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YC-Backed Contractor Directory BuildZoom Raises $1.4 Million Seed Round
BuildZoom, the Y Combinator-backed service designed to connect homeowners with licensed contractors, is today announcing having closed on $1.4 million in seed funding, in a round led by Formation 8 (Joe Lonsdale). The company plans to use the additional funding for hiring and continued product development, with a specific focus on improving some of the site’s consumer-facing tools, like its online project gallery, Q&A section, and marketplace.
Also participating in the round were Hydrazine Capital (Jack & Sam Altman), DV Playground, Digital Garage (DG Incubation), Goldcrest Investments (Adam Ross), Netprice Partners, Michael Liou, Ted Geary, Ullas Naik, Pankaj Shah, Jason Young, and Dakin Sloss.
The service launched this March with over 2.5 million contractors in its database, which was built using public record data from state licensing boards, as well as select data from the Better Business Bureau. Today, the site includes 3 million licensed contractors, 25,000 of whom have now claimed their profiles and uploaded around 60,000 photos of their work.
Company co-founder Jiyan Wei says the service has been growing at the same 12 percent month-over-month rate for the past several months now, and sees on average 2,500 contractors signing up each month.
The site, which competes in the same general space with other services like HomeAdvisor or Houzz, for example, also lets homeowners review the contractors on the site, and combines those scores, along with reviews from elsewhere on the web, as well as with business data like number of completed projects, time in business and more, to offer a simple “BuildZoom Grade” for each contractor.
“Right now it’s sort of like ‘Yelp for contractors,’ but our vision is to evolve it so it’s like a true marketplace,” Wei says of the company’s long-term plans for BuildZoom. “Our vision is to enable and support the actual transaction itself.” Right now, he says, after a homeowner and contractor connect, they go offline to discuss the details of the project, sign contracts, and handle changes. BuildZoom plans to bring those sorts of transactions online.
“We believe if we really going to make this marketplace work better, and if we’re going to help consumers and contractors have a great experience, we have to get involved with the manner in which they structure the agreement and communicate throughout the traction,” Wei says. “All that stuff should happen in the cloud,” he adds.
Having grown from a team of two full-time with other distributed staff at launch, the San Francisco-based company is now putting together a team of half a dozen or so engineers, and other user-facing positions and hopes to grow to 14 or 15 in the next few months.
The site will continue with its earlier plans to sell premium levels of service to contractors, but still shies away from a monetizing mainly through lead gen. That being said, Wei notes that the company isn’t ruling out lead gen entirely, saying that it may experiment in that area, but only so long as it does not compromise the consumer experience.
In A Shift, Crowdstar Launches A Lush Fashion App That's More A Catalogue Than A Game
Crowdstar, the social and mobile gaming startup that made a name by targeting younger women with fashion-focused titles, is veering further away from pure gaming with a new app that’s more like an interactive clothing catalogue.
Called Covet Fashion, the app is like an interactive shopping magazine where women can layer virtual clothing on top of a mannequin. It feels like it targets more of a Polyvore-like audience. (That’s the Goldman Sachs and Benchmark Capital-backed site that lets about 19 million users per month create collages of real fashion items.)
People can pick real apparel and accessories from designers like Rebecca Minkoff, Halston Heritage and Cynthia Rowley. They can compete to win actual merchandise and see style advice from designers like celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe, who has dressed actresses like Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Lawrence.
The idea is that this is a better way to grab attention from female consumers on iPads and iPhones than something looks like a traditional fashion magazine. Higher-end fashion magazines have tried iPad apps but many of them are static images of the actual physical magazine pages that people have to swipe through.
Crowdstar’s earlier games like Top Girl and Social Girl already tapped into the behavior of dressing up and creating virtual looks, but Covet takes it a step further.
The app is not supposed to feel like a game and that’s because the company wants to broaden the potential user base to even more women who might not consider themselves social gamers.
“It’s more like 70 percent photographic. It’s not at all a cartoon,” said Jeffrey Tseng, who is Crowdstar’s CEO. “While we believe that gaming is for everyone, there’s a certain connotation around games. Everything abou this app is designed not just to be a game, but also a shopping and content experience. Maybe a person will fall in love with a certain piece and eventually buy it.”
Every day, users get a certain virtual allowance that they can have to buy different dresses and clothing. But the virtual currency part of the app isn’t really the focus. Crowdstar isn’t trying to create the same kind of “grinding” or time-consuming game mechanics that many other developers use to get players to spend more.
Tseng says players can buy premium currency but the conversion rate is really cheap. It’s perhaps 1 cent to one virtual dollar.
He added that the higher-end brands didn’t feel like the app potentially tarnished their image of exclusivity.
“When they saw what we built, they felt it really did align with their brand. The look and aesthetic don’t really have a cartoony feel at all,” he said. He added that even though social gamers may be stereotyped to less discretionary income, “People do splurge on pieces that fall in love with.”
The app is coming out in late June, and it’s being tested in different international markets.
Crowdstar has taken $46.5 million in funding, including $12 million in a round earlier this month meant to fund this project and another game. The company has been around for several years and was an early player on the Facebook platform before it transitioned to iOS and Android. The company is backed by Time Warner and Intel Capital.
Evernote Sharpens Up Its Picture-Annotating App Skitch For Mac
After a rough couple of months last year when users slammed Evernote for updates to image-annotation app Skitch that they believed were for the worse, today the company is releasing a new version of the Mac app. While the company is still taking slow steps for how it integrates Skitch into Evernote — this was one of the bones of contention for legacy Skitch users in how the app was updated — it is continuing to add more features like better drawing capabilities, part of Evernote’s longer-term strategy to create productivity tools that draw more people to its platform and make Evernote an ever-more useful product.
The updates coming today include updates in four key areas, with some enhancing existing features and others adding new functionality altogether:
- An adjustable canvas: This widens the background for users to have more room to annotate; a simple expansion that makes Skitch potentially useful for creating artwork to be used beyond simply on computer screens.
- Better shapes: While the canvas is getting bigger, these shapes are getting smaller. Evernote says that they have a much smaller minimum size, for “greater precision.” In addition to that, users will be able to use keyboard shortcuts for more precise shape and arrow drawing.
- Screen Snaps: These are getting speeded up so that taking and using them is much quicker.
- Editable PNGs: A new feature, that means users can create .PNG files that they can then re-visit and alter when needed.
A lot of these changes got me thinking about Skitch: it seems like it is increasingly going head to head with online image-editing tools like Pixlr, and to a lesser extent services like Photoshop from Adobe, which has been challenged by online services as well, specifically for winning the casual user.
Now that Evernote has laid the groundwork for more development of Skitch by completely rebuilding from the platform up — it will be interesting to see whether competing more directly with other picture editing services — by adding in, say, filters and other drawing features — is a direction that Evernote would like to take Skitch in further iterations. Again, it would make sense both in terms of making the app more useful, and for potentially figuring out ways of monetizing it by charging for some of the extra features.
We’ve reached out to the company for an update on longer-term Skitch strategy and will add in whatever we find out. For now, you can download the new Mac app, along with Windows, iOS and Android versions, here.
Appington Raises $1.2M In Seed Funding To Give Voice To The World Of Mobile Apps
Mobile startup Appington today announced its $1.2 million seed funding round, which founder Risto Haukioja says will be used to help the startup better deliver on its goal of making it easy for mobile developers to incorporate voiceover in their apps. Voice, according to Haukiojia, is often overlooked in favor of interstitials and video demo tutorials, but it’s a key way to convey meaning without interrupting or boring a user, and that leads to better engagement.
What Appington does is “take apps out of the silent movie era,” but providing an easy way for devs to add voiceover narration through an SDK. Basic users can send out their own recorded voice messages to users at predetermined points throughout the pap, explaining key gameplay elements, for instance, or offering promotion opportunities. More advanced subscription plans even offer professional narration provided by Appington’s partner, a company Haukiojia says is among the leaders in the world of professional video game voiceovers.
Appington claims that voiceovers can increase engagement significantly, and average revenue per user can go up by as much as 50 percent on average. Single-day engagement with Bingo Bash, a casino app, has helped engagement climb by 32 percent, according tot he company’s own data. Looking around for what to do next is definitely not fun for mobile users, but voice is just one of many options. It’s also usually expensive and hard to produce. Appington lets developers worry about developing, however, according to Haukiojia, and takes care of the trickier parts itself.
“We’re trying to make the adoption of voice as easy as possible so that developers themselves would not have to learn so much about audio production and voice production as we have,” he said. “Typically if a developer would go and do this on their own, they would go and do one voice prompt, and based on what we’re seeing and the experience we’ve had so far, you actually start with one version of a prompt and then you iterate from there, and that can have a big impact on engagement.”
Appington’s funding comes from ex-Facebooker Matthew Welty, Unity Ventures and Tandem Capital (whose accelerator program Appington participated in), and will aim to help the startup expand its initial pool of beta testers, and hopefully make the product available free via open beta within the next 45 to 60 days. After that, the company hopes to continue to refine its paid product, and add in premium features over the next year or so for customers with more advanced needs.
Gaming is just one use case, according to Haukiojia, and the one that most readily springs to mind, but the market is wide open in terms of the types of apps that could benefit from Appington’s services, he says. Everyone is looking for ways to boost engagement after the download at the moment, so Appington may be well-positioned to capitalize on that.
From The Team Behind Branch, Potluck Is A New Link-Sharing Service For The Internet's “Lurkers” Who Don't Tweet Or Blog
The team behind the social conversation platform Branch is today launching a new venture with Potluck, a service which seems almost the complete inverse of the company’s earlier efforts at inspiring thoughtful, quality discussions on the web. If, according to the Internet’s 1 percent rule, only a small minority will activity participate in content creation (as with Branch), then think of Potluck as the service that appeals to the larger majority of so-called “lurkers.”
Potluck is essentially a link-sharing network built on top of a users’ social connections from Twitter, Facebook and Gmail. But unlike many of today’s social networks, including both Facebook and Twitter as well as Branch, the focus is not on having users craft an online persona, but rather on the content being shared.
Explains Branch CEO and co-founder Josh Miller in a blog post on Medium (a product, like Branch, also backed by Twitter founders’ incubator The Obvious Corporation): “Potluck takes the performance out of sharing by making it more personal and less stressful.”
He says that on most social networks today, there are pressures to produce “double-digit likes, original witticisms, breathtaking images,” and by emphasizing the content instead of the people sharing that content, the hope is that Potluck will be able to build a sharing service where the first thing that’s noticed is not the who, but the what.
Links shared on Potluck aren’t accompanied by people’s names or avatars, only the topic or name of the link, and the number of your friends who are talking about it. Only after clicking through will you find out who else was discussing that same subject. You can then join in the discussion, or just “heart” it to show your approval.
The links that users share in Potluck are those they come across every day when surfing the web, but often don’t get shared. The links can point to anything – an article, a YouTube video, or even a tweet, and that content will show up in a rich media widget of sorts in the Potluck news feed.
Miller tells TechCrunch that while Branch was seeing adoption among by some larger Internet publishers like USA Today and SoundCloud, for example, it hasn’t caught the attention of the masses. “It has not been catching on with my college roommates or my siblings,” he admits. “The reason it hasn’t, is that with Branch, we very much pushed the publishing mantra…[it] really enticed people who like to publish, but for people who don’t blog and tweet, it’s not something that’s approachable to them.”
“Eighty-six percent of the Internet has not written a tweet or a blog post before, and doesn’t really want to,” Miller explains, citing data from Pew Research.
And yet, Branch had continually added features to try to appeal to that broader potential user base, before finally realizing that perhaps those features would work better in a standalone product. So a couple of months ago, the team ripped out the unused pieces that were not working in Branch, and built them into Potluck.
During its private beta, Potluck’s 1,000 beta testers spent on average 10 minutes on the site sharing links and engaging in conversations.
And yes, in case you’re wondering, the service’s ultimate goal is to cleverly convert the Internet’s lurkers to sharers. “What Branch, the company, cares about is conversations. That’s what we’re driven by,” says Miller. “The whole reason we took the time to even focus on Potluck, is because we really do want to empower the people who are not having conversations to have conversations.”
The launch comes at a time when the most popular social networks, like Facebook, Instagram or even Snapchat, are all based on a “friend graph” that replicates your address book in the cloud, so to speak. All these services are about connecting you with people you already know. Miller, meanwhile, says there’s some nostalgia for the time when the Internet was able to connect you with people you may want to know – like you once found via old comments sections, Internet forums, BBS, or elsewhere.
“I, and none of my friends, have ever known the Internet as a place for anyone but the people we know,” says Miller. “It’s inevitable that on a network of billions of people, there’s an opportunity to connect you with people you might know or should know.”
Plus, he adds, “the next big social network is going to be one that offers you a very unique network that you can’t find elsewhere.” That is, it will build something beyond the social graph everyone is spinning off of today.
Potluck is live now here, and an iOS app will arrive in a couple of weeks.
How Sony's SmartWatch 2 Stacks Up To The Pebble And The MetaWatch Strata
Sony’s first go at the smartwatch mostly went unnoticed – a lot of people, myself included, had to be reminded of its existence when the Pebble made big waves for its huge Kickstarter funding success. But Sony’s not letting its early mover advantage go to waste, nor is it letting the SmartWatch brand die on the vine: Today it unveiled the SmartWatch 2, a successor to its original that improves specs and functionality in a number of ways.
The Sony SmartWatch 2 has competition from the aforementioned Pebble, and from fellow Kickstarter success MetaWatch Strata, which is another smartwatch category incumbent. If fact, so is Pebble, which means that this entire generation of devices is actually not the first, but may well be the first with the chance to actually gain some traction with the wider consumer market. Accordingly, a tale of the tape is definitely in order.
Platform support
Both the Pebble and the MetaWatch win this round, as they support both iOS and Android, while the SmartWatch 2 only works with Android phones. Sony has improved on the previous generation thanks to opening up support for any Android phones, instead of just Xperia devices, which makes this about 1000x more useful. And while the other devices support iPhone, there are limits put in place by the platform that make using smartwatches with iOS far less useful, though many of those are on track to change with iOS 7, which, for example, brings support for third-party app notifications to Pebble.
Battery
Battery life is going to be key to any kind of wide smartwatch adoption, and both Pebble and MetaWatch highlighted their multi-day power capabilities ahead of their device launches. Pebble says it can keep the watch powered for over a week on a single charge, and MetaWatch says its Strata will run for 5 to 7 days on a single charge – in practice, I’ve found both to be at the low end of their estimates, and the Pebble slightly under on some cycles.
Sony’s new watch makes some specific claims about its battery life, as well as making the biggest claim of all: The SmartWatch 2 has the “longest battery time for a smartwatch,” Sony says in its press release, a stat which it says has been verified by Strategy Analytics as of June 21, 2013. But the listed battery time expectations fall under those listed by its competitors; Sony claims 5 to 6 days with low usage, and 3 to 4 days with “typical” use. Testing standards may differ, but it looks like this will be right in the same general area as the competition when it comes to battery life overall, so don’t expect anyone to have a real distinct edge here.
Connectivity
The Pebble uses Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, as well as 4.0 Low Energy (LE) to connect to your device, which gives it some extra notification magic on iOS, while the MetaWatch Strata has Bluetooth 4.0 only. Sony’s SmartWatch 2 uses Bluetooth 3.0, which is interesting since it also claims the longest battery life without Bluetooth LE and with a much larger, color screen. The SmartWatch 2 also offers NFC, a trick neither of its competitors has, which does little beyond simplify the pairing process. Still, it’s an added convenience for users with NFC in their smartphones, and shouldn’t be discounted.
Display
SmartWatch 2 is the only one in the crop with a color display, boasting a 1.6-inch 220 x 176 pixel screen. The Pebble has a 144 x 168, 1.26-inch display, and the MetaWatch Strata has a 96×96-inch screen, which is 1.16-inches. The screens are all close, but there are key differences that users will want to consider. Both the Strata and the Pebble offer a nightlight LED for illumination, but lack any backlighting. This helps with power, but the Sony SmartWatch 2 with its colour display will be more legible in dark environments.
The MetaWatch Strata uses a reflective surface as the base for its screen, which results in it being virtually unreadable in certain lighting conditions, but the Pebble is mostly very legible, though the environmental light level detector is hit or miss. Sony claims that its colour display will be sunlight-readable, but generally speaking an e-ink screen like the one in the Pebble should fare better in that kind of environment.
Water resistance
The SmartWatch 2 is “splash-proof,” but that basically seems to mean you can wear it in a light rain shower or while washing your hands. Sony says not to wear it while showering, bathing, swimming, diving, snorkeling, fishing or doing “water related work.” Also, it notes that the watchband it ships with is neither water- nor splashproof. Basically, you can get it wet – but don’t get it wet.
The Pebble offers water resistance to up to 5 ATM, in both salt- and freshwater, which means you can take it swimming, or run in the rain. Pebble says not to use the watch in hot water, or while diving. The Strata likewise is rated to 5 ATM, or a submersion death of 165 feet. Both the existing devices win out in this category, for sure.
Apps
The Pebble has an API that’s being used by developers to build apps, but apps are coming relatively slowly, and offer fairly limited functionality. No doubt we’ll see more, but out of the box, the Pebble offers little beyond watch faces, notifications, and controls for your on-device music playback. MetaWatch does notifications, but email, calendar, Facebook and Twitter are still “coming soon” and there’s no word on third-party apps. The Strata does do music controls, and has weather, stock and calendar widgets, as well as an out-of-range alert so you don’t leave your phone behind.
The SmartWatch 2 offers call handling on the device (as does the Pebble) as well as a call log, notifications for calls, email, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and more. It does music remote functions, and offers calendar, weather, runtastic and new events aggregation. That’s out of the box, and there’s more planned. You can also remotely snap photos from your SmartWatch, control presentations and more using SmartWatch applications created by developers. Sony might have the edge in terms of app features, if only because it has more clout to convince and sign up developers.
Charging
It’s a small thing, but really important: the SmartWatch 2 uses micro USB to charge, while both the Pebble and the MetaWatch Strata use proprietary cables. That means added expense should you lose the single cable they ship with, and just general inconvenience. Sony definitely comes out ahead here.
Bottom Line
I don’t know if any of these smartwatches will be the one to break the mass market; more than likely, they won’t. But they show an evolution, and Sony’s at least trying to do better than the last time out, and has also clearly learned from the progress of its upstart rivals at Pebble and MetaWatch. Anyone other than early adopters might still want to hold off until OEMs devote and platform makers make more of an effort to actually support smartwatches, but at this point at least you won’t be in for an entirely frustrating experience if you pick one up.
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