The Latest from TechCrunch

The Singularity Is Near: NYU Student Builds A Robot That Builds Burritos
Skype For Windows Now Shows “Conversation Ads” To Users Without Skype Credit Or Subscriptions
The #1 Grossing Game On Android And iOS, DeNA’s Rage Of Bahamut, Has Almost Even Revenues From Both
RockYou Acquires Social Games Developer Ryzing, Moves to San Francisco
Square Hires Former Salesforce SVP Sarah Friar As CFO, Now Processes $6 Billion In Annual Payments
Shopcade Switches On Social Influence And Gaming Features
New Daily Deals Industry ‘Code of Conduct’ Tries To Stem Tide Of Bad Publicity
Twitvid Rebrands As Telly To Focus On Social Video Discovery
Verelo Debuts A New Take On Website Monitoring, Focuses On Site Health & Recommendations
Webcam System Models Your Movements And Emotions On A Lifelike Avatar
Event Management Giant Cvent Scoops Up Seed Labs To Help It Go Mobile
Moonstruck And More: Amazon Beefs Up Its Prime Instant Video Back Catalog With MGM Deal
AT&T’s Updated ‘Toggle’ Service Lets More Employees Use Their Own Devices At Work
Minority-Focused Startup Incubator DreamIt Access Gets Renewed Investment, Will Continue For Two More Cycles
Nokia May Sell Luxury Phone Brand Vertu For €200 Million
Kanvess.com Will Print Your Artsy Instagram Photos For 25 Cents A Pop
Klout For Conferences: SponsorHub Starts Scoring Events’ Sponsorship Value
Real-Time Messaging Startup PubNub Introduces Pulse To Facilitate One-To-One Communications
iFixit Tears Down The MacBook Pro With Retina Display, Deems It Nearly Impossible To Repair
Icann Applicants For New TLDs Revealed As Part Of ‘Reveal Day’: The Full List

The Singularity Is Near: NYU Student Builds A Robot That Builds Burritos

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 09:27 AM PDT

Hey, Internet. Come over here. You sitting down? Cool.

So anyway, there’s this thing I need to tell you about. No no. Over here. This tab. Stay right here.

So this guy at NYU made something special. Are you listening? Put down your phone. Listen. So they made a machine that prints… no, don’t check Twitter. They made a machine that prints burritos.

It’s called BurritoB0t.

I know, right?

Seriously. Cool it with the porn for a second. This is important.

They system will let you use your iPhone to order different condiments and toppings. Sliders control the amount of salsa, guac, and crema. It uses a Thing-o-matic and is currently in beta form, so don’t expect it to make you a burrito anytime soon.

Its creator, Marko Manriquez, is a student at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and this is part of his Master’s Thesis. Remember back when you wrote your thesis? About politics or some junk? Yeah, you should have picked the “build a freaking burrito robot” major. You wouldn’t be an accountant right now.

Anyway, I just thought you should know. What? Seriously? You’re still bored? Fine. Here’s this. Last time I try to show you something cool.

Project Page

Skype For Windows Now Shows “Conversation Ads” To Users Without Skype Credit Or Subscriptions

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 09:19 AM PDT

Skype just announced that it will now begin to show some of its users ads during 1:1 audio calls. These so-called “conversation ads” will only appear for users who don’t have Skype credit or a subscription and, for the time being, these ads will only appear on Skype for Windows, though chances are the company, which is now owned by Microsoft, will also bring these ads to its OS X client in the future. The company stresses that these ads will “be silent, non-expanding and run after we’ve completed our regular detailed quality checks on your connection.”

Marketers will be able to purchase these ads in 55 markets where Skype is available. Ads will be targeted based on “non-personally identifiable” demographic information like location, gender and age. Users will have the option to opt out of Skype using their demographic information.

“Fun Interactivity”

Skype is obviously quite excited about this launch, though it remains to be seen how users will react. The announcement today argues that Skype is a place where users can “have meaningful conversations about brands in a highly engaging environment.” That’s obviously the stuff marketers dream of, but in reality, users probably won’t think of these ads as generating “fun interactivity between your circle of friends and family and the brands you care about” (hence the name, “conversation ads,” I guess).

This is Skype’s second major push into advertising after launching ads on its Home tab last year.

The #1 Grossing Game On Android And iOS, DeNA’s Rage Of Bahamut, Has Almost Even Revenues From Both

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 09:03 AM PDT

Here’s some promising news about Android monetization. DeNA says that Rage of Bahamut, which was the #1 grossing game on both Android and iOS yesterday, is earning about the same revenue per day from both platforms. It’s a single data point, but it goes against recent studies from companies like Flurry that say that Android lags behind in terms of monetization by a factor of 4-to-1. “Contrary to what we read, we’ve been very happy with Android monetization,” DeNA director and Ngmoco CEO Neil Young says. “There is not a big discrepancy between the two now.”

DeNA is a Japanese multi-billion dollar mobile gaming giant that has been trying to crack Western markets over the last three years. It spent up to $403 million to buy a U.S. mobile gaming company started by EA veterans called Ngmoco in 2010, and then it took about a year for the company to fully launch a global mobile gaming network called Mobage.

But Rage of Bahamut’s reign at the top of the charts is a sign that these efforts are starting to bear some fruit. The title has at the top of Google Play’s charts for six weeks. “This has never really been a sprint for us. It’s been a marathon,” Young says. The game had the top slot on both platforms yesterday, but Kabam’s Kingdoms of Camelot took back the #1 iOS slot in the U.S. this morning.

Rage of Bahamut is a trading card game from Tokyo-based Cygames. Under the name Shingeki-No-Bahamut, it was a hit in Japan so Ngmoco brought it over and localized it for Western markets. In the game, players collect and evolve cards so they can do battle with other characters in the game.

Young says Rage of Bahamut is seeing some impressive revenue numbers per day per user. In casual games, you usually see an average revenue per daily active user of a couple cents to 10 cents per day on mobile. The better games can get to 15 to 25 cents per day per daily active user. But Young says Rage of Bahamut has been able to do 4 or 5 times that. He didn’t say how much revenue overall the title is earning, but we’ve seen dual platform hits like Draw Something earn anywhere between $5 and 10 million per month through in-app purchases and advertising.

Young’s stats are promising news because there are concerns that monetization on mobile platforms (particularly through other business models like advertising) may never match what is possible on the desktop web. However, the counter-example to this argument usually involves Japanese companies like DeNA or GREE, which earn far more revenue per user in Japan that what has been seen in the West. Young says mobile games in Japan can earn $1 to $1.50 per daily active user on average. The theory is that Western markets are just behind and that U.S. and European consumers will gradually step up spending through mobile phones until they match Japanese consumer behavior.

This is certainly the bet that DeNA is taking. The company, which is worth $3.15 billion in U.S. dollars, is one of the two biggest mobile gaming companies in Japan. But as that market has become saturated, both DeNA and its archrival GREE have moved overseas to find additional growth.

Both companies are dual platform providers and game developers. That means they make their own games and also offer a network that other developers can distribution their games on. DeNA’s network, called Mobage, publicly launched last fall. The company hasn’t revealed any stats on how large the network is though.

“We’re pretty comfortable with where we are,” Young says. “We’re very fortunate that we have monetization expertise that we’ve been able to acquire from Japan and evolve from our own history.”

RockYou Acquires Social Games Developer Ryzing, Moves to San Francisco

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 09:02 AM PDT

Social games company RockYou just announced that it has acquired developer Ryzing.

The two companies had already worked together on the game Bingo by Ryzing — the game has been available since early 2011, but RockYou took over as publisher through its Studio Partners program in January of this year.

The six-person Ryzing team, including CEO Manu Gambhir, will be joining RockYou. And the company is acquiring Bingo by Ryzing too, which it says has more than 75,000 daily active users. (AppData puts the number at 80,000.) In the announcement, RockYou CEO Lisa Marino says that the game’s model (where users can win real-world prizes through free sweepstakes drawings), combined with RockYou’s more ad-focused business, makes for a unique company: “Not only is real-money gaming superior in monetization to other types of game genres, it is also an accelerator for our ad monetization solutions, and ports well to mobile and other platforms.”

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. RockYou also announced that it’s moving offices from Redwood City, Calif., to the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.

Square Hires Former Salesforce SVP Sarah Friar As CFO, Now Processes $6 Billion In Annual Payments

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 08:48 AM PDT

Mobile payment service Square today announced that it has hired Sarah Friar as its new Chief Financial Officer. Until now, Friar was the Senior Vice President for finance and strategy at Salesforce.com. Before joining Salesforce, Friar worked at Goldman Sachs in corporate finance, M&A and equity research, as well as at McKinsey in London and South Africa.

Square says this new hire and its various other VP-level hires earlier this year should help it grow its product offerings and prepare for its international expansion “later this year.”

In its announcement of Friar’s hire, Square also noted that it now processes “over $6 billion in payments on an annualized basis.” In addition, Square claims that “over 1 million individuals and businesses are able to accept credit cards with Square.”

Despite the hype that still surrounds it, Square faced a few challenges in recent month. There have been, for example, persistent rumors about how the work environment at Square isn’t necessarily the best. That, apparently, didn’t scare away Friar, but given the competitive hiring environment in Silicon Valley, those rumors aren’t going to make hiring easier for Square. The company currently has around 300 employees (up from just 80 a year ago).

There has also been some talk about how Apple’s new Passport feature in the upcoming iOS 6 release could be a prelude to a full mobile payments solution that could take the wind out of startups like Square and others.

Shopcade Switches On Social Influence And Gaming Features

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 08:39 AM PDT

Shopcade’s platform lets people earn rewards for recommending products to Facebook friends. So far so simple, and not entirely original. What’s more interesting is that it’s moving fast to scale up in the US out of its European base in London and allowing users to get rewards as points redeemable as offers from merchants. This includes digital goods likes music from iTunes.

With about 65 million products on the site and many major brands like Urban Outfitters and Adidas, Shopcade has plenty of inventory. But they are attempting to avoiding ‘social spam’ by only rewarding users per purchase not per click.

Now the site is introducing what they call a sort of ‘Klout for shopping’ which works inside the site.

Their new ‘Trendsetter Score’ rates users on their influence in relation to each other’s shopping habits. It’s a new level of gamification of the site which may well improve engagement.

Users now get a set of "missions" or challenges to complete in order to earn rewards, with some being exclusive rewards from partner brands. In addition a “Matcheroo” game allows users to match products they have recently featured in their Shopcade with Facebook friends. Again, they win points.

Unsurprisingly the company recently hired game designer Lawrence Clark to focus on developing and building more game mechanisms into the site.

This whole move may be in response to the enormous growth of FantasyShopper, where users can ‘play’ by building outfits and spending virtual money, as well as buying real-world items. Gamification in social shopping is the new black it seems.

Unfortunately this social influence score on shopping is too internal to Shopcade. I’d like to see it turned into more of a product.

Nathalie Gaveau, the founder and CEO, co-founded PriceMinister (acquired by Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten). Angel investors include Daniel Bernard, former CEO of European retailer Carrefour, Ian Livingston, co-founder of Eidos Games and Lord John Birt, former director general of the BBC.

New Daily Deals Industry ‘Code of Conduct’ Tries To Stem Tide Of Bad Publicity

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 08:04 AM PDT

Groupon-style Daily Deals have had a mixed reception. For many consumers they can be amazing deals, and a great way for small businesses to grab new customers. For others it’s a nightmare of good deals that turn out to be bad, and customers flooding a business with unfounded requests. And let’s not even go into Groupon’s plummeting share price.

So it’s little wonder that the Daily Deals industry (I guess we can call it that now given the number of clone companies) has been feeling a little bruised. And hence the newly formed Global Daily Deal Association, largely driven out of the UK, has put some collective heads together to come up with the industries first ever “Code of Conduct”. Oh yes.

The voluntary Code of Conduct (isn’t it always with these things?) aims to standardise practices across the industry and “enhance accountability and sustainability”. The GDDA hops it will improve the reputation of the industry with consumers and merchants.

The GDDA claims the code will promote fair, honest and ethical best practice; detailed product and service information for cusnsumers; clear and accurate communications on offers; clear policies and procedures on offers web sites; providers will have to have effective procedures for handling complaints and an easy to understand refund policy. The code addresses privacy, misleading or deceptive conduct, complaints, refunds and credits. Businesses that sign up to the code will get a say on its continued development.

Those joining so far include DiscountVouchers.co.uk, Time Out Offers, MumsandMe and DealCollector. Across Europe Dailydeal.de, Sweetdeal and Bownty have signed up.

Stavros Prodromou, CEO of the GDDA admits the daily deals industry has suffered a bad rep: “The sector has previously been affected by a lack of merchant and consumer confidence. The code is the first step toward improving the sector's reputation." Gerard Doyle, CEO of DiscountVouchers.co.uk says they signed to “show consumers our dependability as a daily deal provider.”

However, it’s not clear what sanctions there are yet on what happens if a signatory to the code breaks the rules. Would getting chucked out of the GDDA affect their business? Plus, the awareness of the code amongst consumers right now is likely to be zero. So far the members are smaller players, which in a way are circling the wagons under some some of collective interest.

And if Groupon, by far the biggest provider, does not join, then it’s hard to see this initiative getting anywhere other than being yet another ‘approved’ logo consumers barely ever see.

UPDATE: Despite Groupon’s non-involvement in the scheme they sent us this statement: “We take customer and partner satisfaction very seriously and support the concept of a global code of conduct. Any code needs to be robust, enforceable and ensure the highest possible protection. At Groupon we are constantly improving our standards and approaches to lead the industry in ensuring the best possible levels of partner and customer service. We will be continuing our engagement with regulators, retail and consumer organisations. We welcome these types of initiatives and will evaluate them on an ongoing basis.”

Twitvid Rebrands As Telly To Focus On Social Video Discovery

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Twitvid launched in 2009, with the idea of becoming the “Twitpic of video sharing” on Twitter. But it’s gone through a bit of a pivot over the last year. Last December, the startup relaunched as a destination site where users can find videos shared by their friends.

But it still had that legacy name to deal with. Well no more: Twitvid is rebranding as Telly, and relaunching its site to make social video discovery even easier. In addition to the videos uploaded by Twitvid’s users, visitors also have access to content from sites like YouTube and Vimeo, as well as CNN and ESPN.

When users sign on to Telly, they pick interests and users that they’d like to follow, and then get a personalized feed of videos delivered to them. They can choose to add videos to their collection, share with other Telly community members and on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. There’s also a Telly Chrome extension and bookmarklet available to quickly add videos to their own collection. Finally, users can share their own personal videos on the service.

Prior to the rebranding, Twitvid had been busy putting the pieces into place to enable it, in part by making a few acquisitions. In March, it acquired daily deals aggregator Frugalo and in May it acquired personalized music video service Cull.tv. In both cases, those deals were more about bringing smart folks on board, and it now has 17 employees altogether.

For now, Telly is limited to its web interface, but CEO CEO Mo Al Adham told me to expect some apps to be released, including a Telly mobile and tablet applications. The goal is eventually to provide its social discovery across multiple devices, letting the user connect wherever they are.

Verelo Debuts A New Take On Website Monitoring, Focuses On Site Health & Recommendations

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 07:59 AM PDT

A startup called Verelo is introducing a new type of website monitoring service, which plans to commoditize features like uptime and performance monitoring, with plans to give away as much of those services for free as possible. Instead, Verelo’s premium offerings will focus on other areas, including malware detection and site health, as well as a recommendations feature aimed at the less tech-savvy. This latter feature will observe the site and suggest changes site owners can make and services they can add to cut down on frustrations.

Explains co-founder Andrew McGrath, who previously worked at Syncapse prior to creating Verelo with co-founder Mike Curry, the company’s tagline is “Verelo wants to make the internet a better place.” He said the idea for the service was born out of frustration with existing offerings – and there are many: Pingdom, Uptrends, New Relic, AlertFox – to name just a few.

“Everybody focuses on uptime and performance monitoring,” says McGrath, “because that’s an important place to be. But the reality is, it’s a small feature, even though it’s very important. The direction we’re taking Verelo is more of ‘what’s worse than your site being down?’ Well, it’s your site being hacked and serving up malicious content.”

So while Verelo is offering the traditional monitoring services, they will be just a part of the overall lineup going forward. “When people are thinking about uptime and performance reporting, we want them to think not just of uptime, we want them thinking ‘is my site doing the right thing? Is my site healthy?,’” says McGrath.

Another part of Verelo’s service outside of reporting and malware detection, is a “911″ emergency call feature to help affected sites immediately get back on track. They’ve also build a WordPress plugin that can help blog owners watch their sites for malware. One step up from the free level of service, in fact, is a package aimed at bloggers for just $2.00/month. And even at these lower tiers, Verelo is shrinking the time between checks to 5 seconds (compared with 60+ seconds on the free levels of other professional services).

There are also features aimed at non-technical business users. Specifically, Verelo wants to help monitor and catch all those little things that technical folks know need to be done, but regular people generally have no idea about. Some examples: Verelo could flag when a SSL certificate or domain was about to expire, or it could recommend you create an SPF record, or sign up for a service that can help you improve your site’s load times. On that last front, Verelo may either offer the service itself (ideally) or partner with a company it recommends. Current partners include CloudFlare (also soon a reseller) and PagerDuty, for example.

“Where it makes sense we’ll partner, and where it does not we’ll build,” McGrath says. But the direction the company is heading is to aggregate services and make recommendations. Part of this will involve a site owner’s dashboard, set to go live shortly (pictured below).

The company, founded in January 2012, is currently participating in the Extreme Startups accelerator. Verelo exited its private beta in April and is now making its public debut ahead of Extreme Startups’ demo day. You can use the discount code LAUNCH for 25% off if you’re interested in checking it out yourself.

Webcam System Models Your Movements And Emotions On A Lifelike Avatar

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 07:55 AM PDT

A new system created at Keio University will help add lifelike motion capture and emotion-sensing to apps, games, and design programs by scanning your face and body for cues. The system works on any PC and can recreate all of your facial expressions on a life-like human avatar. The test model lets the team turn a sullen grad student into a cute girl with long pigtails.

"We're using an algorithm that gets updated in line with the motion of the face. So it can track the face very fast, with very high precision. That's the basic technology for this avatar system."

The system lets the average user create lifelike motion captures of faces and upper bodies, adding a bit of realism and ease to a process that usually required special motion capture suits and lots of post-processing.

The project is led by Associate Professor Yasue Mitsukura and is still in experimental stages.

via Akihabara

Event Management Giant Cvent Scoops Up Seed Labs To Help It Go Mobile

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 07:12 AM PDT

In 2009, Todd Rogers and Rick Solner founded Seed Labs to turn their love of music festivals into an experience they could take with them on-the-go. The founders began creating mobile apps that would capture the excitement, community, and conversation at music festivals, which quickly expanded to include sporting events, culinary events, community get-togethers and everything in between. Adding an administrative portal and advanced analytics and reporting tools, Seed Labs grew into an attractive end-to-end solution for organizers and is now the mobile provider for big-name events like the ESPN X Games and Kentucky Derby.

Event organizers haven’t been the only ones to see the appeal. Today, Cvent, the world’s largest event management company you’ve never heard of, announced that it is acquiring the Austin-based startup for $4.2 million. For a 21-employee, self-funded company, it’s a great outcome. Especially as the Seed Labs team will get to stay in their hometown of Austin.

Cvent, which offers web-based software for meeting selection, online event registration, sourcing, management, email marketing and web surveys to corporate and government clients, has been looking to expand beyond B2B. The acquisition of Seed Labs will give it an entry point into the consumer events space by way of the startup’s apps, which have been downloaded by over two million users.

In 2012 alone, Seed Labs created 82 apps for 38 events, all of which include interactive schedules, maps, calendars, bios, image galleries, videos, and notifications — features that aim to enhance the consumer experience of events. Cvent wants to take these features and Seed Labs’ mobile infrastructure and carry it into new markets.

In the last year, Cvent has grown from 700 to over 950 employee and has added 2,500 clients to reach a collective 10,000 clients in 90 countries. The company is growing fast, thanks in large part to the $136 million in funding it raised last year from NEA, Insight Venture Partners and Greenspring Associates. With its boatload of capital, Cvent said at the time that it would begin focusing on strategic acquisitions to help it expand into new markets.

As part of this strategy, the company considered and analyzed over 20 different candidates, Cvent Founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal said. But, after hearing Seed Labs’ name come up again and again when talking to clients and other prospects, it became clear that the startup was respected in the space and represented the best option to help Cvent move into the space. It seems like a lot of consideration for $4.2 million, but you have to respect that.

Especially considering the fact that things weren’t always so rosy for Cvent. As Aggarwal told The Washington Post, three years into building his company, he was facing bankruptcy, was in debt, broke, and living with his parents.

The tough times continued for two more years before things started to turn around. Today, the founder is proud to say that Cvent has had 37 profitable quarters in a row — a pretty damn good comeback story. There aren’t many who would have had the gumption to stick it out that long.

From the sound of it, Cvent has plenty of cash to burn, and though its Seed Labs infusion is pushing the company in the right direction, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Cvent continue to make strategic acquisitions. The momentum is in its favor.

More on Cvent here.

Moonstruck And More: Amazon Beefs Up Its Prime Instant Video Back Catalog With MGM Deal

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 07:08 AM PDT

Amazon has applied for 76 different names in Icann’s new TLD scheme, with several of them pointing to the company’s ambitions to keep pushing forward on its plans to enhance its video and entertainment services — among the names that point to video, including some for its existing brands, are “.movie”, “.video”, “.box”, “.imdb” and “.prime.” Today Amazon announced some news that also underscores that strategy: it has signed a deal with MGM to add “hundreds” of film and TV classics to its Prime Instant Video service.

The deal is a strong step ahead for the company in enhancing the long-tail back catalog for the service, which has up to now been heavily looking to add newer releases to the selection and will see older titles like The Silence of the Lambs, Moonstruck, Dances with Wolves, Rain Man and The Terminator, and TV series like Stargate. Prime Instant Video now has a catalog of some 18,000 titles, including both films and TV episodes, available for streaming.

"Our customers tell us they love having tons of movies and TV shows to choose from, which is why we are focused on adding even more titles to our already extensive Prime Instant Video library," Brad Beale, director of digital video content acquisition for Amazon, said in a statement.

While the deal initially covers “hundreds” of titles, it’s not clear if it will eventually encompass all of MGM’s catalog of 4,100 titles.

Prime Instant Video is Amazon’s video subscription service, in which it offers unlimited downloads for a single fee to compete against Netflix and others offering a similar pricing model, which can be watched online, on the Kindle Fire, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or various other compatible devices. Amazon’s wider video offering, Amazon Instant Video, offers 120,000 titles for purchase or rent. Amazon Prime costs $79 annually.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

AT&T’s Updated ‘Toggle’ Service Lets More Employees Use Their Own Devices At Work

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 06:47 AM PDT

AT&T revealed their intention to jump on the bring-your-own-device enterprise bandwagon with their business-friendly Toggle service last October, which thoughtfully allowed users to segregate their personal and work content on their smartphones or tablets.

Now the company has announced a handful of new updates to the service to make it a more appealing option for companies and IT departments looking to ride the BYOD wave.

If you’re not familiar with the Toggle service, here’s how it works. Once the mobile client is installed and fired up (AT&T is quick to note that it works on devices from all carriers), users will see work-specific web browser, messaging, calendar, and GPS apps meant to keep them productive and undistracted by their multiple versions of Angry Birds. IT departments are also able to sink their fingers into those Toggle-enabled devices to reset passwords, setting up work-related apps, and wiping work mode information if needed.

AT&T notes several times in their marketing materials and on their website that Toggle works for “the top two major operating systems,” including Android 2.2 through 3.X. The company remains coy about what that other OS is, but the updated version of Toggle has indeed been confirmed to play nice with iOS. AllThingsD reports that things won’t stop there — support for Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 is expected to launch later this year.

Also new to Toggle is the Toggle Hub, an internal app store of sorts that lets admins deploy their own work-related custom apps that can only run in work mode. Those admins are also able to track app usage by user groups, as well as make select documents and media files available to the users that need them.

As personal smartphones continue to grow in power and functionality, the barriers to them pulling their weight as business-oriented productivity tools are coming down. According to a May 2012 report from Cisco, 76% of their 600 senior IT admin respondents consider the growth of the bring-your-own-device trend to be a positive development for their company (though the trend also forced Cisco to kill their Cius tablet project).

It’s little wonder that AT&T has made these kinds of plays — if businesses continue to allow users to bring their own hardware to work, the days of huge corporate wireless contracts may be numbered, and with Toggle, AT&T is trying to position themselves to benefit whether that scenario comes to pass or not.

Minority-Focused Startup Incubator DreamIt Access Gets Renewed Investment, Will Continue For Two More Cycles

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 06:46 AM PDT

Startup accelerator DreamIt Ventures is extending its minority-focused entrepreneur program DreamIt Access, thanks to a renewed commitment from previous investor Comcast Ventures. Today, DreamIt announced that Comcast Ventures will invest in two more cycles of DreamIt Access, which will be a part of the Philly 2012 program and the NY 2013 program. Through the additional investment, DreamIt Access will launch up to 15 minority-led startups over the next 12 months.

DreamIt and Comcast Ventures, the venture capital arm of Comcast Corporation, first partnered on DreamIt Access in May 2011, announcing at the time a $350,000 fund to give five startups in the Philly 2011 program an extra infusion of capital (These included ElectNext, Kwelia, MetaLayer, ThaTrunk and Qwite, whose founders are African-American, Asian, Hispanic and Indian.) Later, the investment was formalized into a year-long minority accelerator program called DreamIt Access.

The program was born from the idea that providing minority-led startups with access to mentors, investors and subject matter experts could help impact the under-representation of minorities in the startup ecosystem.

“The DreamIt Access experience provides an unmatched environment for minority entrepreneurs to test their ideas, learn from, and alongside, other startups, and build great companies,” explains William Crowder, Managing Director at DreamIt and lead partner for the DreamIt Access program. “The same success we have seen with our DreamIt companies such as SCVNGR, SeatGeek, and Adaptly can be achieved with minority-led startups through focused efforts like DreamIt Access.”

Currently, DreamIt Access is underway in NYC where 5 minority-led startups are participating: CampGurus, FirstCrush, RevSign, Urban Cargo, and Winston. Applications for DreamIt’s fall Philadelphia program are now underway and will select up to 15 companies, including five minority-led startups.

Nokia May Sell Luxury Phone Brand Vertu For €200 Million

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 06:43 AM PDT

Nokia is reportedly in talks with a private equity group called EQT in an attempt to sell off its independent subsidiary, Vertu.

Vertu is an ultra-luxury phone brand operating independently within Nokia that makes high-end phones with stainless steel, ceramics, carbon fiber. They phones even feature sapphires and rubies as buttons.

Reuters reports that the Vertu price tag is around €200 million (~$249 million).

Unnamed sources claim that the deal should go through in the next few weeks. This option seems increasingly unlikely, however as Nokia is struggling with market share and should be doing everything in its power to streamline its business. Plus, Vertu is an independent subsidiary, so separating the luxury phone maker from the Finnish super company shouldn’t prove all that complicated.

Reuters also reports that Permira, another private equity group, had been in talks to buy out Vertu but never ended up making an offer.

Vertu’s margins have to be high. It certainly doesn’t cost as much to make a phone out of premium materials as it does to buy one in the market. Still, a few developments over the past couple years make selling Vertu a rather attractive option for Nokia. For one, Ulysse Nardin went into the luxury phone business and started to dominate it. Being the number two luxury brand in anything isn’t all that wonderful. Secondly, the iPhone became a status symbol worth much more than its price tag, and so the Symbian-running Vertu brand lost value.

Kanvess.com Will Print Your Artsy Instagram Photos For 25 Cents A Pop

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 06:20 AM PDT

Did you take a brooding Instagram photograph of a bike in a rain puddle and want to share it with your grandma? Well either tell grandma to pull up a chair and put on her reading glasses or head over to Kanvess.com where a dream and a quarter will get you a printed copy of your favorite photo.

The site is brand new and was founded by husband and wife team Sean and Sara Alsobrooks, late of Knoxville. The site is pretty basic: you sign in through Instagram, pick some pics, and print. The Alsobrooks will get your order together and send it along. If you print 100 photos you get free shipping.

The photos print on 3×3-inch photo paper, just the right size for sharing or pasting to your nude body during a college performance art piece featuring images of shadows that look like the facial profiles of reality TV stars (true story!). The minimum order is six prints.

“We have no outside funding,” said Sean. “We’re just starting to get the word out to our friends online. We already have several orders in just a few hours.”

The vision was pretty darn basic. Sean wrote that “we started working on this several months ago after trying to find a place to print our own Instagram photos. We could not find a reputable place that was affordable or that printed simple square prints.”

“We love Instagram. We love the filters. It makes our photos amazing. But it feels like our photos get “stuck” in Instagram. It’s hard to print them and get physical copies. We wanted a simple, affordable way to solve this.”
Kanvess.com

Klout For Conferences: SponsorHub Starts Scoring Events’ Sponsorship Value

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 06:06 AM PDT

SponsorHub, an online marketplace for event sponsorships, is unveiling a new feature today that it’s calling the SponsorHub Score. The company says the score is, yes, “like Klout for events” — every event selling sponsorships on the site gets a rating between 0 and 100 that’s supposed to show the value it will provide to brand marketers.

Founder and CEO Robert Johnston says the SponsorHub Score reflects his larger vision for the company, namely that event sponsorships “should be purchased like any other form of media.” One of the keys to making that happen is providing measurements that help advertisers determine the effectiveness of their spending, so that they can say, “This is exactly why we paid $30K for the sponsorship.”

Johnston says that in determining how to score events, SponsorHub tried to look at things from the perspective of a chief marketing officer and figure out the value of a conference’s attendees to that CMO. So the SponsorHub Score is based on things like social influence, audience demographics (Johnston says there’s the company has “a little bit of a secret sauce” to capture this data from the SponsorHub site and from partners), pricing, and press and attendee testimonials.

SponsorHub Scores will visible on every SponsorHub event listing. Johnston says the company has already been sharing the score with some of its advertisers, and they seem pretty excited. But could there be some backlash on from event organizers? After all, if we stick to the Klout comparison, not everyone has been happy with their Klout score, or positive about the general concept.

Johnston says he isn’t too worried. For one thing, he says the events can post listings on SponsorHub are curated, so there shouldn’t be too many low-scoring, low-quality events on the site. He adds that for newer events, there could be an “aspirational” component, where they get a middling score in their first year and shoot to improve it in year two.

Things will probably get even more interesting with the really high-scoring events, Johnston adds, because they’ll now have more backup to charge their sponsors premium rates.

Real-Time Messaging Startup PubNub Introduces Pulse To Facilitate One-To-One Communications

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 06:00 AM PDT

As developers add more interactivity to their apps, PubNub has emerged with a platform for sending out real-time messages and notifications without investing heavily in the infrastructure needed to support it. While it has historically been focused on one-to-many notifications, the latest product from the startup, PubNub Pulse, will allow developers to add persistent connections between users.

PubNub works to allow developers to add robust messaging into their apps without having to “rebuild the wheel.” The startup’s initial product, PubNub Galaxy, was designed for app makers who wish to simultaneously push out real-time messages in a one-to-many fashion. That allows publishers to push messages to mass-scale audiences during major events to multiple mobile and web applications.

PubNub Pulse, by contrast, was designed with low-latency, one-to-one communication in mind. That will let publishers deliver messages in less than 50 milliseconds without having the complexity that comes with keeping connections live between devices and apps. Initial customers for PubNub Pulse include MyPCBackup.com, Dice with Buddies, CometChat, and “a large VOIP company” which is using the product as a replacement for the SIP communications protocol.

Traffic from clients using the service has exploded over the last several weeks, as PubNub has grown from 1,000 active customers in March to more than 1,500 at last count. Three months ago, it hit a peak of about 100,000 messages per second. But the most recent milestone saw it deliver ten times that — 1 million messages a second — thanks to voting and sentiment analytics apps being used during the E3 gaming conference, as well as HumbleBundle live commerce launch last week.

San Francisco-based PubNub has 14 employees, and recently closed a $4.5 million financing round led by mobile-focused VC firm Relay Ventures.

iFixit Tears Down The MacBook Pro With Retina Display, Deems It Nearly Impossible To Repair

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 05:40 AM PDT

The MacBook Pro with Retina Display is an impressive beast with a stunning screen and top-of-the-line computing innards. That said, it’s about as repairable as a used stick of gum per iFixit. The always vigilant DIY repair company just posted its notes after spending some time completely disassembling the new Apple MacBook Pro. But don’t expect to do the same with your new MBP. iFixit states “[The MacBook Pro with Retina Display] is, to date, the least repairable laptop we've taken apart.”

Apparently the new MacBook Pro is built like a MacBook Air and an iPad in that everything is custom and designed for the thinnest possible end product. The batteries are glued into place, the RAM is soldered to the logic board, it uses a custom SSD, and, worse yet, the screen assembly is all one piece, which means owners will need to replace the whole thing if something happens to any part of it.

This nonsense sort of signals the end to hometown Mac repair shops. Like the new iPad, Apple is designing products to be replaced rather than fixed. An Apple Store Genius will likely be replacing a whole lot more MacBook Pros on the spot rather than swapping out bad components. iFixit, champions of disassembling all the things, couldn’t even get the massive 94Wh battery removed from the case.

Comments about the non-repairable notebook aside, iFixit revealed the inner beauty of the new MacBook Pro. It’s hard to look at the pic of the entire assembly and not appreciate the sheer symmetrical wonder of the construction — just appreciate it from a far since you can’t fix anything anyway.

Icann Applicants For New TLDs Revealed As Part Of ‘Reveal Day’: The Full List

Posted: 13 Jun 2012 05:34 AM PDT

A little bit of a song and dance today from Icann as it released the full list of businesses and other organizations that have applied for their own customized top-level domain names, the first significan expansion on the 22 TLDs in existence today. The full list is here.

In a press conference in London to mark what Icann is calling “Reveal Day,” Icann’s SVP Kurt Pritz noted that over 500 companies and organizations have paid up tens of thousands of dollars to apply for the TLDs, for nearly 2,000 TLDs. They include some interesting twists: the Charleston Road Registry has applied for “.android” and “.google”; Apple Inc. has applied for “.apple.” Two different organizations have applied for “.guardian”: the Guardian newspaper and the Guardian Life Insurance Company. Eleven different applications for “.inc” and “.home”, and Amazon wants “.news” and “.app” (among many others).

Clearly not all will leave this process happy. Icann says that it will be going through a multi-stage process now to decide who will get what.

That will include checking for whether names are too similar to each other, whether they meet technical requirements, and whether the names are geographical or not, and whether they applicants meet financial, technical and operational capabilities to run a registry. More details on the process for getting a name here.

More to come as we continue to look hrough the list and wait for Icann to resume its press conference. (Rather bizarrely it has chosen to take a 15-minute pause in the middle of proceedings, perhaps to get journalists to review the lists.)

As the BBC pointed out earlier today, U.S. organizations account for more than half of the applications are coming from U.S. companies: 883 out of 1,930 applications in total. One journalist asked today whether that is because of the cost issue: Icann set a fee of $185,000 for each TLD application. Icann defended this position and noted that it even provided some financial assistance to organizations that wanted to register for TLDs but could not meet the applications fees, and that in fact the geographical spread was wider than it expected.

“To have 17 applications from Africa is actually encouraging, it’s a significant expansion,” Icann’s CEO Rod Beckstrom said.

Icann will now begin the process of looking at these applications in batches of 500 and it estimates that it will take between nine and 12 months to do that.

Some more details on how Icann will decide who should get a TLD when more than one company is claiming it: after evaluating financial risks and other criteria, including comments from stakeholders, if two are still in contention, priority will be given to the one that is community based. The last resort is an auction.

In total, some $350 million has been collected in the new TLD application process. Icann says this will be used for processing those applications and setting aside money for the risks and other issues that may arise around the different TLDs. As for any money remaining, it would be up to the community to decide how to use it, said Beckstrom.

There have already been some organizations backing out of applications: Icann says 150 refunds have been requested totalling $3.5 million dollars.