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Aiming To Become The ‘Valedictorian' Of Smart Calendar Apps, Tempo Raises $10M
Tempo, the SRI-incubated smart calendar app that launched in February, is announcing that it has raised a $10 million Series A.
The round was led by Relay Ventures and Sierra Ventures. Relay also led Tempo’s (previously unannounced) $2.5 million seed round, and the company’s other seed investors — Mayfield Fund, Horizon Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, SingTel Innov8, Miramar Venture Partners, SRI International, Golden Venture Partners, Seavest Capital Partners, ENIAC Ventures, Gaurav Garg, and Peter Wagner — participated in the Series A as well.
Relay’s Kevin Talbot, Sierra’s Ben Yu, and SRI’s Norman Winarsky are all joining Tempo’s board of directors.
When founder and CEO Raj Singh discussed the funding with me earlier this week, he reiterated his vision to turn the smart calendar into a platform for a powerful personal assistant app. (That’s one of the reasons why it’s particularly noteworthy that Tempo came out of SRI, which was also the birthplace of the voice-powered personal assistant Siri. Winarsky was a co-founder and board member at Siri.) In other words, because it has access to your schedule, Tempo can push information to you as you need it.
You can already see some of that vision in the current version of the Tempo iOS app, which automatically surfaces things like emails, LinkedIn profiles, and driving directions that are relevant to each meeting, but Singh said there’s more to come.
“We think of ourselves as a big data company, and we’re building our understanding of calendar,” Singh said. He previously suggested that future features would take advantage of Tempo’s understanding of things like where you spend money and where you like to eat.
That’s also why Singh argued that Tempo will win out all the other smart calendar apps that have been emerging, such as Cue and Sunrise (not to mention Google’s product Google Now): “Don’t get me wrong, there are companies that have won purely because of UI, but you’re going to win this game by being the valedictorian and investing in technology in an unprecedented way.”
Naturally, Singh said he plans to spend most of the new money on improving Tempo’s technology. I also asked him if he’s finally going to move out of the SRI offices in Menlo Park, and he admitted that I was bringing up a subject of debate within Tempo’s 15-person team — Singh said he’s personally hesitant to give up all the benefits of working out of SRI.
“There’s me being a miser and loving the SRI hallway, but … you have no idea about all the other benefits to being on this campus,” he said.
Tile Wants You To Stop Losing Important Stuff With Its Bluetooth Tags Plus App Combo
Startups aiming to tap into the ubiquity of smartphones and extend their reach with additional hardware add-ons (plus an app) are winking rapidly into existence, as the disruptive vanguard for the long-imagined Internet of Things. Connected objects are just smarter with an app on hand to tap into the data. The latest entrant to this nascent space, Tile, has been incubated out of Silicon Valley mobile accelerator Tandem Capital, with $200,000 in funding, and has just kicked off a crowdfunding campaign on Selfstarter to raise $20,000 to fund initial production of its connected gizmo.
So what is its connected gizmo? Its Tiles are bluetooth low energy tags designed for attaching to valuable items so that these real-world objects — wallets, bikes, suitcases etc — can be traced if they go missing. “We’ve created a super, super inexpensive device that doesn’t need recharging, that gives GPS-like functionality,” explain Tile co-founders Nick Evans and Mike Farley.
These Tiles are used in conjunction with the Tile app, which allows the user to do things like ring a particular Tile to figure out where they put their keys down, say, or view a map of the last known location the Tile they fixed to their bike was at. Tile’s app also lets users turn on a range view when they are within 100-150 feet of a Tile, so they can try to retrace their steps and find where they dropped their item.
Tile’s creators are hoping to get enough people using its Tiles that the usefulness increases based on a distributed network effect. Each Tile app is capable of picking up the location of any Tile, regardless of its owner. So when a Tile user marks one of their tagged items as lost, the whole network is alerted to be on the hunt for it. Should another Tile user then pass within range of the item their smartphone will record its location and send a notification to the owner of that Tile — without that other Tile user being party to any of this background communication.
Effectively, it’s a crowdsourced scavenger hunt, where players are intentionally kept in the dark about the specific role they are playing so that it’s only the person who’s stuff it actually is who gets sent the info to retrieve it.
It’s a nice idea but one which does require a high density of Tile users to create the network needed for it to work. Evans and Farley stress that initially they won’t be playing up this side of Tile, but rather flagging up functionality that doesn’t require a wide network of users to fly — such as the range finder view and ring a tile features that allow Tile users to figure out where exactly in their house their misplaced keys have gotten to.
Targeting its rollout to particular cities, and perhaps also going after specific communities such as college campuses, is another strategy it’s looking at to ensure it builds out its user-base in a way that enhance the overall usefulness of the service to those users, in the shortest possible time frame.
“Where you lose your items is frequently where your friends and your family also go — so in the house, in the office, at restaurants where you typically go to and what not — so as those people around you join the Tile network your little world is going to get populated, so the most important people that join the network are your friends and family. And that is going to be so beneficial that we see it spreading through word of mouth,” adds Farley.
Each matchbook-sized Tile will cost $25 so it’s not exactly inexpensive enough at this point to encourage people to tag all of their important things. And being a still relatively sizeable slice of hardware, it’s not a very elegant thing to stick on personal mobile electrics like smartphones and laptops. Asked whether Tile might look at creating virtual Tiles for digital items that already contain the sensors required to power its Tiles, so for instance a virtual Tile could be added to a smartphone without the need to attach a physical Tile at all, the co-founders said it is something they are looking at, down the line. Initially though they intend to focus on hardware Tiles.
Each hardware Tile is designed to last one year, with the idea being that users don’t have to worry about replacing its batteries. After around 11 months of use, Tile owners will be sent a notification to return their Tile to the company for recycling. They’ll need to pay to purchase a replacement though. This ongoing cost is where Tile sees its initial business model — making a small margin on each Tile — but the co-founders have other ideas in the pot, including the possibility of licensing their technology to other companies. For instance, high end suitcase makers could incorporate their tag tech directly into bags, so suitcase buyers also get the tracking system as part of the whole package.
Facebook Now Allows Publishers To Highlight Their Pages And Authors' Profiles In Shared Links
This isn’t exactly Facebook’s mystery announcement (we’ll still have to wait a little bit for that), but in the shadow of its press event today, Facebook also today made a small but interesting update to its Open Graph tags for media publishers that you’ll likely see in your news feed soon. Publishers can now add two new tags to their HTML that will help Facebook add links to their own Facebook pages and links to the author’s Facebook profile in content previews.
When the publisher tag is set, a “like” button for the publisher’s Facebook page will appear in the content preview whenever an article is shared. The author tag works similarly and will display a “follow” button in the preview that allows Facebook users to follow the author on the site. This, of course, only works if the author has activated Facebook’s Twitter-like follow feature.
All it takes for a publisher to activate this is to add two lines of code to their HTML pages. These tags join Facebook’s other Open Graph tags for displaying article titles, descriptions and associated images.
Facebook also announced a number of other small changes to its platform. Developers will now have to submit at least two screenshots of their app’s user flow when they submit their apps for review, for example, and they can now suppress the creation of a News Feed story when they create a new event for a page.
YouTube Says It Will Bring Advertisers Into Its Partner Program, Starting This Fall
YouTube just announced (as part of this week’s Cannes Lions advertising event) that it’s expanding its partner program to include advertisers.
The program already provides the top YouTube content creators with access to resources for improving their production skills and distribution (and as a result improve their monetization).
YouTube says the advertising program will be structured identically to the existing partner program — just, y’know, for advertisers. The program will start in September with a week-long workshop in Los Angeles. Each advertiser will be assigned a partner manager to help them develop their content strategy.
“By inviting advertisers into our partner program, we hope to give them access to resources and expertise that will help them develop even more compelling and authentic content on YouTube,” said Lucas Watson, YouTube’s vice president of video online global sales, in the announcement press release.
With this program, YouTube-owner Google seems to be encouraging businesses to create advertising that’s designed specifically for the video site, rather than just repackaging existing TV ads and video content. Those kinds of custom campaigns could potentially be more lucrative for YouTube and its content partners — the company also says it will “facilitate the development of strategic alliances with some of YouTube’s top creators” so that advertising and content can be integrated in new ways.
The initial advertising partners are American Express, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson and PepsiCo, along with their ad agencies. This is currently just a pilot program, but YouTube plans to expand it to include 100 advertisers by the end of 2014.
Timehop Debuts Sync, A Way To Time Travel Through Your Offline Photo Archives
Timehop, the startup dedicated to helping you remember your past in an ever more fast-paced world, is taking its first major step beyond collecting content solely from social media services. The company is now debuting Timehop Sync, a desktop client for Mac and Windows which uploads your photo library, and the memories contained within, to the Timehop service.
Originally a hackathon project that would email you Foursquare checkins from a year ago, the startup has gone through a number of transitions before becoming the product it is today. In early 2012, it rebranded itself from 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo to Timehop, and began emailing users Facebook status updates, photos they were tagged in, plus Twitter and Instagram posts. Later, after unsuccessfully trying to get email subscribers to transition to the web, co-founder and CEO Jonathan Wegener says the team realized mobile would be a better direction, given that half of Timehop’s emails were already being opened on iPhones.
Though the company declines to provide its user numbers, Wegener did tell us that the iPhone app’s debut was “huge” for Timehop, and the number of shares per user have since increased by 20 times.
“That was really surprising to us – how much of a publishing mindset people have when they’re on the mobile app, versus being in a consumption mode when they were reading their Timehop daily email,” he says.
With Timehop Sync, the plan is to give those users more to share.
“Personally, I have about 13 years of digital photo history, and of my 30,000 photos, maybe 300 made it to Facebook, Instagram and the other social networks. The vast majority of my photo archive is still offline,” explains Wegener.
“When you take a photo, you’re taking it to look at later. And right now, you rarely go look at your old photos – because it’s overwhelming, because there’s no context, because opening iPhoto and looking at 30,000 photos is going to be an entire day. The big irony is that you take all these photos without ever looking back at them,” he adds.
And since Timehop’s overarching goal is to inspire people to rediscover their past through its “this day in history” bite-sized chunks, the service needed to be able to tap into these private collections.
Using the desktop client itself is simple. You just download the app, install it, and it then automatically starts to sync your photos back to Timehop. By default, the app will upload users’ Pictures folders on Mac and Windows, as well as those stored in iPhoto on Mac. An option to add other folders is also available.
While you can’t granularly pick and choose which photos are uploaded, when they’re shared back with you, they remain private, unless you specifically choose to share them more broadly with your network of friends. Timehop has also implemented some basic logic for handling these larger photo collections, including a means to suppress duplicates and skip over non-meaningful files like screenshots, as well as a way to cluster photos into albums where photos have been taken together at the same time.
Going forward, Timehop will continue to focus on its iPhone app experience, while the email newsletter will remain up-and-running for Android and other non-iPhone users. Wegener says the company is just experimenting too quickly to be able to manage two different platforms (iPhone and Android) right now.
The new Timehop Sync client is available for download here.
Yahoo Closes Its Purchase Of Tumblr For $1.1B, Reconfirms Karp At The Helm Of Social Site
In a week where Tumblr CEO David Karp did the rounds at the Cannes Lions advertising confab in France, Yahoo has now confirmed that it has completed its acquisition of the social network and blogging site for $1.1 billion — first announced in May.
As Yahoo said previously, it will keep Tumblr as an independent site, which will continue to be run by founder Karp. Although, in Yahoo’s words, “the product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately by the Tumblr team,” it will nonetheless be adding one billion monthly visitors to Yahoo’s overall online audience, which it will hope to monetize through advertising and other marketing services.
“Tumblr can bring complementary content to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. Yahoo! will support Tumblr’s efforts to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience,” the company noted in today’s statement.
Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, also added in her support: “Tumblr is an incredible company. I’m thrilled to officially welcome David and his team to Yahoo!.”
No updates today on any of Tumblr’s usage numbers, which were put out last month at the time of the deal: over 300 million monthly unique users, and 50 billion blog posts with 75 million more getting added each day.
Online Gadget Retailer Grand St. Goes Mobile By Launching An Android App
Online retailer Grand St. was formed to help customers find interesting new technology from the vast array of new hardware manufacturers out there. Now it’s taking its online store, with one new product each day, and making it available on mobile devices for Android users.
While we’ve seen a significant growth in the number of software products and apps over the years, due to the lower cost of development, building actual physical things has also become easier than ever. With an influx of great hardware hitting the market, Grand St. want to help surface some of the best. So it’s created a curated marketplace of goods its team loves, making one new item available every day.
With the launch of the Grand St. mobile app on the Google Play store today, the startup is looking to take advantage of the large — and growing — number of Android users out there. While the site itself is still in private beta for now, any Android user who downloads the app will be able to log in and purchase items from its online store.
Still, while Android has the lead in pure number of smartphones out there in the wild, we’ve heard over and over how users of the OS tend to lag behind iOS in terms of engagement or mobile commerce. Or at least, that’s what Apple CEO Tim Cook would like us to believe. So when going mobile, why go Android first?
For one thing, it’s the OS that they know best: 80 percent of the Grand St. team has Android devices, and they’ve all been developing apps for the Google-owned OS for the last four years. And many of its users already have Android devices, frequently making inquiries about devices and their availability or compatibility with the OS. In an email, Grand St. co-founder and CEO Amanda Peyton also praised the way Android has evolved over the last two years, saying that its hardware, store experience, and SDK have all seen “incredible improvements” in that time.
“We wanted to create a native commerce experience from scratch that was both beautiful and, from an interface perspective, something that felt different,” she wrote. “We support Android’s commitment to openness and wanted to build a native experience that for once catered to the Android community first.”
Based in New York, Grand St has raised $1.3 million from investors that include First Round Capital, David Tisch, Gary Vaynerchuk, betaworks, Collaborative Fund, MESA+, Quotidian Ventures, and Undercurrent.
Chartboost Launches Groups Where Game Developers Can Trade Traffic
Chartboost, a platform that helps game developers promote each others’ titles, is opening a ‘Groups’ feature where multiple developers that want to partner up from a specific country, incubator (or wherever, really) can do direct deals.
The San Francisco-based company has quietly built a formidable network incorporating 16,000 games and 8 billion ad impressions per month. They started out by facilitating advertising trades between mobile game makers and helping developers cross-promote titles within their own network of apps. They earn revenue by selling remnant inventory.
The company’s CEO Maria Alegre said the company started getting feedback that groups of four or five developers wanted to trade with each other, instead of doing one-to-one deals. She says indie developers might want to partner up in one group, or game makers from a specific geographic region might want to work together.
“We find that these partnerships are usually based around friendships,” she said. “They might have met at this incubator or at GDC [Game Developers' Conference]. Or they might just respect each other’s work.”
Alegre says that direct deals perform better than typical mobile advertising campaigns. A click-through rate on a direct deal between two different developers is about 10.7 percent, compared to 8.1 percent on a regular network. If a developer cross-promotes their own titles to existing players, the click-through rate is even better at 12.7 percent.
She says the practice has become so popular that about 71 percent of the publishers Chartboost works with are doing direct deals.
“Basically, direct deals have become a required tool for any big developer that needs to do user acquisition,” she said.
They also can have a leveling effect on the entire mobile gaming ecosystem, with indie developers being able to partner up and have similar network effects as bigger game developers like King or Kabam.
“The vision of Chartboost is — instead of first having to make enough money to build a platform team or network tech, we’ll give that technology for free to anyone,” Alegre said. “For most developers, it’s never enough of a priority for them to build a platform internally unless they have so many hits in a row, that they have money to invest in it. But we’re democratizing access to the network technology.”
Chartboost, which started out as a bootstrapped effort, eventually grew fast enough that they attracted $19 million in funding from Sequoia Capital earlier this year. They now have more than 60 employees, mainly in San Francisco.
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