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- Review: Cerevellum Hindsight 35 Rearview Biking Computer
- In Praise Of Quick And Filthy
- IOC Starts To Delete Unauthorized Video Of Olympics On YouTube
- Why Platform Clouds Need to Be More Like App Stores
- Buddy Media, Nanigans, BLiNQ Build On Facebook’s New Ads APIs, Could Show Wall Street The Money
- Soulja Boy Takes On The iPad With His Ridiculous Tablet
- Yo Forbes, Fuck You
- Our Devs Weigh In: We Also Want To Watch The Olympics Instead Of Work
- NBCOlympics’ Opening Ceremony Tape Delay: Stupid, Stupid, Stupid
- A Bear Flag Revolt Brews and “Grizzly” Wins As The Name For The Next OpenStack Release
- Move Over Meteor: Derby Is The Other High Speed Node.js Framework In Town
- Hello La Mode Launches Its Online Fashion Resale Marketplace, Raises $500k Seed Round
- NFC Still Has Legs: Flomio Closes On Half A Million In Seed Funding For NFC-Based Products & Services
- Slow And Steady Wins The Race, Too: Mobile Gaming Study Looks At Earning Potential In Under-Hyped Games
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- Sales Recruiting Startup TheLions Rates The Best And Worst Employers
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- After Just 48 Hours, Mountain Lion Already Accounts For 3.2% Of Mac Web Traffic
| Review: Cerevellum Hindsight 35 Rearview Biking Computer Posted: 28 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT  We’re very lucky that the creator of the Cerevellum is even alive. Evan Solida was a competitive cyclist until a major accident in 2007 left him unable to ride. After years of plastic surgery and physical therapy, he was able to get back onto his bike and now builds unique cycle designs, does contract work, and just released his first product, the Hindsight 35. This unique device is essentially a rear view monitor and race computer for cyclists. It connects to various sensors using ANT+ wireless technology and a small lens and light combo on the back of the bike gives you a full view of what’s coming up behind you in brilliant color. The device also records the scene in five minute bursts and stops recording when you (or your bike) are suddenly interrupted by a collision. In short, it’s a way for cyclists to find out what’s behind them and, if they run into a spot of bad luck, see who’s responsible. The device itself is essentially a 3.5-inch screen mounted to your handlebar with a cable that connects to the camera. An optional heart rate monitor and speed sensor allows for on-the-fly measurements that appear on screen as you ride. To be clear, the Hindsight 35 is a shipping product but is more of a beta product. Because Solida designed, built, and manufactured this product himself, it’s definitely not fully-featured just yet. Luckily, the device is fully upgradable and future systems will include a GPS chip – there’s a place on the circuit board but it’s not yet installed. A bundle with heart rate monitor and speed sensor costs $363.50 and the device itself costs $299. It also lets you record rides – albeit in rear view – with the press of a button. I tried the Hindsight in the crowded streets of Brooklyn and I’m happy to report that it really works and it makes me feel just a bit safer. Riding down 65th Street near my house is always a wild experience but this let me see who was about to pass me and where I was in relation to other cars. Sadly, the transflective display is great in sunlight but nearly disappears when you’re wearing polarized glasses so you either have to look around your shades or eschew them altogether. Regular shades work fine. Cerevellum is a true hardware startup built by a guy who knows his stuff. His story – and his hardware – is inspiring and his rearview is well worth the price, especially for biking gearheads like me.
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| Posted: 28 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT  To paraphrase the late great David Foster Wallace, did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of software development reveals ideological strife and fanaticism on a nearly Godwin’s-law scale? Did you know that software development even had a seamy underbelly? It does, and its name is PHP, the world’s least-loved but arguably most-used programming language. It’s loathed, it’s despised, and it’s everywhere. WordPress, meaning TechCrunch, is brought to you by PHP. Yahoo? PHP. Facebook? Them too–although Quora founder and former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo hastens to stress that “PHP was out of the question” for Quora, and Facebook merely uses it because it’s “stuck on that for legacy reasons”. And yet PHP is allegedly used by more than three-quarters of all web sites. To sum up: everybody hates PHP, except for the countless legions who use it, who should all be very ashamed of themselves. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call that a general consensus. PHP has been called–and by people widely respected in the industry, too–”a fractal of bad design,” “the biggest, stinkiest dump that the computer industry had taken on my life in a decade,” and, worst of all, “the Nickelback of programming languages.” Even its defenders are hilariously half-hearted and mealy-mouthed: it’s “better than you think,” and “has even learned from its mistakes,” we’re assured. Or we’re told that “The true problem with PHP lies in the community,” not the language. Or they just result to ad hominem attacks. Or, well, sometimes they just stop defending it at all. I mean, it’s really hard to defend a programming language whose behavior depends on whether you’re Turkish. And yet. I’m loath to admit it. I may never again be acceptable in polite software company after this article is published. But I have a soft spot for PHP, and not just because I share an alma mater with its creator. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t actually use it; in my ten-year software career I’ve been paid to write code in more than a dozen different languages, but I’ve had to resort to PHP exactly once. For a pet unpaid project. I wrote about ten lines. When I mentioned this to one of the finest developers I’ve ever worked with, he responded: “Dude. TMI.” Did I mention that it’s widely hated? Anyway, my sympathy for PHP’s deviltry is because I appreciate its ethos. Its just-get-it-done attitude. Or, as Melvin Tercan put it in his recent blog post, “here's to the PHP Misfits. The pragmatic ones who would pick up anything – even double-clawed hammers – to build their own future. Often ridiculed and belittled by the hip guys in class who write cool code in Ruby or Python, but always the ones who just get shit done.” He’s on to something there. The best is the enemy of the good, and shipping some working PHP code is approximately a million times better than designing something mindblowing in Haskell that never actually ships. I fully support Jeff Atwood’s call to replace PHP once and for all–but I hope that everyone realizes that eliminating its many, many, multitudinous flaws won’t be enough; they’ll have to somehow duplicate its just-make-it-work ethos, too. Image credit: Double-clawed hammer, Nicole Aptekar, Flickr.
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| IOC Starts To Delete Unauthorized Video Of Olympics On YouTube Posted: 28 Jul 2012 04:28 AM PDT  Well, we knew that Olympic organizers were likely to be tough on unauthorized content, especially after issuing regulations around social media prior to the Games. And evidence of that is surfacing today in the shape of deleted videos on YouTube. Search for scenes from the spectacular opening ceremony in London and while you will find excerpts from official broadcasters like the BBC, videos uploaded by ordinary users are being gradually being stamped out. Viewing one example video here Returned the phrase:
This video looks like it might have been ripped from the BBC’s coverage and re-posted, in which case it would fall foul of YouTube’s rules on copyright. We have reached out to YouTube to check whether video uploaded via mobile from the opening ceremony by users on the ground will be terminated as well. (Update: Sources say this video was ripped form the BBC’s broadcast so it would be subject to a copyright take-down by the BBC/IOC. See further update below). Meanwhile, other platforms for video are flying slightly under the IOC’s radar such as broadcasts from the cycling race today on Swedish startup Bambuser. And you’ll find some content on cheeky old Daily Motion. But – if you’re in the UK – at least you can see still see the Queen jump out of a helicopter with James Bond, thanks to the BBC. Not in the UK? We apologise. Maybe blame global copyright laws… UPDATE: A YouTube spokesperson sent us a statement: “As always, when we’re notified that a particular video uploaded to our site infringes another’s copyright, we remove the material in accordance with the law.”
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| Why Platform Clouds Need to Be More Like App Stores Posted: 28 Jul 2012 12:53 AM PDT  The app store model, pioneered by companies like Handango and popularized by Apple, has become the preferred method for distributing software on everything from desktops to post-PC devices. We’re also seeing this model in the cloud, mostly through software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, such as the Google Apps Marketplace. But what’s been missing so far is a platform-as-a-service that allows you to add components through an app store interface. In the world of enterprise software, SaaS app markets are subverting the binary distinction between “best of breed” solutions that do one thing and do it well and large suites. It’s hard not to root for best of breed solutions. They are, after all, the best at what they do. But large enterprises have reasons for choosing bundles, ranging from integration to procurement issues. With an app store, you can standardize on a particular suite and then augment or replace specific features. For example, both Jive and Yammer are social collaboration suites that include idea management app, but both also include an app marketplace where you can install a competing idea management solution like Spigit or UserVoice. We’ve yet to see this applied to PaaS, but I think it’s something we need. I recently moderated a panel on polyglot vs. single stack platform-as-as-service providers at DeployCon. Although there are clear benefits in choosing a PaaS provider fanatically devoted to a particular stack, the way Nodejitsu is devoted to Node.js, the general consensus of the panel was that the market is heading towards polyglot providers. There are just too many advantages in choosing a PaaS provider that give you a single place to multiple stacks with the same tools. PaaS providers are trying a few ways to get out of the best of breed paradox. Engine Yard acquired Orchestra for its PHP PaaS instead of trying to build something in-house. Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are trying to get the open source community to create a best-of-breed implementation for each stack that it supports. But in the end the truly best implementations may be scattered across providers. Heroku, dotCloud and Active State Stackato may each end up with the best version of one component, but in the end you’ll probably have to pick just one provider. That’s where an app store could come in handy. What if you could sign-up for a public PaaS and then choose among different components? What if you could actually add OpenShift’s Java stack and Nodejitsu’s Node.js stack to a Cloud Foundry PaaS with the click of a button? Not an integration with a separate PaaS instance, but as an actual component within your main PaaS, with support from a best-of-breed provider. I imagine developers competing to create the best architectures and configurations for stacks, and end users being able to pick the best ones. The primary PaaS provider would need to vet these for security and resource efficiency, of course, but it would turn the PaaS into more of a, well, platform. There’s some evidence that something like this could happen. PHPFog already has a selection of “JumpStarts” for different applications and frameworks, such as WordPress, Drupal and Cake PHP. But AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson recently showed me Open JumpStarts, a forthcoming project which would allow third party developers to create and submit custom stacks for various frameworks and languages. We may see this from Amazon Web Services soon enough. Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Marketplace provide the fundamental components. I could see Bitnami or CloudSmith getting into this market as well. You can even see the configuration repositories from Puppet Labs and Opscode as steps in this direction. With an app store model, best-of-breed would become a realistic solution for platform-as-a-service and shake-up the existing support models.
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| Buddy Media, Nanigans, BLiNQ Build On Facebook’s New Ads APIs, Could Show Wall Street The Money Posted: 27 Jul 2012 08:48 PM PDT  Investors demand more revenue from Facebook, and Sheryl’s got just the APIs to give it to them. Over the last two days, three major ads tech partners have revamped their products with recently released Facebook APIs that allow brands to track and optimize for on-site conversions including app installs, buy home page ads and logout page takeovers, and target ads specifically to mobile. The new capabilities in tools from Buddy Media, Nanigans, and BLiNQ Media (who just updated today) will attract ad dollars from app developers, huge brands, and local businesses. That means more revenue for these Ads API providers and more revenue for Facebook, which it needs to rescue its share price, down 11.7% today. On July 12th Facebook revamped its Ads API to handle premium ads sales, including home page and logout page placements which appeal to the world’s top brands and those like movie studios that need to reach a wide audience quickly. It added the option to target ads to mobile specifically on June 5th, which attracts both app developers seeking installs and local businesses trying to reach people out on the town. And a bit further back on April 18th it boosted the Ads API with the ability to optimize and track ads to attain the most on-site conversions – everything from shares and comments to Page Likes to brick-and-mortar checkins. That means instead of seeking impressions or click throughs, advertisers can pay for what they’re actually trying to achieve. However, little ad spend from these products factored into Facebook’s first earnings report yesterday where it just barely hit projections. That’s because the big tools built on the Ads API hadn’t been updated to take advantage of the new features. That changed this week.
Buddy Media bought Ads API provider Brighter Option in February, but it wasn’t up to date with these three new capabilities until yesterday when it launched a major update to its ads tool. Nanigans was quick to jump on the mobile ad targeting and conversions API, and this Wednesday integrated premium ad buying. The company has quietly grown to power 12,000 Facebook ad impressions per second and serve A-list clients like Fab and American Express. I think there’s a good chance they’ll get acquired by some old-world enterprise marketing giant. And today BLiNQ Media revealed to me that its launching version 2.0 of its BLiNQ Ad Manager, which supports mobile and premium ad buying. It has taken much less funding than other companies in the space, so it could be an easy acquisition for a social marketing company such as Wildfire that currently partners to offer Ads API access, or lacks ad buying power entirely. There’s some proof that Facebook’s new ads types including mobile are performing well, including reports like ours featuring data from multiple ads API companies that showed a 13X for mobile ads over web ads. And the social network can rely on these providers to try convincing advertisers. But it will need more than one-off examples like Sheryl Sandberg citing on Facebook’s earnings call that Electronic Arts got a 4X return in sales on its Facebook ad spend. It needs irrefutable evidence that social ads work before Wall Street will budge and give its ugly share price some love. Facebook’s head of advertising Greg Badros will be on stage at our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp on August 3rd, so buy your tickets to soak up strategy on making social ads work for you. [Image via]
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| Soulja Boy Takes On The iPad With His Ridiculous Tablet Posted: 27 Jul 2012 05:53 PM PDT  Hop up out the bed…turn my tablet on? Rapper Soulja Boy has released a branded tablet with Tokova called the “Tiger Shark Soulja Boy Edition.” The tablet has a 7 inch screen, runs on Android and the speakers go hammer. Pause for a second and ask yourself: would I rather have a tablet designed by Soulja Boy or Steve Jobs? Tough choice. Luckily, the Soulja Boy Edition is on sale for the very affordable price of $599, which just so happens to be the price of a 32GB WiFi iPad. I would love to know what goes through people’s heads when they buy something like this (if anyone has? Ever?). Like, what idea lost to this one in a Tokova strategy meeting? A Nicki Minaj smartphone that screeched “Beez in the Trap” at you every time you got a text?
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| Posted: 27 Jul 2012 05:16 PM PDT  TechCrunch is currently missing <%=Fucks%>, according to Forbes’ Brian Caulfield. We expect to add more <%=Fucks%> into our posts in <%=deadline%>. Responds our more serious than me co-editor Eric Eldon, ”Our disappointing F-Bomb second quarter 2012 financial results and outlook for the third quarter 2012 illustrates that our F-Bomb business continues to be in the midst of transition. Within our F-Bomb business unit, we have established early momentum with F-Bomb+, and we are increasing our investments in F-Bomb+ to achieve market success.” I have no idea what the fuck that means because there are numbers in there. Even if I did understand what that meant, I probably wouldn’t give a fuck anyways. Also, TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Also also, TechCrunch CrunchUp/August Capital Party. TechCrunch, fuck yeah.
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| Our Devs Weigh In: We Also Want To Watch The Olympics Instead Of Work Posted: 27 Jul 2012 04:33 PM PDT  Editor’s Note: Rob Saurini is a hard working developer at TechCrunch, except for today. Today, he just wants to watch the Olympics, like a true patriot. So I’ve been sitting here for the past couple of hours searching for a way to watch the Olympics Opening Ceremonies when I should probably be doing actual work. Nada. Zilch. Zip. The best I could do was a live blog here or there. Well, that and the spammed links in Google as well as questionable sites that try to manipulate you into downloading a shitty plugin or answer a bogus survey. NBC, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to air the coverage at 7:30pm EST in the US. I think this sends a clear message to the rest of the world. “You can wait while we get as many advertisements as we can with what amounts to the largest pre-game show in the history of ever. Also, fuck you.” Don’t worry, you can still watch the events live, right? Not a fucking chance. You need to have a subscription to a cable or satellite TV service. If you have one of those you can watch at the official NBC Olympics website as well as on your smartphone or tablet. Since I only have Netflix, I guess I’ll just have to continue my X-Files marathon and absorb the Olympics in text form later. Or you know, do some work.
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| NBCOlympics’ Opening Ceremony Tape Delay: Stupid, Stupid, Stupid Posted: 27 Jul 2012 04:15 PM PDT  If you were paying attention to Twitter today, you were probably met with two conflicting sides of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. On the one hand, you had those who were on the ground (or who had access to the live stream somehow — more on that later), and those who were bitching about not being able to watch the ceremony live. While most of the rest of the world — or at least Europe — was watching the ceremony live, U.S. audiences were held hostage by NBC, which holds the rights to the games here. Rather than broadcasting the biggest event of the Games live as it happened, NBC decided it would air the ceremony on a tape delay, to capture a larger overall audience. Now, tape delays are nothing new, but they do seem archaic at a time when online video and social media bring an air of immediacy to live events. The existence of the NBC Olympics Twitter account is evidence of this, but the account seems totally misused in this case: NBC live tweeted the whole ceremony, with no apparent sense of irony around the fact that its target audience couldn’t actually watch the events it was describing. Instead of building excitement around the ceremony, and engaging with its viewers, all NBC ended up doing was frustrating its audience — the people who care most about watching the thing. So really, how bad was NBC’s strategy around the U.S. broadcast of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony in London? So bad that Mark Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, and someone who should really fucking know better, tweeted out a link to a pirated live stream of the ceremony taking place in London. (Ironically enough, he was tweeting about the appearance of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, that magical thing which made the pirate stream available to the rest of us.) Think about that for a second — you’ve got a titan of industry telling viewers to ignore the local broadcast rights and pay attention to an illegal copy of the event instead. Telling viewers not to worry about waiting for the taped broadcast, that this is something you should be watching right fucking now, and damn NBC if they’re not making the stream available and someone else is. The big lesson here is that if people care enough about finding a certain piece of content and watching it — live or otherwise — they probably will. The sad thing is that NBC probably could have had things both ways — it could have live streamed and broadcast for the work-time crowd and those kicking it at home, and still had people show up for a re-broadcast after work, if they couldn’t watch live. This is a lesson that we thought NBC had learned from the 2008 Olympic games, when it held back live streams of the games for events that would be later broadcast on tape delay. To its credit, NBC is live streaming most competitions, even when the broadcast of those events will happen later. But for whatever reason, that lesson wasn’t applied to the opening ceremony. No doubt NBC made the decision not to broadcast the ceremony live because it was worried it would lose some of the primetime audience — after all, people are more likely to show up and watch something at 8:00 PM than mid-day on a Friday. It had advertisers who paid big money to show up against the event, and it didn’t want to piss them off by running the ceremony early, when people were at work and would only be half-paying attention. Maybe it thought that if it broadcast the ceremony live there wouldn’t be a primetime audience. So here’s an idea for NBC in the future, especially when it tackles the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia: Forget about the tape delay. Or sure, show the ceremony in primetime, but also show it live while it’s happening. Those who care enough to get up and watch the thing at 6:00 am will do so — and the rest of the audience will show up in the primetime hours, just as they always have. And then your twitter stream won’t look so stupid and embarrassing and frustrating for those who actually want to see what you’re tweeting about.
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| A Bear Flag Revolt Brews and “Grizzly” Wins As The Name For The Next OpenStack Release Posted: 27 Jul 2012 03:44 PM PDT  Oh yeah – the bear is in the house. The Bear revolt won. OpenStack’s next release will go by the name “Grizzly.” I love this story. OpenStack is the open cloud effort for organizations to build their own clouds. The fast growing organization has since its start had a policy for naming protocols. It stated that the name had to be for a county or municipality where the OpenStack Summit would take place. The nane could only be eight characters. Releases have been done in alphabetic order as follows: But some in the OpenStack community had other thoughts. A subversive movement emerged to amend the rules. The community revolt spread and so Thierry Carrez, the release manager for OpenStack called for a vote:
Of course, Grizzly won. And so OpenStack did two polls. The regular poll selected "Gazelle.” It had 35 votes. Gilroy came in second with 27 votes. But the revolt poll had different results. It showed overwhelming support for the "Grizzly" name with 88 votess. Instead of going with the regular poll, Grizzly was named victor. And so now, OpenStack has a new naming method. It’s called The Waldorf exception that accepts elements of the state or country flag in addition to city or county names. Bring out the Grizzly, baby!
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| Move Over Meteor: Derby Is The Other High Speed Node.js Framework In Town Posted: 27 Jul 2012 03:30 PM PDT  Although the company behind Meteor, a framework for building real-time JavaScript applications in vein of Google Docs, just announced a nice big $11.2 million round of funding, it’s not the only game in town. In my story earlier this week I mentioned Mojito, a framework developed by Yahoo. But there’s still another framework that has escaped my attention, even though it’s around longer than Meteor: Derby. Much like Meteor and Mojito, Derby is a client and server side JavaScript framework for building real-time applications. Its synchronization engine Racer can be used independent of Derby. Nate Smith (an ex-Googler) and Brian Noguchi are the core developers of the framework, and the founders of the stealth startup Lever. “We have a stable financial base,” Smith wrote on the project’s Google Group. “We have a very different business model than Meteor, and we are creating a product-focused company that will continue to support the framework.” Meteor, on the other hand, is being developed as the primary product of the Meteor Development Group. From a technical standpoint, one major difference is the way the projects handle server side JavaScript. Both projects use Node.js on the server side, but Meteor uses a library called Fibers that fundamentally changes the way Node.js applications are written. By default, Node.js uses callbacks, an approach to coding that’s well explained for non-programmers here. Fibers abstract callbacks away so that developers can use a more traditional style of programming. Fibers vs. callbacks has become a contentious argument in the Node.js community. Proponents of using Fibers instead of callbacks claim it’s much easier to code in Node.js using Fibers. The core Node.js team claims that only a vocal minority of the community prefer Fibers. Even if that’s the case, it could be that developers who don’t like callbacks are simply being scared away from Node. On the other hand, I’m told that the fact that the callback model was essential to Node.js’ success. There have been many attempts to run JavaScript on servers since the languages introduction in 1995, but Node.js is the first one to really take off. Many of the failed server side JavaScript projects tried to shoehorn JavaScript into more traditional programming approaches, but Node.js embraced the asynchronous nature of JavaScript. It could be that there’s room for both approaches. Tim Caswell, the resident Node.js mentor at Cloud9 IDE, concluded “Instead of teaching newcomers to never use these tools, I simply advise them to learn the basics first and then once they are comfortable with that feel free to experiment with these alternative tools.” Anyway, it’s not a zero sum game, but one thing that will determine the success of these projects is community adoption. As Matt Asay points out, you can’t buy a community with VC cash. It’s early days for both communities. Meteor has a few more contributors than Derby but both projects have attracted a few contributors from outside the sponsor companies. Both have small but active mailing lists.
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| Hello La Mode Launches Its Online Fashion Resale Marketplace, Raises $500k Seed Round Posted: 27 Jul 2012 02:55 PM PDT  We’ve seen an increasing number of fashion startups lately and the newest one is Hello La Mode, a New York-based startup that just launched its marketplace for luxury fashion resale last week. The company just announced that it has raised a $500,000 seed round from three undisclosed angel investors. That’s not quite on the same level as some other fashion-focused companies like JustFab, which raised $76 million this week, but Hello La Mode has an interesting business model that sets it apart from other fashion startups. Until now, Hello La Mode co-founder Eric Gagnaire tells us, people were often hesitant to buy secondhand apparel online because of potential issues with quality and conformity. His company, however, makes sure that every item that is put up for sale goes through a “manual check by fashion experts.” The company plans to use this funding round to build its mobile and tablet apps, as well as to hire more of experts to scale its operations. Hello La Mode currently operates in the U.S. and Canada. Users who want to sell their clothes can just list them on the site for free. Once a sale is made, the seller receives a free UPS shipping label to send it to Hello La Mode and it’s only send to the buyer after it passes the company’s quality tests. Transactions between the seller and buy are held in escrow until the purchase is certified and shipped. Sellers pay a transaction fee ($25+) that depends on the price of the item they are selling. The company believes that having a trusted third party will give buyers more confidence to shop for used cloths online. The team also notes that it will “feature only the most luxurious fashion items for sale as chosen by our editors and celebrity tastemakers.”
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| Posted: 27 Jul 2012 02:41 PM PDT  Because we’re in need of some brighter NFC-related news today, Flomio, a TechStars-backed startup, and makers a platform for building NFC and RFID enabled applications, has closed a seed round of $525,000. The round was led by RMR Capital, and included participation from TechStars, the Cloud Power Fund, Matthew Lally (Augme, Pickflair), and Clint Watson (FASO). Based in Miami, Florida (“Silicon Beach!”), Flomio has a different approach to NFC, which will be reflected in a website redesign going out next week. In short, it wants to humanize the technology. Originally a side project from founder Richard Grundy, Flomio was recently accepted into TechStars Cloud, the cloud computing-focused incubator which held its first demo day in April. If you had checked out the Flomio website in the recent past, you may remember that it was touting how its technology could be used to build NFC applications, and it offered a store where you can buy NFC tags and readers. While it will continue to sell tags, stickers and hardware devices, the company’s focus going forward will be on targeting consumers and specific vertical markets (e.g., art) in order to make NFC technology seem more accessible to normal folks…and even fun. Flomio competes with another NFC startup we’ve previously covered called Tagstand, but has a different point of view about the space, according to company founder Grundy, whose background includes 12 years at Motorola. “We have a different approach,” says Grundy. “We’ve done events, just like they have. We’ve done outdoor deployments just like they have, but what we focus on the most is on this instrumented space model which is all about using peer-to-peer to allow people to engage physical spaces.” Grundy explains that NFC had been traditionally modeled around passive tags – that is, a combination of a reader and a tag that responds when excited, e.g. by waving your device over the tag or tapping it. But what really inspired him about NFC’s potential was the newer “peer-to-peer” technology, which was introduced in 2009. This allows two readers to talk to each other. The newer technology could enable wild, sci-fi stuff. For example: “if you want your cell phone to talk to your microwave, and download a recipe about how to bake a potato and it just programs the microwave for you,” explains Grundy, “that sort of use case can only be enabled through a peer-to-peer solution. We were enabling developers to put that to action,” he says. Unfortunately, though, developers weren’t biting. “That’s so far ahead of what people are doing today, we found difficulty gaining traction,” Grundy admits. So now the company is dialing things back a bit…for now. Instead of targeting developers, they’re going to focus on popularizing NFC with users, in a number of different ways. Some of these details are still under wraps for a few more weeks, but the long and short of it is that they’re going to help make NFC fun, not scary, not confusing, and not geeky. As CXO (that’s “Chief Experience Officer”) Timo Ronan explained to me, “we understand the human side of life, we’re not just engineers.” “We figure if Touch is the next wave, it conceptually needs to permeate our brand. We want to be real people to real people. We just happen to be pretty smart and stuff,” Ronan says. OK, then. Here’s a sneak peek at the new website, to give you an idea: ; And here’s a concept video of a tag they’re working on (note: there’s no deal with Starbucks, it’s just an idea. BACK OFF LAWYERS): And just for the heck of it, here’s a video, entirely unrelated to product, of something awesome they filmed the other day:
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| Posted: 27 Jul 2012 02:29 PM PDT  App store analytics firm App Annie released a report on mobile gaming this week, which focused on the earnings potential of what it defined as “long-term” versus “short-term” games. That is to say, it found that mobile app superstars with media buzz were not necessarily outperforming the slow and steady games that flew under the radar - meaning, those that never cracked the top 25 grossing ranking, for example. Long-term games earned an average of $920,000 versus $549,000 for short-term games, App Annie says. And the top-earning long-term game earned $3.9 million versus $1.4 million for short-term. For starters, App Annie classified a “long-term” game as one in the U.S. Apple App Store that spent 12 months or more in the Top 26-125 Grossing ranking by revenue. A “short-term” game, meanwhile is one that spent three months or less in the Top 25 Grossing ranking. But this study doesn’t quite work for me. And here’s why: to begin with, the sample size was amazingly small. 14 of highest-grossing apps were analyzed under both long and short-term. So 28, altogether. Some examples of long-term games included “Cartoon Wars 2 Heroes,” “The Sims 3,” “Cut the Rope,” “Gun Bros.,” and some of the short-term games were “Global War,” “Need for Speed Hot Pursuit,” “Spider-Man Total Mayhem,” and “Stick Stunt Biker.” To be fair, App Annie contents that, at face value, 28 apps out of 125 doesn’t seem to imply a comprehensive sample, but the qualifiers regarding time spent in both the second tier and first tier (without any crossover) eliminates a good portion of the eligible apps for analysis. So App Annie says the sample is “representative,” if not comprehensive. In this study, 8 of the 14 games in each category were free. Long-term games had an average selling price of $3.99 and short-term games had an average price of $4.08. The most expensive long-term game was $9.99 versus $6.99 for short-term. The long-term category was also dominated by strategy games, while action dominated the short-term game category. Simulation games were popular in both categories. App Annie then concludes there’s a viable success strategy in creating a solid game that people play over and over, and that remains popular for a long period of time, even if lower in the charts. This, as opposed to being briefly popular and going out in a flash. Citing data from mobiThinking, App Annie noted that 1 in 4 mobile apps are downloaded, used once, and then deleted. Mobile games, like apps, often get played with, then removed when the fun and/or buzz wears off. Frankly, though, the conclusion regarding financial success is a bit obvious. If you take a game that’s been #50 for a year, compare it with a game that’s been #10 for 3 months, for example, YEAH, IT CAN EARN MORE. But maybe some people need charts and graphs to get that? Ouriel Ohayon of Appsfire notes that short-term hits are often due to big marketing pushes that didn’t translate into stickiness and revenues. However, he adds, some hits are meant to be short-term hits. They are designed with a short-term life cycle in mind – like a seasonal version of Angry Birds, for example. This study doesn’t seem to consider that, he says after taking a look. That’s the same sort of feedback we heard all around from others, too. Another problem with study’s conclusion, is that it’s not as simple as saying that action games are good for a quick buck. There may just be specific mobile game genres where the industry has figured out the game mechanics of engagement better than others. There’s more that can be analyzed here, in terms of what works, but this particular study falls a bit short. App Annie has a ton of great data at its fingertips, but it would have been nice to see a deeper study, large sample size, and more analysis about not what types of games fell into each category, but rather what strategies made the long-lasting, slow burning games successful. After all, what developers really want to know is how to keep their app from getting “X”ed.
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| Mack Weldon Launches To Take The Pain Out Of Buying Men’s Underwear Posted: 27 Jul 2012 02:16 PM PDT  Ok guys, admit it: You hate shopping, but you know what you really hate? Shopping for underwear. Well there’s a new brand of men’s apparel, called Mack Weldon, that is designed not just to provide a better fit for men’s underthings, but also to provide a better customer experience online. With its recent launch, Mack Weldon offers a choice of underwear between trunks and boxer briefs, as well as undershirts and t-shirts, both available in crew- and v-neck options. It specializes in basic, classic colors, and a unique fit that’s meant to ensure maximum comfort. When I first heard about the startup, I thought it was an interesting business, sort of along the lines of Bonobos or Warby Parker or other apparel brands that have cropped up online. But the thing that really got my attention is founder and CEO Brian Berger, who previously worked at Comcast as part of its Silicon Valley-based CIM product group, as well as stints at Excite and WebMD. So what’s a Silicon Valley product guy doing peddling T-shirts and underthings for men? When thinking about what he wanted to do next, Berger thought to himself, “What is a product I’m constantly unsatisfied with? What is an experience I’m constantly unsatisfied with?” And, well, underwear was that thing. Berger said he saw an opportunity to innovate on the product, while also creating a better customer experience. So he teamed up with co-founder Michael Isaacman, who previously worked for apparel brands like Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and Rocawear. And they began looking to source high-quality materials and find the best factories and fulfillment centers to create and ship its product. So there are a few things that make Mack Weldon different, according to Berger. The founding team worked with a couple of apparel consultants who were former Nike and Adidas executives to determine the best type of fit and prototype new products. And what it came up with is actually pretty good. To start, Mack Weldon clothes are made with a signature blend of cotton, Lycra, and Lenzing Modal fabric, a super-soft, anti-microbial fabric. It’s also put a lot of effort into ensuring the right fit and comfort for its apparel. Mack Weldon underwear is designed with waistbands and elastic in the legs that are made to be comfortable while also staying put. It’s also designed with “mesh cool zones” to breathe in places where dudes tend to sweat. (No more swamp butt!) T-shirts have rotated seams — so that they’re not cut under the arm — and undershirts are cut long and run thinner, so that they stay tucked in your pants and don’t bunch up under your clothes. On the customer service side, Mack Weldon has a few things going for it that differentiate it’s buying experience from other brands. While its shirts and underwear might be a tad more expensive than your run-of-the-mill underthings — though maybe not from a designer perspective — the brand gives discounts for bulk purchasing. Users get 15 percent off when they spend $100, 20 percent off when they spend $150, and 25 percent off when they spend $200 or more. It also has an auto-replenish feature that will let users sign up to have more product automatically sent when they need it. But it’s not about tricking users into signing up for a subscription service for a product they don’t know they like yet — it’s about getting people who like the product to decide they want more of it. “Our philosophy around auto-replenishment is that we want to make things easier for guys,” Berger told me. “We want to earn customer loyalty.” So I’ve tried out some of its products and have to say that from a quality perspective, I really like what Mack Weldon has done. Shirts and underwear are extra-comfortable, although I personally found sizing in shirts to run slightly big (it suggests you go up a size if you’re unsure). The good news is that after running through the laundry, shirts and underwear didn’t shrink much, although it’s too early for me to tell how they’ll hold up over time. The other good news — if you’re not satisfied or something doesn’t fit, Mack Weldon will issue a full refund for clothes returned within 30 days.
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| Gillmor Gang Live 07.27.12 (TCTV) Posted: 27 Jul 2012 01:10 PM PDT |
| Pinwheel Changes Name To Findery Following Injunction Posted: 27 Jul 2012 12:59 PM PDT  Location-based note-sharing app Pinwheel has changed its name to Findery, after the U.S. District Court of New York granted Pinweel, a photo-sharing app, a preliminary injunction over the similar names. In February, Caterina Fake (yep, last name Fake involved in a naming-rights lawsuit…I can’t make this stuff up) launched Pinwheel. The older Pinweel demanded that Pinwheel change its name, and eventually they wound up in court. Yesterday, our own Anthony Ha–or “Anthony Ha of the TechCrunch blog,” as Nick Bilton (of the Bits blog of The New York Times newspaper) calls him–reported that Fake had redirected pinwheel.com to 2bkco.com, presuming it to be a placeholder for a name change. Now we know that it’s changing to Findery, but the new site isn’t up yet. BRB, changing our site to a new and improved, court-mandated name! Fake tells me she can’t comment because of the continuing legal activity around the trademark, but wrote a blog post explaining the change to Findery. You have to wonder if Fake does manage to have the injunction overturned in court, if she would change back to Pinwheel. Pinwheel was only in beta testing, so a name change shouldn’t hurt it much. An ongoing legal battle and a second name change could do more damage than good for Play us out, ironically named Pinwheel Crunchbase entry.
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| Sales Recruiting Startup TheLions Rates The Best And Worst Employers Posted: 27 Jul 2012 11:54 AM PDT  As startups struggle to hire top-notch talent, several startups (like Interview Street and Coderwall) have emerged with a focus on recruiting developers. Now a company called TheLions is offering a similarly-focused approach to the world of sales. For most startups, salespeople are almost as important as the technical team, since they’re the ones who bring in revenue. Since its founding in 2010, TheLions quietly built a data-driven approach to sales recruiting for startups — founder Matt McGraw says his company finds sales “lions” who rate highly on loyalty, performance, pedigree, and talent. TheLions already has customers on the recruiting side of the business, so now it’s taking the technology and applying it to the opposite problem, namely helping salespeople identify the best companies to work for. A salesperson can visit TheLions site to search for jobs (the listings are pulled from the websites of the startups themselves), then see more data about whether it’s a good place to work. Specifically, TheLions rates employers on their ability to retain those aforementioned sales lions after they’re hired. Based on LinkedIn data and its own interviews, McGraw’s team determines how many of those in-demand salespeople a company has hired, then figures out how many of them stuck around for at least a year. For example, McGraw points to Box as a highly rated employer. When you look at Box’s profile on the site, you can see that TheLions has tracked 60 sales hires at Box, and that 54 of them stayed for at least a year, giving the company a 90 percent success rate. In contrast, TheLions has tracked 17 hires at Fuze Box, and only five of them stayed for more than a year, so it has a success rate of 29 percent. Profiles on TheLions include other data about the company and sales team, such as the median tenure, gender ratio, and median age. These ratings will probably be controversial, especially among companies that score poorly. From McGraw’s perspective, that’s not a bad thing, since controversy could help raise the company’s profile. At the same time, there’s a contact form so that employers can reach out if they think the data is wrong (or for any other reason). Over time, McGraw says he wants to add more data points and more companies. The site is free, and it sounds like he’s not quite sure yet what the revenue model will be — it will probably involve connecting TheLions’ recruiting business with its company profiles and job listings in some way. TheLions has raised $250,000 in angel funding.
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| Modington Lets You Shop For Outfits, Not Just Clothes Posted: 27 Jul 2012 11:32 AM PDT  Pranav Dharma, a former IBM engineer, self-described “fashionable” geek, and founder of new women’s apparel startup Modington, thinks that today’s online e-commerce sites don’t reflect how women really shop for clothes and accessories. So he decided to create one. Enter, Modington. “I was inspired by observing how my wife shops,” says Dharma, “she would get a dress, then started hunting for accessories. I thought there’s room for improvement there [with online shopping], because the current websites don’t seem to capture this natural manner in which women tend to shop,” he explains. At first glance, it may seem like Modington is a competitor with Polyvore, the popular virtual styling and fashion community which lets users mix and match to create personalized outfits online. But Dharma says that he doesn’t really think of that service as a competitor. “Polyvore is the granddaddy of the user-sourced outfit creation approach. However, Polyvore is an affiliate-driven site. I wanted to go for an end destination, e-commerce site,” he says. Dharma saw the potential for Modington based on how women were sharing outfits from Polyvore on Pinterest. ”All these Polyvore outfits are insanely popular on Pinterest, and you see the women were commenting ‘I want this outfit now!’,” he says. And, he added, ShoeDazzle also recently shifted its model from subscription-based e-commerce to a more traditional approach, but one which involved curated stylist-driven collections of shoes, handbags and jewelry. Like ShoeDazzle, Modington offers stylist-designed collection, in this case, featuring an outfit and accessories. The plan is to allow women to buy each item individually, or get a discount for buying the entire collection at once. (That latter part will go live in a few more weeks, he says). The company is starting very small – just 19 outfits are available right now, with 5 more coming in a week or two. Modington buys all the items wholesale, mainly from independent designers, including Moon, Esley, and Heartbreaker collections, to name a few of the brands offered. Dharma wants to launch small (oops, TechCrunch’d), to gauge user response before scaling. Oh, and he could also use a co-founder, too. It’s Friday, so you may as well blow that paycheck on some cute clothes.
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| After Just 48 Hours, Mountain Lion Already Accounts For 3.2% Of Mac Web Traffic Posted: 27 Jul 2012 11:19 AM PDT  Just 48 hours after its official launch, Apple’s Mountain Lion, the latest version of Apple’s desktop operating system, has already captured 3.2% of Mac web traffic according to a report by ad network Chitika. Given its low cost ($19.99) and the fact that it’s available as a download and very easy to install, chances are these numbers will continue to increase quickly over the next few days. Mountain Lion has already passed OS X 10.4 (Tiger) in Chitika’s stats and is on its way to pass Leopard in the near future. Last year, Chitika reported that the adoption of OS.X 10.7 Lion was lagging behind expectations and that users weren’t updating from Snow Leopard at their usual rates. Judging by the data Chitika released today, that continues to remain true, as Snow Leopard remains the most popular Mac OS on the company’s network (45.5%), followed by Lion (35%). As our own MG Siegler pointed out in his review earlier this week, though, “If you didn't like Lion, you'll probably love Mountain Lion even more because it seems to fix a lot of the performance/quirkiness issues that some folks were having with the last version of OS X.” While not every Mac that runs Snow Leopard today can be upgraded to Mountain Lion, chances are that quite a few Snow Leopard users will decide to finally update their computers now. I just took a glance at our own analytics data for TechCrunch.com and according to Google Analytics, almost 17% of those of you running Mac have already upgraded to Mountain Lion. Also, while Snow Leopard remains the most popular Mac OS in Chitika’s data, almost 60% of TechCrunch readers run Lion today and just 22% use Snow Leopard. As with all of these stats, then, it’s important to remember that the data is limited to users who visit sites that are part of Chitika’s ad network. This could skew the data, but Chitika’s numbers have typically been very close to those we’ve seen from other third-party analytics companies.
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