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- Apple Issue Causing Widespread App Crashes, FairPlay DRM May Be To Blame
- Is This A Thing? A Business Man Carries iPad In His Pants Through Grand Central Station
- Wikileaks To Publish Millions Of Emails From Syrian Officials
- AppHero Raises $1.8 Million For App Recommendation Service Which Learns Your Interests From Facebook
- From The Heart Of Beirut, Startup Accelerator Seeqnce Plans To Thrive
- Noom Weight Loss Coach Gets A Revamp After Company Hit 13.5M Organic Downloads On Android
- Startup Weekend Columbus: An Empire Is Born
- Motorola Quietly Reveals The LTE-Friendly, Kevlar-Clad Atrix HD
- The Warby Parker Of Gadgets? YBUY Gets $1M From Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures To Open Its 50k-Strong Waitlist For Test-Driving iPads, Jawbones And More
- Waze Doubles Its User Base To 20 Million In 6 Months
- Housebites Adds Do-It-Yourself Option To Its Airbnb-For-Takeout
- First Came Facebook Disconnect; Now, Open Graph Redirect, A Plug-In To Read FB Open Graph Links Without The Apps
- Concept Art Dictionary Gives A Word’s First Google Image Result Instead Of A Definition
- Munchery Is Trying to Reinvent The Personal Chef, And Early Signs Are Promising
- “In the Studio,” Heroku’s Mattt Thompson Wants to “Automate Away” Web Development
- Remember When Google Was A Search Engine?
- Refer.ly Lets You Earn Cash For Recommendations (And Now, Donate It To Charities)
- Cloud Vertical Lets You Track Your Infrastructure Spending on Amazon Web Services And More
- Microsoft’s Azure Accelerator In China Debuts Inaugural Class
- Three Startups Defending Democracy In America: Votizen, Memeorandum, and NationBuilder
| Apple Issue Causing Widespread App Crashes, FairPlay DRM May Be To Blame Posted: 05 Jul 2012 09:16 AM PDT  Developers are frustrated over what appears to be an issue with corrupt app store binaries being served by Apple, which is leading otherwise functional iOS and Mac applications to immediately crash upon launch. The issue was tipped to us by app developers and has also been making the rounds thanks to details shared by high-profile app developer Marco Arment of Instapaper. On Arment’s blog, he characterizes the issue as one where iOS apps crash as soon as they are opened, without even showing the splash screen beforehand. Instead, they quickly fade to black then return the user to their iPhone or iPad’s homescreen. For Mac apps, he says a dialog message may appear, reading: "[App] is damaged and can't be opened. Delete [App] and download it again from the App Store." (Arment is also keeping a well-maintained list of affected apps on his site, we should note). Developer Concerns: Not Knowing Who’s Affected Or Where, Angry Customers Lashing OutWhat’s worrisome is that the issue doesn’t appear to be affecting all developers in all regions, which makes the issue hard to track down. According to Metronome+ maker Joe LeBlanc, he has seen reports from the U.S., Japan, Korea and France, for example, indicating the problem is worldwide. These reports, from LeBlanc and other developers, have been trickling in for a couple of days now, and the situation doesn’t appear to be fully resolved as of yet. The developers we spoke with are concerned about leaving their damaged apps online because the issues will lead to angry, 1-star user reviews from consumers who believe the developer is to blame for the application’s faulty behavior. Laments Mark Rickert of Mohawk Apps, maker of Checkout Helper, the issue is definitely on Apple’s side, and he’s helpless to resolve it. “I’m extremely frustrated that this incident will tarnish my brand image and goodwill that I’ve built up over the last one-and-a-half years,” he says. “My app is a ‘premium’ type app for business users and if people can’t use it…they’re going to go elsewhere.” Adds Reuven Moskowitz, founder at Penguin Digital and maker of the clever iPhone photo printing app MophoApp, “we could be losing thousands of users an hour. If this was Google Play, we’d be able to pull the update and wait until this was fixed and resubmit. But with Apple and their approval process, if we pull we’d have to wait two weeks until approval again.” Developers Say Apple Remains SilentBut what’s really bothering developers is that Apple has not responded either, whether via email, in developer forums, or in bug reports. “Apple doesn’t provide a comment, there is no explanation about this problem,” Phoster’s maker Bucket Labs responds. “We are receiving lots of email by the hour, but we couldn’t do anything.” Meanwhile, the folks behind zombie survival game Please Stay Calm also say that they’re “constantly trying to contact Apple and get an update,” but are still getting reports of crashes. Andrew Johnson, co-founder of GaiaGPS says all they’ve gotten is an email auto-response from Apple, but, as of this morning, some users are reporting the problem is fixed while others are still affected. However, according to Readdle CEO Igor Zhadanov, the issue may already be resolved, it’s just that the change hasn’t it made its way to all Apple servers yet. “We only receive occasional emails from affected users. It wasn’t the case yesterday, though. It definitely hurt many applications that people are relying on,” he says. “For almost 500,000 users of our Scanner Pro application, more than 105,000 downloaded the update yesterday,” he adds, giving a scope of the problem. “Angry emails, Facebook, Twitter and App Store 1-star ratings – all that kept our team pretty busy.” Apple’s FairPlay DRM To Blame?But Zhadanov also provides one of the few technical explanations for the problem, which has puzzled many. He thinks the issue has to do with Apple’s DRM (digits rights management) called FairPlay. “It seems Apple’s FairPlay DRM mechanism wasn’t applied properly to application packages that are delivered to the user when he or she downloads the update. After the installation, the application doesn’t pass DRM validation and terminates immediately,” he explains. The reason why the issue seemingly affected some users and not others had to do with delays in having the bug and related fix propagated through Apple’s network of servers. Presumably, when the fix reaches all the servers, it will be resolved permanently. Laurent Mascherpa, CEO of Massive Finger, maker of Pinball Maniacs, suggests that Apple could implement tools that allow developers to perform progressive rollouts of apps in the future. For example, after deploying to a few thousand to ten thousand users, they could flip the switch to push the rollout to all. But, if problems were reported, they could pull the update and revert their app to the previous version. This would help in situations like this, he says. The general recommendation at this point from all developers is to wait to update your apps. For those who have already been affected, however, there are more troubles ahead. Even after the fix is implemented, game players may lose data. Explains Dan Russell Pinson of top educational app Stack the States, some of his users have found success by deleting and reinstalling the app, but they lose their game progress. (The workaround for this is to delete the app then reinstall an older version from the iTunes backup, we’re hearing.) We’ve also reached out to Apple, but have not heard back.
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| Is This A Thing? A Business Man Carries iPad In His Pants Through Grand Central Station Posted: 05 Jul 2012 07:38 AM PDT  Every morning, my lovely girlfriend walks through Grand Central Station in New York City on her way to work, and every morning, she sees something odd. Such is the nature of living in the Big Apple. This happened: she saw a man — a regular dude in slacks and a button-down — carrying his iPad in his butt. Witness the horror. Admittedly, there’s very little news value to this story, but I have to wonder, is this a “thing”? An iPad easily fits in a bag, and there are plenty of covers that include handles, allowing you to carry the tablet like a briefcase. But to a New York straphanger, perhaps this isn’t accessible enough. Perhaps the tablet needs to be as available as the phone in your pocket, and thus the butt tuck. My main question, if we just assume that this is acceptable behavior, is whether or not the iPad is safe. How tight are this man’s slacks to allow for a securely stowed iPad? And moreover, is it not totally sweaty and disgusting when he whips it out? Unofficially, feel free to participate in a caption contest in the comments. There is no reward except our amusement.
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| Wikileaks To Publish Millions Of Emails From Syrian Officials Posted: 05 Jul 2012 07:36 AM PDT  Wikileaks has just announced that they’re processing a trove of 2.4 million emails from and to Syrian officials that details the links between the internationally despised regime and outside governments and organizations. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wrote that the "the material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria's external opponents." The emails could have come from a trove hacked out by Anonymous in February that detailed the excesses of the Assad family during the conflict. Wikileaks describes the trove as containing hundreds of thousands of addresses in multiple languages. The database comprises 2,434,899 emails from the 680 domains. There are 678,752 different email addresses that have sent emails and 1,082,447 different recipients. There are a number of different languages in the set, including around 400,000 emails in Arabic and 68,000 emails in Russian. The data is more than eight times the size of 'Cablegate' in terms of number of documents, and more than 100 times the size in terms of data. Around 42,000 emails were infected with viruses or trojans. To solve these complexities, WikiLeaks built a general-purpose, multi-language political data-mining system which can handle massive data sets like those represented by the Syria Files. The first “release” – a few emails regarding Finmeccanica – aren’t particularly juicy, per se, but instead point to the mundanity of statecraft, even in a country gone mad.
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| AppHero Raises $1.8 Million For App Recommendation Service Which Learns Your Interests From Facebook Posted: 05 Jul 2012 07:30 AM PDT  Following Apple’s acquisition of Chomp, the app search and discovery business continues to heat up. Last month, app search startup Quixey raised a healthy $20 million Series B, and today a much younger startup, AppHero, has raised a $1.8 million seed round for its app recommendation platform. The round included investment from OMERS Ventures, Golden Venture Partners, and ENIAC Ventures along with other angels and seed funds who, combined, have put in around $1.3 million. An additional $500,000 came from other undisclosed sources. The company is building an app recommendation service that helps users find new applications to try by analyzing their historical activity and their social data. It also includes a friending functionality so users can see which apps their friends are installing and recommending. At first glance, this setup sounds very similar to what the mobile app recommendation platform Crosswalk is currently doing. Like AppHero, Crosswalk keeps track of your apps and allows you to recommend your favorite ones to others. And it does a better job at figuring out your interests than iTunes Genius does, in my opinion. However, while Crosswalk taps into Facebook (and other services) to discover which of your friends are on the platform, AppHero takes a different route – it actually uses your Facebook data to help it make its recommendations. According to AppHero founder Jordan Satok, also the creator of popular website App of the Day, AppHero looks at nearly everything you do on Facebook including liked comments and threads, liked pages, your shares, profile data, interests, location and more. However, it’s not parsing the text in your status updates just yet, although that is something they’re now working on, he says. A recent high school graduate, Satok started AppHero in May 2011, finding inspiration in the untapped potential of mobile technology. “These devices are capable of so much, and people are under-utilizing them,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about how we can deliver the most value to consumers, and it led down this path of thinking about the space of personalization.” He thinks that AppHero is a better tool for app discovery than an app search site because search is only great when you already know what you’re looking for. “But people don’t know what they don’t know,” he says. As for the comparisons with Crosswalk and the like, he claims the big differentiator is the underlying intelligence in AppHero. Not only does the service understand “who someone is and what they’re like,” Satok says, it also learns more about them over time by tracking their Facebook social data (think: updated location, marital status, likes etc.) and activity (e.g., geo-location, app downloads and likes/dislikes). Currently a team of five, AppHero will use the new seed funding to hire machine learning experts to help grow the team.
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| From The Heart Of Beirut, Startup Accelerator Seeqnce Plans To Thrive Posted: 05 Jul 2012 07:13 AM PDT  If you were going to choose an interesting place to run an accelerator program for startups, Beirut would probably be one place you’d pick. I recently travelled to the city to meet with Seeqnce, a unique project which hopes to woo the Lebanese diaspora – spread throughout the world after Beirut’s notorious war-filled history – to a newly peaceful Lebanon. This summer it plans to create 8 new startups drawn from Lebanon and the rest of the Arab world. Each startup will get investment, mentoring and offices. So far they’ve had over 275 applicants from 17 countries apply for the program which starts in September and ends in March 2013. Located in the the cool Hamra district of Beirut, in an office that was converted from a derelict apartment, Seeqnce plans to accelerate Beirut’s startup scene. Already one of its startups, Cinemoz, is on its way to becoming the “Hulu of the Arab world” and has already partnered with Brightcove. It offers over 1,000 premium Arab entertainment titles and is heading towards an audience of 100,000 – big when you consider broadband penetration in the Arab world is still not high. Speaking to Samer Karam, one of the key co-founders Seeqnce, he was quick to point out that Seeqnce is not an incubator, but an accelerator. Founded in May 2010, he and his friends decided they needed a place for early stage startups to come together and work. They were joined by AlterKey and ClashWith (a gaming startup). The first few months were run as a collective. Then – after a big party in Beirut in November 2010 (as part of global entrepreneurship week) attracted over 300 people – they realised there was a growing tech and startup scene in Beirut. “We set out to create a big startup space. We funded it through friends an family, and invested a lot into turning this old apartment into a space, says Karam. They decided on a 6 months incubation programme, allowing for the time it would take to train brand new entrepreneurs and engineers from the region. They also actively recruited people to come into the programme as opposed to people knocking on the doors. The new Seeqnce programme invests $75,000 for 30% equity with 10% buyback option based on performance. Follow on rounds have the right of first refusal. The large amount of equity is structured on the basis that they are skipping a round based on the fact they are going through Series A. But “We are not adamant that it will always work this way,” says Karam. He admits the “exit potenial in Beirut is limited to say the least. But Lebanon is a multi-language region, which means we can reach far beyond our borders.” This will work well with content-oriented startups like Cinemoz that will appeal to the big media companies in the Arab world, as well as the traditional players like the telcos. Plus they are starting to lure back the Lebanese diaspora and talent from the rest of the world. “The beauty with Lebanon in terms of the Arab region is that there is a great deal of free speech. So we are seeing huge amounts of ex-pats returning to this newly stable country.” It’s certainly early days, but if you can build a startup accelerator in Beirut, then, well, look out world.
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| Noom Weight Loss Coach Gets A Revamp After Company Hit 13.5M Organic Downloads On Android Posted: 05 Jul 2012 07:12 AM PDT  Noom Weight Loss Coach, an Android app that has seen over 5 million organic downloads, has just undergone a major redesign. The usual wheel on the homescreen has been replaced with a task list that shows all of your progress and goals at a glance. The exercise function has also been revamped to seamlessly integrate the pedometer into everything you do, letting you track your steps with your phone. The app has added rewards and motivational features to increase engagement, along with a few new food tracking abilities. The idea is that you shouldn’t have to input very much information — just the bare necessities — and Noom will do the rest on its own to help you lose weight. The app has also hit some major milestones with the launch of this new version, including 10,000 daily installs for Noom apps and 13.5 million cumulative downloads for Noom Inc. The company reports that 86 percent of active members have lost weight, with an average of 4.2 pounds per user. Samsung and Verizon have also been impressed, making Noom the default fitness partner on Samsung Smart TVs and Verizon’s first mWell partner. The new version of the app is rolling out over the next couple weeks, so if you feel like checking it out head on over to the Google Play store and install the app. Click to view slideshow.
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| Startup Weekend Columbus: An Empire Is Born Posted: 05 Jul 2012 07:07 AM PDT  The power is out in Ohio thanks to a series of rough storms that lashed down trees and left us in a sweltering swamp. As I sit here with 75% of my laptop battery left, drenched in sweat, in a totally dark house, recapping my first Startup Weekend experience — unfortunately I am one of the last of the 500,000 central Ohioans affected by power outages due to last weekend’s storms — I realize that I love the Startup Weekend concept. That concept, which we have covered before on several occasions, is simple: take a bunch of people with ideas and lock them into a room for 54 hours until the create something. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation funds a brilliant model. It gets people to do stuff, make stuff…a push to action. At a local level, I’ve seen enough success stories like Cannon.fm, Venueseen and Fundable emerge from the platform that I was intrigued to attend the event when it traveled to Columbus Ohio. I’m a big believer in rapid prototyping and I found that StartupWeekend is rapid prototyping for businesses. For the uninitiated, the event went down like this: About 150 people gathered in a big, beautiful cement room on the top floor of the Loane Crane Center at the Columbus College of Art and Design. After hearing the effervescent and fairly inspiring Dan Rockwell, kick off the event by decreeing that, among other things “TechCrunch is not traction” (it got a few chuckles from the crowd, myself included), the event proceeded with the precision of a a well oiled machine. National Startup Weekend representative Nick Seguin laid out the rules and local organizers Brian Billingsley and Suzy Bureau efficiently moved the event forward. A cast of local and national mentors were introduced and agreed to participate including a gentleman from Dallas named Bruce Parker with whom I had previously spoken regarding his mobile payments platform called ModoPayments — a nice surprise. More than 41 people stood in line to give a one minute pitch about an idea. After the initial pitches were completed, a quick vote identified the most popular concepts and teams coalesced around those concepts. There ended up being about 12 teams or so. 68% of my laptop battery left. The rising cream of this particular weekend were not necessarily the picks I called in the the “march-madness” style bracket in my head. Of the 41 pitches I watched, I was much more interested in the food recycling concept, the Google Street View of apartment interiors and the queen mother of them all…a doorbell that streams a picture of whomever is ringing it (I think it already exists but I still loved it). The winner — Posh Haven — was a fine idea. The concept revolves around curated online shopping experiences. You basically shop for interior designs based on picture themes and the service helps you find items like those in the picture. For example, if you look at an image of a “beach bungalow” themed interior, Posh Haven helps you find places to buy the items in that image (multiple lamps, chairs, etc that all match that theme). The team did an pretty good job of showing the potential for instant profitability with an affiliate-style purchase (earning 4%) using their site right in their final presentation — an excellent kung fu move that the judges instantly noticed. However, it wasn’t the fireworks display I had hoped for. One of the runners up was a prototyping/layout sharing website called Mockly. It was pitched with speed, grace and confidence. Much utility housed in this familiar concept (see InVision). The other runner up called Chameleon — probably the most out-there of the bunch — actually built a demo app that gets rid of facial blemishes, in real time, during Skype video calls — a slightly narcissistic concept but definitely the coolest demo of the lot. 53% battery left. About mid way through the 54 hour marathon, I spoke with a few of those teams to hear about their idea and their progress. Below are a few of those conversations: 11% left. Man, Final Cut Pro eats up a ton of battery. I’ll wrap this thing up. I’ve been to many a hackathon…heck, we do a great one ourselves, but the scale and pace at which Startup Weekend proceeds is truly monumental with events happening all over the world, month by month. With this scale in mind (and for a wannabe data nerd like me), it would be interesting to see, at a macro level, how different solutions and winners map to the needs of their regions. I found it interesting that in Columbus — a city housing retail and service behemoths like, Limited Brands (and many post-Limited Brands spinoffs), Nationwide Insurance and Cardinal Health to name a few — so many of the concepts we saw emerge from this Startup Weekend event were retail mobile apps or websites. It therefore seems likely that the events themselves and the solutions that emerge are directly tied to and mirror the economies of their hosting city – entertainment apps in entertainment cities, retail apps in retail/service oriented cities. Makes sense. Organizer Nick Seguin confirmed my somewhat obvious observation when he let me know that in Mongolia, for example, one of the best Startup Weekend solutions had nothing to do with an iOS nor Android app but was rather a solution for growing chili peppers. 4% All in all, it was a pretty fascinating weekend and the biggest take away for me is that, regardless of placing in the competition, many, many ideas are spawned during these 54 hour rampages. Many of those non-placing ideas are also good and really compelling in some way and a few of them are just plain whacko. No matter, it is definitely worth the efforts of all involved. Lo and behold, the power is on (and in the nick of time). Looks like this story will get uploaded after all.
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| Motorola Quietly Reveals The LTE-Friendly, Kevlar-Clad Atrix HD Posted: 05 Jul 2012 06:30 AM PDT  Rumors and questionable leaks of Motorola’s next Atrix device have been making the rounds for what seems like ages, but Motorola finally put all that speculation to rest last night. The company recently revealed the new Ice Cream Sandwich-powered handset on their website, albeit with a notable lack of fanfare. With its rounded corners and gently sloping back, the Atrix HD looks an awful lot like a softer version of its Verizon-bound cousin, the Droid RAZR. The similarities don’t end there though — like the Droid RAZR, the new Atrix sports an 8-megapixel main camera, and its rear-end is also clad in Kevlar (though it sports a slightly different weave pattern). Meanwhile, the device’s 4.5-inch 720p Colorboost display is swathed in a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass to help things from betting too hairy when the Atrix takes a spill. A quick look inside reveals that the Atrix HD is running on an unspecified 1.5GHz dual-core processor, and packs 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, an LTE radio, and an embedded 1780 mAh battery. While it isn’t quite as thin as its Verizon counterpart, the Atrix HD squeezes all of that into a (titanium or “modern white”) frame that comes in at 8.4mm thick. Though the device’s spec sheet is now available for our prying eyes to pore over, we’re still left without some salient details. Even though its logo is displayed prominently under the Atrix’s screen, AT&T has yet to officially acknowledge the device’s existence. As such, there’s no word on a release date or pricing, but I wouldn’t expect things to stay that way for too much longer.
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| Posted: 05 Jul 2012 06:20 AM PDT  The retail world of consumer electronics is a tough game, with a lot of the traditional bricks-and-mortar trade continually pushing online to compete against the likes of Amazon and eBay for consumers that prefer to get a wider selection for cheaper prices to seeing the products in action before purchasing. A startup called YBUY is trying to turn that ecommerce model on its head, by offering a kind of extended lease service to online buyers, giving them the chance to try out gadgets at home before closing the deal. With daily new sign-ups registering around 2,000 at the moment, today YBUY is announcing it's picked up $1 million in Series A funding from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's investment firm Tomorrow Ventures. The concept behind YBUY is fairly straightforward: for a flat fee of $24.95 per month, it offers a selection of consumer electronics and kitchen gadgets — both new and refurbished — giving users the option of getting them for 30-day testing periods before actually agreeing to buy them. YBUY pays for all the postage and packaging to send you the product and get it back if you don't want to keep it. Stephen Svajian, the founder and CEO, tells me that the product selection is pretty varied: it ranges from iPad tablets to Jawbone and Breville kitchen products. But it also features products from Kickstarter campaigns. The idea is curating and aggregating the best and becoming an alternative to, say, a Google product search. "We only represent what we think is the best product in a particular category," he tells me. "We do a lot of the work [looking for them] the online shopper would typically do." YBUY is not yet disclosing its total number of customers or tunrover but says that it's been growing 25 percent month-on-month, and as an example created 2,000 accounts yesterday. Svajian says that in customer interviews, the main reasons for going for YBUY over something like Amazon are multiple. For one, there is the issue of financial commitment. Even if sites today have good return policies, "They don’t like to see the $600 leave their bank account on something they’re not sure about." Then there is the issue of returns: these can be a hassle, but YBUY encloses return packaging with each product. The third reason is a bit of a surprise: "They feel bad," he says. Apparently there is a kind of stigma or guilt around returning products that keeps people from doing it, whereas here it's built into the business model, almost being encouraged. There is also the issue of trust: online there is a bit of a worry that people will never get all their money back in return situation. Although YBUY bills monthly, Svajian says he doesn't put itself into the category of "subscription e-commerce." That's because they are getting ready to introduce another model as well: "We felt it would be useful to have a subscription early on to drive engagement and to be able to run experiments to track against different months," he says. But in the next few months, the company will be rolling out a different option for customers. "They’ll be able to choose whether to bill monthly or just get billed when they receive a product. We’re big believers in one, single experience for customers and our customer interviews have told us they want this model, but we’d like to see the data before we commit to just one option." If there is a comparison between YBUY and another business, it might be Costco, where YBUY appeals to the discover/demand driver, and Costco to discounts. "We’re both a membership club with a disruptive distribution channel that delivers long-term value to customers," he notes, but adds: "It’s strange thinking about us like Costco, because we just give you cool stuff and Costco gives you cheap stuff, but I think our manner of disruption will be similar and we’re focused on the long-term." What's perhaps most compelling is that as the service continues to grow, it's actually making better and better margins on the service. In December, he says, they were losing $50 per customer. Now they are making around $35 per customer, with the value per customer at $450, with the profitability per customer ranging between 25% and 50%. In terms of partnerships, YBUY currently has no plans to do any white-label agreements with brands to offer this kind of leasing service on their behalf, or for any other e-commerce sites that want to introduce this kind of service into the purchasing mix. And Svajian says that he is reluctant to make direct deals with manufacturers full stop, even for promoting on their own site: "We’ve done a deal with a manufacturer and we’re reluctant to do that again. We think its more important to have integrity around the process. If we are paid by the manufacturers to slot their products, then that detracts from our value prop to customers – to get them the best stuff. We need to be rabid about the value we deliver to customers and we don’t want anything to get in the way of that." The whole try-before-you-buy space is pretty nascent at this stage but we are seeing others moving here, too. Warby Parker is doing it with eyewear; and Trunk Club's applying it to fashion, among others. On that trend, Svajian is adamant that it's not just a fad but something that speaks to what customers are actually needing today: "This isn’t disruption for disruption’s sake. Rather, it’s important to note that this disruption is being driven by the customer. Customers want to try before they buy. The consumer will drive the push into this model." For now that will keep YBUY in the U.S. with international growth somewhere down the line. Svajian is a lawyer by training but has been a serial entrepreneur, with YBUY being his fourth company. Jim Patterson, the Yammer chief product officer, has been a partner in two of them — in addition to being an angel investor in YBUY. One of them, AudioCaseFiles, targeting the legal market, sold for a 10x return for its investors when it was sold to Courtroom Connect. Other angel investors, in addition to Patterson, in this Series A round include David Hanna, Chairman and CEO of CompuCredit Corporation.
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| Waze Doubles Its User Base To 20 Million In 6 Months Posted: 05 Jul 2012 05:34 AM PDT  Waze, the Israel-based social navigation and traffic service, today announced that it now has 20 million users. That’s quite a milestone for any startup, but what makes this number so impressive is that the company also announced that it added half of its users in the last six month and continues to grow quickly. Just in the last month, the company said, it added 1.8 million new users to its community. All of these users, said Waze, have used the app to drive over 3.2 billion miles so far. Waze has received funding from a number of prominent Silicon Valley funds (including Kleiner Perkins) and Horizons Ventures Hong Kong. In total, Waze has raised about $67 million since its launch in 2008. The company is clearly on a roll right now and given that it depends on its users to collect traffic data, having more users is obviously a boon for anybody who uses the service (though, as usual, Waze is happy to report the download numbers, but that obviously doesn’t mean it actually has 20 million active users). Just two weeks ago, Waze announced a number of new features, including the ability to see real-time fuel prices in the company’s mobile apps. Earlier this year, Waze also added a hands-free feature to its iPhone app that allows users to just wave their hand in front of their iPhones to start Waze’s voice-recognition mode to report traffic conditions while driving. The company, unlike most of its competitors, also makes the source code of its apps available to anybody who would like to take a look and modify it. Still, with the arrival of built-in turn-by-turn directions in iOS6 (and with Google already offering this feature on Android), it’s hard to predict the future of Waze. The company apparently provides some data to Apple and chances are Apple is paying a fee for this data, but it remains to be seen how quickly the company can continue to grow after Apple releases iOS 6 with its built-in turn-by-turn navigation.
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| Housebites Adds Do-It-Yourself Option To Its Airbnb-For-Takeout Posted: 05 Jul 2012 03:08 AM PDT  Housebites, which we’ve previously described as the UK’s Airbnb-for-takeout, is launching a new product in Beta today: Housebites Fresh — a subscription service that aims to let anybody cook at home in the style of a “TV chef”. Slightly daft and PR-fueled description aside, what we have here is actually quite a nice idea, the origin of which we’ll dig into later. Each week, Housebites Fresh subscribers are sent a box of freshly chopped ingredients accompanied by a recipe card so that — in less than 40 minutes — they can prepare a freshly cooked meal at home, inspired by the professional chef-standard take-outs already delivered as part of the main Housebites service. In addition, Housebites Fresh will learn a subscriber’s tastes, says the company, so as to provide “varied and interesting meals”. Recipes on launch will include ‘Sea Bass with Puy Lentils’ and ‘Gremolata and Malysian Chicken Curry with Jasmine Rice’. For now, interested users can sign up to get in on the Beta, while the service launches proper by the end of this month. Overall, the Housebites Fresh approach reminds me of the many startups that are emerging trying to match recipes with actual shopping list fulfillment and delivery, and an overall trend of using the Internet to eat more healthily and gastronomically — see my recent coverage of LoveYourLarder, for example. To that end, Housebites CEO and founder Simon Prockter says that the idea for Housebites Fresh was always part of the company’s business plan, though it’s very similar to the Samwer Brothers’ HelloFresh. Prockter even jokes that he copied the latter’s colour scheme, a sideways jab at Germany’s king of the clones. Interestingly, however, HelloFresh appears itself to have been inspired by a Swedish startup with a near-identical model. So not such a fresh idea after all.
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| Posted: 05 Jul 2012 02:12 AM PDT  A new Chrome plug-in that lets users bypass the installation of Facebook apps, but still consume the content your friends are sharing via those Facebook-enabled apps, has been picking up users at a solid clip since going live only a week ago. Facebook Open Graph Redirect, which works with Facebook apps for sites like SocialCam, Yahoo, the Washington Post and others, now has 3,200 users, and another developer has now used the same code to create a Firefox plug-in as well. The growth of Open Graph Redirect is another example of how services that help you bypass some of the creeping effects of social media are hitting a chord with consumers: Brian Kennish, the ex-Googler developed Facebook Disconnect, a Chrome extension that disables traffic from third-party sites to Facebook servers but still allows you to access Facebook itself, tells me it now has over 700,000 weekly users, impressive growth considering that back in March it had 200,000 installs. While Facebook Disconnect disrupts the usage traffic that gets sent by third-party sites to Facebook, Open Graph Redirect works in the opposite direction by disrupting activity within Facebook. Its purpose is twofold: First, it lets users bypass the need to download an app themselves in order to be able to read content shared on an app by someone else. Joe Levy, the developer behind the service, says apps that the plugin would impact include Yahoo, Washington Post, MSNBC, SocialCam, the Guardian and Viddy. “With a lot of users, it has a large potential to disrupt the ‘social reader’ auto-posting features of Facebook’s new Open Graph, as people will no longer need to install these apps in order to view the content ‘hidden’ behind their install buttons,” Levy tells me. The second result of using the plugin is that you the user subsequently don’t have to share what you happen to be reading with others . He tells me he’s not been in contact with Facebook about the plugin, and he acknowledges that Facebook probably wouldn’t be very happy about people installing it, but he also adds: “I’m not sure Facebook could shut down the plug-in. “While it is probably against Facebook’s EULA to install this plug in, I think Facebook could only ban users using the plug in (if they really wanted to), but not cause Google to remove an extension from the Chrome Web Store that simply grabs HTML and modifies it.” He points to Facebook Disconnect’s continuing growth as “much more detrimental to Facebook than this.” Kennish, meanwhile, notes that Facebook Open Graph Redirect is not the first to try to disrupt the social sharing features within Facebook. He points to an open source “side project” he did with Nik Cubrilovic (once an employee here at TechCrunch) called Frictionless (we wrote about it here) that has recently been updated by some contributors. Facebook Disconnect has been updating, too, with an added feature on its Chrome and Safari plug-ins called Collusion, which Kennish says lets users visualize and, optionally, block all invisible websites that track you. Levy says that his hope is that with Facebook Open Graph Redirect, if the plug-in gains more traction, Facebook and the websites whose apps “currently force users to install something that will have read/write access to their Facebook data will rethink the current way of doing things.” And that could potentially lead to a redesign of Open Graph and the “social reader” apps that would “better suit users.” But if Levy sounds like he’s anti-Facebook, far from it: “I am a big fan of Facebook,” he tells me. He even flew out from his home in North Carolina to their offices a few months ago for a final round of interviews to work there. “I do think these new open graph features and social readers are taking sharing a bit too far, especially considering all the privacy concerns people already have with Facebook,” he says. He points out that the plug-in has been enthusiastically received on Hacker News, Twitter, and AntyWeb. “If that has any correlation with how most Facebook users feel about Facebook’s social readers, then there is certainly a wide market for this extension, and certainly a number of things Facebook can improve upon in this area.”
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| Concept Art Dictionary Gives A Word’s First Google Image Result Instead Of A Definition Posted: 04 Jul 2012 11:32 PM PDT  Here’s something that you’ll either want to buy immediately — or that will just strike you as a giant waste of paper. There’s no in between. Though I will venture a guess that Sergey Brin was going to get to this after he finishes with his Google Spectacles. From Crap Is Good, we’ve learned that two London artist/designers, Ben West and Felix Heyes, have created a visual dictionary, courtesy of Google. In other words, the artists took an average dictionary and replaced every single word (that’s 21K words for those of you counting along at home) with the first Google Image result for that particular word. Crazy? Maybe. Slightly brilliant? Call it maybe. The result is a 1,240-page pic-tionary comprised of JPEGs and PNGs that will shock, confuse, and amaze. So just how defensible is the proprietary technology behind the “Google Book”? West tells Creative Applications in an interview that the books was enabled by two PHP scripts that his brother wrote for them: “The First one takes a text list of dictionary words and downloads each image in sequence, and the second lays them out into columns and outputs a PDF.” That’s a script that I’ll bet at least one of you faithful readers could whip up in a jiffy. So, just because everyone loves a contest, let’s say that the Google trolling, artistically-inclined reader that comes up with the best alternative to the Google Book will receive a free TechCrunch t-shirt and maybe even some love from the TC Twitter account. As to the Google Book, after getting a PHP assist, the designers printed the results and put them in a handbound book replete with thumb-indexed pages and a “marbled paper hardcover,” whatever that means. As to how do the artists see their creation? “It’s really an unfiltered, uncritical record of the state of human culture in 2012,” West told Creative Applications. The best part, and most telling statement about Human-Internet Relations is that West estimates that about half of the Google Book is “revolting medical photos, porn, racism, or bad cartoons.” We’re also going to reach out to Google Images to see what the team has to say about this. For them, it seems like a free litmus test for how well Google’s algorithm matches images to the wild, weird, and wacky words in our lexicon. It’s a fun way to see how well (or poorly) Google chooses to associate images with gems of the English language, like “pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism” or “OMG” (which, by the way, is in the Oxford English Dictionary). Of course, you could just Google these words yourself, but it just doesn’t feel quite right unless they’re packaged into something that feels, tangibly, more like a dictionary. According to the interview, the designers are looking to print a number of softcover editions to sell and you can sign up by finding the designers at home here. It isn’t clear whether proceeds from sales will be used to pay copyright holders of the images or not. Your thoughts?
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| Munchery Is Trying to Reinvent The Personal Chef, And Early Signs Are Promising Posted: 04 Jul 2012 09:00 PM PDT  Editor's Note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur who created Onesheet, Webbygram, TipList, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. You can find him on Twitter at @mulligan. There are plenty of people who can make great home cooked meals (ex: homemakers) and plenty of people who would probably pay a reasonable price for someone to cook for them (ex: young professionals / bachelors). There’s an opportunity somewhere in there. Munchery is one of the latest startups to go after it. The company’s tagline is “Reinventing the Personal Chef: Gourmet Delivered to Everyone”. It’s a pretty simple concept: professional chefs make a certain number of meals that are sold daily through the Munchery site. The meals are delivered to your door and all you need to do is heat them up. Yum. I’ve known about the service for months, but always forget to use it. Recently, however, I’ve had constant reminders because they just launched an iPhone app that sends a daily push notification about what’s available that night. Ordering Today, a dish caught my eye and I pulled the trigger. I decided to order the Grilled California Baja Yellowtail from Chef Raymond Reyes (Gather Restaurant. Alum of Michael Mina, Blowfish, Yoshi’s, Sushi Ran, and Bistro Liaison). It was listed at $15.99.
The ordering process was simple. You select the dish, enter the address and phone number, and request a delivery timeframe. The options were one hour increments between 5-9 PM (I chose 7-8). There is a delivery charge of $2.95, so my total came to $18.94. A little pricier than I expected, but that didn’t stop me from ordering. Delivery Around 6:30 I got a call asking if they could deliver the food early. Minutes later, a young woman holding a Munchery branded bag was standing at my door. Since the payment had been completed through the app, she smiled, handed me the bag, and was on her way. Seamless process. Preparation Inside the bag there was a closed take-out container sealed with a sticker describing how to heat the dish up:
When opening the box, I expected the meal to be all mashed together, but it looked about as good as food can look when presented in a take-out box. I transferred the meal to a oven safe tray and heated it for 5 minutes. Simple. Taste The meal was delicious. For something that only took about 5 minutes of effort, it was a great way to eat a balanced, healthy meal at home. Plus, it was much more gourmet than anything I would have made on my own. The fish was well cooked and the flavors of the rice and vegetables complemented it perfectly. The warming instructions were perfect. Takeaways The meal from Munchery was easy to order, delivered on time, and delicious. They have nailed the core experience. But price is definitely an issue. Right now the price point seems in line with what you would spend if you went out to a restaurant, or if you ordered delivery through GrubHub (and honestly, it felt similar to having take out delivered). This means in its current form, the service will be competing for consumer mindshare when making a decision to go out to a restaurant or having food delivered. In my opinion, the price point is too high to make it a competitive alternative to cooking at home. While the meal was potentially healthier and more gourmet than a normal take out meal, it wasn’t that much easier to buy / prepare. If anything, it was more work because I had to plan ahead and then heat it up. Potential However, when evaluating startups, it’s a waste to assess their potential based on what they do now. It’s important to think how the service could grow and expand. And I think Munchery has really interesting opportunities down the line. If Munchery works, there are many ways it could lower the price and compete with consumer grocery spend, instead of consumer take-out or go-out spend. Here are two simple ones:
Overall, I love this concept and am very excited to see how this space progresses as the companies in it start to scale. From my first experience, Munchery is off to a very good start.
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| “In the Studio,” Heroku’s Mattt Thompson Wants to “Automate Away” Web Development Posted: 04 Jul 2012 07:00 PM PDT  Editor’s Note: Semil Shah (@semil) is currently an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been an official contributor to TechCrunch since January 2011. “In the Studio” barrels through the summer months by welcoming a hacker from the rustbelt, a former mobile lead at a company acquired by the world’s largest social network, and now, having relocated to the Bay Area, leads mobile and design efforts for one of the Valley’s great web development platforms. Mattt Thompson (yes, there are three T’s in Mattt) is currently focusing on mobile and design for Heroku, a company he joined after his previous employer — Gowalla — was acquired by Facebook. And in his free time, he’s either toying with some of his new projects or thinking deeply about the future of web development and its relationship to mobile. In this short discussion, Thompson discusses a range of topics that would be on the minds of mobile application creators as well as web developers. As the web presents limitations in a mobile app context, many apps also interact with the web in significant ways. Thompson believes app developers should be spending the overwhelming majority of their time designing their app experience and focusing on growing users, while leaving some of the development to other services. He also shares his deeper philosophies around the hacker ethos of solving hard technical problems in today’s environment where new tools and web dev environments can, in some ways, “automate away” some of the more repeatable and/or trivial technical problems.
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| Remember When Google Was A Search Engine? Posted: 04 Jul 2012 05:48 PM PDT  The lineup of products announced at Google I/O last week was disorienting: JellyBean, Nexus 7, Nexus Q, Google Glass, an updated Google Maps, Google Now and so on. It was about as disorienting as reading and navigating through the entire Wikipedia entry for Google or getting stuck in that “YouTube” parody loop where you can’t find the thing you’re searching for because there are so many viral spoofs of it. Search is so broken … Google, what happened to that problem? I thought you were ONIT. It’s not exactly clear when Google ceased to be a search company. It became more like a company that wanted a finger in every pot in order to protect its future as a search company; Perhaps it was the early acquisition of Google Earth? Perhaps, but, if the marker only counts when viewed as a defensive measure, my guess would be the later acquisition of YouTube. Anyways, what is clear after this Google I/O is that Google is now a hardware company, a social company and a mobile company; And it’s a company destined to be at war with other companies. David Pogue put it well in his sprawling, and not entirely correct, analysis of what lies ahead for the search engine’s Tablet front, “Nexus phone, Nexus tablet, Nexus sphere thing; what is Google thinking, anyway? If it truly wants to emulate Apple, it should minimize confusion, not foster it.” Some would argue that Google’s “spray and pray” product development philosophy is strategic, “Overall, Google has lost focus because it had too,” Josh Constine explained in a Branch chat on the subject, “The genesis of social and mobile means the Internet can’t be won with one product anymore, even search.” “The problem is they never talk about context as to why they do those experiments so people don’t quite grok their long-term impact,” Om Malik defends the company’s product ambitions in that same thread. “Google Glass is a perfect example – looks like a toy but it is the future of information retrieval.” Except that when I casually ask a somewhat prominent Googler whether the company did indeed have some overarching plan to get to the “future of information retrieval,” as Om implies here, he said something to the sentiment of, “Oh, no, there’s no plan. The different factions just duke it out.” Mind you, this was just after io had finished. Google Glass has great potential, but the problem is that there’s an acute lack of a grander vision at Google (did you see what I did with “vision” right here?). Despite Larry Page’s efforts to pare stuff down as a CEO, “More wood behind fewer arrows” doesn’t seem to be happening. As Internet comedian Aaron Levie put it,“Google is focused, on everything.”
“With all of these services, they’re trying to compete with nearly every startup and big company on the planet,” Levie said when I emailed him to elaborate on his initial tweet. “That’s going to be extremely tough, and not a recipe to do anything really well (see: Google Health, Wallet, Checkout, Latitude, Offers, etc.).” There’s this nagging suspicion that Page is driving without a map. I guess Google fans (which, in a sense, I am) just hang onto the Google products we love while forgiving the company its trials and errors, of which there are many. We hang on to a perverse hope that there is some sort of conscious macro-vision for the company and everything will fall into place. This hope assumes that products like Google Buzz and iGoogle are just negligible collateral damage in the quest for truly visionary products like Google Glass (you see what I did just there with “visionary”?). To achieve this macro-vision, the acquisitions that indeed bolster the platform’s ability to protect itself from Apple, Google and Facebook’s advances, like YouTube, should be brought to the forefront of Google’s expansion efforts and be approached as a search problem. Like, why do you think Google Hangouts are one of the most popular things on Google+? Because they play to one of the search engine’s strengths. So, it should be 1000% times easier to search for videos on YouTube then. We Google fans are hanging on because we secretly believe that genius Google developments like Google Glass will eventually allow us to remember the name of that guy we barely recognize in the restaurant when it eludes us. Because gosh, we are so bad with names! Top image via: Engadget. Bottom image via: JohnBiggs
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| Refer.ly Lets You Earn Cash For Recommendations (And Now, Donate It To Charities) Posted: 04 Jul 2012 03:49 PM PDT  Refer.ly, a Y Combinator-backed startup that makes it easy for people to earn affiliate revenue every time they recommend a product or book, is now allowing its users to donate their earnings to charity. The company, which only just launched six weeks ago, is syncing up with about 100 charities or so including the March of Dimes and American Heart Association. All proceeds can go to a user’s charity of choice. Refer.ly takes no cut. The company also started a summer reading campaign on behalf of Room to Read, which builds libraries in the developing world. The company is donating $1 for every book purchased through Refer.ly this month. Refer.ly is a service that lets everyone earn a commission on recommendations. Big retailers like Amazon often give a single-digit percentage commission to partners that refer them successful sales, but it’s often been hard for regular people to sign up for these programs. Refer.ly makes it easy for anyone to create an affiliate link that can earn them this cut. So far, the company has seen its users earn about $1,000 in commissions since it launched a little over a month ago. The company’s chief executive Danielle Morrill, who was previously the head of marketing for Twilio, said she recognized that not all users would necessarily want to earn income from product recommendations. But they might feel good about giving that money to charity. “We tried to get a good mix of charities,” she said. “We wanted a mix around hunger, housing, poverty, international aid and other causes.”
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| Cloud Vertical Lets You Track Your Infrastructure Spending on Amazon Web Services And More Posted: 04 Jul 2012 03:29 PM PDT  Now that there’s Google Compute engine, there is yet another infrastructure service that IT managers and startups have to consider. So how do IT managers decide to how to efficiently spend on cloud services? A Dublin-based startup called Cloud Vertical is stepping in with analytics that measure everything from everyday spending to EC2 instances, Amazon S3, Elastic Map Reduce and more. It currently supports Amazon Web Services, Heroku and VMWare. “With the old model, you never had to track flexible capacity,” said chief executive Ed Byrne, who sold his last company Hosting 365 to Sungard for an undisclosed amount in 2010. “But in the new model, you can always add more capacity. Capacity can be infinite.” Cloud Vertical tracks spending by days, weeks and months. It also predicts future costs and compares your spending against industry norms. It can also send alerts and texts if there are spikes in usage. The higher service tiers also help IT managers see where they’re wasting money and optimize how they spend on infrastructure. “Right now, all of this data is kept in silos,” Byrne said. “There are individual tools but no one is aggregating data the top to get deeper insights.” The pricing plans range from $5 to $750 per month depending on whether the client needs just basic reports or more sophisticated recommendations. The $5 version provides basic reports while the $50 version adds extra reporting plus SMS and e-mail alerts. The $750 plan brings optimization recommendations. Then there are even higher enterprise-level plans that are negotiable based on the client. Cloud Vertical is backed with about a half million euros in funding from Delta Partners and Enterprise Ireland. The company has seven people in Poland, Ireland and the U.S. It faces competition from several other startups like New Relic, Portland-based Cloudability, Cldrdr, Canada’s UptimeCloud and more. Amazon also has its own CloudWatch service, which has been available to premium customers.
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| Microsoft’s Azure Accelerator In China Debuts Inaugural Class Posted: 04 Jul 2012 02:30 PM PDT  As you may recall, Microsoft recently got into the startup accelerator game, launching its first self-directed and self-run accelerator in Israel. The program is different from Microsoft’s Kinect Accelerator, for example, because Microsoft is the owner and operator of these new programs, which are now rolling out elsewhere in the world, including India and China. Unlike your typical clone of YC, Microsoft is not snagging an equity stake nor providing funding for the startups it hosts. But it also doesn’t plan to run out of cash for its programs, either. (See Mike’s deep dive into the Israel-based incubator here). This Friday, the Chinese accelerator will announce its inaugural class of startups, a unique group because of Microsoft’s focus on cloud computing businesses which already have products and end users. A desire to pick and back companies with a clear and proven market is typical in China, so it’s not surprising to find Microsoft leaning in this direction here. ”Another key difference,” explains David Lin, Microsoft Accelerator Director, ”is that we co-locate the Accelerator workspace at Microsoft R&D campuses – this is the case for Tel Aviv and Bangalore as well.” “In our case, the Beijing R&D campus, officially named Microsoft Asia Pacific R&D HQ, has over 2,000 engineers and scientists in a brand new 100,000 sqm (or roughly 1m sq. ft) campus,” Lin continues. “We have 20 top-notch internal mentors including 6 IEEE fellows and seasoned managers with combined professional experience of [est] 400 years in software/IT/tech. Additionally, we have selected very mature startups who have existing products and users. We classify these startups as being in the pre-A range and we believe that startups at this level of development are a perfect fit for the resources and mentorship we provide,” he says. “We have high expectations for our first session, and we expect that a very large percentage of our startup teams will become successful businesses.” With the Chinese program, Microsoft has the opportunity to establish a foothold in the large and growing cloud computing market in China – a market which China itself has put heavy emphasis on through its own initiatives and investments. Microsoft is not the first U.S.-based entity with an interest in fostering entrepreneurship in China (to its own ends), of course. Just this year, a consortium of Chinese and American financial institutions launched a Silicon Valley-China tech accelerator called InnoSpring. And Chinaccelerator, a member of the Global Accelerator Network (formerly the TechStars Network), was the incubator where TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing 2011 winner OrderWithMe got its start. While Microsoft is using its accelerators to promote its own cloud platform, Windows Azure, the startups selected for the Chinese program are actually developing on multiple platforms, including open-source. Seven companies in the current group, in fact, are building on open-source technologies, we’re told. Microsoft’s accelerator is also being honored as an “Innovation Accelerator” by the administrative committee of the Zhongguancun Science Park, the Chinese “Silicon Valley” where the accelerator is located, the company says. Below, is the first class of startups: A design driven team that creates high-quality Windows Phone 7 applications, with every app the product of extensive research and analysis, geared to facilitate user enjoyment. An innovative company dedicated to providing quality service for mobile APP networks. Its pioneering service platform, Devs Desktop Real Device Testing Suite, provides services tailor-made for App developers. A mobile, multimedia company with special focus on photo-related applications in areas such as album management, special effects, and animation. Wormhole is a leading “Siri”-like voice assistant for Android that enables users to have a conversation with their phone, makes phones easier to operate, and helps solve life problems. A webpage bookmark tool that puts the webpages that intrigue a user into a short summary, or a webclip. Users who have similar webclips and interests can find each other, and even become friends. BanBao is a free Personalized Social Information Companion for your Windows Phone that puts your friends, news and tweets in one place so you can access them anywhere, anytime. A mobile gaming social network platform that offers compelling features including leader board, achievements, multi-player and SNS integration. Creator of edu-tainment oriented apps and language learning apps for the Japanese market. They believe that by getting addicted to life as though it were a video game, people can fill their lives with happiness. An app that allows users to send coupons for a custom meal via text message, and to send virtual gifts and attend celebrations in spirit. Atom Creates social collaboration tools that help mid- to small-sized enterprises socialize and coordinate software.
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| Three Startups Defending Democracy In America: Votizen, Memeorandum, and NationBuilder Posted: 04 Jul 2012 01:51 PM PDT  The USA was founded by entrepreneurs who said “England has become bloated with bureaucracy. Let’s disrupt it by starting our own agile, more innovative nation.” But on the country’s 236th birthday, we find some democracy’s machinery needs a tune up. Political news, campaigns, and voting itself require an update for the 21st century. Considering our roots, its only fitting that entrepreneurs would be the ones to rise to the occasion and use technology to make this great nation greater. Here a look at five bold startups putting the power of democracy back in the hands of the ordinary person. VotizenDemocracy doesn’t work if you don’t vote, so Votizen helps make sure your friends do. Log in with your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts and you’ll see who in your network is registered to vote. Pick an election and the candidate you support, and Votizen gives you a list of friends who support that party and are eligible to vote in the race. That way you can remind them to cast theirs or band together to campaign for who you want to win. Co-founder Jason Putorti tells me Votizen’s goal is “to make ordinary voters more powerful. Right now, people with the big checkbooks get the access, but money is just a proxy. If ordinary people can get their friends to turn out to vote, candidates are going to court them in the future.” It’s working. Votizen has identified 1.3 million registered voters to their friends, and has been shown to actually get people to the polls on election day. In fact, United States Senator Barbara Lee of Oakland, California will take a meeting with whoever gets her the most pledged votes on Votizen. MemeorandumTo vote intelligently, you need to understand the issues of the day. Exhausted from information overload, though, it’s tough to dig deep and get a balanced perspective across party lines. But Memorandum makes it easy. This political news aggregator collects the must-read news from across hundreds of outlets on “one easy-to-scan page” that automatically refreshes every five minutes. If you’re more of a techie than a politico, you might know Memeorandum’s sister site and the first thing I read in the morning, Techmeme. Gabe Rivera, founder of Memeorandum, explains “I think it helps democracy in that it pulls readers out of their comfort zones. While lefties tend to read lefty blogs, and right wingers stick to their corner of the web, both types of readers seem to make an exception for Memeorandum, exposing themselves to views divergent from their own.” While other political news sites might need an army of editors to stay so up-to-date, Memeorandum is sorted entirely algorithmically. Thanks to the cold, hard wisdom of computers, Memeorandum stays unbiased so you can make up your own mind. NationBuilderSo you’ve read the news and voted but you’re fed up with your local politicians. It’s time YOU ran for election. Previously, conducting a sophisticated campaign and having any chance of displacing an incumbent would requires a ton of money and expertise you probably don’t have. Luckily, now there’s NationBuilder, a “toolkit for leaders” that lets you create a professional, social website for galvanizing and organizing your supporters. NationBuilder lets you raise money, collect local voter files on who’s registered, create a supporter database, coordinate volunteers to phone your constituency or go door-to-door, and offers everything else you need to get elected. Plans come as cheap as $19 a month for small campaigns. Since NationBuilder is affordable and non-partisan, it lowers the barrier to becoming a candidate and levels the political landscape. Since raising $6.2 million from A-list investors in March, NationBuilder has nearly doubled the number of projects and campaigns it helps organize to 950, including ones for big-name candidates like Cory Booker, the Mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Co-founder Joe Green, formerly of Causes, tells me “NationBuilder shifts power away from big special interests, and towards grass roots candidates. It makes who gets elected not about endorsements of wealthy groups. It empowers candidates to win because of the way they talk to voters and the message they give. A lot of people say politics should be more like business. We actually think politics should be more like the Internet. It should be permission-less.” With the knowledge, connections, and tools these startups offer, it can be. So this July 4th, take tech in hand and make your voice heard. You don’t need anyone’s permission to change the world. For more on democracy technology, check out these videos (parts 1, 2, and 3) of my panel on Social Meda + The Vote at LA’s Silicon Beach Festival last month. [Image Credit: Jesse Brown]
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