Microsoft's Latest “Scroogled” Ads Attack Sharing Of Information That Google Developers Need To Process Transactions

Today, Microsoft has leveled more accusations about Google’s practices by way of its “Scroogled” campaigns. This time, the complaints are about how Google handles users’ data when they purchase an application from Google Play.

Previous “Scroogled” campaigns have targeted both Gmail and search over ads and privacy.

In the two videos below, Microsoft uses animations and words to walk you through “what might happen” if your data were to end up in the wrong people’s hands. It’s a fear campaign, and it really doesn’t have any basis whatsoever.

Take a look at the videos and we’ll get into what actually happens when you buy an app from Google Play.

In the second video, a “real life” situation is played out on the front steps of an apartment building:

A Google spokesperson provided us with the following statement:

Google Wallet shares the information needed to process transactions and maintain accounts, and this is clearly stated in the Google Wallet Privacy Notice.

Why the mention of Google Wallet?

The main difference between Google Play and the Apple App Store is that Google uses its “Wallet” service to process transactions. While it’s not a third-party service in the sense that it’s a different company, it is a function of the process that is not embedded into the Google Play experience. It’s something that users are made aware of in the terms of service and privacy policies when they sign up.

More importantly, when merchants and developers sign up to sell things in Google Play, they must buy into not sharing any of the information that they get, which is name, email address and general location — the things that all companies selling things online need in order to process your transaction and provide support. Better start your attack against Amazon, Etsy and everyone else on the Internet, Microsoft.

The timing is interesting on this, because this is the way that Google Play has always worked. Its privacy policies haven’t changed since last July, in fact.

At the end of the video, if you got that far, you’ll notice that Microsoft ends things with a big “Windows Phone doesn’t do it this way.” Instead of doing an advertisement on how great Windows phones and apps are, Microsoft has decided to go after how “horrible” Google is. The “Scroogled” site even has a big old link to explore Windows Phones. Isn’t that convenient?

If Microsoft was purely trying to protect consumers from having their data “stolen” by nefarious app developers, don’t you think that it would focus on that, rather than trying to drum up business for itself?

You can’t put something on the Internet if it isn’t true, right? Wrong.

Wait, wasn’t that bearded “french” guy the same one that shows up at the end of the second Scroogled video? At least we know who is doing Microsoft’s ads now.

Put those marketing dollars into making great products that people love, Microsoft.

Google Play keeps all of your favorite music, movies, books, TV shows, magazines, and apps all in one place. Google Play allows the user to sample any content before they purchase. Google Play also makes recommendations to its users of music that they may enjoy in relation to what they’ve purchased already.

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Just Six Months After Being Acquired, Twitter's Vine Hits #1 Free Spot On Apple's App Store

Twitter acquired the mini-video-taking app Vine last October before it ever launched, sending everyone into a frenzy about the company getting into the video space.

In late January, Twitter finally launched the app to much applause. Since then, it’s gone from being temporarily removed from the featured section due to an issue over adult content to being used in interesting ways by brands and celebrities.

Today, it all paid off, as it hit the top of the charts for free apps in the U.S., according to co-founder and Creative Director Rus Yusupov:

https://twitter.com/rus/status/321406005076451328

https://twitter.com/bobby/status/321406757983358977

It’s a pretty impressive feat for any app that’s not a game to hit this spot, and it’s also impressive for Twitter to have another presence on the list, in addition to their own core app. Clearly the push from Twitter helped the cause. The top app on the free store gets quite a bit of downloads after it hits the spot, eventually coming back down to earth after a quick explosion.

The charts are based on new downloads and the trajectory of its current download popularity. Therefore Twitter’s own app sits at No. 35, which just means that a lot of people have already downloaded it. When an app is at the top of the charts for a long time, it’s safe to say that there are a lot of new users being onboarded daily.

Vine’s closest competition in the social sphere? Snapchat. And even then, a few games stand between the two. The good news for Vine and Twitter is that the service is iOS-only at the moment, which means there is quite a bit more growth for the app to experience, much like Instagram did when it went over to the Android platform. Nearly half of all Instagram users are Android users.

The multi-app approach is working for social companies, as all you have to do is look at Facebook’s success with Messenger, Instagram and the quick-hit Poke to get the idea. Once a big platform starts splintering off smaller experiences with focus like video, or, say, eventually music, its main audience will of course at least give them a try.

Cheers to the Vine team.

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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Vine is the best way to see and share life in motion. Create short, beautiful, looping videos in a simple and fun way for your friends and family to see.

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Yandex, Russia's ‘Homegrown Google', Looks At Gesture-Based Interfaces To Power Apps

Russian search giant Yandex has collaborated on developing an experimental gesture-based interface to explore how similar technology could be incorporated into future social apps and mobile products. The company offers digital services beyond search already, launching and expanding mapping services and translation apps, for instance, in a bid to drive growth as its domestic search share (60.5% as of Q4 2012) has not grown significantly in recent quarters. Future business growth for Yandex looks likely to depend on its ability to produce a pipeline of innovative products and services — hence its dabbling with gestures.

Yandex Labs, the division that came up with its voice-powered social search app Wonder (an app that was quickly blocked by Facebook), has been working with Carnegie Mellon University on a research project to create a gesture-based social interface designed for an Internet-connected TV. The interface, demoed in the above video, pulls in data from Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare to display personalised content that is navigated by the TV viewer from the comfort of their armchair using a range of hand gestures.

Here’s how Yandex describes the app on its blog:

The application features videos, music, photos and news shared by the user’s friends on social networks in a silent ‘screen saver’ mode. As soon as the user notices something interesting on the TV screen, they can easily play, open or interact with the current media object using hand gestures. For example, they can swipe their hand horizontally to flip through featured content, push a “magnetic button” to play music or video, move hands apart to open a news story for reading and then swipe vertically to scroll through it.

The app, which was built on a Mac OS X platform using Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral for gesture recognition, remains a prototype/research project, with no plans to make it into a commercial product. But Yandex is clearly probing the potential of gestures to power future apps.

Asked what sort of applications it believes could be suitable for the tech, Grigory Bakunov, Director of Technologies at Yandex, said mobile apps are a key focus. “Almost any [Yandex services] that are available on mobiles now: search (to interact with search results, to switch between different search verticals, like search in pictures/video/music), probably maps apps and so forth [could incorporate a gesture-based interface],” he told TechCrunch when asked which of its applications might benefit from the research.

Bakunov stressed these suggestions are not concrete plans as yet — just “possible” developments as it figures out how gesture interfaces can be incorporated into its suite of services in future. ”We chose social newsfeeds to test the system [demoed in the video] as it can bring different types of content on TV screen like music listened by friends, photo they shared or just status updates. Good way to check all types in one app,” he added.

As well as researching the potential use-cases for gesture interfaces, Yandex also wanted to investigate alternatives to using Microsoft’s proprietary Kinect technology.

“Microsoft Kinect has its own gesture system and machine learning behind it. But the problem is that if you want to use it for other, non-Microsoft products you should license it (and it costs quite a lot), plus it has been controlling by Microsoft fully. So, one of the target was to find out more opened alternative with accessible APIs, better features and more cost-effective,” said Bakunov.

Yandex worked with Carnegie Mellon students and Professor Ian Lane to train gesture recognition and evaluate several machine learning techniques, including Neural Networks, Hidden Markov Models and Support Vector Machines — with the latter technique showing accuracy improvements of a fifth vs the other evaluated systems, according to Yandex.

The blog adds:

They [students] put a lot of effort in building a real training set – they collected 1,500 gesture recordings, each gesture sequenced into 90 frames, and manually labeled from 4,500 to 5,600 examples of each gesture. By limiting the number of gestures to be recognized at any given moment and taking into account the current type of content, the students were able to significantly improve the gesture recognition rate.

Launch Date: September 23, 1997

Yandex is an internet technologies company that operates in Russia, CIS and Turkey. It is the largest Russian and fourth-largest world internet search engine. Yandex is an acronym for the phrase Yet Another Indexer. As of March 2013, Yandex had about 61% of the Russian search market (source: LiveInternet.ru). Yandex’s mission is to give the answer to the user anytime and anywhere. Company provides its services for desktop and mobile users and develops embedded solutions as well. The company specializes on highly-targeted...

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AT&T And Boingo Team Up To Offer 1GB Of Monthly Wi-Fi Free At Hotspots In Reciprocal Deal

Boingo has just announced via a press release that through a partnership with AT&T, it will now offers AT&T subscribers access to its hotspots at international airports beginning today, with service expansion planned throughout the rest of the year. As part of the same deal, Boingo subscribers will be able to access AT&T hotspots across the U.S. free of charge.

In the agreement, which applies to AT&T customers who subscribe to either the 300MB or 800MB international roaming data add-on packs, and any Boingo subscribers, the clear winners are the consumers. The expansion means that AT&T users traveling abroad will have a much wider footprint of Wi-Fi access, which should in turn ease their need to use add-on roaming packs and incur data overage charges.

The bigger winners might be Boingo subscribers, however, who now have access to a lot more Wi-Fi hotspots in the U.S. AT&T offers a fairly dense concentration of Wi-Fi hotspots through the U.S., with around 30,000 locations across the country. The arrangement shores up holes in either partner’s network, while providing better access for customers of both.

Offloading network traffic to Wi-Fi hotspots is a key element of carrier efforts to reduce network congestion, increase service quality and decrease infrastructure costs, so for AT&T this is about both adding options for customers and also helping to diminish its own costs around providing international roaming services. It also addresses a major user sore spot, since there are few things more frustrating than finding out you’ve exceeded your international bandwidth caps and ventured into overage territory. That said, these don’t come cheap: as mentioned, only customers with the $60/300MB and $120/800MB monthly add-on pack will be able to participate.

Carriers still need to figure out a way to make using smartphone internationally somewhat affordable, and offering access to free Wi-Fi hotspots is one way to do that. But relegating it to customers who are already paying a tremendous amount for data roaming to begin with seems like an insufficient move. Still, maybe this foretells a much broader (and more useful) partnership to come.

AT&T Inc. (AT&T) is a holding company. AT&T is a provider of telecommunications services in the United States and worldwide. Services offered include wireless communications, local exchange services and long-distance services. AT&T operates in four segments: Wireless, Wireline, Advertising Solutions and Other. Its Wireless subsidiaries provide both wireless voice and data communications services across the United States, and through roaming agreements, in a substantial number of foreign countries. Wireline subsidiaries provide primarily landline voice and data communication services, AT&T...

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Boingo Wireless, Inc. (NASDAQ: WIFI), the world’s leading Wi-Fi software and services provider, makes it easy, convenient and cost-effective for people to enjoy Wi-Fi access on their laptop or mobile device at more than 325,000 hotspots worldwide. With a single account, Boingo users can access the mobile Internet via Boingo Network locations that include the top airports around the world, major hotel chains, cafés and coffee shops, restaurants, convention centers and metropolitan hot zones. Boingo and its Concourse Communications...

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After Rebooting, Lulu Sees Its Database Of Guys App Hit 200K Users In 8 Weeks Across U.S. Campuses

Lulu (formerly Luluvise), the controversial mobile app that lets girls anonymously review and recommend guys, is seeing some pretty decent traction since it rebooted in February to focus on launching across U.S. college campuses, early Facebook-style. The London/U.S. company, backed by Passion Capital, PROfounders and a host of prominent angels including Yuri Milner and Dave Morin, has garnered 200,000 users in 8 weeks across the five U.S. universities where it’s actively been marketed.

That’s out of a possible market of 6 million female U.S. undergraduates, while at the current trajectory Lulu reckons it could be on track to reach 1 in 4 female undergraduates in the U.S. by the end of the year, something which it then plans to use as a springboard to target the U.S. female market as a whole.

Pitched as a “girls-only app for dating intelligence” or an anonymous database of guys, created by girls — men are strictly prohibited from joining via Facebook login and other checks — Lulu has, perhaps understandably, received its fair amount of criticism, even though it initially stalled before take off. The main charge being that the same concept if applied to guys rating girls would be frowned upon, not least by investors, though in actual fact there are a number of similar startups targeting males.

The other, more legitimate, charge levied at Lulu is that the men reviewed have little right to reply due to being locked out of the app, even if there is a limited accompanying app that lets them edit their basic profile. A lawsuit waiting to happen, maybe, though the app’s ToS clearly puts the onus on the women asked to upload reviews, suggesting slightly disingenuously that they must seek the permission of the guy they are reviewing first if they choose to post information about them that may contravene any data-protection laws.

All of which hasn’t put off the startup’s backers. In February, Lulu announced it had added another $2.5 million to its coffers, bringing the total raised to $3.5m.

Of course, controversy has also undoubtedly brought lots of PR, including a fair amount of mainstream media coverage in the UK and U.S., such as on Ryan Seacrest’s Virgin Radio show, so it’s not so surprising to see some traction happening stateside.

Interestingly, I’m told that overall Lulu’s U.S. college campus traction is coming at an acquisition cost of $0.07 per user, while in the first 5 universities where the app launched, it achieved 35-40% penetration within 2-3 weeks. It’s now scaling this approach nationwide.

Other interesting stats that have been shared with TechCrunch: 50% of new users come back weekly, visiting 8 times per week on average, spending 45 mins in the app per week. In addition, 52% of users create content. Overall, Lulu has seen 57 million profile views, 4 million user sessions, 5.2 million reviews read, and 10 million searches.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for every three women that join, one guy tries to — unsuccessfully — sign up.

Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

Lulu is the smart girl’s app for private reviews and recommendations of guys.

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Enthuse.me Is An Online Profile Creator To Help You Pimp Your Personal Brand

It’s probably hard to get people enthusiastic about another service that lets you build a professional profile online. But that isn’t stopping Enthuse.me from giving it a go. The startup, based in London’s “Silicon Roundabout”, recently launched a public Beta of its one-page profile creator that targets the self-employed, small business owners, and other kinds of individuals who want to build and promote their personal brand online.

At first glance, competitors would appear to be services like About.me or Flavors.me, which, like Enthuse.me, also consolidate a user’s various web presences and online identities into a single, well-designed page, although a more direct competitor is probably something like Zerply.

To begin creating your own Enthuse.me page, you first pick a username, which also forms the basis for your Enthuse.me web address (e.g. enthuse.me/sohear), and sign up manually or via LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook login. Next you upload an avatar and fill out a short bio defining your expertise, which acts as your personal pitch and appears at the very top of your profile page.

You then populate the rest of your Enthuse.me page with links to and content from your various online presences, such as your career history pulled in from LinkedIn, your follower stats from Twitter, or your Klout score from Klout.

Then comes the more creative part. Using Enthuse.me’s various modules, you add and showcase more content from the web or created and uploaded specifically for your Enthuse.me profile, demonstrating what you are good at and any past projects or achievements. This might be media coverage, blog posts you’ve written, YouTube videos, photos or other visual media.

Finally, you can link to and recommend up to 5 other Enthuse.me profiles to check out — your “A-list” experts — which acts as a form of association and a way to encourage you to invite others to join the service. Overall, the resulting page, though nicely designed, is fairly minimalistic and lacks the customizability looks-wise of other online profile creators, which could be both a good and bad thing depending on your own taste for these things.

Longer-term, the company plans to add social networking features, potentially encroaching a little more on professional networks such as LinkedIn. This might also form the basis for a “knowledge marketplace” that lets users, whose bread and butter is selling services under their own personal brand, to use the site to sell their time or other wares, with Enthuse.me taking a small cut of any transaction.

Of course, that’s getting a little ahead of ourselves and is a far cry from what exists today, both in terms of functionality and the needed network effects. Scale, and a ton of it, will probably be required first. And in an already crowded space, that will undoubtedly be Enthuse.me’s biggest challenge, no matter how enthusiastically the startup or its backers — the company has raised around £1 million in funding from MLC50 — tries to meet it.

Showcase your expertise Create an elegant, one-page profile to show off your work, knowledge or passion. Hand-pick the best examples of what you do to cut through the noise of multiple social networks, blogs and portfolio websites, and focus on only the things that really prove you know your stuff.

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Local Business Marketing Startup Circl Ties Facebook To Foot Traffic, Courtesy Of Mobile Measurement Tools

Circl a new startup helping businesses run online promotions using social media and email marketing, is launching today with already over 1,000 customers who have signed up for the platform, over 100 of which who have since gone live. Although there are plenty of competitors in this general space, what makes Circl interesting is the way it ties into mobile in order to track the success of various promotional campaigns.

Founded by Soso Sazesh and Neej Gore, who bring their own experience with both search engine marketing (SEM) and performance marketing to the new company, the two were inspired to create Circl to address a need in the local space.

“The way you do online marketing, it’s very metrics focused. It’s focused on ROI,” explains Sazesh. “And when you look at what’s available for local businesses, it’s very expensive – you have to give away 75 percent of what you’re selling with certain companies – or you run promotions on Facebook and Twitter, or on your email marketing lists, and you don’t know what’s actually driving people in,” he says.

Circl wants to close that gap by actually tracking the conversions from social media and email to real-world foot traffic, letting business owners know which promotions really worked. To do so, the platform allows the business to set up a promotion using Circl’s centralized dashboard, which they can then share out to Facebook, Twitter, email or elsewhere. When the customer clicks the link, they’re prompted to enter their phone number which sends the offer or deal via text to their phone.

Once in store, the customer clicks the link in the text at point-of-sale, which verifies that they’re actually there using the phone’s geo-location capabilities. But it also identifies the source of the promotion, allowing the business owner to better understand things like which channels work better than other, which promotions send more customers, how many people came in for a particular deal, and more.

By gathering this data, businesses can then improve the way they advertise, and increase conversions. However, Circl will take things a step further, too, by also making suggestions and offering optimizations out of the box.

The system uses machine learning, Sazesh tells us. It first aggregates data across its own customer base, so it understands how businesses in a particular region perform, or how businesses in that same category perform (e.g. how other local pizza places perform). Of course, for these recommendations to be powerful, Circl needs to gain significant traction. If it can achieve that, a future step may allow businesses to not only get recommendations as to how to proceed, but may also be able to compare themselves to others in their same space.

But for now, the company is focused simply on onboarding new businesses, taking advantage of the founders’ SEM experience in user acquisition efforts. The immediate priority is figuring out which channels should come next (Foursquare and Yelp are on the roadmap, Sazesh notes). The long-term goal is to be channel agnostic, and to help customers not only launch and track promotions, but also increase their presence on social media in order to better support those goals.

Pricing starts at $99 per month for up to three locations, and enterprise pricing is also available. AngelPad-backed Circl is currently raising seed funding.

Circl allows local businesses to create and distribute promotions across email, twitter, and facebook - all from one place. Circl uses location technology to track customer visits attributed to a given promotion. This allows Circl to provide deep insights and recommendations into what type of promotions perform best, on which channels, and when.

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Slim For iPhone Helps You Keep Up With Facebook, LinkedIn And More, Without Obsessively Checking For Updates

In our state of continued information overload, and because of the growing number of services which we have to check in order to keep up with the information that matters to us, things get missed by even the most active social media users. A new startup called Slim wants to change that, and is today launching an iOS application which allows you to discover and be alerted to the most important life events from your friends and colleagues – like births, anniversaries, job changes, and more.

Today, there are already a number of companies attempting to make sense out of the noise that’s out there by leveraging the data on social services, then applying their own unique algorithms to present things you shouldn’t have missed. For example, I have a folder on my iPhone dubbed “Summarize” filled with apps that do similar things to Slim (or at least play in the same general news summary space), including things like Prismatic, Clipped, Thirst, undrip, Wavii, Circa, Antenna, NewsWhip, and, until recently, Summly. Some of these are more focused on summarizing news stories, while others are meant to filter through your social media accounts, like Facebook or Twitter, for example.

But, combined, what they point to is that we’re now in search of tools that help us address the real-time nature of information flow and what it’s doing to our abilities to keep up and stay engaged. Just because news moves in real-time, that doesn’t mean people do.

Slim’s app is slightly different from apps that merely summarize Facebook or Twitter in that its focus, as CEO Yair Levin explains, is also on the business user, not only the consumer. “We are targeting business users who have little time but want to stay aware of opportunities and reasons to get in touch with friends and clients, active social media users who need a ‘safety net’ to ensure they don’t miss an important update from one of their networks and infrequent users who just want the highlights from social media,” he says.

The app uses natural language processing to build users a customized feed of all the important activity across Facebook and LinkedIn, and it sends out push notifications when a major milestone occurs. As you swipe through the updates that appear, you can also train Slim even further by starring the updates you appreciated and marking those you don’t want to see again. The app will learn your preferences in time, becoming more relevant the more you use it.

In addition, Slim takes things a step further than some others do, by allowing you to not only view the updates, but also respond. What’s clever here is that the app doesn’t just allow you to respond via the social network (e.g. by commenting on the post itself on Facebook), it also offers other real-world mechanisms for reaching out, including text messages, calls, emails, and it even connects you to Gifts.com if the announcement requires a gift. Handy.

Slim users can opt to receive a weekly or daily digest of their updates, as well, which works as another good way to stay on top of what’s happening, even when you haven’t had time to check the app or the social networks yourself. (Note that the weekly digest email is switched on by default.)

As of today’s launch, only Facebook and LinkedIn are supported, but the plan is to add Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Salesforce and Yammer in the next month or so. Based in San Francisco, Slim’s co-founders include two Israelis, CEO Yair Levin and CTO Zeev Vax. Currently a team of four, Slim has closed on $200,000 in seed funding from G7 Ventures, and the round is ongoing.

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR BUSY PEOPLE Slim discovers the most important updates from your friends and family on Facebook, LinkedIn and more. It makes it easy to respond and show you care, so you never miss out and are always there when it matters. 1) DISCOVER IMPORTANT MOMENTS Slim sorts through your social networks, recognizes the most important events and delivers them in a clean and simple format. Simply connect your Facebook, LinkedIn and others to come, and Slim discovers your...

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Medium Adds Collaboration Tools To Its Publishing Platform, Allowing People To Add Notes To Your Posts

Today, Ev Williams’ latest startup Medium added some tools to bring people together while they’re writing. The collaboration tools are similar to what you’d find in Google Docs, but clearly the key is to working on something to share publicly, together.

The service isn’t open to the public yet, but it’s a beautiful set of tools to help you write about the things that interest you and then file them away in collaborative groups and categories called “Collections.” You can add your own posts to someone else’s collection, creating a fun, and social, environment for writers.

In a post called “Don’t Write Alone,” Williams discusses the new features and the philosophy behind what Medium is building as a whole:

Since starting Medium, we’ve maintained a focus on collaboration. We’ve touched on it with collections, which allow many people to contribute to the same idea. But today we’re taking it a big step forward with pre-publish collaboration.

Within your post, you’re now able to click a “invite collaborator” button, which gives you a link to send to friends:

Once you’ve done that, the person can then come in and add notes to certain sections on your post:

After the post is published, the people who worked on it with you get their due credit automatically:

Even posts that are public can be annotated, with the author having the choice of whether to make your additions public or not:

In a way, this is a complete re-imagination of commenting systems, where instead of a slew of comments showing up below a post, points can be made about particular passages, which open up a brand new avenue of discussion.

It’s extremely interesting to watch Medium evolve, as we know that Williams has come from creating Blogger to shoving Twitter into the mainstream. It looks like all of the little things that Blogger never had as a publishing platform are now being put into the Medium product.

The interesting use-case for something like this is when your friends take a look at your posts and catch some typos, or perhaps a link that doesn’t work. Instead of firing off an email to you or an instant message, you can see notes in-line and then take action on them before or after you’ve published. You really get a sense for how useful this is once you see notes dropped into your own posts:

Imagine being able to write an article together and then publish it, which is something that you can’t do on any other competing service. That would be quite amazing and something I wouldn’t mind trying out. Secondarily, I wouldn’t mind being able to launch a note into a brand new post, giving that person the credit for sparking a new idea for me.

Publishing platform for the sharing of ideas and experiences.

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Originally from Nebraska, Evan Williams co-founded Pyra Labs to make project management software. A note-taking feature spun off as Blogger, one of the first web applications. Williams left Google in October 2004 to co-found Odeo. In late 2006, Williams co-founded Obvious Corp with Biz Stone and other former Odeo employees. Obvious has acquired all previous properties of Odeo, including Odeo and Twitter, another project started by Williams. On October 4, 2010, Ev Williams stepped down from his role...

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Big Money For Little Sites: Mobile Website Maker DudaMobile Raises Another Round, Extends Series B By $10.3 Million

Mobile website maker DudaMobile has just raised another round, following a busy 2012 which saw the service grow to 4 million mobile sites, the introduction of new partnerships, and a major overhaul of its site builder product. The funding, an extension to its $6 million Series B from last spring, brings in $10.3 million in new funding, led by previous investors Israeli-based Pitango Venture Capital and Oren’s Capital.

The company got its start as a white label platform which allowed businesses to build mobile-optimized websites. Then, around a year and a half ago, it launched a self-serve platform open to anyone. Unlike some DIY website building tools out there, what makes DudaMobile interesting is that it takes an existing desktop website and turns that into a mobile site that automatically stays in sync with its desktop counterpart as new changes are applied.

In addition to pulling in the content from the desktop site, DudaMobile’s product also looks elsewhere across the web, where the business might have other data worth adding to its mobile presence. For example, the site builder can pull in content from places like Facebook, Yelp, or Google Places – even if the website owner didn’t provide their usernames or URLs for those services.

Last month, DudaMobile relaunched its website builder after five months of development efforts, updating its legacy interface to uncover some of the buried features, while also making it more intuitive and user-friendly.

The company has also formed several high-profile partnerships, with resellers and other partners like GoDaddy, Yahoo, Google, Homestead, OpenTable, AT&T and Webs.com. It closed several deals in Japan, as well, two being Yahoo Japan and GMO Nikko, and three more which it’s not yet permitted to disclose for a month or so. It has also localized its platform in three other languages besides English, including Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese.

The Google GoMo partnership, which offered small businesses free mobile sites, officially wrapped last month, but the impact to DudaMobile was huge. Over the last year and a quarter, the company grew its team from 5 in the U.S. and 15 in Israel to now 30 in the U.S. and 30 in Israel. Last summer, the Palo Alto-based company opened up an office in Atlanta, Georgia, too, focused on mobile advertising.

This new division launched in response to customer feedback, explains DudaMobile’s Communications head, Dennis Mink. Once they had their mobile website running, he says, customers then wanted to know how to get traffic, leads and sales. The ads team now helps customers run mobile search and ad campaigns, especially those that get customers to call the business directly. “That’s so much of what it comes down to these days on mobile websites these days – it’s that little ‘click-to-call’ button…it’s unbelievable how successful that little button is,” Mink says.

The GoMo deal also helped DudaMobile grow its brand-name recognition, and build out its reseller program. While the company declined to provide revenue information, Mink says growth on that front has been “significant” and the company is hoping to hit profitability by year-end.

Going forward, the new funding will be used mainly for product development. The company already integrates with services like OpenTable, Locu, SinglePlatform, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, Google Places, and soon, Constant Contact. Now it’s looking to expand integrations with a focus on email and CRM systems, plus couponing, deals and offers platforms.

Mink also teased news of a “game-changing” new product release expected to launch into beta later this year, but wouldn’t go into details. “It will leverage all the experience we have in converting sites and identifying content and being able to reorient it in different ways for different screens,” he hints.

Also in the works, and expected to release at the end of April, is a new “build from scratch” mobile site builder which instead of syncing with an established desktop site, simply lets businesses start a new site on mobile, whether that’s because they’re bypassing the desktop altogether or they need a site to function as a mobile-friendly landing page for a campaign.

With the additional funding, DudaMobile has raised around $18+ million in total.

DudaMobile makes websites mobile. The platform makes it easy to convert existing websites into mobile friendly sites with just a few clicks. First launched as a white label platform in early 2010 and later as a self-service mobile website builder at http://www.dudamobile.com/, DudaMobile now hosts over 1.4 million mobile websites, with users creating over 100,00 new mobile sites per month. Duda offers mobile features geared toward small businesses including one-click site conversion, auto sync between the regular site and mobile...

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After Rebooting, Lulu Sees Its Database Of Guys App Hit 200K Users In 8 Weeks Across U.S. Campuses

Lulu (formerly Luluvise), the controversial mobile app that lets girls anonymously review and recommend guys, is seeing some pretty decent traction since it rebooted in February to focus on launching across U.S. college campuses, early Facebook-style. The London/U.S. company, backed by Passion Capital, PROfounders and a host of prominent angels including Yuri Milner and Dave Morin, has garnered 200,000 users in 8 weeks across the five U.S. universities where it’s actively been marketed.

That’s out of a possible market of 6 million female U.S. undergraduates, while at the current trajectory Lulu reckons it could be on track to reach 1 in 4 female undergraduates in the U.S. by the end of the year, something which it then plans to use as a springboard to target the U.S. female market as a whole.

Pitched as a “girls-only app for dating intelligence” or an anonymous database of guys, created by girls — men are strictly prohibited from joining via Facebook login and other checks — Lulu has, perhaps understandably, received its fair amount of criticism, even though it initially stalled before take off. The main charge being that the same concept if applied to guys rating girls would be frowned upon, not least by investors, though in actual fact there are a number of similar startups targeting males.

The other, more legitimate, charge levied at Lulu is that the men reviewed have little right to reply due to being locked out of the app, even if there is a limited accompanying app that lets them edit their basic profile. A lawsuit waiting to happen, maybe, though the app’s ToS clearly puts the onus on the women asked to upload reviews, suggesting slightly disingenuously that they must seek the permission of the guy they are reviewing first if they choose to post information about them that may contravene any data-protection laws.

All of which hasn’t put off the startup’s backers. In February, Lulu announced it had added another $2.5 million to its coffers, bringing the total raised to $3.5m.

Of course, controversy has also undoubtedly brought lots of PR, including a fair amount of mainstream media coverage in the UK and U.S., such as on Ryan Seacrest’s Virgin Radio show, so it’s not so surprising to see some traction happening stateside.

Interestingly, I’m told that overall Lulu’s U.S. college campus traction is coming at an acquisition cost of $0.07 per user, while in the first 5 universities where the app launched, it achieved 35-40% penetration within 2-3 weeks. It’s now scaling this approach nationwide.

Other interesting stats that have been shared with TechCrunch: 50% of new users come back weekly, visiting 8 times per week on average, spending 45 mins in the app per week. In addition, 52% of users create content. Overall, Lulu has seen 57 million profile views, 4 million user sessions, 5.2 million reviews read, and 10 million searches.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for every three women that join, one guy tries to — unsuccessfully — sign up.

Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

Lulu is the smart girl’s app for private reviews and recommendations of guys.

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Facebook Phone Review: “HTC First” Decorates Home With Extra Alerts But A Shabby Camera

After years of rumors, the Facebook Phone aka the HTC First finally launches April 12th for $99 on AT&T. It’s light and supple, plus comes with a suped-up version of Facebook Home pre-installed that pipes in non-Facebook notifications, but the 5MP Camera is a let down. If you’re highly social, want a mid-range handset, crave email alerts, and aren’t a photo buff, the First could be a great fit.

Considering this is Facebook’s first time really getting its hands dirty with a handset, I was very impressed with the First. Its comfy feel and soft edges make it a joy to hold. The 720p, 341 PPI screen is sharp, though not blazingly bright.

Facebook’s launcher replacement runs great on the First’s modified version of Android Jelly Bean 4.1, which is responsive and fun to play with. Home’s Facebook Chat/SMS multi-tasking is a game-changing efficiency booster, and the detailed screen makes laying back and watching Cover Feed photos stream by very relaxing. Unlike the downloadable version of Home that becomes available for five other handsets on Friday, the optimizations made to Android let the First display notifications from any app on your Home/lock screen, rather than just those from Facebook.

But in getting the price down to $99 on contract, Facebook and HTC sacrificed camera quality. Its 5MP can’t compete with the 8MP of the cameras on the iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S III which crowd its price range. Home also buries access to camera beneath an extra tap, which might make you miss some spontaneous candids. You can disable Home completely, but that kind of defeats the purpose.

That’s my short take. Now let’s look a bit closer.

When I first got my hands on the HTC First during the demo session blitz after the launch event last week, I was so fixated on the Home software that the handset’s hardware kind of faded into the background. It wasn’t until I got my review unit that I realized that was the point. The First is designed to get out the way so you can focus on the people instead. It accomplishes that by feeling downright friendly in your palm.

The glass screen seems to curve down at the thin bezeled edges into the surrounding plastic case and its matte finish. There’s not a sharp edge to be found, nor any cold glass or aluminum. Rather than a triumph of industrial chic, the First feels cozy — dare I say sensual. It’s thin, and the plastic helps keeps the weight down despite the 4.3 inch screen. Between the rounded edges and sleek figure, it’s a breeze to slide into your pocket.

The First’s specs place it firmly in the mid-range handset market. That’s why HTC didn’t trumpet them too loudly at the launch event. But other than its camera, it holds its own in its class alongside the 4S and S III.

The LTE connection is very speedy, the screen is colorful and clear, and NFC is a nice bonus. The battery life is decent, but goes quick if you’ve got the brightness turned up to take advantage of Cover Feed. The last 15% of the battery seemed to drain infuriatingly quickly, which can be rough when you’ve been rationing and expect that much juice to get you to the end of the day. Thankfully the micro USB charger fills up relatively fast, though the phone won’t automatically turn back on once it’s banked sufficient electrons.

Here’s the First stacked up against the 4S and S III:

Facebook went out of its way to declare that Home doesn’t require a forked version of Android, and that it didn’t build some “Facebook OS” — except it did. Mark Zuckerberg noted that the First’s operating system was optimized for Home. Later, HTC confirmed to me it worked with Facebook to alter some of the Jelly Bean frameworks. This gives the HTC First’s version of Home a big improvement over the standard downloadable homescreen replacement app that also launches April 12th.

The First’s homescreen and lock screen can display big notification tiles for anything that appears in the Android notifications tray. This includes Facebook alerts about tags and likes, but also incoming emails, calendar appointments, Twitter replies, and more. The downloadable version of Home only shows Facebook notifications. Surfacing a wider set of alerts could attract more business-minded consumers, in contrast to the general opinion that the HTC First and Home are for teenagers.

As for the standard Home features, they work great, but are merely a reason to own some phone that can download it, which doesn’t have to be the First. Cover Feed fills your home and lock screens with a full-screen, one-story-at-a-time stream of the best updates from your news feed. It only works in portrait mode, which is a bit odd considering so many photos these days are shot in landscape. A Ken Burns-style slow pan effect makes sure you see most of an image in the 5 seconds before a new one slides in. If a friend shares a pure text update or link, you’ll see their cover photo behind words. The big images and large fonts on the sharp screen make Cover Feed a great laid-back experience, perfect for laying in bed. It makes the standard Facebook app’s news feed look sterile and stagnant by comparison.

My favorite feature of Home on the First was Chat Heads, the chat multi-tasking system. Incoming Facebook Messages and SMS appear as little bubbles of friends’ faces that persistently float over the top of whatever app you’re using as you navigate around the phone. Tap one and your message thread drops down in an overlay on top of your current screen, allowing you to look at something like a Map or Yelp, and then quickly open a conversation and relay information you just learned, bouncing back and forth without having to open and close the apps like with standard “multi-tasking” on iOS and Android.

To leave Home, you tap and hold your profile picture at the bottom of cover feed and drag it in one of three directions. Left for Facebook Messenger, right for the last app you used, and up to open your app favorites screen. You can customize this with whatever apps you want quicker access to, or swipe right to reveal your full list of apps.

You can turn off Home with a few taps of of the Home settings menu to get a more standard Android experience. If you don’t though, there are a few things you give up. Rather than being able to access Google Now and search from the home or lock screen, you have to open the app drawer and slide right to get access to the search box. You can luckily hold down the Home button on the First to instantly conjure these though.

What’s more problematic is that the standard Camera app is totally buried in the app drawer so you can’t access it for spontaneous candid shots. When you do get it open, the 5MP camera takes soft, almost blurry images, and is even worse in low light. This is the worst part of the HTC First.

Facebook’s goal is to wrestle more control of the mobile ecosystem away from Apple and Google, and the HTC First could be a smart initial move. The device isn’t perfect, and considering Facebook’s recent focus on photos, the lackluster camera seems incongruent. But Facebook’s probably wasn’t expecting to hit a home run on its first swing. It has a lot to learn, and by working closely with HTC it likely gained a ton of insight on what to do next.

It could be a long time, if ever, before Facebook has the skills to make a premier smartphone to challenge the latest Apple and Samsung models. But the mid-tier market is large and that’s Facebook’s game — scale. It wants to connect everyone, not just those with hundreds and hundreds of dollars to throw down on a handset.

The HTC First is aptly named. It’s just the first “Facebook Phone”. Facebook has devised the Home Program where it will offer other handset manufacturers guidance on how to fiddle with the versions of Android they run to optimize Home. It might take six months, but I expect some OEMs will bite. If you’re deadset on getting a Facebook Phone, this probably won’t be your only option.

In the end, if you want the latest mobile technology, the First lags behind. Still, it’s a great device beyond the camera. So if the HTC First’s strengths align with your priorities, go ahead and pre-order.

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Viki, The Hulu For Foreign Language Content, Revamps Site, Upgrades Subtitling Tech To Scale Up Users

Viki, the video streaming site that has carved out a niche for itself as a destination for premium, subtitled, foreign language streamed video content — some 1.5 billion streams today, all translated by crowdsourcing — has renovated itself in a bid to scale up to improve its advertising-led business model. Today, it is unveiling a new site, including an improved video player and easier subtitling technology to “improve engagement and overall consumption,” in the words of its VP of engineering, Rohit Dewan, who notes that while the site is aiming for 100 million users, actual monthly uniques are closer to 22 million, with over 7 million on mobile.

It’s an interesting time to take a look at the company — backed by $24.3 million from the likes of Andreessen Horwitz, Greylock and Charles River Ventures — given the focus that over-the-top video streaming has at the moment. Yahoo is reportedly very close to announcing a deal to buy a majority stake in Dailymotion for a price of $200 million or more; Spotify might just be eyeing up a move into streaming video, and meanwhile competitor Rdio has launched Vdio. And that’s before looking at the growth of Amazon and Netflix in this area.

One of the big focuses for a site like Viki, created around long-tail content in partnership with premium content publishers worldwide, is to make it as easy as possible for users to move from one video to another. To that end, included in the update will be a better focus on recommendations. That includes a YouTube-style river of related content down the right side of the screen once you enter a video — frankly, surprising that Viki lacked that before — plus more sophisticated recommendations based on what you are actually viewing on the site. A “Netflix-style” engine, is how Dewan describes it.

But perhaps subtitling is where a site like Viki perhaps comes into its own to stand out from the likes of YouTube, DailyMotion and the others. It runs a patented platform that lets users collaborate on subtitles for the millions of pieces of content on the site. The focus of those translations tends to be the web’s lingua franca, English, but as you can see in the shots below Viki makes great use of the power of the web to provide a number of other languages — the Korean show below has translations in 27 languages, “all created for free by our users,” notes Dewan. “It’s astounding.”

The update, Dewan says, will improve the speed and accuracy of those crowdsourced translations, with the ability to do more segmented viewing and translating. But where Viki has yet to go — although we may see more of this on the horizon — are ways of testing the boundaries of how to subtitle and how to consume those other languages. For example, if the site has so many mobile users, you could see a time where it might look for a partnership with the likes of Nuance to power voice-to-speech translation. And since dubbing has such a strong following in some countries, some of those voice translations could even potentially be used in raw formats, without translation to text.

Dewan would not comment on whether Viki might explore these sorts of innovations down the line, but he did note that it is exploring a way of using Google Translate, or a variation thereof, to create instant translations, which could then be tailored and improved by users.

In a bid to spread its content elsewhere, Viki is also now on version four of its API. It’s already available as apps on iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Samsung TV, BlackBerry and Nokia and around 10 other platforms.

Old and new comparisons below.

Viki is a global TV site that streams TV shows, movies and other premium content, translated into more than 150 languages by a community of avid fans. With over 1 billion videos viewed and nearly 300 million words translated, Viki uniquely brings global prime-time entertainment to new audiences and unlocks new markets and revenue opportunities for content owners. Viki is the first and fastest platform for real-time subtitling of video – from Hollywood Hits to Japanese Anime to Korean...

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Google Gives $3M Global Impact Award Grant To Three Organizations To Support “Global Human Trafficking Hotline”

Google’s non-profit arm announced its Global Impact Awards program last December and has announced three organizations that would be receiving $3 million in grants. All of these organizations are focused on setting up human trafficking helplines to help identify potential victims and provide them with support, no matter where they are in the world.

The three organizations — Polaris Project, Liberty Asia and La Strada International — are working together to form a “Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network.”

In Google’s announcement today, the company says that 21 million people are enslaved in one way or another globally and generating $32 billion in profit for those who are managing the illegal activity. The hope for these organizations is that they can collect data from all local helpline services to be able to view patterns and triangulate the hotspots in the world that are most egregious. Dating back to 2011, Google has invested $14.5 million into anti-trafficking efforts.

Two outside companies, Palantir Technologies and Salesforce.com, are providing analytics and data-integration tools, as well as a hotline center to help scale the anti-trafficking network.

Here’s what Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas and Jacquelline Fuller, Director of Google Giving, had to say about the announcement:

In the U.S., Polaris Project has collected data from over 72,000 hotline calls, helping local and national anti-trafficking communities better understand the dynamics of the crime. No such actionable hotline database has existed globally — but it doesn’t need to be that way. Clear international strategies, increased cooperation, and appropriate data sharing amongst anti-trafficking organizations will help victims, prevention efforts, and sound policymaking. Slavery can be stopped. Let’s get to it.

Here is the announcement of the awards:

You can read more about Google’s non-profit efforts in an interview that I conducted with Jacquelline Fuller for The Weekly Good.

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Adknowledge Acquires SocialWeekend Labs To Add App Promotion Tools

Online ad company Adknowledge just announced that it has acquired SocialWeekend Labs, a startup that built tools for developers to promote their apps, and also built its own Facebook and mobile apps (such as Birthdays+ and Photos+).

It sounds like Adknowledge is most interested in the startup’s developer tools, as well as its team — the company says it plans to integrate those tools into its own offerings, while continuing to serve existing SocialWeekend customers.

“SocialWeekend has a first-class team of engineers with proven user acquisition expertise,” said Ryan Stephens, general manager of Adknowledge’s Apps business, in the acquisition press release. “They can help us take our already-robust marketing suite for app developers to an entirely new level.”

The SocialWeekend website doesn’t go into too much detail about the startup’s technology, but it says that more than 150 million users have “installed a SocialWeekend product.” It also emphasizes the startup’s strength in analytics, social, scaling and mobile.

SocialWeekend was founded by Shane Walker, Andrew Tso, and Fariz Chowdhury, and it raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Great Oaks Venture Capital, Brad Harrison Ventures, and various angels. The financial terms of the acquisition aren’t being disclosed, either.

The entire SocialWeekend team will supposedly join Adknowledge’s San Francisco office.

Adknowledge is an online advertising company that seeks customers who are looking for ad solutions beyond Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Adknowledge operates an online marketplace that allows advertisers to bid for traffic in websites, email and smaller search engines. Publishers can show Adknowledge ads by utilizing AdStation on their website, email list, or search engine.

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Great Oaks Venture Capital LLC (GOVC) is an early and seed-stage investment firm funded and launched by Andrew Boszhardt, Jr. Based in New York City, they invest in start-ups in technology sectors such as e-Commerce, SaaS, Cloud, Mobile, Gaming, Social, Ad Tech and Content/Distribution.

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Badgeville Names Former Cast Iron Exec Ken Comée As Its New CEO

Gamification startup Badgeville just announced that it has appointed Ken Comée as its new CEO. Co-founder and outgoing CEO Kris Duggan will become the company’s chief strategy officer, and he will also remain on the Badgeville board.

Comée was formerly the CEO of Cast Iron Systems, a cloud company that was acquired by IBM, and of PowerReviews, which was acquired by Bazaarvoice. He might not seem like the obvious choice to run a gamification company, but Badgeville says it’s actually selling its tools (which allow companies to add social features and game mechanics to their products) to some big enterprise customers, like Deloitte, EMC, and Oracle.

“Gamification is not a fad,” Comée told me via email. He later added, “I see user engagement as the vital factor in the success of all cloud and web-based technologies. While we’ve … had tremendous success in driving user engagement across key consumer environments, we’ve also tapped into a great market opportunity to extend more into employee engagement.”

As a startup grows, it’s not unusual to see a more seasoned executive replace the founder as CEO. However, I asked why the move made sense now, and Duggan pointed to two things. First, he said the company needs “a proven leader to scale to the demand of our enterprise customer and partner base.” Second, this will give Duggan time to become “a full-time visionary and evangelist” who can “cement the market.”

I also asked how they’d avoid some of the conflicts that can arise when someone steps down from the CEO role but doesn’t leave the company. Both of them said they’ve already been working together, because Comée has been serving as an advisor to the company for the past four months.

“We make a great team,” he said.

Badgeville launched in September 2010 at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, where it won the audience choice award. (Duggan is the one on the left accepting the award in the photo above.) It says that it now has hundreds of customers, and that its revenue doubled in 2011, doubled again in 2012, and will, yes, double this year.

Launch Date: September 27, 2010

Badgeville, The Behavior Platform, is the global gamification leader. World-class companies including Deloitte, EMC, CA Technologies, Dell, Appirio, Samsung, NBC, Universal Music, Bell Media, The Active Network, Recyclebank, and hundreds more rely on our SaaS solution to measure and influence user behavior. With the industry’s largest network of partners and integrations, Badgeville provides Game Mechanics, Reputation Mechanics, and Social Mechanics that track, surface, and reward behavior across all of a company’s web properties and enterprise applications. The Badgeville Platform leverages...

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Instantgram.Me Turns Your Instagram Photos Into Magnets, Calls The Whole Fridge Into Question

These days, you can get your Instagram photos printed onto just about anything. There are companies that print out Post-it-sized Instagrams, Instagrams on Canvas, Instagrams on wood and fiberglass, and everything in between.

Today, Instantgram.me is joining those ranks with its new Instagram magnet-making business. The service offers 9 magnets, all 5cm x 5cm, for $17.00 with free worldwide shipping.

The prices aren’t necessarily a steal, but magnets are actually smart uses for Instagram pictures. Let’s face it: our Instagrams aren’t always worthy of a spot on our walls, or even printing in the first place. But magnets are cute and funny, and they’re usually holding up pictures of our loved ones anyways. Instantgram has just lopped one in with the other.

The company also sells non-magnet prints of your Instagram photos in a product called Squares. You can either get a 24-set of 5? x 5? prints, or a 48-count set of 2.5? x 2.5? prints again for $17. The beauty of it is, with both magnets and squares, you can choose duplicates of certain pictures thanks to an easy-to-understand interface. This turns your Instagram photos into those cute little elementary-school pocket pictures you used to pass out to your friends.

Perhaps more interesting is the fact that an entire ecosystem has sprouted up around Instagram, an app that generated no revenue for the majority of its lifetime, before getting acquired by Facebook for $1 billion. There are countless services that are based on Instagram, from printing services to Instagram clones and back again.

We have yet to see any of these services or apps break away from the crowd into household-name territory, but that isn’t to say it’s not going to happen.

Instantgram, like CanvasPop and Prinstagram and Kanvess and InstaThis and Instacanvas, has a good a shot as any. But perhaps not so great a name.

Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above or any Android device running Android 2.2 or above. In an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram confines photos into a square...

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Pandora Surpasses 200 Million Registered Users, 140 Million Access Via Mobile

Pandora has just announced that its online streaming radio has quite a few listeners. In fact, the company has surpassed 200 million registered users in the U.S. That’s up from 100 million registered users in July of 2011, meaning that around half of Pandora’s users have come over in the past two years, despite the fact that Pandora launched all the way back in 2005.

Slow and steady wins the race, eh?

Of those 200 million registered users, over 140 million of them have tuned in to Pandora via mobile, which just goes to show how crucial it is to have a mobile presence, no matter the business. Pandora users have also given over 25 billion thumbs, to help personalize their stations, and on average Pandora streams around 200 million songs before 10am each morning.

Perhaps more interesting than user growth is Pandora’s ability to spread new music to a huge userbase. Pandora mentioned this morning that the company has played more than 100,000 unique artists and over 1 million unique songs just last month.

Here’s what Pandora founder Tim Westerngren had to say:

We started this company to help people discover and enjoy music they love, and to help artists reach and grow their audiences. Only in our wildest dreams did we imagine what it would become. It is now clear that radio is changing, and that’s great news for music fans and for the tens of thousands of working artists who now have a home on the air.

Growth in registered users is surely something to be excited about, but what’s most important to a service like Pandora is monthly active users. At the end of March, Pandora boasted 69.5 million monthly active users, which is up from 59.9 million in December of 2012.

In fact, the company has shown steady growth in MAU over the past couple years.

Pandora Radio is an internet radio service, recommendation service, and the custodian of the Music Genome Project. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users provide feedback on approval or disapproval of individual songs, which Pandora takes into account for future selections. While listening, users are offered the ability to buy the songs or albums at various online retailers. As part of the Music Genome Project, over...

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Newsana Combines Reddit's Community With Expert-Driven Curation To Create A Better Way To Consume The News

During their time with Journalists For Human Rights, Canada’s largest media development NGO, Ben Peterson and Jonathan Wong helped train local journalists in sub-saharan Africa on how best to report on human rights, governance (or lack thereof) and uphold the fourth estate. To help them teach these aspiring reporters, the friends looked for the best examples of Human Rights journalism. But all they found was a fire hose of news content, and the Herculean struggle of to find the best stories amidst all the noise.

Peterson tells us that this challenge quickly led them to ask, “wouldn’t it be great if we could get a group of Human Rights experts to find the best articles for us?” The answer to this question took shape in a platform called, Newsana, which the founders are officially launching today. Founded in early 2012 as an answer to the challenge of finding the best Human Rights news content, Peterson and Wong soon realized that their expert-driven crowdsourcing solution could be used for any topic.

The co-founders joined forces with a team of developers and social media experts and spent the next seven months building out the platform. Informed by the rise and fall of sites like Digg, Newsana looks to combine the best of community-based, social news sites (a la Reddit) with expert-driven curation. Unlike others of its ilk, the platform is looking to become an exclusive online community targeted at those who are “passionate about learning and discussing news and ideas,” Peterson says.

Those looking to help curate the news and have a particular area of expertise they’re interested can apply to become members of the platform. Newsana then screens these “experts,” and once accepted, allows them to choose the content they want to share and discuss. Members can vote on their favorite stories of the day, and Newsana uses its algorithms to post top stories across 35 categories (at launch), including Business, Arts and Entertainment, Lifestyle, Media, Politics and Technology.

Based on community activity, the top five stories in each category are then served in those verticals for anyone and everyone to consume. So, anyone can read and consume Newsana’s stop stories, but if you want to vote, pitch stories or engage others in conversation, you have to be logged in. Once accepted, members can invite 10 new people per week.

“The biggest challenge for us,” Peterson tells us, “is to keep the quality high. While we love and respect Reddit and strive for the same kind of community interaction, we don’t want to become just another social, news-sharing clone.” That’s why Newsana has opted for an invite-only system, to help it curate its community and reward constructive activity. To that end, within each vertical, the site ranks members based on their contributions, and the higher their rank, the more weight their activities are given on the site.

“We think that our ultimate value offering is to provide the most essential, quality news quicker than anywhere else,” Peterson says. While Twitter is a shotgun blast of news, as are Google news and RSS feeds, Newsana distills each category down to five critical topics, populating those categories with content chosen by experts.

At launch, the startup’s goal is to expand its member base, although the co-founders aren’t sure yet what the ideal number of contributing members will be; “we’re going to wait and see on that one,” the co-founder tells us. But, eventually, we want to have millions of experts and hundreds of thousands of topics. In the long-term, we want to become a historical guide, where you can find the most essential stories from two months ago, a year ago, or 50 years ago.

In terms of monetization, a potential stumbling block for any news aggregator, Peterson says that the company’s first priority is to build out a strong community and, once that is in place, the team “will work with them on the best way to monetize.” When pressed, the founder says that their first approach will likely center around providing native, branded content from sponsors — the same method Techmeme employs for its tech news aggregator.

To date, Newsana has raised $500K in seed financing from a group of Canadian angel investors, including Gary Slaight (President and CEO, Slaight Communications), Prem Watsa (Chairman and CEO Fairfax Financial Holdings) and Mohammad Al Zaibak (President and CEO, Canadian Development and Marketing Corp).

Going forward, in the next couple of weeks, Newsana plans to release an iOS app and begin offering an email newsletter with notifications to allow users to consume news in weekly email digests. The team will also look to take design and UX cues from popular newsreaders like Flipboard as it looks to build out Newsana’s mobile footprint.

“Over 70 percent of individuals online feel overwhelmed with the information available to them,” Peterson says. “Newsana was designed to solve this problem for our members because they don’t have to filter through all the noise and chatter to access the relevant content they want. We like to think of Newsana as the ‘News Nirvana’.”

For more, find Newsana at home here.

Newsana is an online community of experts and thought leaders who share, discuss and work together to choose the five most essential news stories and ideas of the day on the topics of their expertise. The community’s efforts coalesce a current and historical guide to the best news and ideas on a growing array of popular and important issues.

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AppGratis Was Indeed Pulled By Apple, But “Reports Of [Its] Death Are Greatly Exaggerated”

iOS App Discovery Service AppGratis just confirmed that it was indeed pulled from the App Store on Friday. At the time, commentators were left wondering what was wrong with AppGratis’ app. Founder and CEO Simon Dawlat wrote a long blog post explaining the full story.

“AppGratis is very much up and running,” Dawlat said. “The reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,” he continued. While there have been other incidents, the App Store review team never went so far. For example, Apple said in October 2012 that AppGratis was spamming the App Store because it had released different localized apps for each country instead of a single app with multiple localizations. As a reminder, AppGratis helps App Store users discover new apps, provides a short description and makes paid apps free for a day.

The company was surprised when Apple pulled the app over the weekend. The App Store review team approved the iPad app a week ago — AppGratis was about to promote its iPad launch, but it’s now futile. For now, the service will continue to function for existing users. AppGratis’ website and newsletter aren’t affected. But don’t expect to download the app again in the App Store or to get an update notification.

On Monday, AllThingsD reported that Apple banned the app for violating two developer guidelines and not respecting the general philosophy of the App Store.

Dawlat confirms that Apple pulled the app because of the two guidelines:

2.25: Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.

5.6: Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.

This time around, it is much harder to fix the app — Dawlat doesn’t outline possible changes. His announcement is a way to shed light on the issue with Apple, and probably to make the review team change its mind. He promises more announcements soon.

Over the past couple of months, AppGratis made a series of key announcements. In January, it has raised $13.5 million. It crossed the 10 million-user mark in February with apps seeing up to 1 million downloads in a day. And now it has 12 million users.

In other words, AppGratis has grown a lot in a very short period of time. Selected apps now skyrocket to the first ranks of the App Store. Developers then have to share their revenue with AppGratis during and after the deal. Apple could see the service as a way to promote an app in the Top Apps section.

Arguably, it is because AppGratis became big that Apple started looking into it. Yet, the news that AppGratis was pulled from the App Store was very sudden. Dawlat even says in the middle of his post: “and as I’m about to push the ‘publish’ button on this story, I’m still in absolute shock as to what is happening to us.”

Premium app discovery network spanning 120 countries, 10 million iOS users, delivering 100 million app installs yearly. AppGratis is the best way to get your app downloaded by millions of people, no incentives attached. The company has a staff of 40 and is headquartered in Paris, France.

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Tumblr Overhauls Its Android App With Path-Like Interface, Brings “Take A Photo” Back To The Desktop

Today, Tumblr launched a new version of its Android app. Its interface is the design you’re seeing in many apps lately, mostly made popular by Path.

Yes, Tumblr has gone Holo with its UI. That aside, the app feels way more responsive, letting you scroll through all of the cat photos and emo shots of your pals. Its pull-down-to-refresh even got a snazzier animation.

The brief note from the Tumblr Staff blog came along with an animation of the new navigation…animations:

Tumblr for Android just got a total facelift! We’ve completely redesigned the interface, added fancy post animations, made images pop, and a whole lot more. Download the update today.

Tumblr has also made it so that photos pop out in your stream more, so as to increase interaction within the app. This is something that Facebook recently announced it’s doing with its own News Feed:

It’s interesting that Tumblr attacked the Android app first, as its iOS version still has this boring old interface:

Stay tuned for the iOS version, though, since its latest major overhaul was back in November. There’s only one problem with the new interface, though. You can’t post from any page you’re on. I’d like to see the animated “post” button follow me no matter where I am on the site. Right now, you have to go back to your stream to post something.

Since it’s not all about mobile, for those who like to take “selfies,” (who doesn’t?) the company has brought back the “take a photo” functionality to the desktop site. If you just want to show all of your followers exactly how you feel right now, you can just shoot a shot and post it to your stream like this:

Sadly, that feature only works on Chrome and the latest versions of Firefox. Sorry, Safari and IE users, no selfies for you.

Happy Tumblr-ing.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is...

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Local Business Marketing Startup Circl Ties Facebook To Foot Traffic, Courtesy Of Mobile Measurement Tools

Circl a new startup helping businesses run online promotions using social media and email marketing, is launching today with already over 1,000 customers who have signed up for the platform, over 100 of which who have since gone live. Although there are plenty of competitors in this general space, what makes Circl interesting is the way it ties into mobile in order to track the success of various promotional campaigns.

Founded by Soso Sazesh and Neej Gore, who bring their own experience with both search engine marketing (SEM) and performance marketing to the new company, the two were inspired to create Circl to address a need in the local space.

“The way you do online marketing, it’s very metrics focused. It’s focused on ROI,” explains Sazesh. “And when you look at what’s available for local businesses, it’s very expensive – you have to give away 75 percent of what you’re selling with certain companies – or you run promotions on Facebook and Twitter, or on your email marketing lists, and you don’t know what’s actually driving people in,” he says.

Circl wants to close that gap by actually tracking the conversions from social media and email to real-world foot traffic, letting business owners know which promotions really worked. To do so, the platform allows the business to set up a promotion using Circl’s centralized dashboard, which they can then share out to Facebook, Twitter, email or elsewhere. When the customer clicks the link, they’re prompted to enter their phone number which sends the offer or deal via text to their phone.

Once in store, the customer clicks the link in the text at point-of-sale, which verifies that they’re actually there using the phone’s geo-location capabilities. But it also identifies the source of the promotion, allowing the business owner to better understand things like which channels work better than other, which promotions send more customers, how many people came in for a particular deal, and more.

By gathering this data, businesses can then improve the way they advertise, and increase conversions. However, Circl will take things a step further, too, by also making suggestions and offering optimizations out of the box.

The system uses machine learning, Sazesh tells us. It first aggregates data across its own customer base, so it understands how businesses in a particular region perform, or how businesses in that same category perform (e.g. how other local pizza places perform). Of course, for these recommendations to be powerful, Circl needs to gain significant traction. If it can achieve that, a future step may allow businesses to not only get recommendations as to how to proceed, but may also be able to compare themselves to others in their same space.

But for now, the company is focused simply on onboarding new businesses, taking advantage of the founders’ SEM experience in user acquisition efforts. The immediate priority is figuring out which channels should come next (Foursquare and Yelp are on the roadmap, Sazesh notes). The long-term goal is to be channel agnostic, and to help customers not only launch and track promotions, but also increase their presence on social media in order to better support those goals.

Pricing starts at $99 per month for up to three locations, and enterprise pricing is also available. AngelPad-backed Circl is currently raising seed funding.

Circl allows local businesses to create and distribute promotions across email, twitter, and facebook - all from one place. Circl uses location technology to track customer visits attributed to a given promotion. This allows Circl to provide deep insights and recommendations into what type of promotions perform best, on which channels, and when.

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HopStop Launches Crowd-Sourced Transit Alerts Through HopStop Live!

HopStop, the location services app that helps you navigate the wacky world of public transportation, has today unveiled its biggest product launch ever, with the release of HopStop Live!

The service is integrated with HopStop’s default iPhone app, as well as having its own standalone app called “Live!” The apps let users crowd-source information in real-time about delays to subways or trains, giving even more clarity to the morning commute.

HopStop already accounts for delays that are marked on the MTA’s web site for service disruptions, but that isn’t an all-encompassing view. Many times, trains will be delayed because of police investigations or accidents, and the corresponding delay alert doesn’t appear online for many hours after, or not at all. Still, these delays can really bork up a day, and so HopStop is letting its massive user base start calling out issues for fellow users.

Though crowd-sourcing public transit delays has been done before — most notably by Waze and NextTrain, along with some other mobile apps — HopStop brings a new level of scale to the recipe.

As of today, HopStop has announced that its userbase has surpassed 2 million monthly active users, and the app access data points for 700 transit agencies, 20,000 lines, and 750,000 stops.

Here’s what CEO Joe Meyer had to say about it:

The real-time public transportation space has attracted so much attention over the past twelve months with a countless number of new transit apps all professing to have the answer to real-time. The problem with the vast majority of these is that as impressive and headline-grabbing as their goals or claims may be –they all lack the critical ingredient for any crowd-sourced service to be useful –a big enough crowd of endemic users. Over the past nine years, HopStop has grown to be the biggest independent player in the transit routing market, and today’s launch of HopStop Live! will leverage our large user base and strong commitment to product excellence to define the future of real-time public transportation information.

The main goal is that users will build and foster mini-communities around their particular commute, keeping each other in the know about delays and service disruptions in a way that official lines of communication are too slow for.

For now, the HopStop Live! service is only available for iPhone, but the company is working on rolling it out to other major platforms in the coming months.

HopStop, a leading location-based service, provides door-to-door walking, biking and mass transit directions. HopStop’s service is currently available in 57 major cities worldwide including Boston, Chicago, London, Long Island, Los Angeles, New Jersey, New York City, Paris, San Francisco, Saint Petersburg and Washington, DC. HopStop also offers point-to-point directions and mapping services through a wide array of mobile applications, as well as advanced SMS capabilities for requesting and receiving directions on the go.

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