The Latest from TechCrunch

EMarketer: 26% Of U.S. Consumers Access Social Networks On Mobile Today, Facebook 85% Of That
Endorse Aims To Take The Pain Out Of Couponing, By Offering Discounts Through Mobile Apps
Boutine Lets Women Build Their Own Virtual Boutiques
Netflix Brings ‘Just For Kids’ User Interface To The Xbox 360
A Bunch Of People In A Room Building A Phone: What The iPhone Document Says About Samsung
Influitive Raises Unusual $3.75 Million Seed Round From 11 Investors For Customer Advocate Platform
Here’s What Happened At Fluent
Square’s Starbucks Deal Puts It At The Epicenter Of ‘Seismic Change’ Away From Cash
Connectify Dispatch Lets You Combine All Your WiFi Connections Into One Super Connection
Former Google Executive Dave Girouard Launches Crowdfunding Service Upstart, Raises $1.75M
Pivotshare Raises $1 Million To Help Anyone Sell Media Direct To Fans
Conan O’Brien Breaks Down The Apple/Samsung Trial [VIDEO]
Social Data Platform DataSift Sets Targets On Wall Street; Hires Financial Vets, Opens New York Office
Poshmark Launches ‘Showrooms’ To Help Users Sift Through Its Growing Fashion Resale Database
BMC Doubles Down On DevOps, Acquires VaraLogix
Backed By Palantir, Groupon Brazil Co-founders, Printi Wants To Bring A Web-Based Kinko’s To Brazil
Vital Insights Gets $20M From Bregal Sagemount To Drive Auto Sales SaaS To New Markets
Kiip Takes Its First International Steps, Inks Reward Network Deal With UK’s Yo! Sushi
Boingo Wireless Buys Ex-Googler’s Cloud Nine Media, Digs Further Into Sponsored, Free WiFi And Ads
Realtime Gets $100 Million To Build “Whole New Era Of The Internet,” AKA The Real-Time Web

EMarketer: 26% Of U.S. Consumers Access Social Networks On Mobile Today, Facebook 85% Of That

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 09:19 AM PDT

Image2 for post Details On The Upcoming New Facebook iPhone App. Now With Events!

Figures out today from eMarketer estimate that in the U.S., just under 82 million consumers, or 26% of the population, will access social networks from their phones this year, rising to nearly 117 million by 2014. But if you are a social networking startup that sees that low-penetration figure as an opportunity, be aware that at the moment Facebook has all but cornered the market, and that the market is slowing down. Facebook today accounts for 85% of all mobile social networking activity, and that proportion is only growing: eMarketer projects that Facebook will account 87.4% by 2014 — or four out of every 10 mobile users and nearly two-thirds of smartphone users.

Meanwhile, growth in social network on mobile is slowing right down, from 50% in 2011 to 18% by 2014.

Basing estimates on a variety of survey and traffic data from research firms and regulatory agencies, historical trends, company-specific data, and demographic and socioeconomic factors, eMarketer analysts found that smartphones are completely dominating social networking activity in the U.S. at the moment.

Some 95.5% of all users are checking and updating on their statuses on higher-end devices, it says. In other words, the different efforts we’ve seen from the likes of Twitter and Facebook to make their services friendly to lower-end devices are almost certainly mainly being utilized outside the U.S. Overall, in a separate piece of research, eMarketer notess that 116 million people in the U.S. will own and use a smartphone monthly this year, 43% of them Android devices.

EMarketer projects that by 2014, the percentage of people in the U.S. using social network sites on their phones will remain a minority activity, with 36.2% of users accessing sites (among the mobile population, the number is about 10 percentage points higher, at46.3%) . This shows that while the figure is growing, and indeed needs to be a consideration for companies like Facebook, PC-based access will continue to account for the majority of use in the U.S.

Indeed, eMarketer estimates that the number of Facebook mobile monthly active users this year will be around 70 million people. That works out to less than half of the 186 million MAUs that Facebook reported for June 2012 in the U.S. and Canada (Facebook’s worldwide MAU figure for June 2012 is 955 million).

Although we are still at a relatively young stage in the market, the landgrab for social mobile might at the same time be closing off: eMarketer notes that growth is slowing down by quite a lot in the next few years.

In 2011, it was growing by 50%; this year that will come down to 40%, and by 2014 “the number of mobile social networkers will increase by just 18%” although it does point out that this is “still in the healthy double digits.” It notes that mobile Facebook usage (as it dominates the space) “will have a similar growth trajectory.”

Endorse Aims To Take The Pain Out Of Couponing, By Offering Discounts Through Mobile Apps

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 09:00 AM PDT

The couponing industry is 125 years old, and in that time it hasn’t changed that much. Users are forced to go through a laborious process to save just a bit of money on groceries and other products. Well, Endorse is coming to consumers with a simpler way to get discounts on everyday products, with a set of mobile apps that will allow them to get money back on everyday items like soft drinks, snacks, and toilet paper.

We first wrote about Endorse when it raised $4.25 million from Accel Ventures and SV Angel in January. When it first launched, it was a web-only experience, with users choosing items to buy from Endorse.com and then mailing receipts in to receive credit from their purchases. (!!!) Not long after, it launched iPhone and Android mobile apps in a closed beta test. Now the startup is opening those apps up to anyone who wishes to use them, enabling users to save between 10 percent and 100 percent on purchases.

The apps work like this: You go to a local store and open up the app, and it’ll offer up discounts on various products like soft drinks, snacks, and toilet paper. You purchase the items you want, and after you’ve paid you take a photo of your receipt. Endorse then makes note of the items, and credits your account with whatever discount should be applied. Once the account has reached $25, Endorse will cut you a check — although it’s looking into quicker means of payment, like through PayPal, issuing reloadable debit cards, or automatically crediting the account you paid with.

The whole thing turns the 125-year old coupon industry on its head. For consumers, the app eliminates the need to clip coupons, many of which can only be used in specific stores. They can get discounts on products featured in Endorse, regardless of where they were purchased — whether it be in their ultra supermarket, local corner store, or the gas station’s Qwik-E-Mart while on the road.

For brands, the app provides better targeting and analytics. Consumer brands spend some $5 billion in coupons every year, but only 1 percent of all coupons are actually redeemed, according to Endorse founder and CEO Steven Carpenter. Even worse, once redeemed, the brands have no information about who actually used the coupon.

Instead of spending billions of dollars on mailers and coupons run in the newspaper and having no idea who is using them, Endorse provides brands with detailed data about where purchases were made, and data around who’s made purchases with the discounts. Endorse connects with Facebook, so it can provide aggregate demographics data about its users.

That means it could also better target users with discounts, rather than blinding issuing coupons to the general population. The whole thing creates a better feedback loop between consumers and brands. As a result, it’s already drawing interest from some big consumer brands. Carpenter wouldn’t comment on the companies that it is working with, but a quick glance through the app shows brands from consumer goods companies like PepsiCo and General Mills.

Carpenter incubated the startup as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel, after selling Cake financial to Etrade in 2010. Early employees to Endorse come from YouTube and PayPal, and have been building both the back end platform for brands to promote their products, as well as the apps that consumers use.

The company now has 12 employees, and is already generating revenue, as it gets a cut for purchases made thanks to the discounts it offers. While it’s being used mainly for groceries today, Endorse could spread to other product categories as time goes on. That could mean more discounts for consumers, and for brands, it could mean a better way to reach their customers.

Boutine Lets Women Build Their Own Virtual Boutiques

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 08:42 AM PDT

The startup world can’t seem to get enough new fashion-focused companies these days (or rather, lots of startup founders have discovered women are a great target audience in the wake of Pinterest’s soaring growth). So here’s another entry to whet your collective social shopping whistles: Boutine.com. Similar in some respects to Polyvore, as it also enables women to browse and create new looks by mix-and-matching items, Boutine’s key difference is that it aims to be the place you buy those items, too.

According to founder Pramod Dabir, he was inspired to try his hand at a fashion startup after years of working in investment banking (yes, really) thanks to a little inspiration from his then finance, now wife. She was at Stanford Business School, and was living in a house with six other girls. So he was there, too. That really opened his eyes to how women interacted with fashion. One of the women at the house was more fashionable than the others, he noted, so she would give the others fashion advice. And these women would even make purchasing decisions based on her suggestions. The idea, then, much like with Polyvore, is to try to take that “fashion inspiration” and curation angle to the Internet. Hence, Boutine.

But Boutine isn’t just a social-sharing site centered around fashion. It’s an online store. Sourcing items from a variety of indie designers, over half of whom are international, Boutine organizes and presents the pieces in a drag-and-drop interface where women can create looks using tops, bottoms, dresses, handbags, jewelry and other accessories. Of some 300 signups from designers, Boutine curated the selection down to just 75 designers, with help from a team of experts from the fashion industry. Today, there are around 2,000 individual items on the site, with an average price fo $150 per item.

In addition to the mix-and-matching Boutine allows, users can also add their own Instagram photos to their collections (as the outfits or outfit groups are called). This allows them to start with a photo of something they already own, then find other items to match with it. For example, you could find a necklace to complement a date-night dress, or some new jeans to go with a shirt you love. When collections are complete, they can be shared to all the usual places – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or even blogs via embed codes or a WordPress plugin.

When a shopper decides to buy, the entire checkout happens on Boutine itself – it’s not an affiliate site, Dabir says. According to the site FAQ, Boutine charges a 20% commission on products sold, and Stylists (that’s you) would receive a 10% commission for putting the look together. Boutine collects the total commission and distributes the appropriate amount to the Boutique Owner, meaning the bloggers, stylists, and fashion enthusiast who are the active participants building collections on the site.

The company has been quietly running in beta for about a month, and while it’s too early to disclose user numbers and traction, the initial engagement times the startup is seeing are promising, says Dabir. “For the registered users, the average time on site has been about 25 minutes,” he says. “And they usually come back to the site about 3 to 4 times a month.”

Boutine is currently bootstrapped with money from friends and family, but it’s in the process of raising seed funding now.

Netflix Brings ‘Just For Kids’ User Interface To The Xbox 360

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 08:39 AM PDT

Netflix is making it even easier for kids to bypass channel surfing and search for their favorite shows and characters, with an updated app for the Xbox 360. The latest version of Netflix’s Xbox 360 app, which went live this morning, brings its increasingly popular ‘Just For Kids’ user interface to the gaming console.

Netflix’s Just For Kids UI debuted nearly a year ago, offering its younger users an easier way to find and watch their favorite shows. Unlike Netflix’s usual user interface, which highlights movie box art and descriptions, Just For Kids is character-centric, so that toddlers can navigate what they want to watch based on which popular characters most appeal to them, whether it be Dora The Explorer or Spongebob Squarepants. Since introducing the UI on the web, Netflix has been busy porting it to other devices, such as the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3, Apple TV… and now the Xbox.

For the Xbox 360, the updated app is a clear win, as it will mean even more media consumption on the game console. Microsoft seems to be pushing the Xbox more as a media hub than a game console these days, so grabbing the attention of a home’s youngest users is one way to solidify its place in the living room.

That said, the emergence of the interface and increased Netflix viewing from younger viewers might be having an effect on traditional children’s programming channels. Viacom has seen a fall in ratings at its Nickelodeon channels, for instance, which seems to coincide with the broader release of Just For Kids.

A Bunch Of People In A Room Building A Phone: What The iPhone Document Says About Samsung

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 08:03 AM PDT

There’s an old saw in consumer electronics that goes something like this: if Palm/Google/Samsung/LG/Huawei/RIM wants to compete with Apple, why don’t they hire a bunch of great people, lock them in a room, give them millions of dollars, and make them build a great phone. They can’t come out until they’re done.

Don’t believe this is true? Check out the 132 page document released during the Apple v. Samsung trial that’s making the rounds right now. It proves two things: that the iPhone was top of mind for Samsung designers and engineers and, more important, there was a group of people dedicated to figuring out what it took to make a best-selling phone. Whether they succeeded or not is a matter of debate – the Galaxy line is doing quite well – but the document shows us exactly how Samsung reacted to the iPhone.

The document is exactly what Samsung needed to do in reaction to the iPhone, but many would argue that their efforts were aimed at copying rather than innovating. Samsung is a leader in Android phones for a few primary reasons – this document is one of them – and it made perfect business sense.

CE designers are in the business of making phone after phone. If you’re confused as to why Samsung just doesn’t shut down their assembly line and build a few great phones, it’s because, like content businesses and food service, you make money by making things. Notice I didn’t say selling things. You just need to release them. Of the number released, a percentage will sell, a percentage will be returned, and you can then discount the products and/or recycle them. It’s an endless loop predicated on very basic market variables.

Apple, however, interrupted that loop. They built something that was clearly very popular and was eviscerating phone sales. Nokia didn’t fail because people didn’t like phones anymore. They just didn’t like Nokias. RIM isn’t on the ropes because CEOs have moved away from email. It’s on the ropes because Apple ate their lunch.

The reaction? Well, some phone companies – Palm being the best example – put a bunch of folks into a room and built a phone. They spent a lot of money, pumped out a nice mobile OS, and then ran out of cash. Other companies like Microsoft embarrassed themselves for a little while and then redid their entire operating system from the ground-up, offending die-hards in the process but potentially remaking their business.

Samsung simply saw the competitor and copied it. Motorola used to be winning by making phones that were anti-iPhones. Samsung is winning now by making the iPhone. It’s working for them, and it will continue to work. They have the ability to make millions of units a year and sell the vast majority.

Again, a flat slab of dark glass does not an empire make. Apple didn’t invent the dark-obelisk-like design, they merely took it to its obvious conclusion. Samsung, blindsided by this upstart, did what huge corporations usually do: they yelled at their designers who, in turn, assessed what they were doing wrong and wrote a report on it. This report is living proof that Samsung was and is scared of the iPhone and, more important, they’d do anything to copy it.

How scared was Samsung? I remember a Samsung rep asking me before the launch of the first iPhone what I thought of a non-existent product. I gave him the standard laundry list of rumored specs I had heard over the months before and he, presumably, took them back to his team.

What Samsung ultimately did was take a bunch of people, lock them in a room, and yell at them. The result is the document below. It’s a reaction to perceived failure and it’s essentially a carefully worded mea culpa. As Mic Wright notes in Kernel, the company is a defining force in South Korea and failure of any stripe is not allowed. Does this mean Samsung needs to be singled out for copying the iPhone? No, but it does mean that Samsung tried its damnedest to make things right in its own myopic way.

View this document on Scribd

Influitive Raises Unusual $3.75 Million Seed Round From 11 Investors For Customer Advocate Platform

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Influitive has raised $3.75 Million from 11 investors for the company’s customer advocate platform that helps companies generate qualified leads and shorten buying processes.

Founder Mark Organ said the unusual seed round is illustrative of how the venture capital community is getting more engaged in smaller deals.

“It’s a huge seed round,” Organ said in an interview yesterday. “It could be called a seed preferred round.”

Organ said he raised money on both coasts. He leveraged Angel List. Seed funding came from the likes of venture capital firms such as First Round Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Relay Ventures.

Organ has just a wee bit of credibility in the market where Influitive plays. He founded Eloqua, the marketing automation platform that started trading last week on the NASDAQ Exchange.

Influitive’s business model reflects the new world of online customer advocacy that has emerged in the past several years with the rise of the read/write web. Blogs, Facebook, Yelp – they’ve all provided the foundation for individuals to rally around businesses that they believe in.

These people are as much in the business to business community as they are in the consumer world.

With Influitive, clients initially set up an “AdvocateHub,” which serves as a branded portal that advocates visit to learn how they can market the company and help build an ecosystem that drives referrals.

In exchange, advocates receive rewards from the sponsor companies. This may be a bottle of wine or free access to a user conference. The goal is to get the advocates interacting with the company.

The service has a certain degree of gamification involved. Fill out a survey and you get some points. Follow the company on Twitter you get some more points.

Organ said Eloqua did three institutional rounds of investment. With Influitive, the first round is yet to come.

Venture capitalists are willing to put in a lot less money and not take a board seat. Instead, venture capitalists are sitting in board meetings as observers.

This reflects the realities of the new economy. It takes a lot less money to take a company to scale.Distribution is affordable. VCs have to get in early and build a tiht relationship so they can later do the $50 million round they dream of.

Cindy Padnos is the founder and managing partner at Illuminate Ventures. Her firm invested in Illuminate. She says her firm liks to work with companies that have raised $1 million but are not quite ready for a Series A round.

“I am seeing more entrepreneurs who are doing that,” Padnos said.

The competitors Influitive faces will come from the social CRM space. The challenge will be attracting the right advocates who are doing it for the love of the business more than the excitement of rewards.

Here’s What Happened At Fluent

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 07:41 AM PDT

Fluent is shutting down, or so you may have heard. It’s no surprise that a startup has failed – most do. It’s no surprise that an ambitious, bite-off-more-than-you-can-chew startup that went so far as to proclaim it was inventing “the future of email” is shutting down – that’s a hefty order for anyone to fill. And it’s no surprise that a company based in Australia (which to most VC’s may as well be the moon), couldn’t raise enough funding to continue …well, that’s no surprise, but it’s pretty sad.

What may end up being the bigger takeaway here for anyone daring to tackle one of those frighteningly ambitious startup ideas is that they should know that they’re taking on a damned near impossible task. Because if anyone can build a better Gmail, the one that’s best positioned to do so is Gmail itself.

Investors: Fluent Is “Too Ambitious”

That’s what Fluent co-founder Dhanji Prasanna tells me, at least, when I asked him if anyone could ever really take on Gmail. And Fluent’s potential investors agreed. “Many thought getting users to switch from Gmail was too ambitious,” he says. This, even though Fluent wasn’t asking people to actually switch email providers. It was just another way to interact with the service, similar to Sparrow. A new UI.

It also didn’t help that an investor pulled out at the last minute, due to a conflict of interest. “We could have taken the rest of the round and kept on, but then we’d be back at the raising table a lot sooner than we liked,” says Prasanna.

But the fact that Fluent was a new URL, as opposed to an app (like Sparrow), was a sticking point. “In both the literal and metaphorical senses, the muscle memory of `g-m-a-i-l.com` is just too powerful to overcome,” Prasanna told me, when explaining what happened at the startup. “This is not to say you can’t build a popular email service, but what we attempted was an enormous uphill challenge.”

Co-founder Cameron Adams agrees that it’s not something you can take on, if you don’t have the funding in place. “While trying to raise funds, the feedback that we got was that it was a great product and a great team but there was some trepidation at attacking the established email space,” says Adams. “We needed proof of quite large user numbers and growth – something we couldn’t supply with our own money.”

Gmail’s Baseline Is Too High To Beat

Prasanna also feels that the company got too caught up in trying to be a better Gmail, and early user feedback only served to highlight how far Fluent would have to go to beat the baseline Gmail had established. “Gmail is a fantastic service – it is the app I used the most bar none before Fluent,” he says. “For most users it is good enough. And therein lies the problem.”

“We were building feature parity with Gmail, while we should have been building out a can’t-live-without value feature like attachments or search,” he adds, ”i.e., something people would part with money for.”

Prasanna then recounted a story of meeting the CEO of Zimbra, who told him that he would simply walk out on a client if they were using Gmail – it’s just not worth trying to beat them, he told Prasanna. “There are a hundred little reasons why I think Fluent did things better than Gmail, but for most people Gmail is good enough,” Prasanna says. “And even if someone buys those hundred little reasons, they don’t necessarily add up to a single forcing function to switch.”

Turning Down Acqui-hires & What Comes Next

In any event, he insists that the decision to shut down came long before the Sparrow acquisition by Google. And like Sparrow, they too had “acqui-hire” options presented from “the usual suspects, as well as other red-hot Valley startups.” But the founders wanted to move on to different things that appealed to each of them on a personal level. “Ultimately, the financial motive didn’t rule the day. I like to think we deserve some credit for that,” he says.

The good news is that their dream – that is, one that speaks not to building a Gmail killer, but of building a service that makes sense of your data and helps you discover new things – has not been entirely killed. It will just sit on the back burner for a while, Prasanna says. Or maybe it will be incorporated into new projects in the future, he muses. But none of the founders are working on email-related projects now. Adams is working on a design startup called Canva. Prasanna is joining a stealth mobile apps startup in San Francisco. The third co-founder Jochen Bekmann is keeping his project under wraps for now.

Can anyone kill Gmail? Maybe one day someone will, the founders still believe. But they’re going to need a large runway to do so.

Prasanna will be posting more about his thoughts later today here on his blog. He adds that he doesn’t speak for the whole team.

Square’s Starbucks Deal Puts It At The Epicenter Of ‘Seismic Change’ Away From Cash

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 07:02 AM PDT

The $25 million funding and sales deal announced late yesterday between mobile payments startup Square and coffee giant Starbucks is big, but it is only the tip of the iceberg for what the implications will be for Square and for mobile payments in general.

The deal formally covers 7,000 U.S. Starbucks stores, where Starbucks says customers will have "another way to enjoy a quick and seamless payment experience" at the coffee houses, alongside Starbucks' existing mobile app, which also lets users pay without cards or cash and has seen some 60 million transactions to date.

But however big that already is, the Starbucks deal could mean more.

It potentially gives Square, which has 2 million businesses and individuals using it worldwide, a partner on which to piggy back into international markets. And a big back it is: Starbucks has nearly 20,000 stores worldwide today. Around 12,000 of them are in the U.S. But growth is happening just as much outside the home market as inside it: in Q2 earnings from the end of July Starbucks noted that it had plans to grow that by 1,200 stores in fiscal year 2013: 600 in the U.S., 500 in China and 100 in EMEA.

The "Squarebucks" deal gives rise to questions of what is going to happen with all of the other players in this space. Since Square launched in 2009, a number of companies have cropped up offering similar products to enable card-based payments. In the U.S., among the bigger plays are Sail from Verifone; Here from PayPal; and GoPayment from Intuit.

The connection between those existing and Square is very strong indeed: we heard from one reliable source that in fact PayPal's development of Here was directly a result of the company wanting to develop a product like Square's. "The whole ethos at PayPal right now is to bring in as many technologies for processing as possible," I was told. When PayPal saw what Square was doing, it created Here, and card.io fits in perfectly with this plan.

Over in Europe, there has been a period of free-form growth with none of those U.S. players yet to set up shop. There are several players, but some of the more active include iZettle from Sweden, mPowa in the UK (which had its own, slightly absurd run-in with Square) and PayLeven from the Samwer Brothers. All of these have been developing and promoting their own point-of-sale, card reading mobile accessories, with much promise but still small numbers for roll-outs.

There is still room for consolidation among all of these — either in the form of acquisitions or just falling by the wayside for lack of scale.

But you know what? It may not matter. That’s because this partnership will let Starbucks customers use "Pay with Square", its mobile app that circumvents the use of cards altogether. That means this partnership catapults Square into a place where its cardless app could get used significantly more than the company's phone attachment.

As Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, noted earlier today on CBS, "The consumer is going through a seismic change in which cash is eventually going to be obsolete."

And given that Pay with Square is software based it could end up linking up with whatever solution finally becomes the de facto hardware standard, whether it involves NFC chips, QR Codes or barcodes, mobile card-reading dongles or something else completely different — or even if it remains focused on cards, which are likely going to remain for a long time to come.

Pay with Square lets the company forge relationships directly with consumers rather than with merchants — and that means that whatever happens under the hood — whether it is about NFC or QR, or even if it decides to lift off the credit card platform to a different kind of financial instrument altogether — that customer relationship will remain, something that could be welcomed by a population that doesn't really care about which technology does what. Indeed, as Jack Dorsey told Charlie Rose this morning on CBS: "My fascination has always been simplifying complexities."

As for Square itself, there will almost certainly be more news coming in its wake, since the company notes in the release that the $25 million Starbucks investment is "part of the company's Series D financing round". Other backers in the Series D, which in total is reportedly in the $200 million range, include Rizvi Traverse.

And with money, there are likely to be more product/partnership announcements to come. That's because Square is, like Dorsey's other company Twitter, very much built in the mold of a modern startup. Although Square has yet to release APIs like its European rival iZettle, there is still an emphasis on ecosystems and linking up with other players in this space to create compelling offers for users. There are so many players in the market right now that you can see already dancing around mobile payments — Groupon, Foursquare, Facebook, Amazon, naming four not yet in the retail space — that Square may be spoiled for choice for partners.

There there is just one small thing left to conquer for Square: actually getting the masses to think of pulling out their phones instead of their wallets to set the wheels in motion.

Connectify Dispatch Lets You Combine All Your WiFi Connections Into One Super Connection

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 06:41 AM PDT

Not all Wifi connections are created equal. Some are free; others are relatively expensive. Some are fast, and some are painfully slow. But what if you could combine all of your connections into one super-fast, super-reliable connection?

That’s what the Connectify folks — the same ones who are using software to turn your PC into a hotspot — are doing with Dispatch, their new Kickstarter project. The idea is simple (despite the fact that the technology surely is not).

WiFi is everywhere. It’s in the coffee shop, in the airport, and likely in your pocket (in the form of either a 3G/4G hotspot or a tether-friendly smartphone). Yet anywhere outside of your home or work connection, things tend to be a bit slower and less reliable. Connectify Dispatch is a software solution that lets you combine a public WiFi connection (at the airport, for example) with another network (like your 4G hotspot).

This allows you to do things that wouldn’t normally be possible on a slow, crowded, yet free network, while not running up a crazy bill on your expensive hotspot. Dispatch lets you set different priorities for certain networks, so you can set the airport WiFi or an Ethernet connection to “primary,” and your hotspot to “secondary.”

Connectify has already had some incredible success, including funding from IQT and a staggering amount of usage on its WiFi Hotspot app. The company tells us that 233,000 active users have started a Connectify Hotspot connection in the last 24 hours. That’s nearly 10,000 users every hour.

The same type of success is only sure to follow with Dispatch (Kickstarter link).

Former Google Executive Dave Girouard Launches Crowdfunding Service Upstart, Raises $1.75M

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 06:01 AM PDT

Dave Girouard, the former president of Google Enterprise, has struck out on his own with a new startup called Upstart, which offers crowdfunding and mentorship tools to help college graduates pursue (in his words) “a more entrepreneurial path.”

Girouard argues that there’s currently a “misallocation of capital in our economy” — the fact that large companies spend lots of money to recruit and hire college graduates, yet given their lack of traditional credit history, the graduates themselves “couldn’t raise $30,000 if their life depended on it.” Usually, of course, their life doesn’t depend on it, but that kind of money could help people pursue their big ambitions and dreams, rather than settling for a corporate job that they’re not that excited about.

With Upstart, people can raise personal funding (the company’s website declares, “The startup is you“) in exchange for a share of their future earnings. After they sign up, students create a profile with their achievements and goals, verify their academic credentials, then identify how much money they want to raise. With that data, Upstart calculates how much of their income they’ll need to share with investors in order to raise that funding. (Girouard notes that some college graduates are going to be better bets to earn more money, so they’ll need to commit a smaller percentage of their income.) Then investors can commit to backing a graduate for an amount of their choice, in increments of $1,000.

The payments are made on a monthly basis, and are verified based on annual tax returns. The maximum amount of your income that you can commit is 7 percent, and you don’t have to pay for years where you make less than $30,000.

Girouard argues that this approach is particularly suited for the entrepreneurial lifestyle, where your income is likely to be “lumpy and inconsistent.” The payment size varies based on how much you’re making, so if you have a lean year, hopefully you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to be able to afford your payment. On the other hand, in the years when that hard work pays off in a big financial reward, your backers will benefit too. And if you become the next Mark Zuckerberg, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be writing insanely large checks to those investors — the payments are capped at a 14.99 percent annual return.

It’s not just about the financial backing, either. The point is to connect students with people who will provide mentorship as well as money — indeed, they’ll be particularly motivated to provide that mentorship thanks to the financial incentive. (Girouard also suggests that as with many early Kickstarter projects, participants will raise a lot of the money from people they already know.) This emphasis on connecting students with mentors is, Girouard says, a big part of what sets Upstart apart from other “income-based repayment” efforts like Thrust Fund.

Another question is whether people really need more incentive to become entrepreneurs — if anything, I’m hearing complaints from investors and entrepreneurs that it’s too easy to start a company nowadays, leading to startups that aren’t driven by big ideas. (That also makes the general recruiting landscape more difficult, which is a big source of those complaints.) Girouard says that may be true in Silicon Valley, where graduates of Stanford and other schools have access to “a lot more options and capital,” but he says the area is just “a very narrow slice of the country.”

Upstart should help fund a much broader range of efforts than just your run-of-the-mill tech startups. For example, Girouard notes that one of the schools participating in the pilot program is the Rhode Island School of Design, where graduates might want to start their own small design shops rather than going to work for someone else. Upstart funding will also be available at Arizona State University, Dartmouth College, University of Michigan, and University of Washington this fall.

The company has raised a $1.75 million seed round of funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, NEA, Google Ventures, First Round Capital, Crunchfund, and Dallas Maverick’s owner Mark Cuban.

Pivotshare Raises $1 Million To Help Anyone Sell Media Direct To Fans

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 06:00 AM PDT

While the technology to sell content directly to consumers has existed for a while, few seemed to take advantage of it. Then something changed: First there was Louis C.K., selling his one-hour special Live At The Beacon Theatre to fans for just $5, DRM-free and all. Then Aziz Ansari followed suit. So did Jim Gaffigan. In fact, if you’re a big-time comic and not selling comedy specials direct to your fans, you’re probably doing something wrong.

And it’s not just comics — there’s also a growing community of indie filmmakers who are selling movies on their own, forgoing traditional distribution channels. And what about musicians who want to distribute recordings of their performances, or educators whose lectures could be valuable outside the university system? If you’re not a well-known star, there haven’t been a lot of good ways to make your content available to consumers.

Anyway, that’s what Pivotshare is for. The startup provides a self-serve platform that will let anyone — absolutely anyone — upload their audio or video files to the Internet and sell them directly to fans. And to do so, it’s raised one million dollars in Series A financing from new media investor TownsgateMedia.

Up until now, most content creators putting video online tried to recoup the costs through advertising, but that’s not always the best solution. In part, that’s because getting set up was too complicated. But with Pivotshare, creators don’t have to worry about the vagaries of picking an online video platform, paying for a CDN, setting up a payment system, etc. All they have to do is upload a video, set their price, and Pivotshare takes care of the rest.

Even better, there are no upfront costs or recurring monthly fees associated with publishing those videos through Pivotshare. The startup collects a portion of sales, which means that creators only pay Pivotshare when they are actually making revenue through its platform.

Pivotshare isn’t alone in trying to help content creators monetize their content. VHX, which was behind Aziz Ansari’s special, as well as the online distribution of Indie Game: The Movie, recently raised $1.25 million. The difference is that Pivotshare is hoping to go beyond big-name content producers to enable speakers, conference organizers, and other associations to better monetize their video assets. There will likely be even more companies popping up to cash in on this new opportunity as direct-to-consumer media sales continue to take off.

Conan O’Brien Breaks Down The Apple/Samsung Trial [VIDEO]

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 05:58 AM PDT

Apple and Samsung are currently entrenched in courtroom warfare. Apple alleges that Samsung stole some of iOS’s key functions. Samsung is saying nuh-huh. Here’s a video of a Samsung VP, released by Coco O’Brien’s web monkeys, that shows Samsung, the company’s products and its attitude are completely different from Apple’s.

Listen, Apple and Samsung’s legal battle can make some fun headlines, but it’s mostly just an interesting sideshow. It’s just two massive consumer electronic giants moaning over icon placement and retail strategy. Outside of Samsung and Apple’s boardrooms, only fanboys care about the outcome.

Apple has the right to defend what it feels it developed and patented. And likewise, Samsung has the duty to keep up with the Joneses, or if you will, the Jobses, and make sure its products can compete against the market leader.

Social Data Platform DataSift Sets Targets On Wall Street; Hires Financial Vets, Opens New York Office

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 05:37 AM PDT

DataSift, the ‘social data platform’ that provides developers and third parties with the ability to access and interrogate Twitter, Facebook and other real-time social sources, is doubling down on its Wall Street play today. The company is announcing the hiring of two financial veterans, along with the opening of a Madison Avenue, New York office. It’s been pitching its wares as a way for fund managers to get the upper hand for a quite a while now, so this latest move shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.

Robert Passarella, previously of Dow Jones, has been appointed as DataSift’s Managing Director of Finance where he’ll lead the company’s financial industry initiatives and build on its existing financial product offerings. Paul Balser, who joins from StockTwits, is taking up the role of DataSift’s new Managing Director of Financial Institutions Sales, and will be responsible for the company’s institutional relationships.

Working out of the company’s new New York office, both will be charged with building on DataSift’s “robust real-time and Historics social data platform” which is said to help fund managers make faster trading decisions based on shifts in public sentiment towards companies, stocks and news.

A Wall Street veteran, while at Dow Jones Passarella was previously vice president and managing director for the institutional markets business where he was responsible for Machine Readable News, Sales and Trading products, Venture Source and DJ FX Trader — Dow Jones’ first desktop product for the foreign exchange trading marketplace. In other words, he brings experience of managing products that bridges the gap between technology and financial news.

Equally experienced, Balser was previously Vice President of Business Development and Head of Sales at StockTwits. Prior to StockTwits, he held senior positions in institutional equity sales for Alex Brown & Sons, Lazard Freres, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and Cowen.

Wall Street has long been driven by sentiment, and so mining social data as another data point certainly makes sense. But there’s a lot of data to mine, which is of course where DataSift’s pitch comes into focus. There’s an estimated 400 million tweets a day, for example.

To that end, DataSift claims to aggregate billions of social interactions from “more than a million public social data sources”, which as we’ve already noted includes Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, forums and online message boards. It recently integrated with NewsCred, so that its data mining can go beyond the real-time and social platforms to also include news articles, which is said to give traders and fund managers an insight into how financial news spreads through the social web.

DataSift, which now has offices in the UK, San Francisco, and New York, raised a hefty $7.2 million in a follow-on Series A round from existing investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures in May. This brought DataSift's total funding to $15 million.

Poshmark Launches ‘Showrooms’ To Help Users Sift Through Its Growing Fashion Resale Database

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 05:00 AM PDT

Poshmark, the startup that makes an iPhone app for posting, buying, and selling women’s apparel and accessories, has rolled out some new features to accommodate its growing user base.

Since Poshmark launched in December 2011 with $3.5 million in venture capital, the company has grown to having an annual run rate of $40 million in items listed, with tens of thousands of items populating each “Posh Party” for the community to post item listings that occurs typically once or twice daily (the company expects its annual item value to hit $500 million by year-end.) The update being launched today — curated ‘Showrooms’ — aims to help users more effectively sift those items into what is most appealing or interesting to them.

Poshmark is a very visual product, so it was great to have the company’s CEO Manish Chandra stop by the TechCrunch TV office to give us an in-person show-and-tell. Watch the video above to see him give us the rundown on the company, how it’s growth has been, and the latest update of Poshmark — and explain how it is separate from the growing pack of fashion and reseller apps populating the current web market such as Copious and Threadflip.

BMC Doubles Down On DevOps, Acquires VaraLogix

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 04:45 AM PDT

BMC Software, perhaps best known for its Remedy line of IT management products, announced today that it will acquire VaraLogix, makers of tools that help companies automate software deployments. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The move follows BMC’s acquisition of StreamStep and continued efforts to tap into the growing DevOps market.

“DevOps” is a nebulous term referring to, among other things, the application of methods from agile software development to IT operations. Automation is a big theme and tools like Puppet (backed by Puppet Labs) and Chef (backed by Opscode) are popular tools.

Many incumbent IT and development project management companies are scrambling to adopt the methodologies and lingo of agile and DevOps. Serena Software for instance got its start selling change management software for COBOL applications running on mainframe since the 1980s, but these days it’s marketing an agile and DevOps oriented IT management products such as Demand Manager and Agile Scheduler. Other older companies like UC4 and IBM are jumping on the bandwagon as well.

And the craze isn’t just limited to IT management vendors. Earlier this year storage giant EMC acquired the agile development consulting company Pivotal Labs.

Varalogix, a lesser known player in the DevOps tool market, was founded by CEO Tim Wall (who was previously the Manager of Financial Planning and New Business Development for the Playboy Entertainment Group) and CTO Robin Fuller (previously a Senior Software Engineer at IBM).

Backed By Palantir, Groupon Brazil Co-founders, Printi Wants To Bring A Web-Based Kinko’s To Brazil

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 04:36 AM PDT

American investors and VC firms (like Sequoia and Accel) have begun to turn their attention to Latin America, particularly to one of the region’s fastest growing economies: Brazil. Thanks to skyrocketing Internet penetration, the growing number of B2C eCommerce companies that have popped up over the last year and a population of just under 200 million, Brazil has become an appealing market for entrepreneurs.

Although change is coming fast, many of Brazil’s industries remain offline and are plagued by inefficiency and a lack of transparency. So, today, two European entrepreneurs are launching Printi, an on-demand, web-based solution through which they hope to revolutionize the country’s printing market.

While it’s not necessarily the sexiest of industries, co-founders Florian Hagenbuch and Mate Pencz believe that printing has been one of the slowest to innovate, telling us that right now “Brazil is a million lightyears behind the U.S. and Europe” in the industry. So, by leveraging the scale afforded by the Web and by streamlining ordering mechanisms, the co-founders hope to significantly reduce the time and cost it takes for local businesses to print their essential corporate, promotional, and marketing materials.

Printi’s platform offers users the ability to choose (at launch) from a product portfolio of 6,000+ printed materials, including business cards, flyers, folders, notebooks, posters, etc. On top of that, the startup offers instant price quotes (i.e. more transparency) and automated order pooling that the co-founders believe will enable the business to offer prices that are 15 to 20 percent lower than the market average.

However, it’s important to remember that building a business in Brazil inherently comes with plenty of its own hurdles. Although internet penetration in Brazil has grown from 8 percent to 50 percent in nine years and Brazilians are increasingly ready to consume online, there’s still a lot of bureaucracy in the Brazilian system. Bootstrapping is tough.

Partly, that’s due to the high cost of skilled labor in Brazil. While the payroll tax in the U.S. is about 15 percent, in Brazil it’s close to 70, and companies generally have to pay for at least one meal a day for their employees, along with transportation costs, etc. Worker protections are built into national policy, thanks to the years of hyperinflation that ravaged the country leading to a generation of risk-averse (and crippled) Brazilian entrepreneurs and startups.

Add the difficulty to fire underperforming employees, the fact that business owners can (and will) get sued for just about anything (and for Printi a somewhat capital-intensive business), and you can see why startups need early funding to get off the ground. That cushion is imperative.

To help it hurdle these obstacles and build a little padding, Printi is launching with $1.2 million in Series A funding from a group of investors from both Silicon Valley and Brazil, including Greenoaks Capital, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, serial Brazilian entrepreneur Fabrice Grinda and Groupon Brazil co-founder Florian Otto.

Oh, and there’s also the market opportunity. Printing is a $15 billion market in Brazil, but right now it’s mostly offline and local startups and small businesses find little to no transparency when it comes to how these companies determine their prices and how long it will take to fill orders.

While the co-founders say that competition does exist from local print solutions — and that the FedEx Kinko’s model is represented by companies like AlphaGraphics — most extant solutions revolve around time-sensitive, smallish orders and day-to-day office needs. So Printi wants to become the best solution for a wider range of order-types and printing needs.

The other key is that Printi offers users the ability to select from a variety of options and view prices for their order in a few minutes. There are obviously a whole mess of variables in printing (like the number of sides you want something printed on, finishing, laminations), which makes building a backend which can perform these realtime calculations is no easy task. Traditionally, in Brazil, one has to call the printer to place an order, who sends back a PDF, and if you have to tweak part of the design, the price changes, and the process begins again. But Printi is able to automate processing of those adjustments so that it can serve prices in realtime — something you won’t find offered in Brazil.

What’s more, there are currently a lot of entities that are making money on the same order. Printi gives users a direct process as well as guidance through which they can get feedback on their artwork. People often make mistakes in preparing the things they want printed, the co-founders say, so they’ve developed a feature which checks artwork for errors and lets users know, up front, whether or not they’ll be able to print the order.

This removes a lot of the hassle and time required from small businesses to prepare their orders, and automating and optimizing the production flow helps cut down on paper loss (and costs) and minimize the margin of error. Printi also automatically pools printing orders to give its SMB and corporate customers access to those lower (and what the co-founders believe to be more democratized) prices.

Again, while the print industry may not be the sexiest market to be in, using the Web as a sales channel enables Printi to take advantage of lower fixed costs and faster turnaround — and remove some of the inefficiency that’s endemic to the offline market. So, when one looks at the new margins this can create, Hagenbuch jokes, the model starts to look a lot sexier.

This increased efficiency has led to Printi selling over one million flyers within the first month of its beta launch and has already led to some of Brazil’s most established corporations joining as clients.

With more and more attention turning to Brazil as an emerging market, disruptive, high-margin online businesses like Printi are going to become increasingly common. Just ask Baby.com.br, which has raised over $20 million from Tiger Global, Accel and SV Angel or Open English, which itself recently took on $40+ million in funding to attack the Brazilian market.

For more on Printi, find them at home here.

Vital Insights Gets $20M From Bregal Sagemount To Drive Auto Sales SaaS To New Markets

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 03:47 AM PDT

Vital Insights, an enterprise startup focused on providing a cloud-based customer experience management solution to the automotive industry, has announced a $20 million growth round from a single investor, private equity firm Bregal Sagemount. This is a first round of funding for the company, which has actually been cash-flow positive since 2008, seeing revenue growth of 30% in the first half of 2012. The company’s flagship product, ForesightTM, is already in use across 4,000 dealerships with 125,000 enterprise users, covering such brands as Mercedes-Benz, Maserati, Jaguar Land Rover, Volkswagen, BMW, Audi and Infiniti. Jason Tryfon, CEO and founder of Vital Insights, tells TechCrunch the funding will be used to expand the Canada-based business further internationally.

The success of Vital Insights, growing on its own revenue steam, is another example of how enterprise startups are finding a groove right now, building on the new vogue for cloud services and an increasing receptiveness among enterprises for more disruptive, immediate solutions to their pain points, a trend we covered in more depth a few days ago. “We disrupted a segment where the processes and technology to manage customer experience hadn’t changed for years. We’d built a technology where data workflow and process worked much faster, and really have helped with customer satisfaction. The market was ready,” he told TechCrunch.

As other enterprise startups have noted, getting a foot in the door is easier once you have a proven product.

“It was difficult because we were the small player, but we proved ourselves with the first implementation with Mercedes Benz USA,” he noted, growing from that to cover most of the luxury automotive segment, and now moving into the mass market segment. “We’re now the big company that all little companies wish they could be, and the small company that all the big companies wish they could be.” The company competes with the likes of J.D. Power, he tells me.

Regarding the choice to wait so long for funding, and for choosing a private equity rather than VC firm, Tryfon said this route was the better one for his company:

“Usually a startup hires an investment bank, and taps 14 or 15 select firms. We were going to do that but I realized when we started interviewing banks that a lot of PE firms didn't want to deal with the banks. I knew that running the process on my own would require a lot of calories on my part but I had this feeling that from where we were it would be better to do it on our own.” He also noted that given Vital Insights already had a decent customer base, the kind of development usually gained through a VC backer wasn’t as necessary for his company.

He said it was a nine-month process selecting Bregal, because he wanted to make sure he found the “right partner.” (Remember, cash hasn’t been an issue for the company for years already.)

And what is the right partner?

“A firm with experience with tech companies of our size going to IPO or exiting,” he said. It also helped that managing partner Gene Yoon, who had come from Goldman Sachs and now joins Vital Insights’ board, “was a great match in terms of our business model.” He says that Bregal has already started suggesting potential customers, as well as tuck-in acquisitions that Vital Insights might make with the new funds.

The company is currently at 61 employees and plans to hire up to 30 more people, as well as expand into Asia in early 2013.

Kiip Takes Its First International Steps, Inks Reward Network Deal With UK’s Yo! Sushi

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 01:12 AM PDT

Kiip — the San Francisco-based mobile marketing startup that has created a “rewards network” in which users see offers for free goods and services instead of mobile ads — is going international. The company has signed on with the UK-based sushi chain, Yo! Sushi, to deliver offers for free food across apps used in the UK that have integrated Kiip’s service.

Although Kiip has had some of its U.S. customers serve ads outside of the U.S., this is the first time a non-U.S. company has signed on for the service, and the first time Kiip is sending out offers in the UK on a localized, London-only basis, to coincide with the fact that there are so many more people (and specifically Americans) in town for the Olympics. In a meeting this past weekend in a little coffee shop in London, CEO and co-founder Brian Wong told me this is just the beginning of many deals like this as Kiip ramps up its growth, on the back of a recent $11 million Series B round of funding.

The expansion comes at a time when Kiip is competing against a number of other companies that also deliver rewards instead of straight advertisements, like Foursquare and Groupon. The space remains wide open, says Wong, and “we have realized that we could become the trusted rewards provider out there.”

If there’s one thing that seems to annoy the otherwise mild-mannered Wong, it’s that Kiip often gets called a mobile advertising network. “We’re about rewards, not ads,” he told me, stretching out the r-word. He thinks ads, in their current state, have some major limits because of issues with usability and effectiveness. “When you see companies jamming ads into small formats, saying ‘let’s just shrink this billboard,’ it just doesn’t work,” he said.

Rather than trying to figure out how best to cram lots of information into a limited space, Kiip has moved the goalposts altogether and focused its use of small real estate directly on something that a customer can use immediately. While there are a number of apps on the market that push offers to users — Groupon and Foursquare being two examples — Kiip’s innovation of putting those rewards directly into apps by way of its network means that its offers go, in Wong’s words, “wherever you are.”

He says that up to now the engagement rates have been very encouraging. So far, Kiip has seen a 22% redemption reward rate, and 50% of its redeemers come back to Kiip for more. The majority of users, Wong says, are between the ages of 18 and 34, and Kiip sees a relatively equal mix between male and female users, with ads coming in from big names like Disney, Best Buy and Procter & Gamble.

The bigger picture will see Kiip trying to better match up rewards with increasingly relevant apps. Right now, the company is still in early-adopter phase with a lot of the activity focused around gaming — either in the form of actual mobile games or in areas like fitness apps, which have a natural gamification element to them. It is here that the Yo! Sushi brand fits in particularly well — the company has a kind of Japanese-manga-inspired branding that matches well with gaming design.

But down the road, there will be separate micro-networks around areas like female-focused apps and women’s consumer products; car apps and car-related rewards, and so on. And with the increasing push on location-based offers you can see how this, too, will also start to play a more prominent role with Kiip.

Looking ahead, Kiip is planning to announce more brand partnerships in the UK soon, and it is “on the verge” of rolling out its first campaigns in the middle east and Asia Pacific, with Kiip’s London office, led by Eamonn Carey, leading much of that growth.

Boingo Wireless Buys Ex-Googler’s Cloud Nine Media, Digs Further Into Sponsored, Free WiFi And Ads

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 12:01 AM PDT

Boingo Wireless may have made its name with paid WiFi hotspot access, but today it is doubling down on free: the public WiFi operator is buying Cloud Nine Media, a startup co-founded by ex-Googler Sebastian Tonkin that specializes in sponsored WiFi services, which in turn cost nothing for consumers to use. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition is a mark of how public WiFi services are evolving to a point where, with the rise of smartphones — and especially tablets and gaming devices that do not have cellular access — more people are expecting access wherever they are without going through the trouble of paying for it, and how Boingo needs to change with the times. Boingo provides managed WiFi services in public places like shopping malls, airports, and restaurants, with its 500,000 hotspots covering some 1.5 billion people each year worldwide. Since opening for business in May 2010, Cloud Nine has picked up deals with 6,000 airports, hotels, and other public areas in the U.S. and Canada, who now offer WiFi access free of charge, “brought to you” by sponsors who get 30 seconds of airtime with users before they can proceed with Internet access.

This is something that Boingo has already been doing to some extent: this summer the company teamed up in a promotion for Google Offers to provide free WiFi across New York City’s transportation network and 200 other hotspots. The Cloud Nine deal signifies that this kind of arrangement may now become a lot more common.

“As we’ve expanded our WiFi services into new venue categories, the demand for sponsored access and location-based advertising services has grown in parallel,” noted David Hagan, president and CEO of Boingo, in a statement. “Cloud Nine Media brings a formidable portfolio of tools and talent that will help us take our execution to the next level.”

Boingo is timing the news with the release of its Q2 results, which come out later today. In Q1, the company reported revenues of $24.19 million, missing analyst expectations. Its guidance for this quarter is between $25 million and $26 million (the company’s ticker, if you didn’t know it, is WIFI).

The acquisition also represents a setback for another company, and possibly a setback for another kind of public WiFi business model: JiWire has been Boingo’s advertising partner since 2008, serving premium, location-based ads on Boingo’s WiFi network. TechCrunch understands that this deal is due to expire at the end of this year and will not be renewed, with Cloud Nine taking on advertising responsibilities in addition to unmetered sponsored access.

“Since advertising and sponsorship [are] an increasingly important aspect of our WiFi service, it made sense to add that expertise to our core capabilities as a company and
move away from outsourcing it,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The deal also gives Boingo a stronger foothold into the developer ecosystem in the Bay Area: Cloud Nine is based in San Francisco, while Boingo’s headquarters are in Los Angeles.

Tonkin, meanwhile, now becomes Boingo’s director of advertising products and
strategy, where he will oversee product development, network development and campaign execution; define product and network expansion strategy; and work with key advertisers and venue partners.

Tokin knows something about splash screens and analysing advertising data. Before co-founding Cloud Nine, he was a product marketing manager for Google, leading on acquisition marketing and community building for iGoogle and Google Analytics. His co-founder is Henry Liu, an ex-banker who had also founded InciteBot.

Realtime Gets $100 Million To Build “Whole New Era Of The Internet,” AKA The Real-Time Web

Posted: 08 Aug 2012 12:00 AM PDT

Realtime, a technology developed by a company which has been around since the Internet’s earliest days with the practically un-Googleable name “Internet Business Technologies,” has just received a massive $100 million investment to help fund its lofty plan to build the real-time web. The company offers a developer framework that now powers 2,000 real-time client applications, but, until now, it has only been available outside the U.S.

However, with the new investment from the three-month old, Såo Paulo-based BRZtech, a firm backed by private investors in Europe and South America, as well as Portuguese investment vehicle The Ongoing Group, Realtime is today launching its developer platform stateside.

“What can I do to be disruptive?,” CEO Andre Parreira asked himself years ago, when thinking about how he could scale his company internationally. “I looked to the Internet, and I saw that the Internet is based on a 30-year old protocol – it’s still request/response – so it’s static. It’s not delivering on the promise that the Internet will give us a true interactive experience,” he said. “So, let’s create the live web,” he thought.

That’s the goal with Realtime, which offers a freemium-based developer framework for building live web applications. However, to be clear, the funding isn’t just for the company itself – it’s also to fund the industry, including everything that would need to spring up around this “live web” ambition in order to make it a success. The company claims to have already signed up over 1,000 developers for its beta and plans further outreach through conferences, hackathons and other competitions.

Nope, no small dreams here. Just “a whole new era of the Internet,” as Parreira calls it.

How It’s Built

The platform can be used without changing the underlying technologies of the web. Instead, it runs on top, creating persistent, bi-directional connections with every user. It’s powered by ORTC (Open Realtime Connectivity) and xRTML (extensive Realtime multiplatform language).

ORTC is a cloud-hosted messaging system for web apps or native apps running on Android, iOS or Windows Phone. It enables applications to push updates from the server to the browser or client without requiring a manual page refresh. It relies on WebSockets, a protocol supported by the current versions of all major browsers except Internet Explorer 9, which requires a plugin. For browsers that don’t support that standard, ORTC will fall back to the next best thing: AJAX, which has long been good enough for applications like Gmail. SSL is available for secure connections.

ORTC has API support for several languages and frameworks, including Node.js, ASP.net, Java and PHP and supports iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Parreira says he began work on the Realtime platform three years ago, and wanted to make sure it was something that would work cross-browser, cross-device, and cross-language, so anyone could use it. “The idea is to create an abstraction layer so you can use the real-time messaging system in a cloud-based environment,” he explains, “then you can develop whatever you want without worrying about what could happen in terms of protocols in the future.”

Use Cases: Publishing, E-Commerce, Ads

Currently, there are three main use cases for such a system. One would be for web publishers, who want to offer more interactivity between users on their website. In this scenario, users could see what others were doing on the site, including which sections of the site were popular, what comments were being added, etc. The experience would be familiar to any Chartbeat users – it’s that same feeling of live connectivity that would be present here, but it could do more than just highlight clicks and shares. (You can see a publisher who has implemented Realtime here, for example).

Another vertical would be e-commerce, which would allow retailers to watch as customers shop the site, then offer them things like coupons, discounts, or customer support in order to increase conversions. And then there are real-time ads, which is currently the third most popular use case, but one which could finally steer advertisers away from click-based metrics. ”Because you’re connected in real-time with a persistent connection, and it’s bi-directional, you can also see where your audience is in the moment, what they’re doing, and what they’re looking at,” says Parreira. “So, if you have an ad in front of you, our system can note that you’re looking at the ad, and can track the time to the millisecond.”

The company is now entering the U.S. market, so it’s looking to partner with more companies here. However, it already has some deals underway, including several around the social TV space, such as with TVplus and Watchwith, for example, as well as with social marketing company Nobox, and TV channels Univision and the Tennis Channel. Worldwide, there are many other clients, including Sephora and South America’s largest bank, Banco do brasil. Combined, Realtime’s partners now power 120 million user connections across the web.

Parreira says that many people have talked about the real-time web, but generally in abstract terms. “Realtime is the first company building a tangible framework that will make that abstraction a reality. We did not create a product. We created an industry,” he boldly proclaims. “Real-time will be the foundation of the next web, the modern era of the web, or, if you want, ‘web 3.0,’ and I think it’s really going to impact a lot of businesses.”