in long-tail consumption: Nielsen notes that the time spent on the top 50 apps is actually down compared to last year: the top 50 apps today get 58 percent of our app time, compared to 74 percent in 2011. As with our own personal app catalogues growing in size, this points to consumers getting more diverse in terms of what apps they are using overall, not a surprise really when you consider that there are around 1.1 billion apps currently between just Google Play and the Apple App Store.

Social Travel Service Gogobot Passes 1 Million Registered Users

Posted: 16 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT

We’ve been covering Gogobot since it first launched in early 2010. It took the social travel discovery and advice site a little while to find its niche, but since about the middle of 2011, it’s been adding new members rapidly. Today, Gogobot is announcing that it has now surpassed the 1 million registered user mark. According to the company’s own data, a new member is signing up for service every 15 seconds. Overall, Gogobot now has 65 times as many members as just a year ago and its users have now shared over 5 million places on the service.

In its early days, the site was more akin to a Yelp for travel than a social travel discovery site. Since then, it has added numerous new features, including Facebook and Twitter integration (Gogobot says 92% of its users now use their real identities to sign up for the service), as well as gamifcation elements like badges and leaderboards. You can also just browse the site for reviews and recommendations without having to sign in, of course.

The site credits much of its recent growth to the launch of its iPhone app last October. Since then, the company says, the number of reviews submitted by user has doubled, the number of photos uploaded by user has increased fivefold and the number of trip plans created on the service has doubled.

Given these numbers, it’s pretty clear that the company is on to something. While the company prefers to compare itself to other social travel startups like the Wanderfly, and the Pinterest-inspired travel sites Trippy and Gtrot, there can be little doubt that the companies it is really trying to challenge in this space are TripAdvisor and – maybe to a lesser degree – Yelp.

So far, Gogobot has raised $19 million. Its investors include from major venture capital firms like Battery Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Innovation Endeavors. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund has also invested in the service.

Want To Reach Light TV Viewers? Put Ads On YouTube, Says YouTube

Posted: 16 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The children are our future. You can learn a lot about the future by watching them, particularly by watching how they use technology and how they consume media, and how that will translate into future business models.

Take newspapers, for instance: Somewhere along the line the younger generation stopped reading newspapers, opting instead to get their news online. (This idea seems quaint, now, for those of us who make our livings writing for web-only publications.) Or take my generation, which somewhere along the line decided that it didn’t want land lines — who wants a phone that only rings in a place you’re rarely at?!?! — and went mobile-first, and in most cases, mobile-only.

I thought about this trend when I saw a study YouTube did with Nielsen, seeking more information about the elusive “light TV viewers.” So what do we know about them? They’re generally younger — under 49 years old — and they tend to be well-off, college-educated, and highly influential due to their interest in social networking. In other words, they’re a highly coveted demographic among marketers.

These aren’t the people who just sit in front of a TV for five hours every day. In fact, they average only about 39 minutes of TV viewing a day, according to the study. But it’s not like they’re great outdoorsmen. Instead, they are finding their entertainment elsewhere — online, on mobile devices, on social networks, etc.

YouTube’s goal was to help advertisers better understand and target messages to this strange beast. The cross-media study with Nielsen looked at how effective ads were across TV, YouTube, and the Google Display Network. (GDN) And not surprisingly, the study found that advertisers can better reach kids who don’t really watch TV by also putting their ads on YouTube and GDN.

Here are the stats to back those claims up: According to YouTube (and Nielsen), campaigns that included YouTube and GDN added four percentage points of incremental reach to light TV viewers. More importantly, it cost 92 percent less to achieve those results online versus on TV. The study also found that putting ads only on TV didn’t reach some 63 percent of light TV viewers — because duh, they don’t watch TV.

But for me, the most interesting thing about this research around the “light TV” segment is that it’s growing, with the number of households opting for broadband Internet over cable TV increasing 22.8 percent over the past year. Granted, that’s 22.8 percent over a very small number, but it’s a much bigger percentage than the increase in the number of people who signed up for cable last year.

The point is that, just like the kids who stopped reading newspapers or paying for landlines, we can probably expect this young generation of people who aren’t really that into TV to continue to not really be that into TV. And if that happens, the $100 billion TV advertising industry will need to find other ways of reaching that audience.

As seen in the study, YouTube will be one of those channels, and an important one — but frankly, not the only one. We can expect to see TV ad spending shift to multiple new outlets as time goes on and marketers seek to reach an ever-growing number of viewers who are on their mobile phones, tablets, and PCs instead of watching TV.

As Earlybird Lands LinkedIn Co-Founder, Euro VCs Look To The Valley

Posted: 16 May 2012 05:41 AM PDT

Lately a trend has emerged: European VCs putting down more roots in Silicon Valley to take advantage of the current scene and act as a bridge for European companies trying to form local partnerships, and of course as a mechanism for M&A or further funding with US-based VCs. One of the more recent firms to do this was Index Ventures, which a year ago put partners on the ground for the first time outside of its bases in the UK and Switzerland.

The latest to join that trend is Earlybird Venture Capital out of Berlin which has brought on Valley-based Konstantin Guericke as a venture partner. Is this part of a developing theme?

Guericke co-founded LinkedIn, where he was vice president of marketing, he took it to six million members and profitability. German born, he also served as CEO of jaxtr, a social communications start-up purchased by SabSe Technologies. He’s currently on the boards of several startups and mentors student entrepreneurs at Stanford University, where he graduated.

Guericke says startups coming out of Europe, and particularly Berlin, that are highly viral and globally scaling from Day One can “compete with the best in Silicon Valley and reach a worldwide audience." He’s basically correct: far too many European startups are not suited to the continent’s small fragmented markets, don’t realise it soon enough and need to look elsewhere to scale.

Meanwhile, the VC trends in Europe continue.

As we know, Accel, which has a good footprint in London, is a firm with a large US arm already. The other main player in Europe are firms like Balderton, but it prefers, as does Eden Ventures and others, to bridge with US-based VCs.

The opposing view of course is that so long as you have contacts, you don’t need an office on the ground. The reverse is working in Berlin of course: VCs are flying in and out of the place (in some cases even just commenting from Munich or Hamburg) but few have felt the need to open full-blown offices. Perhaps the renowned Berlin winters are putting them off for now? Admittedly Wellington Partners is in Berlin so often it might as well have an office.

Earlybird is the exception, moving its full operations to Berlin and raising $100 million for their new fund.

But right now there is a debate raging about whether European Venture Capital has much of a future. Atlas’s Fred Destin has returned to that theme again recently saying Euro VC is too unwieldy, too in hock to governments and hide-bound by staff incentivised by management fees rather than exits.

Are European VCs, like their political equivalents in Brussels, now viewing Europe as a burning building with not enough exits, as UK PM Cameron once said of the Euro? Is that why we are seeing this attempt to bridge with the U.S.?

Conversely we’ve seen the rise of new entrants like Passion Capital and the soon-to-launch Hoxton Ventures. These guys are actually pretty optimistic about Europe and its ability to build companies outside the salary inflation (and the rest) of the Valley.

You pays your money and you takes your choice I guess.

Then there are quite different new entities like Blackbox VC where early stage startups literally live in a dorm in Atherton trying to catch the ear of the Valley.

More on that later, but for now let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Wave Accounting Raises $12M from Social+Capital Partnership, Charles River Ventures & OMERS Ventures

Posted: 16 May 2012 05:32 AM PDT

Wave Accounting, which makes 100 percent free accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses, has raised $12 million in a Series B round of financing from the Social+Capital Partnership (s23p), along with existing investors Charles River Ventures and OMERS Ventures. With the funding, Wave plans to continue aggressively increasing headcount, in engineering as well as sales and business development.

Wave was founded in July 2009 and launched its software in November 2010, introducing a cloud-based solution for small businesses that didn’t have accounting expertise. The app offers double-entry accounting, invoicing, expense tracking and financial dashboards, which provides data to small business owners who might have previously been reliant on spreadsheets to track payments. The product is completely free, with Wave making money off of advertising and offers that are made to users on the web.

So far, the software has been used by more than 250,000 small businesses in more than 200 countries around the world, although VP of Community, Content and Communications Rob Maurin says that about 70 percent of users come from North America. The company helps to manage more than $24.3 billion in income and spending for small businesses, most of which are nine employees or less.

Altogether, Wave Accounting has raised a total of $18.5 million. That includes a $5 million Series A round last October, along with a $1.5 million seed round in June 2011. It’s been adding personnel pretty quickly — doubling to about 45 employees since the beginning of the year — and it expects to keep hiring over the next several months. Maurin says most hiring will be in engineering, though the startup is looking to boost sales and business development.

Fotopedia Is On A Roll: Now Gets 200M Image Views Per Month, Launches Morocco App

Posted: 16 May 2012 05:30 AM PDT

Fotopedia is quickly building a reputation for producing beautiful travel-focused photo apps for iOS. Today, the company is launching its latest free app, which focuses on Morocco. The app is optimized for the new iPad’s Retina Display and, as usual, features hundreds of stunning professional images.

Morocco is the company’s eleventh app and as Fotopedia’s senior vice president of global business Christophe Daligault told me earlier this week, the company’s plan is to release about two apps per quarter going forward.

Fotopedia has actually gone through a subtle but interesting change since its inception. In its early days, Fotopedia was mostly producing something akin to large coffee table books for the iPad era. These apps often featured thousands of photos, but as Daligault told me, most users would only ever see a small number of all of these images. Now, the company is focusing more on smaller projects and sees itself more as a publisher of beautiful travel magazines. As part of this change, Fotopedia also recently started updating its apps with new photo tours and other content on a regular basis.

Thanks to this, as well as the growing popularity of the iPad itself, of course, Fotopedia has been seeing explosive growth over the last few months. In March, it served up a very respectable 120 million page views across its apps. In April, that number jumped to 200 million. About 60% of these came from iPad users and overall iPad views were up 70% in April compared to March.

The company’s apps have now been downloaded over 12 million times. The average user currently loads the app 4.5 times per month, a number that has been steadily increasing since Fotopedia launched its more magazine-like approach.

As the company is growing, it’s also evolving its business model. Its free apps currently feature a mix of sponsorships and more traditional full-page ads. What the company is working on, too, is something akin to an “AdWords for images” that will allow advertisers to create their own ads and target users in specific countries and with very specific interests. Given the global reach of the apps and the fact that its users are clearly interested in travel, finding advertisers will likely turn out to be pretty easy for Fotopedia.