Carpooling Marketplace BlaBlaCar Reaches 3 Million Members, Rides Into Germany

Well, it looks like the carpooling race in Europe continues. BlaBlaCar, the European carpooling marketplace and competitor to Carpooling.com, has announced that it’s reached the milestone of 3 million members, almost double from this time last year. It’s also expanding to Germany, giving testimony to being a truly pan-European player.

In January last year, the Paris-headquartered company raised an additional $10 million from Accel Partners and existing investors ISAI, and Cabiedes & Partners, specifically for European expansion. Since then its carpooling communities have extended beyond the UK, France and Spain, to include Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), Poland, Portugal, Italy (via an acquisition), and now Germany, of course.

The launch into Germany, including opening an office in Hamburg, also puts the heat on ten year-old Carpooling.com, which is based in neighboring Munich and targets most of Europe, including 7 language-specific websites. In comparison, Carpooling.com claims 4 million members.

Founded in 2006, BlaBlaCar taps into the collaborative consumption phenomenon — long before anybody called it that — by offering a carpooling or ridesharing marketplace to connect drivers with empty seats and paying passengers, helping to offset long distance travel costs.

Drivers can charge passengers through BlaBlaCar or directly, while there are a number of security mechanisms, such as phone number authentication and user ratings of members, which form the basis for being blacklisted, if necessary. In other words, along with the network and marketplace aspects, it’s building a trust platform.

Accessible on the web and via mobile apps, BlaBlaCar says it’s currently seeing around 500,000 passengers every month.

BlaBlaCar is a car sharing website that connects drivers with empty seats and paying passengers to offset distance travel costs. It has created a new, affordable and sustainable way to travel, currently used by more than 500,000 passengers every month. BlaBlaCar’s 3m-member community offers thousands of destinations across Europe every day. Backed by Accel Partners and ISAI, it operates in ten countries across Europe, and is based in Paris with offices in London, Madrid, Milan, Hamburg and Warsaw. The site...

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carpooling.com is the No. 1 Ride Sharing Network in Europe, moving over 1 million people each month. carpooling.com offers reliable ride sharing opportunities that are affordable and easy to access by computer, mobile phone or social network. People can choose who they want to ride with, how much space and comfort they need, where they want to meet and what they are willing to pay. People can also book and pay online for even more convenience and safety. carpooling.com...

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Twitter Pushes Android App Update To Fix The “Me” Tab Bug

Over the weekend, we told you about an issue with Twitter’s Android update from last Wednesday. The issue centered around the “Me” tab not loading properly, just giving you a spinning wheel on a white screen.

Users took to Twitter to complain about the bug, saying that they couldn’t access important features on the screen, like reading DMs and switching accounts. You could search for yourself and tap on your avatar to find your way to your profile, but that was a hack more than anything else. Most users just thought they had a bad connection and waited for the screen to load…forever.

Today, the company released an update to the app that fixes the bug:

v4.0.1
- Fixes “Me” tab loading issues
- Improved UI on Honeycomb devices

I’ve confirmed with multiple people who were having the problem that this update does indeed fix the issue, and the “Me” tab is now loading quickly. It didn’t seem to affect every Android device, but the folks it did affect have been pretty loud about it since last Wednesday. Here’s a tweet from just a few hours ago:

https://twitter.com/Sumz__ox/status/321342582221328384

Consider the bug squashed.

Twitter has been working on unifying the experience for the service on all platforms, including native apps. The main reason for pushing out updates to the mobile versions were to incorporate the new Twitter Cards that were announced last week.

This was just a bump in the road for an otherwise beautifully redesigned app that now lets you cycle through your four tabs with a gesture.

Now all four tabs work.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

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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Blab Predicts Which Social Media Conversations Are Worth Joining

Blab is launching a platform that allows businesses to predict — up to three days in advance — which social media conversations are going to be important.

Co-founder and CTO David Snelling gave me a brief demo of the product yesterday. He showed off a visualization tool that highlights the up-and-coming topics at any given moment, a “magazine view” featuring the most engaging content in a given topic, and most uniquely, a chart predicting the extent to which the conversation will spread in 12, 24, and all the way up to 72 hours ahead, along with an indicator of how confident Blab is in its prediction.

To be clear, Blab can only make these predictions about conversations that have already started — it can’t predict what news will break in the next three days. But even though it’s not a crystal ball, Snelling argued that it can help companies decide which conversations they should join and which topics they should focus on. After all, those companies don’t want to hop on a bandwagon just as the excitement is dying down.

“If you’re going to create long-term content, you want it to be where [consumers] are going to be landing, not where they are now,” Snelling said.

Co-founder and CEO Randy Browning added that these predictions help companies “emerge from the thicket of trees and get a view of the forest.”

The predictions can be made with as little as 30 minutes of data, Snelling said. To do so, Blab looks at the initial conversational patterns and compares them to past data, so that if things are unfolding similarly to a conversation in the past, the technology can extrapolate how the conversation will proceed.

When I asked if there are specific topics where Blab makes more accurate predictions, Snelling answered, “We’re really not concerned about the topic, we’re just concerned about the behavior.” He also warned that conversations are “a living thing” that change over time, so the predictions get more accurate as Blab collects more data.

Other Blab features include the ability to identify influential users and to find relevant comments even if they don’t use a specific keyword. In the future, Snelling said he wants to add more nuance to the predictions, so that they suggest which platforms are likely to see the most activity.

Blab has raised $3.5 million from strategic investors Horizon Media and Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners, as well as various angel investors.

At Blab, we’re pioneering Predictive Social Intelligence™. We’ve built an engine that predicts tomorrow’s conversations, today. We bring in 60M posts per day from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. We classify conversation clusters by psychographic audiences allowing us to map the social web. We then show predictions on the size of relevant conversations, where they are heading geographically and source-wise across the conversation canvas. We process about a quarter of a billion computations in real-time, giving companies invaluable insight on...

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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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Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle & Others Brand Android A “Trojan Horse” In EU Competition Complaint

FairSearch.org group, a lobby group that counts Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle among its number, has filed a complaint about Google’s Android platform to the European Commission, describing Android as a “Trojan horse” designed to enable Google to “dominate the mobile marketplace and cement its control over consumer Internet data for online advertising as usage shifts to mobile”. We’ve reached out to Google for comment and will update this story with any response.

The Commission is in the midst of investigating Google’s online search practices over concerns of bias so FairSearch — a coalition of tech companies who all compete with Google and its services in some way — is likely hoping to pile additional pressure on at a time when the EC’s Competition Commissioner already has Mountain View on his mind. (In addition, Google is facing enforcement action across Europe for its unified privacy policy which consolidated more than 60 separate privacy notices, linking usage of various different Google services.)

FairSearch’s complaint is that “Google uses deceptive conduct to lockout competition in mobile” — by, specifically, requiring OEMs that use Android to pre-load a suite of Google services and give them “prominent default placement” on the device in order to also get access to ”must-have Google apps such as Maps, YouTube or Play”.  By doing this, FairSearch argues that Google “disadvantages other providers, and puts Google’s Android in control of consumer data on a majority of smartphones shipped today”, adding that this “predatory distribution of Android at below-cost makes it difficult for other providers of operating systems to recoup investments in competing with Google’s dominant mobile platform”.

Other providers of operating systems of course includes FairSearch member Microsoft and its Windows Phone platform which — unlike Android — is not free for OEMs to use and has failed to make any significant dent in Android’s global smartphone marketshare (though it has made a bit more progress in some European markets such as Italy, according to recent Kantar figures). Nokia also has its own mobile OS which competes with Android at the low end of the phone spectrum (Series 40), and uses Microsoft’s platform for its high end smartphones. Nokia does not use Android.

“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” said Thomas Vinje, Brussels-based counsel to the FairSearch coalition, in a statement. “We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market. Failure to act will only embolden Google to repeat its desktop abuses of dominance as consumers increasingly turn to a mobile platform dominated by Google’s Android operating system.”

FairSearch cites Strategy Analytics data from Q4 2012 that pegged Android’s smartphone share at 70% of global shipments, and eMarketer data covered by Forbes suggesting Google’s dominance of mobile search advertising extends to 96% of the market.

At the time of writing we were unable to reach the Commission’s Competition spokesperson to confirm whether it plans to investigate FairSearch’s complaint — and, if so, whether it might link this complain to its current investigation into Google’s search practices. According to the Guardian, the EU Competition Commission team has been considering whether to include Android in any settlement with Google but has not yet reached a decision. Update: a Competition Commission spokesperson said: “We can confirm that the European Commission received the complaint from the Fairsearch.org. We have no further comments.”

There’s no doubt the computing market is reforming itself with mobile devices at the core, while the traditional desktop PC’s share declines – Gartner’s latest devices forecast paints a picture of the old empire of the PC crumbling away over the next five years as smartphones and tablets rise up to take its place — which explains Microsoft’s urgency to derail the Android bullet train, any which way it can. (Notwithstanding the irony that Microsoft itself was fined $731 million last month for antitrust violations that date back to 2011 relating to how it bundled its Internet Explorer browser with its Windows OS. IE is, of course, also the only browser choice Microsoft offers on its Windows Phone platform — but since Windows Phone has such a tiny marketshare Microsoft gets to favour its own services without any risk of being accused of anti-competitive behaviour).

Setting aside the Microsoft ironies, Google does police Android usage by withholding its Play Store (and other services) if too many changes are made but OEMs are of course free to fork Android, as Amazon has done with its Kindle Fire tablets, and thus can jettison Google’s surrounding services if they want — as is the case with many Chinese implementations of Android. It’s also possible to skin Android entirely, and tuck all Google’s services out of sight, as Facebook Home seeks to do. To say Google Maps, YouTube and Play are “must have” apps also seems a little disingenuous — when Nokia, for example, has its own mapping software (Here Maps) which at other times it would doubtless argue is competitive with Google Maps. As for YouTube, it can always be accessed via the mobile web.

That said, there is no doubting Android’s dominant position in the smartphone space. And Google has moved to limit the growth of alternatives — such as its smackdown to Acer (a member of the Android-backing Open Handset Alliance) when it announced plans to launch a phone based on Alibaba’s Aliyun OS — so it remains to be seen whether the Commission will decide it needs to take a closer look at Google’s strategy around Android and whether it needs to seek to level the smartphone playing field.

In August 2005, Google acquired Android, a small startup company based in Palo Alto, CA. Android’s co-founders who went to work at Google included Andy Rubin (co-founder of Danger), Rich Miner (co-founder of Wildfire), Nick Sears (once VP at T-Mobile), and Chris White (one of the first engineers at WebTV). At the time, little was known about the functions of Android other than they made software for mobile phones. This began rumors that Google was planning to enter...

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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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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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