TechCrunch
Facebook Launches First Branded Stickers, Previewing A Potential Sponsorship Biz
One day, brands might pay Facebook to become downloadable sticker packs. Facebook just launched its first branded sticker pack for messaging — a collection based on the new Universal film Despicable Me 2. While the studio didn’t have to pay to have them appear in the sticker store, and they’re free for users, Facebook might eventually be able to charge brands for the viral exposure.
I’m fascinated by stickers right now. A lot of people think they’re dumb, no different than emoji, and won’t have an impact on the messaging landscape. I disagree. The whole point of messaging is to accurately communicate, but text without body language or vocal tone strips out emotion that stickers can provide. I see them as a resurgence of pictographic communication, a way for functionally similar messaging apps to differentiate themselves, and a possible revenue generator.
Many startups, from Line to Path, make money by selling stickers. Facebook has instead made all 15 or so downloadable sticker packs freely available from a store inside the smiley button in Facebook and Messenger for iOS and Android. Just yesterday it turned Mark Zuckerberg’s dog Beast into a sticker pack.
People are looking for unique and efficient ways to express emotions without typing, and stickers are a fun way to do that. Facebook’s strategy of giving them away could keep people on its messaging system rather than switching to Google Hangouts or new independent messaging apps, or falling back on SMS or iMessage. The advantages of keeping people loyal to its messaging system likely outweigh the revenue Facebook could earn by nickel-and-diming users with $1 sticker fees.
But sponsorships could turn Facebook’s vast messaging traffic into dollars. Since stickers are inherently viral, intimately sent from person to person, brands could be willing to pay a lump sum or per-use fee to get exposure for their imagery.
That won’t work with all brands. Most people probably don’t want to send a Honda Accord sticker. But anything with cute characters associated with it could become a nice branded sticker pack. Despicable Me, known for its funny yellow minions, works well.
Everyone’s wondering why the tech giants and startups are fixated on messaging. The answer could be a (a little yellow monster) staring back us.
Xentry Wants You To Reuse Your Old Smartphone As A Wi-Fi Door Caller Display
If you’re anything like the average technology writer you’ll have a drawer full of old kit lying around the place, gathering dust. Well here’s what looks like a neat use for old smartphones that are still functional even if they’re no longer good enough to be your everyday device. Reusing tech kit so it gets a second life to extend its usefulness is obviously to be encouraged — and the plethora of sensors in the average smartphone mean there are plenty of options for use number 2.
U.S. startup, Xavage Technologies, has come up with one: it’s created a phone-housing-plus-app combo — which it’s calling Xentry — that turns an old iPhone or Galaxy S Fascinate into a door-mounted caller-display so you can see who’s at the door and communicate with them via the corresponding app on your own in play smartphone. The old phone is mounted on the inside of your front door, with a customised peephole attachment replacing an existing peephole lens, allowing the phone’s camera to spy on whoever’s outside.
The “smart door” system streams real-time video and audio over your home Wi-Fi network so no need to have a SIM in the door-mounted smartphone. Other features include the ability to disguise your voice when you respond to the caller at the door; door movement detection (using the phone’s gyroscope) so that you can set alerts if someone is trying to enter or exit the house; and a virtual receptionist feature to trigger a message when someone opens the door.
The app also lets you take still photos of the video of whoever is at the door, and supports zooming and exposure adjustment. Simultaneous connection to the door-mounted camera is also supported meaning multiple in-home smartphone owners can see who’s outside.
Xavage is looking to raise $200,000 via Indiegogo to fund production of the two Xentry models, one designed to house old iPhones (3GS/4/4S) and one for the Samsung Galaxy S Fascinate. It’s unclear exactly what the phone housing will be manufactured from but presumably some form of plastic.
Charging the Xentry sounds like it may be a bit of a chore. The housing is designed to incorporate the phone’s charging cable but Xavage adds: “Backers are expected to use their existing charging plug and USB cable while Xavage provides a 15 feet (3 meter) USB adaptor cable.”
So, in other words, you’re going to have to plug a charger cable into the device that’s mounted to your door for at least some of the time. Unless the phone can easily be removed from the housing for charging. Still, for a little inconvenience, you’re getting a low upfront cost video caller door display — and reusing your old phone to boot. The cost per Xentry looks to be around $55.
Square Hires AdSense “Godfather” Gokul Rajaram Away From Facebook
While Square has seen several top senior people leave over the last year, it’s also making up for them with some notable hires.
Today Gokul Rajaram, dubbed the “Godfather of AdSense,” is joining Square from Facebook, where he was the product director of ads. At Facebook, he oversaw the company’s aggressive monetization push over the past year, including incorporating better ad units on mobile devices.
The company says he’ll oversee Square Register, the point-of-sale system that the startup designed for small and medium businesses to use from tablets and smartphones.
“I’ve been fortunate to work for two mission-driven, world-changing companies, and Square’s vision and passion for helping businesses grow is inspiring,” Rajaram said in a statement.
He joined Facebook through the sale of his startup Chai Labs to the social network back in August 2010. Before that, he also was a key leader in developing Google’s AdSense network.
While Square has lost recent executives like COO Keith Rabois and other senior people like Jared Fliesler to the world of venture capital, Rajaram is a win for the company as it figures out its strategy going forward. The company picked up Francoise Brougher from Google as Business Lead in April. It also hired former U.S. trade representative Demetrios J. Marantis as head of international government, regulatory and policy work last month.
TC's Picks From TechStars NY Summer 2013 Class
We’re here at the TechStars 2013 Summer class Demo Day, and the graduates are nothing short of delightful, from a service that helps church congregations make donations to a Fitbit for cars to a service that helps expecting moms plan for baby’s arrival.
The TechStars accelerator is one of the nation’s biggest and most notable tech startup programs, and the NY-based class should make Silicon Alley proud. So without any further ado, here are TechCrunch’s picks from the 2013 Summer class:
Triggermail
Fayez Mohamood and Mahmoud Arram started Triggermail to help ecommerce companies send their customers relevant triggered emails in a similar fashion to Amazon’s personalized email service. For those of you who don’t have a degree in marketing, triggered emails are marketing emails that are sent after a certain event (or trigger) like your birthday, 90 days passing since you’ve visited the site, or your purchase of a product on the web site.
As it stands now, the founders believe that marketers are segmenting users based on geography, age and gender, but that there could be a much higher ROI where there is a deeper level of personalization. When Triggermail signs up a client, they give the client code to put on their ecommerce website to track users’ behavior. Meanwhile, the client gives Triggermail the copy for emails, and Triggermail returns with the five best triggered emails that brand should send. The brand chooses which emails they’d like, and then Triggermail populates the content within the copy for each individual user.
For now, the team is still price testing, but cost to clients should be in the $1000s.
weeSpring
weeSpring was born out of a personal pain point. Co-founder Allyson Downey found herself in tears at a Baby’s “R” Us when she was pregnant with her first child, overwhelmed by the variety and her unfamiliarity with the brands. As she delved into preparing for the baby’s arrival, she found that the standard practice among other expecting mommy’s was an excel spreadsheet, which is then passed around between other mommies for recommendations on brands and things to add to the to-do list.
Clearly, this is not the best use of technology to solve this problem. And so weeSpring was born. The site lists thousands of products that have been recommended by other moms, whether they’re in your social circle or part of the weeSpring network. The site opened to the public in January and went from 300 pre-populated products to now over 1,500 products, with over 30,000 product ratings. Each product has been recommended by at least one user.
According to the founders, a married couple, they built the site expecting to see anywhere between 5 to 10 ratings per user, but rate an average of 15. Users can choose to view recommendations and ratings from friends only, or the entire network, and if you cross 25 ratings you become a featured mom, floating to the top of the reviews thread.
Faith Street
Faith Street is a mobile and desktop network that helps you find a congregation, connect with others, and give to your church. Eventually, the social platform will tap into synagogues, masques, and all of the various faiths, but for now the team of Christ co-founders is working on building up the network for Christian churches.
Churches set up their own specific network for their congregation, wherein events can be planned, prayers can be heard, and (yep, you guessed it) donations can be made. And yes, Faith Street is taking a small percentage of the tithings. I asked them upfront, being raised in a Christian background myself, how they could justify taking a sliver of what is biblically commanded funding for the church. They explained that they believe online giving tools will actually end up bringing more overall money into the church anyways.
Over 12,000 church leaders have come to the platform to sign up for the free service. The team only processed their first donation last week, but in a world where over $100 billion is given to churches each year, they’re likely on a road to quick profitability.
Placemeter
Before we go out each day, there are a select number of circumstances we check, namely the weather. But the folks at Placemeter believe that, one day, we’ll also check to see how crowded or traffic-filled our intended destination is before we ever leave the house.
Using highly sophisticated algorithms and the livestreams already available online covering Manhattan, Placemeter can determine how crowded that Forever 21 is or how packed the coffee shop around the corner is by counting the people walking in and out automatically. In fact, the team only needs 2,000 more cameras deployed to cover the entirety of Manhattan.
Eventually, this will result in a mobile app, but for now the team is working on data acquisition. They don’t only need consumers of their data, but folks who are willing to contribute. After all, Waze has 50 million users, but only around 70,000 contribute data to the mapping service.
That said, Placemeter is asking users to sign up to contribute, and place an old camera phone outside their window to contribute streaming video over Wifi using their app. Early contributors will have access to that data, and an app meant for consumers will be out in the fall.
Dash
Dash is a Fitbit for cars. In every car made after 1996, there is a port underneath the steering wheel called an OBD (on board diagnostics). This port is what allows mechanics to run diagnostics quickly on your car, a practice they often overcharge for. With Dash, users can simply buy the OBD plug-in and connect it to the Dash mobile app to run their own, constant diagnostics on their car.
The app gives them feedback on their driving across a number of touchpoints, including accelerating to quickly, braking too hard, etc. But it also acts as an OnStar-type system, detecting if you’ve been in a collision and calling emergency services. Plus, you’ll always have a gauge on your car’s health and get an estimate from the app of what it’ll cost you to fix a problem.
Dash is available as an iOS and Android app, which is currently in beta. It will operate with a freemium business model, where users can unlock further data about their driving and car through in-app purchases.
Microsoft Adds Bootstrap Support To Visual Studio 2013
At its Build developer conference today, Microsoft announced that it has added support for Bootstrap, the popular framework for responsive websites that was launched out of Twitter in 2011. Visual Studio 2013′s project templates will use Bootstrap by default when you want to build a web app in Microsoft’s ASP.NET now. If you were already tired of seeing too many Bootstrap-based sites, chances are you will now encounter even more of them.
For Microsoft, it makes sense to add Bootstrap to its developer tools for web apps. It is the most popular framework for building responsive sites and has the most active ecosystem of services around it. In his demo at Build, for example, Microsoft’ Scott Hanselman also showed how developers can use Bootswatch to find Bootstrap themes to make their sites stand out a bit more. This isn’t directly integrated into Visual Studio, but it obviously just takes replacing a CSS file to change a Bootstrap theme.
Developers could, of course, always use a Bootstrap competitor like ZURB’s Foundation for their apps, too, but the default for ASP.NET web apps is not Bootstrap.
The preview of Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download.
Promising To Bring Mobile Ads On-Par With Desktop, Real-Time Bidding Startup Gradient X Leaves Beta
After a six month test period, Gradient X is the beta label off its mobile ad platform.
Backed by $3.75 million from GRP Partners (er, I guess that’s Upfront Ventures now) and others, the company claims to bring performance ads on mobile to “feature parity” with other forms of digital advertising. The features highlighted on its website include audience data pulled and normalized from multiple sources, a real-time bidding platform that’s been specifically optimized for mobile, algorithms that predict ad performance, and actionable dashboards (you can see one of those aforementioned dashboards below.
And there are some impressive names involved, both at the company itself and among its advertisers. Gradient X said brands like Western Union, Jeep, Audi, Toyota, Motorola, HTC, and Microsoft have used the platform, while the startup’s founding team includes CEO Brain Baumgart (formerly chief strategy officer at Adconion Direct), CIO Julie Mattern (co-founder and formerly the chief technologist at the Rubicon Project), and CTO Michael Lum (former head of engineering at OpenX).
“To date, agencies, and advertisers have not been able to invest in mobile at the levels they’d like to due to these shortcomings,” Baumgart said in today’s press release. “The Gradient X mobile platform explicitly tackles these issues by providing unparalleled transparency, audience data, and brand safety, all via real-time bidding.”
During the beta period, the company says its grew to provide access to 400 million unique devices and 50 billion impressions. Baumgart told me via email that it continued launching new features during that period too, including support for rich media and video ads, support and tracking for cost-per-install ad units, and its data management platform.
Windows Azure Now Stores 8.5 Trillion Data Objects, Manages 900K Transactions Per Second
Microsoft announced at the Build conference today that Windows Azure now has 8.5 trillion objects store on its infrastructure.
The company also announced the following:
- Customers do 900,000 storage transactions per second.
- The service is doubling its compute and storage every six months.
- 3.2 million organizations have Active Directory accounts with 68 million users.
- More than 50 percent of the world’s Fortune 500 companies are using Windows Azure.
In comparison. Amazon Web Services said at its AWS Summit in New York earlier this year that its S3 storage service now holds more than 2 trillion objects. According to a post by Frederic Lardinois, that’s up from 1 trillion last June and 1.3 trillion in November, when the company last updated these numbers at its re:Invent conference.
So what accounts for the differene between Azure and AWS? It all has to do with how each company counts the objects it stores. With that in consideration, it’s likely Azure’s numbers are far different if the same metrics were used as AWS.
Nevertheless, the news highlights the importance of Windows Azure for Microsoft, especially as the enterprise moves its infrastructure, shedding data centers to consolidate and reduce their costs.
Over 50 percent, 3.2 million organizations.
Content Recommendation Startup My6sense Raises $2M After Shifting Focus To Mobile Publisher Tools
Personalized content startup My6sense announced today that it has raised $2 million in new funding. It’s also using the announcement to talk about its new focus — the company’s Content Discovery Bar for publishers.
In the past, my6sense used its technology to build content recommendation apps for consumers. Co-founder and CEO Avinoam Rubinstein told me that there was some promising early adoption, but “we actually faced a significant issue of generating revenue on a consumer application.” So the team decided to build a tool for publishers instead.
You can see how the Content Discovery Bar works in the video below. The basic idea: When someone is browsing a news or content app or mobile website, a small “more” tab will appear when they’re ready to see more content. If they tap on the tab, a bar will open recommending content that they might find interesting.
To make those recommendationMy6sense is taking advantage of the technology and AI expertise that it developed previously. And while there are other content recommendation services for publishers (such as Outbrain), Rubinstein noted that none of them are built specifically for mobile. The mobile use case is particularly challenging, he said, because you don’t have the screen space to waste on stories that the reader doesn’t care about.
Publishers can also include sponsored content in the bar, and then share the revenue with my6sense. So even though the company is no longer purely consumer-focused, its business model is still based on advertising.
My6sense is only officially launching the Content Discovery Bar today, but it says the bar has already been used by publishers to recommend nearly 5 billion articles, and that half the users who see the initial prompt choose to open the bar.
The funding comes from an undisclosed investor — my6sense says it was one of the company’s original angels. The startup has now raised a total of $7.5 million.
Hasty Plans To Take On GrubHub With Super Healthy Takeout and Delivery App In SF
GrubHub or Seamless – and if you’re in Europe, Just Eat, DeliveryHero, HungryHouse and many others – is, as we all know, something of a guilty secret. On demand food ordering has exploded in recent years. But trying to pick the healthy option is rarely that easy. Step in Hasty, a new bootstrapped startup which is starting in San Francicso first but hopes to expand in the US and internationally. To join the waiting list for the private beta of the ‘takeout and delivery’ iPhone app, visit the site. Instagram’s lead designer, Tim Van Damme, happens to be an advisor to the company. There are 200 private beta invites for TechCrunch readers via this link.
It’s very simple. You use the app to order healthy food from a curated set of local restaurants, prepared your way, and delivered via the restaurant’s own takeaway service. Hasty gets a cut of the transaction and the restaurant gets to tap a very discerning customer interested in (probably) higher cost dishes.
The startup has worked directly with restaurants in SF to ensure no MSG or additional sugar is used along with minimizing salt and oil. They look for the healthiest and tastiest dishes on any menu, calculate the nutrition facts for each dish, and take high quality photographs of each dish, then put it into a good looking app.
You can order based on dietary preferences (e.g. paleo, low carb, gluten free) from a curated set of the best and healthiest restaurants in a given city. The startup claims that early testing has seen users migrating from other food ordering apps and ordering 2-3 times per week.
They are tapping a section of the $250 billion takeout and delivery market in the US, which has yet to wake up to healthy fast food in much volume, and is subject to – pretty legitimate – attacks from health campaigners.
Hasty is founded by Oxford graduates David Langer and Chris Hollindale. Previously Langer founded GroupSpaces, the UK-based membership software company that was backed by Index Ventures and today hosts around 5M members. Hasty is being advised by Van Damme and Jude Gomila, co-founder of Heyzap.
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