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- Meet Bitplay BANG!, The Lamp You Can “Shoot” From Across The Room
- Enterprise Video Transfer Startup Latakoo Signs Deal With NBC For Newsroom Integration
- Recce, A Rich, Interactive Map That’s Also A Gaming Platform, Launches With $4M From NEA
- Can You Pronounce Huawei?
- OldTweets Reveals Twitter Founders’ First Tweets, And Yours Too. (Wow, They Were Boring!)
- This Probably Isn’t The iPhone 5, But It Looks A Lot Like What We Expect
- BBC Launches Localized iOS, Android Olympics Apps (Video Not Included Internationally)
- Docomo Closes $22.5M, 20% Investment In Baidu Mobile Content JV: DeNA Games Coming First
- BBC Finds Badly Targeted Facebook Ads Don’t Work. No Kidding.
- Viki Climbs The Great Firewall, Signs With ‘China’s Facebook’ Renren For Its First Video Distribution Deal In The Country
- Digg Sold To LinkedIn AND The Washington Post And Betaworks
- Eric Schmidt: Google Self-Driving Cars Should Become The Predominant Mode Of Transport In Our Lifetime
- August Capital Summer Party Tickets Released
- E-Signature Company DocuSign Raises $47.5M Led By Kleiner Perkins, Mary Meeker Joins The Board
- The Future Of Customer Experience – 3 Examples Of Virtual Assistants, Biometrics And Siri-Style Services
- InMobi Acquires MMTG Labs, The Startup Behind AppBistro And AppGalleries
- Shareaholic Raises $3 Million Series A Led By Kepha Partners For Sharing And Analytics Platform
- Updated: Betaworks Acquires Digg (For Significantly More Than $500K)
- The Fancy’s E-Commerce Expansion Continues With Launch Of “Buy” Button For Web Publishers
- Bing Fund: Microsoft Officially Launches Its New Angel Fund And Incubator Program
| Meet Bitplay BANG!, The Lamp You Can “Shoot” From Across The Room Posted: 13 Jul 2012 09:06 AM PDT  A solid chunk of my formative years was spent lurking under tables, peering around corners, and generally tiptoeing around whenever possible. I fancied myself a tiny James Bond (or Weng Weng, considering my heritage) and — strange as it may sound — there's nothing I wouldn't have given to have the bitplay BANG! remote controlled lamp help me live out my pre-adolescent fantasies. And how exactly would that work? Well, putting aside its sleek, minimalist design, the remote to operate the lamp is a little white gun. That's right, if you're ever in need of more light, just shoot the lamp to turn it on or off — the gun/remote has a range of just under 50 feet too, so there’s no excuse for leaving that lamp on as you wander throughout the house. Sadly, I haven’t been able to determine whether or not the gun makes that wonderful ricocheting bullet sound when it “fires,” which would just put me over the moon. Even better, the lampshade automatically tilts itself when "shot" into the off position to complete the effect. I suppose if you wanted to take the boring approach, you could always just use the on/off switch located on the power cord, but where's the fun in that? Alas, the lamp comes with a pretty hefty price tag — it'll set avid spy impersonators back a cool $299, and I imagine that constantly turning the lamp on and off just for kicks may require users to stock up on plenty of extras.
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| Enterprise Video Transfer Startup Latakoo Signs Deal With NBC For Newsroom Integration Posted: 13 Jul 2012 09:06 AM PDT  Austin-based video startup latakoo just scored a major deal NBC News and parent company NBC Universal, which involves the launch of a pilot program to integrate the service into its newsrooms, following a period of testing. The company, for those unfamiliar, has been working to make videographers’ lives easier by offering tools to move large SD or HD video files over the Internet. Latakoo soft-launched back in summer 2011, and has been specifically targeting newsrooms ever since – a place where video transfer is still often done through surprisingly old-school methods, like FTP, sharing via tape, syncing over satellite connections, and general purpose file-sharing services, for example. The product is a software program that runs on a computer or mobile device, compressing large video files down to 1.5% to 5% of their original size, while still maintaining their quality and resolution. The resulting files are uploaded to a user’s account inside the latakoo site, where they can then be privately shared or streamed to others. You can also tag them, search transcripts, download them in a variety of formats and share to Facebook, YouTube and Box. (With more services on the way). And there’s a RESTful API for other integrations. Latakoo CTO Ben Werdmuller tells me that NBC Universal had been testing the service over the past year, and is now planning to integrate it into their internal communication systems and workflows over the next five months. “That includes both our one-click video compression and transfer app for Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad, and our back-end video delivery infrastructure,” he explains. The iOS app was first released in February, and the company is about to push out a new version, he adds. According to Werdmuller, the company has seen wide usage across broadcasters in the U.S. and Mexico. He mentions that one customer, Nexstar Broadcasting, which runs 55 TV stations in the U.S., is now seeing a 5x to 8x return on its investment. For many broadcasters on the service, the savings come from their ability to ditch the satellite truck, which one client said was $500 to hook up and $25 for every five-minute satellite window. And there’s the truck operator to think of, too. Those are some hefty costs Latakoo is helping to take down. Of course, the service requires that users have an Internet connection of some sort, so it won’t work everywhere. But disconnected areas are fewer and far between these days. Back in September, our own TechCrunch TV Exec Producer Jon Orlin took a skeptical look at the service, and walked away impressed. He used the service to transfer some large files that would have normally taken at least six hours just to upload. Instead, the file transfer was completed in just 30 minutes, and the video quality was “perfectly acceptable,” he said. NBC isn’t the only major company working with Latakoo – the company has hundreds of paying customers now, and most recently helped the Science Channel deliver video from the SpaceX launch. To date, Latakoo has raised $1.3 million in seed funding from private investors.
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| Recce, A Rich, Interactive Map That’s Also A Gaming Platform, Launches With $4M From NEA Posted: 13 Jul 2012 08:34 AM PDT  While we wait for the full-throttle effect of Apple Maps in iOS6, a new app has launched today that is raising the game for what we should be expecting out of the world of social-mobile-local services. Recce — pronounced “wreckie”, British slang for “reconnaissance” (only English people would make slang out of a word like that) — presents a 3D, animated birds-eye view of a city, and what is going on in it, by aggregating dozens of data feeds from other services — ranging from mapping providers to those building listings of places to eat, and social networks like Twitter, integrating it all, and then presenting it in a slick, attractive app that is essentially a searchable map. (Think of Recce as the pretty face of big data.) And it’s launching with some strong support: NEA is the lead investor in a $4 million Series A round in Recce’s developers, London-based eeGeo, with total funding for the company now at $4.7 million including a seed investment from Initial Capital, Swordfish Investments, and others. In its earliest iteration, Recce is only providing maps and data for central London, with San Francisco and New York next in line, but its developers are thinking big. The intention is to extend out to many more cities over the coming months. And, signficantly, to do more besides maps: Recce is also building itself out to be a platform not only for all location-based services but also location-specific games. Does all of that sound too ambitious? Not if you know a bit more about the people behind the venture. Besides heavy-hitting backers like NEA, Recce is coming to market with an impressive amount of experience behind it: the founders are Ian Hetherington, formerly MD for Sony Playstation (now CEO of eeGeo), and Rian Liebenberg, formerly the engineering director for Google (now COO). Liebenberg only left Google in September 2011, to join Hetherington in what he fondly calls “scrappy startup life.” But he’s no slouch: when at Google not only did he help build up the company’s entire R&D operation, but he was one of the main people behind the creation of Google Hangouts. “It was my baby,” he told me. The idea for Recce — which by the way was originally supposed to be called Mapply, until a French company called Mappy called to say “Non!” — came out of what Liebenberg says was an awareness of all the interesting applications out there that are location-based but the challenge of how to use them collectively to their best advantage. “It’s a problem of discovery,” he says simply. And if you have had to toggle between a number of apps on your phone to figure out the best place to get an ice cream or whatever else in a city you don’t know very well, you probably know what he’s talking about. One app may have the most comprehensive listings, but they’re out of date. Another has outdated user reviews. Another has live reviews but lacks breadth or a link to a decent navigation map. And that’s before looking at some of the more practical uses of a city app: looking for train times or bus arrivals, for example. Recce’s listings and map become like the merged version of all of these. You can use it to find things to do and services near you, bookmark them for future, find your way to them, and tell other people about them. The app works in real time, but it also has an offline mode, which stores the latest update on your tablet or smartphone. In a handy tweak, Recce will tell you how many minutes since it was last updated — useful for time-sensitive listings like transportation or cinema information. There are other features on Recce that make it an engaging and exciting product to use. There is the quick and fun process of navigating your way around a city — using your finger you can zoom in and out of locations, and walk around buildings, and collapse them if there are too many in your way to get a good perspective — features that may really come into their own in Recce’s games-platform strategy. And the fact that you can use it as a client to update sites like Twitter gives it currency beyond just using it as a way mine existing data; it becomes a data generator in its own right. It seems to provide a potentially neat complement to what Twitter, for example, is doing in fact with its advertising push: the fact that every tweet from Recce is location-specific could make it an attractive platform for Twitter advertising focused on specific locations. As for that ad part… this is probably where the company will be looking for its first revenues since Recce is launching totally free to use. The ads will likely come in the form of badges and promotions for particular locations on the map — for example Starbucks putting in its own branded badges on its city locations. The company has already spoken to a number of major brands about getting involved in this way, although Liebenberg says that this is not an area that Recce is pursuing for now. The goal, he says, is to keep building up its maps and user base, making Recce a richer place to live.
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| Posted: 13 Jul 2012 08:15 AM PDT  Never mind that this is clearly an ad agency video; it’s clever. And smart. After all Huawei has big plans for the U.S. market. “We’re not known to the general public,” James Jiang, vice president of product and marketing for Huawei, said at CTIA last October. “We’re taking the initiative to build a name for us.” The Chinese mobile company is a major supplier of white label cell phones with a major chunk of its products co-branded by a wireless carrier or 3rd party. But speaking at CTIA, Jiang revealed Huawei plans on being a top 5 mobile brand in the U.S within the next three years. That would put Huawei among the likes of Samsung, LG, Apple, Motorola, and HTC — an impressive goal to say the least. Huawei is making moves towards this objective, too. Its latest hardware is impressive even if it’s not yet headed to U.S. stores. What’s more, the company recently announced plans to move its North American R&D headquarters from Plano, Texas to Santa Clara, Calif. and add 500 new employees to its workforce. Setting up shop in the heart of Silicon Valley says Huawei is ready to compete, but it’s equally important to make sure U.S. citizens know how to say the company’s name. It’s ‘wah-way,’ in case you were wondering.
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| OldTweets Reveals Twitter Founders’ First Tweets, And Yours Too. (Wow, They Were Boring!) Posted: 13 Jul 2012 07:35 AM PDT  This week, Kellan Elliott-McCrea launched a new Twitter search engine called “oldtweets” to a bit of buzz. As the name implies, this tool finally lets you pull up tweets from Twitter’s early days, specifically its first year up-and-running. That means tweet IDs 1 to 20,000,000, to be exact, which occurred during parts of 2006 and 2007. And you guys, this is the most fun I’ve had on the Internet all week. Now, we all know the infamous first tweet from co-founder now CEO Jack Dorsey: “just setting up my twttr,” but with oldtweets, you can actually pull up a history of Twitter’s early adopters’ first communications. And so, for the heck of it, that’s just what we did, starting with the Twitter co-founders themselves. [Note to RSS readers, this post has images in it which you won't be able to see. Stupid RSS!] What does oldtweets tell us? Well, mainly that we were super-dull people on Twitter at first. (Maybe we still are, but have lost our sense of self-awareness?). Yes, we were tweeting the mundane details of our lives back then. As TechCrunch blogger-turned-VC MG Siegler notes of the early tweets, ”my god they were boring.” (One of his first, appropriately: “writing a blog post.”) Meanwhile, Dorsey first tweeted out fascinating tidbits like “lunch,” “sleep,” and oddly, “drawing naked people.” OK. As for co-founder Evan Williams, he also tweeted out ”just setting up my twttr,” at 4:02 PM on March 21st, 2006, just twelve minutes after Dorsey had done the same. I guess this was what all the cool kids were tweeting back then - Biz Stone did it, too (Update: Kellan reminds us the interface prompted you to tweet that). But Williams proceeded to use Twitter for posting thoughts about the technicalities of the service, and other ideas he was having at the time, e.g., “wishing that this form field got focus() onload,” “thinking: what if Odeo was a web-based media player?,” “wondering if the status web page should auto-refresh (ajax! ; ).” Co-founder Biz Stone also used Twitter more for status updates from his daily life – “wishing I had another sammich,” “feeling pains in my back,” and “going out to do an errand,” for example – but a little excitement could be found back in the first days, too: “getting my odeo folks on this deal.” Looking for some more early Twitter users to stalk? Try Listorious. Or just try entering in usernames you know, like Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley (@dens), who once tweeted ”about to die from this hangover,” and later, “not dead yet.” Me? I was “looking for work” and “checking my gmail.” YAWN. But seriously, oldtweets. I could do this all day.
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| This Probably Isn’t The iPhone 5, But It Looks A Lot Like What We Expect Posted: 13 Jul 2012 05:54 AM PDT  As iPhone season amps up — and make no mistake, the rumor mill is already spinning at full speed — we’re bound to see “leak” after “leak.” The latest comes by way of a site called KitGuru.net, which claims to have a “test unit” of the device. That’s about where the post lost me, not to mention the fact that the image looks Photoshopped. But let’s just set that aside for a moment. The images shown actually take into account most of what we’ve seen/heard before. The iPhone 5 is expected to have a larger screen with the same 640px width, and we also expect a new 19-pin mini connector instead of the usual 30-pin port. So while 97 percent of me believes this isn’t the real deal (I’m not a total cynic), it’s still valuable to have a clearer look at what’s expected, even in blurry form. The real value is seeing the “iPhone 5 test unit” alongside an iPhone 4S. This should give fanbois a nice comparison look at what’s expected to be a 4.08-inch display. Again, I would be heart-attack-style surprised to find out that KitGuru was playing around with an early iPhone 5 unit. That just doesn’t happen. But it’s somewhat strange that the site pulled the post. Trusted Reviews speculates that the pull-down has something to do with Apple’s involvement, whereas I’m thinking the site is trying to get a little extra credibility by acting like Apple requested the post removal. In either case, the images are in line with the more dominant rumors out there so I suggest getting comfortable with the new size and ports. Whether this image is real or a hoax (and methinks it’s a hoax), those new features are likely to be true.
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| BBC Launches Localized iOS, Android Olympics Apps (Video Not Included Internationally) Posted: 13 Jul 2012 05:21 AM PDT  The two-week countdown to the Olympics is on, and the big broadcasters are getting their ducks in line for how they will be streaming, tweeting, sharing, and generally filling your digital life with their own twists on big sporting event. The latest development comes from the BBC, which today released the iOS and Android versions of its Olympics apps featuring text commentaries, news updates and “medal moments.” There will separate editions for the UK and the rest of the world: because the BBC only has rights to stream content in the UK, it will only be the UK version that will include streamed video; the international version, the BBC tells me, will only have links to clips on its website. But it will have localized content, using GEO IP targeting to deliver headlines for teams from whatever region you are in above all others. The move comes days after NBC spelled out its own plans to leverage Facebook to enhance its own “digital Olympics” experience. It also follows news of BBC inking a deal with Facebook to develop a multi-channeled, live event streamed experience that will live on Facebook — again, restricted only to those accessing FB out of the UK. The release of the apps is part of a bigger initiative at the BBC to ramp up significantly its digital touchpoints with users. As we have written before, especially internationally the BBC gets a lot of its revenues from legacy services like DVD sales and TV channels. This is about laying groundwork for people to think of and use BBC properties beyond that, with options for monetizing in the form of ads coming alongside it. “We want to ensure we offer our users the most entertaining, immersive and relevant experience,” said James Montgomery, Controller of Digital & Technology for BBC Global News, in a statement. “We believe these latest updates to the site, along with the creation of a version for mobile users, and the bespoke app ensure sporting fans across the globe can enjoy the games whenever and wherever they choose." The BBC tells me that the apps’ free usage will be ad-supported. There will be “adhesion” banner ads, which will be fixed to the bottom of the screen (similar to how they are in the BBC’s News apps). “These will support rich media or standard banner ads,” the spokesperson says. The BBC also going one step deeper on the regional approach: the international edition of the app, as well as the BBC’s main Olympics website, has GEO IP targeting built into it so that users in different parts of the world will actually get headlines about national teams from wherever they are accessing the app. That’s a nice touch, and very in keeping with the BBC and its regional-first approach. Except the only problem is that sometimes you may — shock — actually want news about other places as well. For example, I’m Russian/American, and I live in the UK. That’s three countries I want to keep tabs on, BBC. And that’s before I begin to obsess about China’s gymnastics team. (Yes, you will still be able to access all of the BBC’s Olympics coverage, which will include analysis, reporting of all events, the medals table and fixtures list, as well as video and audio content. But if optimizing the mobile experience is largely about making things easier to access on small devices, that means it will be a lot easier to see region-specific-content first.) On its website, the BBC is also incorporating the ability to personalize content even further: users can choose “five favorites” from sports, teams or individual athletes, which they can follow throughout the Olympics, getting updates specifically about these five topics. As is standard with most app developments today, the BBC is putting in some social features and options for offline consumption. Downloading the free international app, you get offline access to the more general international homepage, and you can also share stories, video clips and event results through sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as by email.
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| Docomo Closes $22.5M, 20% Investment In Baidu Mobile Content JV: DeNA Games Coming First Posted: 13 Jul 2012 02:43 AM PDT  It’s been a long time coming — plans for a mobile content partnership between NTT Docomo and China’s search giant Baidu were announced a year ago — but today it’s finally happened: the Japanese telco has announced the completion of their $22.5 million (¥1.78 billion) investment in a joint venture in China, Baidu Yi Xin. Docomo becomes a 20 percent shareholder in the new mobile content distribution platform, with Baidu holding the remaining 80 percent. The two have also announced the first apps to come out as a result: they will be games and other services from Japan’s DeNA, which is taking its content, originally created for the Japanese market, and localizing it for China, starting in August. We’ve written quite a bit over the last week about the increasing amount of non-Chinese consumer content that is coming to market on the Mainland, and this is another example of how international brands are partnering with China’s biggest consumer players to put that into effect. In addition to today’s deal, which aligns Docomo with China’s equivalent of Google, others have included a deal announced earlier today between video site Viki and China’s equivalent of Facebook, Renren, (which also will have Japanese content as a focus) as well as a deal between China’s YouTube, Youku, and NBCUniversal for feature films. Like Google, Baidu, which has a business based largely around search advertising — Baidu’s share in China is 80 percent. And also like Google, it has been getting very serious about its activities in the mobile market, perhaps taking a cue from Google and its own huge steps with Android. In China, it’s almost even more imperative to focus on mobile for future growth: the country is now the biggest mobile market in the world, with growth there far outpacing growth in fixed broadband. There are now more than a billion mobile subscribers, and this year China will also become the biggest smartphone market in the world. But as others have pointed out, the key right now is to try to squeeze more money out of those huge numbers. Baidu may also be taking a cue from investors, some of whom are punishing its stock on worries that it may be too over-reliant on those search revenues in their core business, and not diversifying enough. That has led Baidu to creating its own forked Android OS and putting it on its own devices, as well as working on apps for other platforms like iOS, where it is the default search provider. And Baidu looks like it will also be developing more on Windows Phone soon, too. But JVs are notoriously hard to get right, and Baidu in fact doesn’t have a brilliant recent track record. A $50 million partnership with Japan’s Rakuten for an e-commerce portal, Lekutian, closed its doors in April, less than two years after launch, after failing to pick up enough users. For Docomo’s part, the company is the leader in mobile in its own market — and was a very early trailblazer in mobile content in general with its i-mode platform created at a time when many people in the U.S. and Europe still didn’t even own a basic device. But the islands of Japan have their limits, so it’s always looking further afield for its next moves. That’s had mixed success so far — plans to make i-mode as popular in Europe as it was in Japan, for example, never really panned out (more challenges for JVs). But more recently it has been increasing its content activities outside of Japan again. Not just with this Baidu JV but also with acquisitions in Europe, where earlier this year it said it would pay up to $300 million to buy another early mobile content player, Buongiorno in Italy. If things go to plan in China, we might see some of that Buongiorno content making its way there, too.
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| BBC Finds Badly Targeted Facebook Ads Don’t Work. No Kidding. Posted: 13 Jul 2012 01:38 AM PDT  This week the BBC tested out Facebook advertising by running a campaign for the Facebook page of a fictitious small business called VirtualBagel. The investigation was headlined “Facebook ‘likes’ and adverts’ value doubted”. During the week over 3,000 people Liked the ads even though the company doesn’t exist and simply shows you a picture of a bagel. The ‘investigation’ is partly a reminder that Facebook still has issues with fake profiles and Astroturfing, but is also a simple re-stating of the fact that you get what you pay for and if you put up a dumb ad targeted too widely you’ll waste your money. The BBC’s tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones spent a whole $10 on Facebook ads to promote the page, adding a little light targeting to reach a potential audience of “112 million customers” and garnered 1,600 Likes within 24 hours. VirtualBagel turned out to be popular in Egypt, Indonesia and the Philippines, but not in the UK or U.S. where bagels are more typical fare. However, most of the people who liked the page appeared to have fake profiles which had also Liked a bunch of other random pages. Finding he got a lot of Likes from places that probably wouldn’t be interested or even able to do business with his UK-based Bagel business, Cellan-Jones ends up pondering the efficacy of Facebook ads when there were so many fake profiles on the system. Facebook has responded saying – naturally enough – the experiment is “worthless” because the ads were not targeted enough, and yes, there are fake profiles in Facebook but they act to discourage the practice, and fake profiles are not allowed under their T&Cs. This is not exactly news. But, asked the BBC, can Facebook’s $100bn valuation be justified when there are so many fake profiles? Well, how can we put this Rory, did you do the same campaign for $10 on Google AdSense and find a lot of bad clicks? Because there’s a truism here – yes there are scammers and spammers and astro-turfers on the Internet. But at least on Facebook, you can generally see where they are coming from and get a sense of whether they are fake customers or not, which is the significant difference with something like Google Adsense, and of course why Google+ is crucial for Google’s future going forward in terms of ad targeting. Facebook has responded, with their response summed up with the statement: “We’ve not seen evidence of a significant problem. Neither has it been raised by the many advertisers who are enjoying positive results from using Facebook…. Looking at the test case you flagged – the person has, for some reason, taken a scatter-gun approach to distributing their ads, sending them to multiple countries with little or no demographic targeting.” Now, the Beeb was put up to this idea by a social media consultant Michael Tinmouth who’d found his small business clients were clicking false clicks on their ads. Here’s a little information on Tinmouth. He describes himself as a “Journalist, investor and communications strategist tweeting about social media, entrepreneurship, small business and occasionally my travels and cats!”. Tinmouth is a former editor of Entrepreneur Country, which is run by Ariadne Capital. Ariadne is generally regarded in the tech sector as a high-priced agency, run by high profile business woman Julie Meyer, which makes most of its money by charging introduction fees between startups and Angel investors. Until April this year Tinmouth had about 10,000 Twitter followers, but then on 15 April his follower count jumped dramatically to nearly 30,000. There is no suggestion than Mr. Tinmouth “gamed” his followers by using one of the many services out there to buy Twitter followers. And it would be cruel of us to point out that there may potentially be some fake Twitter profiles following Mr. Tinmouth, so we won’t do that.
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| Posted: 12 Jul 2012 09:00 PM PDT  Online video site Viki has made a big business out of aggregating content from around the world, covering 150+ languages in all, and making it accessible to all by crowdsourcing translations from its community of users. Now that pool of viewers is set to get a little deeper with a new distribution deal with Renren, known as the Facebook of China, which will see Renren create a special channel called VikiZone on 56.com, its video sharing network. This is the first time that Viki has partnered with a third party to power its online TV service. The deal not only promises a new swathe of Chinese viewers to the Viki — Renren has 160 million registered users in the country and will be promoting VikiZone heavily to them — but it is also a mark of how Chinese online video sites and consumers’ tastes are becoming more international, and are looking for more professional content to meet that demand. Coincidentally, today’s news follows just days after Youku — the biggest online video site, known as China’s YouTube, and competitor to 56.com – announced a deal covering blockbuster films from NBC Universal. Renren has said as much, too. "In our continuous pursuit to enhance user experience, we wanted to give our users a wide range of high quality video contents from across the globe. Teaming with Viki, an innovative and resourceful player in video streaming, is an important step towards our goal," said James Liu, Renren's coo, in a statement. While Viki has a large (and often eclectic) catalog of content accessible through its own portal, it looks like the Renren deal will be only for a selection of that. Examples of what will be included are “hundreds of hours” of Cartoon Network programs, TNT dramas — and, Viki CEO and co-founder Razmig Hovaghimian says, content from Japan and Korea, apparently quite popular on the Mainland. Part of the reason for offering only a “cherry picked” selection rather than the full catalog may be down to making sure the content stays on the right side of China’s censors. They have been known to crack down on social media services when things go against approved editorial grain — and Viki, with its user-generated translations and recommendations bent, is a social site, as is Renren. For this service, Hovaghimian says that Viki will be serving the content from Renren itself, with servers located in China. That’s in contrast to sites like the New York Times — which, when it launched its Chinese edition the other week, it made of point of noting its servers would not be in the country, likely to help the NY Times maintain editorial control. A video site, Hovaghimian says, has to make an exception to that ideal: “If we served the videos from outside China, the use times and access would be horrid.” Like Viki’s main site, all content on VikiZone will be free to watch and ad-supported. Down the line, Hovaghimian says that the company wouldn’t rule out paid options as a way of securing the best content. “We've considered a paywall because then it’s easier to get better and fresher content,” he said, referring to the returns just being that much higher on paid services. “It's hard to do that on ad-based model.” (NBC’s deal with Youku will see the film content sit behind a paywall.) While Viki and Renren are not disclosing the exact financial terms of this deal, it’s likely to be based around sharing resulting ad revenues. For now, most of the ad sales being done on the site will be through Renren, with a portion of the inventory reserved for Viki to sell itself. It would likely do that through its ad partnership with the BBC (which was also one of the investors in Viki’s most recent, a-list $20 million round). The deal with Renren is not exclusive, meaning that Viki could be soon launching VikiZones on other video portals like Youku. But it may be a different kind of platform altogether that Viki will tackle next in China: Hovaghimian says it is deep in negotiations with another third party for a mobile-only service that will focus on short-form content and music videos. And there are prospects to continue launching more of these third-party partnerships with local video portals in other countries, too. Not only is it working on licensing more Chinese content to take out of the country — one recent upload from Hunan TV now is available in 25 languages, he says — Hovaghimian points out that there is a big opportunity in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, which typically have very high CPMs compared to those in the west. “That gives us a high opportunity to monetize,” he says.
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| Digg Sold To LinkedIn AND The Washington Post And Betaworks Posted: 12 Jul 2012 07:49 PM PDT  Sun Valley and self-driving cars aside, the story of the day today is that social news site Digg has sold its remaining assets for $500K to the NYC-based tech firm Betaworks. While that number is indeed in the ballpark, we’re hearing from multiple sources that the total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously unreported acquirer, LinkedIn. According to a familiar source, the Washington Post ended up paying $12 million for the Digg team. Around the same time, career social network LinkedIn paid between $3.75 million and $4 million for around 15 different Digg patents including the patent on “click a button to vote up a story”. Betaworks picked up all the remaining assets today, including the domain, code, data and all the traffic for between $500k and $725k. We’re hearing that Borthwick and co. will license from LinkedIn whatever patents it needs to execute on what it chooses to do with those assets. I have no word on how the “single-digit millions equity deal” some are reporting fits in here exactly. Pre-acquisition, social news vanguard Digg had raised $45 million in funding from Greylock Partners, Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and other Valley notables. Digg was an extremely influential site for anyone who worked in the early era of online publishing, so it being scrapped for parts is sort of weird, especially for those of us who used to beg friends to vote up Digg stories.
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| Posted: 12 Jul 2012 03:58 PM PDT  Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt offered some new insight into Google’s self-driving car program today at his annual press talk at Allen and Co.’s Sun Valley conference. Schmidt revealed that Google had talked to “all” of the auto-manufacturers globally about the cars, which he called “not yet ready for productization,” facing challenges including getting individual states to approve it (Nevada is the only one currently). “The current biggest problem is that it runs at the speed limit and nobody drives at the speed limit,” Schmidt said. Apparently Google has prototypes that don’t run at the speed limit however; as Schmidt revealed that Google had a racecourse in an undisclosed location, where the car would race human-driven cars, and win. Schmidt also went into how exactly the car worked, saying that a consumer will eventually type an address in what he called “Google maps on steroids.” “The deal here is that there’s a person in the driver’s seat, and a really big red button that says “Off.” He said the self-driving car would function much like a plane’s auto pilot, ultimately bolstered by a real human on standby. When asked if the more technophobic mainstream would easily adopt the novel technology, Schmidt responded, “Depends on how drunk they are.” Schmidt brought up the sad statistic of 35k people killed each year in drunk driving accidents in the United States, and the even sadder fact that that is considered a good statistic because it’s remained constant over two to three decades. “It’s a terrible tragedy,” Schmidt said, “The sooner we can get cars to drive for us the more lives we can save … self-driving cars should become the predominant mode of transportation in our lifetime.” Image via: Zack Sheppard
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| August Capital Summer Party Tickets Released Posted: 12 Jul 2012 03:21 PM PDT  As promised, we have released another batch of August Capital Summer Party tickets. Tickets sell out quickly and if your buyer bot is too slow to snag passes for you and 400 of your closest friends, you can always purchase a ticket to the Facebook EcoSystem CrunchUp here which includes a ticket to the Facebook Ecosystem Conference and a fast track ticket to enter the August Capital Summer party! About the Facebook Ecosystem Conference at the Fox Theater (capacity limited participants) August 3, 12:00 – 5:00 pm CrunchUps are highly participatory mini conferences hosted by TechCrunch where we focus in on important "now" themes in non-traditional formats. About the 7th Annual Summer Party at August Capital Join us for a great mix of start-up demos, networking, giveaways, drinks and fun on the best deck on all of Sand Hill Road. Due to limited capacity and strong demand for tickets, we regret tickets are NOT TRANSFERABLE and NOT REFUNDABLE. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door. Attendee identification will be checked at the door against the guest list; paper tickets not necessary. Parking will be extremely limited so we encourage you to leave plenty of time to find parking, or carpool with friends and co-workers.
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| E-Signature Company DocuSign Raises $47.5M Led By Kleiner Perkins, Mary Meeker Joins The Board Posted: 12 Jul 2012 03:12 PM PDT  Updated Electronic signature platform DocuSign has raised $47.5 million in Series D funding. The round was first revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the company just sent me a few details. DocuSign has also confirmed that Mary Meeker, the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner (and former Morgan Stanley analyst) who’s most famous for her reports on the mobile industry, is joining the DocuSign board. It looks likely that Kleiner led the new round, but neither DocuSign nor Kleiner has confirmed that. (For now, the company will only say that the funding comes from “premier investors, public funds, and strategic tech-industry leaders.”) Founded in 2004, DocuSign describes itself as “the industry standard in electronic signature” — and that’s probably a fair description. The company says 18 million people have used its products to sign 120 million documents, and that more than 150,000 documents are “DocuSigned” every day. DocuSign previously raised a total of $56.4 million from Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners, Sigma Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Salesforce.com, and others, with its Series C announced in December 2010. I’ll be speaking to CEO Keith Krach later today and will update this post with his comments. Update: Krach confirms that Kleiner led the round. Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures, SAP Ventures, and “a large global institutional investor” also participated. DocuSign will use the new funding to invest in three main areas, Krach says — research and development, expanding into new industries, and expanding internationally. Apparently Krach and Meeker have known each other since Ariba (where he was CEO) went public more than a decade ago, when she was at Morgan Stanley. Asked whether Meeker is approaching this as a mobile investment primarily, Krach says the company’s mobile apps are “absolutely taking off.” At the same time, he says Meeker’s also just looking for disruptive technologies. “By the second half of this decade, the vast majority of signatures are going to be electronic,” Krach says. “Every person is a potential customer.” (Also, an earlier version of the story said the amount raised was $50 million, because that’s what DocuSign said initially, but the press release says $47.5 million, which was also the amount included in the SEC filing.)
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| Posted: 12 Jul 2012 02:53 PM PDT  The future of customer service is less about the people than it is the sound of a person or the virtual image of an individual. Humans are just so inefficient. But they can be improved, too, through interfaces that provide them more automated capabilities. Salefsorce.com is on the edge of this trend. It continues to acquire companies that automates an agent’s tasks to become more efficient and customers to experience a less odious way of getting their issues answered. This week it acquired GoInstant, which makes it easier for anyone in a customer experience role to share a Web page. It requires no plug-in. It’s simply a URL that connects the agent and the customer . Other examples include Zendesk, which now provides customers with a new Facebook private messaging capability. And Twilio now says developers can create apps that send SMS messages to people in 150 countries. That also provides a a new level of automation that can be built into a customer experience environment. “In the customer care and collaboration realm, this sort of infrastructure empowers users to designate when and how they want messages delivered to them as part of “unified communications,”said Dan Miller, senior analyst and founder at Opus Research. What these companies are doing is just a warm up. We are entering an age of virtual agents, soothing Sir-style voice recognition and immediate verification through biometric data. Here are three examples that Miller has been writing about on the Opus blog: Virtual Personal Assistant: Meet Lola. She’s a Web-based virtual assistant created by the BBVA, the Spanish financial services provider. BBVA has a long history of providing customer-centric experiences. Lola is known for her human-like understanding of what customers are communicating either through typing or talking into their computers. The idea is to create a personal experience that is conversational and comes with a high degree of understanding between Lola and the people she is helping. Biometric Authentication: According to Miller, Nuance Communications and Chennai-based Uniphore Software Systems will focus on bringing speech recognition and voice biometric-based authentication to mobile banking throughout India. The service has professional services resources to build interfaces with banking institutions' or third-party back-office systems (such as CRM and transaction processing.) Siri-Like Service: Dragon ID, also by Nuance, is a voice authentication service that wakes up when it hears you talk. It can change accounts on a device based upon the voice of the person. That means a change from passwords we type to “passphrases.” The voice is the password. That has endless application in a customer centric environment. It means it make it easier to complete transactions. The voice can recognize you and complete a transaction with a mobile wallet application. Customer experience is going through a rapid innovation cycle. It makes sense. Humans need lots of help.
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| InMobi Acquires MMTG Labs, The Startup Behind AppBistro And AppGalleries Posted: 12 Jul 2012 02:50 PM PDT  We’re hearing that mobile ad network InMobi has acquired MMTG Labs, a San Francisco startup that operates AppBistro, an application marketplace for Facebook pages, and AppGalleries, which is a white-label app store platform that is in use by the likes of Brit Media. The financial terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but we’re told that both the founders and investors at MMTG Labs are “very happy.” The entire five-person team, led by co-founders Ryan Merket and Nalin Mittal, are joining InMobi as part of the acquisition. MMTG first came on the scene back in May 2010 when it launched AppBistro at TechCrunch Disrupt. They were incubated in i/o Ventures and went on to secure some $550,000 in funding in August 2010. The launch of AppGalleries (then called AppStores) occurred earlier this year, in January. It was that new platform that most caught the attention of InMobi, people close to the deal tell us — and the AppGalleries technology will likely be adopted by InMobi and added to its suite of products. InMobi, meanwhile, certainly has the paycheck to pay for acquisitions. The company claims to be the largest independent mobile ad network int he world, and it just raised $200 million in a Series C led by Softbank this past fall. Nearly a year ago, InMobi snapped up HTML5 ad builder Sprout for an undisclosed sum.
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| Shareaholic Raises $3 Million Series A Led By Kepha Partners For Sharing And Analytics Platform Posted: 12 Jul 2012 02:13 PM PDT  Shareaholic, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that makes browser extensions and other tools to facilitate the sharing and discovery of web content, tells TechCrunch that it has raised $3 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Kepha Partners, and included participation from existing backers General Catalyst Partners, NextView Ventures, 500 Startups and other angel investors, who all invested in Shareaholic’s previous seed rounds. This brings the total outside capital invested in Shareaholic to $5.5 million. Shareaholic started four years ago as a “nights and weekends” project, but has since blossomed into a full-on company with a current staff of 10 employees. The company, which began with a simple web extension to let people share content to their social networks, first garnered attention in 2008 when it won the Grand Prize in Mozilla Foundation’s Extend Firefox contest for the best Firefox add-on. Now Shareaholic has a whole suite of tools including open platform APIs for blog publishers and analytics tools for tracking audience behavior. The company says it now reaches 270 million users per month. The new funding will be put toward hiring more staff to further build out its technology and products, Shareaholic says. The company has big ambitions for the future — last week it announced it had brought on former Yahoo CTO Raymie Stata to its advisory board. At that time, Shareaholic’s CEO Jay Meattle told the Boston Business Journal’s Kyle Alspach that Stata would be used to help Shareaholic build “an open interest, influence, and intent graph at scale that rivals that of Facebook.”
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| Updated: Betaworks Acquires Digg (For Significantly More Than $500K) Posted: 12 Jul 2012 01:35 PM PDT  Betaworks, the company behind bit.ly, news.me, Chartbeat and a number of other successful products, has acquired the social news site Digg.com for an undisclosed amount. Betaworks’ founder John Borthwick will become the new CEO of Digg. The site’s current CEO Matt Williams will join Andreessen Horowitz as Entrepreneur in Residence after the Betaworks transition is complete. Digg’s founder Kevin Rose joined Google a few months ago after the search engine acquired his latest startup Milk. Update: Rumor has it that the price was just $500k, but that number doesn’t really make a lot of sense, given that the site still gets enough traffic to make more than that in a year by just selling ads. Talking to AllThingsD, Digg CEO Matt Williams confirmed that “the overall consideration is significantly larger” and includes a combination of cash and equity. Another source close to the negotiations tells us that the price was indeed not $500k. We haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact price yet. Betaworks promises to turn Digg “back into a startup,” with low budgets, a small team and fast update cycles. None of the remaining Digg employees, it seems, are moving to Betaworks. Instead, the News.me team will take over the management of the site. Betaworks, says Digg, will soon unveil a new “cloud-based version of Digg” that will complement News.me’s iPhone and iPad apps. According to Digg’s outgoing CEO Matt Williams, his team “considered many options of where Digg could go, and frankly many of them could not live up to the reason Digg was invented in the first place — to discover the best stuff on the web. We wanted to find a way to take Digg back to its startup roots.” Betaworks says it’s planning to “build Digg for 2012.” Once a poster child of the Web 2.0 revolution, Digg slowly faded into the background over the last few years, especially after its 4.0 update alienated many of its users. After that, Digg never quite found a niche for itself as content sharing moved to social networks like Twitter and Facebook (and the competing social sharing site Reddit). It still has a sizable amount of users, but it’s really just a shadow of its former self today. While an announcement like today’s acquisition would once have received hundreds of “diggs” and comments within a few minutes, the fact that today’s announcement has only 16 diggs and four comments so far is rather telling. Earlier this year, the Washington Post Company hired 15 of the site’s engineers to power its own social products. Ever since, it was pretty clear that the site was likely going to be acquired sooner or later. In 2008, Google was reportedly interested in acquiring Digg for around $200 million, but walked away from the deal. That deal would have been a nice return for the service’s investors. In total, Digg raised $45 million from a number of SiliconValley most prominent investors since its launch. The last funding round – a $5 million Series D round – closed exactly a year ago. At that time, the site was still valued at around $35 million and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington reported that without that round, the company would have had only had about 6 months of runway left before it would have had to close its doors.
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| The Fancy’s E-Commerce Expansion Continues With Launch Of “Buy” Button For Web Publishers Posted: 12 Jul 2012 01:18 PM PDT  This week, New York-based The Fancy, a Pinterest-like site with a focus on not just browsing, but buying from its collection of inspirational imagery, began encouraging users to share its content on social networks in exchange for cash rewards. But paid promotion via social sharing was only one part of the company’s larger plan. Today, the company is rolling out another piece of the puzzle and is introducing “Buy” buttons to power purchasing behaviors on any website. The “Buy” button is targeted at bloggers and other publishers, not online merchants or e-commerce sites, of course. It should be especially appealing to the large and growing community of fashion bloggers, who frequently post images of clothing and accessories like those that you also find on The Fancy. And it gives them another way to monetize their sites beyond using text-based or banner advertisements. The Fancy is working closely with the Independent Fashion Bloggers network at launch, which represents over 30,000 writers. According to editor Taylor Davies, the button could end up being “the next step in how we, as blog consumers, shop and purchase things we like and see,” she says. The advantage of this button, Davies thinks, is that it allows users to make purchases from the site without leaving the page. (Checkout pops up in a window on the site itself, similar to what 72Lux currently offers – see screenshot below for an example). The connection to the fashion industry is one of The Fancy’s key strengths, in fact, as one of its big investors is PPR, the $25 billion firm run by Francois Henri-Pinault which owns major fashion brands like Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. Because of that relationship, several high fashion sites now sport Fancy’s social commerce integrations, including Alexander McQueen, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and others. The company also partnered with Oscar de la Renta earlier this year to sell an item from the designer’s spring collection, and saw $10,000 worth of the shirts sold in the first week. Working the e-commerce angle is a major differentiating factor for The Fancy, which offers merchants a way to sell via the site, and its rival Pinterest. In fact, Pinterest backer Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten, recently alluded to The Fancy’s movements in this area with a thinly veiled hint of disdain, telling Forbes, “there are so many copycats of Pinterest already who are focusing just on shopping but they are not getting as much attraction as Pinterest because they are too commercial.” That may be true for some users, but success stories like Fab.com, for example, do prove there’s potential in social commerce. And on The Fancy, it’s growing. In May, its platform was seeing $50,000 a week in commerce. That number is now $75,000, Michael Silverman, Fancy COO tells me. The site also has a million users who “fancy” items over 500,000 times per day. “Many people say they do social shopping, but nobody does it as extensively as we do,” The Fancy CEO Joe Einhorn told TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis yesterday at Allen & Co’s Sun Valley conference, where Einhorn, Pinault and the Fancy board member Jack Dorsey were all in attendence. Allen & Co is a major investor in The Fancy. Publishers will be able to implement the button on their site using a single line of Javascript code. Once installed, Fancy pays the bloggers 2% of the purchase price to their Fancy account, 30 days after shipping – the same as with the affiliate links introduced earlier this week. The new “Buy” button should be made available on the company’s website shortly, alongside the other widgets and buttons The Fancy currently offers.
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| Bing Fund: Microsoft Officially Launches Its New Angel Fund And Incubator Program Posted: 12 Jul 2012 01:12 PM PDT  This wasn’t exactly a secret anymore, but Microsoft just officially unveiled its Bing Fund, a new angel fund and incubator program sponsored by Bing and “backed by the experience, expertise, and resources of Microsoft.” The idea here, says Microsoft, is to “partner with like-minded entrepreneurs—great talent that is innovating online to solve big problems and create amazing new experiences.” The fund is looking for startups that focus on mobile and web experiences and which provide “both inspirational vision” and the “ability to execute.” Microsoft also recommends that the startups that plan to apply for this program already have a working prototype and a broad plan for how to tackle the problem they are trying to solve and what the market for their products looks like. Startups will be accepted on an on-going basis and the Bing Fund is also looking to partner with existing accelerators to find potential candidates for the new fund. The plan is to focus on just a few startups at a time and as companies graduate, new ones will be accepted to fill their spots. Microsoft doesn’t promise that it will acquire successful startups, but the company says that “acquisition is always a possibility.” Besides receiving funding, the startups that are accepted into this program will receive subsidies to use Bing’s APIs and also access to technologies developed by Microsoft Research. Microsoft also plans to provide these startups with mentors inside the company and promises that the IP and product will remain in the hands of the participating companies. Startups that are located in Seattle will also be able to take advantage of co-workspace in Bellevue (a few miles away from the company’s main Redmond campus), where the Bing Fund team and Microsoft’s machine learning, search and data experts are located. It’s worth noting that the Bing Fund does not require companies to use development stack, but it does encourage startups to participate in its BizSpark program, which gives companies that are less than three years old and make less than $1 million per year discounted access to its development tools. BizSpark already works with TechStars, by the way, to make $60,000 worth of Azure compute and storage services available to the companies in its Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure program.
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