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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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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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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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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UK's EE Will Double 4G Speeds To 130Mbps As It Aims To Pass 1M LTE Users By Dec. 2013

EE, currently the only mobile carrier offering 4G LTE services in the UK, plans to double the speed of its mobile data network in the country’s 10 biggest cities to 130 megabits per second, as it braces itself for competition from other carriers that are scrambling to get their own LTE networks up and running. In a presentation this morning in London, Olaf Swantee, EE’s CEO, also says that the carrier is aiming to pass 1 million subscribers by the end of 2013, equivalent to about 8% of its overall user base, which is currently at 27 million subscribers.

This represents a pretty ambitious goal for EE. In February, it noted that it had picked up only 201,000 users in the four months since launch; those were 3G and 4G users, so at the time we didn’t know how many of those were on LTE. Today, Swantee noted that one out of every four new customers have selected 4G services. Doing a bit of back of napkin math that’s only around 50,000 new 4G users — meaning that it is betting big on accelerated adoption as well as a successful plan to migrate some of its existing users.

But at the same time EE also continues to offer its 4G calling plans at premium prices, a function of it being the only 4G operator at the moment and therefore milking that monopoly for as long as it can before prices have to drop in the face of competition.

“We are setting 4G limits that other players cannot match,” he told a group of journalists. The company, which is a JV between France Telecom’s Orange and T-Mobile, has about 36% of all the spectrum available for 4G services — the most of any carrier, with Vodafone second at 28% of spectrum. The full breakdown of who won what in the spectrum auction is here.

The list of 10 cities that will get the boosted speeds are Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Sheffield.

It’s important to note that the 130Mbps are “lab speeds,” meaning that realistically they will be slower for now. EE says that the first city where it has already started to boost its network, Cardiff, has “headline” speeds of 80Mbps on its network. As a point of comparison, speeds on the network are typically around 20Mbps on average.

The carrier is also boosting capacity for 4G services. Is says it is doubling the amount of 1800MHz spectrum bandwidth dedicated to 4G, from 10MHz to 20MHz, meaning less congestion when it does have lots of users simultaneously trying to access YouTube on its network. “This will give 4GEE customers… access to some of the fastest mobile speeds in the world, reinstating the UK as a leader in mobile and digital communications,” it notes.

EE’s wider goal is to have 98% coverage of the UK’s population by 2014, with 80 cities and towns by the end of June, Swantee said.

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