TechCrunch
A Peek Inside Science Inc.'s Santa Monica Tech Startup Studio [TCTV]
TechCrunch has written quite a bit about Science, the Los Angeles-based startup “studio” that’s helping to create and grow some of the more interesting companies on the tech scene today.
So when a few of us TechCrunch TV folks were in L.A. earlier this month, we made it a point to head over to Science’s Santa Monica HQ to get a firsthand look at what it’s really like inside. After all, a video is worth at least 1,000 words, right?
Watch the video above to see the busy (and buzzy) Science space, and hear co-founder Mike Jones talk about the studio’s past, present, and future — and how the Southern California locale shapes its startups.
Memorability Lets You Create & Narrate Beautiful iPad Photo Books, No Printing Required
There’s no shortage of mobile photo book applications on the market today, but a majority of these are focused on taking digital creations and turning them into offline, printed products. Memorability, a recently launched iPad photo book app, is different. Instead of bringing online web printing services to the new, smaller screens of smartphones or iPads, the app instead suggests that we no longer need to print out our photo scrapbooks at all – and that an iPad-only solution actually has advantages of its own.
If you do a search for “photo books” in the iTunes App Store, you’ll find a variety of solutions for building photo albums which can then be drop shipped to your home. Some of these are built for iPhone, like Mosaic and Simple Prints, for example. Others, like Printzel, are universal apps, and others still, like KeepShot, are iPad-only. Memorability fits into this latter group in the sense that it’s been designed for tablets alone.
But unlike the others, Memorability is not meant as a utility for building hardbound photo books – it’s the digital replacement for them. There’s no accompanying web service or printing option with the app – users’ albums are saved locally to the iPad, while the company’s servers will only host the albums shared with other family and friends for up to thirty days.
Like the traditional scrapbooks it’s inspired by, Memorability includes pre-designed templates which can be customized with text and captions. But it also includes a unique feature as well: voice support. In addition to arranging photos into albums, users can record narrative voice-overs. The resulting photo books can then be viewed in an automatic slideshow mode, or can be swiped through manually.
Private sharing is built into Memorability, allowing users to friend each other, then view and comment on each others’ books which appear in the app’s feed. Plus, you can optionally share books to Facebook or via email to reach family members or friends without iPads, and there the photo books are turned into movie files which play the slideshow and narration when clicked.
Based in Chapel Hill, N.C. and bootstrapped by husband and wife team Anne and Tom Clark, Memorability got its start – as many companies do – in order to solve a personal pain point in the co-founders’ lives. “I have thousands of photos of my children on my computer, but as a busy mom, I never had time to do anything with them,” says Anne, who worked on Memorability’s interaction design and wireframes while husband Tom, currently a senior director of product at TIBCO, coded.
“When I looked for a solution for my iPad where I could display my photos, I wasn’t happy,” Anne says of the iPad’s current app selection. “I wanted something that was more like a physical photo album. When I didn’t find anything like that, I decided we needed to do it,” she adds.
Currently, the premium version of the app is available for free in the App Store, offering a number of built-in themes, and the ability to record up to a minute of voice per page on albums that can be 20 pages long. After the launch period is over, the app will remain free but will then cost $3.99 to upgrade to the full version with more free themes and albums not capped at 5 pages each.
A number of album themes will remain available for in-app purchase in both editions, and new themes will be added monthly, says Anne. Given the scrapbooking vibe of building the digital books, there may be an opportunity for Memorability to sell additional embellishments in time, but the company decided against the “sticker pack business model” for now because the immediate goal is keeping the app easy to use. However, the team is considering letting users pay to keep their albums shared with others for longer than the 30-day default at some later point in time.
Memorability is interesting because it actually replicates the feeling you used to get from putting photos into a scrapbook, while also taking advantage of the digital medium that’s now at hand. It’s a lot like Disney’s recently launched private social networking app Story, except that Story is only built for iPhone, and is not as polished or pretty – things that matter to Memorability’s most likely female, Pinterest-pinning, family-focused crowd.
The Clarks also envision Memorability as more than just another tool for sharing photos, but rather as a storytelling platform, Anne explains. “One thing I’m hoping with this is people will have meaningful interactions by viewing these personal photo stories from family and friends,” she says.
The premium version of Memorability is available as a free download here. (The code MEMORABILITY will get you one extra free theme.)
eBay CEO John Donahoe: I Wish We Could Buy Airbnb But We Can't Afford It
At Fortune’s Brainstorm Conference in Aspen today, eBay CEO John Donahoe joined the stage with Airbnb’s co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky to talk about how they mentor each other (you can watch the livestream here). The two CEOs have been informally advising each other for a few years, after being introduced through eBay board member and Airbnb investor Marc Andreessen. In fact, Donahoe asked Andreessen who the smartest founder was in Silicon Valley, and he immediately responded with Chesky’s name.
Fortune Deputy Managing Editor and moderator Stephanie Mehta asked Donahoe why eBay doesn’t just buy Airbnb. He explained that he would love to buy the company (which was most recently valued at $2.5 billion), but eBay can’t afford it.
In fact, Donahoe believes that Airbnb can be a great independent company and will be “the next eBay,” and “one of the more successful startups of this generation.” According to eBay’s last earnings release, the company has $11.7 billion in cash or cash equivalents as of late June.
The love wasn’t just dished by Donahoe. Chesky says that Donahoe is the archetype of the world class CEO that can manage a successful company, and he relies on the eBay CEO as a core advisor to help make him a better leader and CEO.
As for other acquisitions, Donahoe said the marketplace giant and PayPal parent will continue to acquire new startups that are developing compelling technologies. Stay tuned.
5by Wants To Be Your Web Video Concierge, And It's Taking Aim At Phones And TVs, Too
I like to think we’ve all been here at one point: You’re bored out of your wits and rather than try to do something productive, you just spend hour after endless hour on YouTube. The problem that tends to come up in those situations is that, after a while, you just can’t find videos that strike your fancy any more. Tragic, I know.
As it happens, that’s exactly what Greg Isenberg, founder and CEO of a Montreal-based web video startup called 5by is trying to fix. 5by takes a decidedly different approach to how it finds and plays videos for you, though it may look a little familiar if you’ve spent some time mucking around with mobile music apps.
5by has been called the Songza of video, and it’s not hard to see why. Once you mosey over to the website, you’re greeted not by a smattering of videos but by a series of categories like “Blowing You Away” and “Killing Time.” Clicking any of those categories brings you to a slightly more granular set of options to choose from (think “Animals” or, my personal favorite, “Space”), and one more click takes you straight into a video (culled from YouTube or Vimeo) of 5by’s choosing.
When you’re in a video, you’re presented with a series of reactions: you can hit buttons to signify that you’ve laughed at the video being shown to you, hated it, or felt it tug at your heartstrings. And if a video just isn’t your cup of tea, there’s always a skip button to take you far, far away. While all that skipping or liking or OMG-ing is going on, 5by is quietly taking all of those little interactions and learning what you do and don’t like so it can serve you a video better suited to your tastes the next time around.
It sounds like a simple enough concept, and Isenberg says it’s working very well so far. He and the rest of the 5by team launched a very lean version of the site at the Launch conference held this past March, and in the days that followed, 5by attracted thousands of visitors who stayed on the site for about 12 minutes. These days, that average time on site has jumped to 19 minutes, and Isenberg says that the site has curated about 100,000 videos for its users to gawk at.
At this stage, all that content curation is handled by the small 5by team, with a little help from a curation algorithm designed to bring in high-value video from multiple sources. The algorithm knows to pull in videos from popular sources like Vice and Epic Meal Time and sort them into the proper categories for users to discover. But that process of curation won’t remain in-house for too much longer. Part of the 5by monetization plan hinges on a CPV model like the one StumbleUpon leans on, but Isenberg says companies are starting to sign on as curators and push their own videos to viewers who like video categories or certain kinds of videos.
It’s no secret that the line between video content and the ads that go in between those videos has grown awfully murky, and sponsored content on websites like BuzzFeed show that there’s a decent chunk of people who don’t mind mixing content and advertising. Now third-party curators can target certain types of users to receive videos and native ads (remember, 5by can figure out what you like and what you don’t) and Isenberg says Playboy has signed on to be the first one.
The thing that hasn’t eluded the 5by team is that, as enthralling as a leanback web video experience can be, there’s only so much leaning back you can do when you’re plopped down in front of your computer monitor. As far as Isenberg is concerned, the future of 5by will rely on branching out from traditional PCs. They’re working on an iOS app, and it ditches the web version’s category view in favor of a greater focus on how much free time you have to blow.
Isenberg also confirmed that 5by has already engaged in talks with two major television OEMs about the prospect of baking 5by into their forthcoming smart TVs. Why? Well, for lack of a better term, the YouTube experiences you’ll find on most smart TVs are generally pretty lousy. It’s still early days for 5by, but I’ve already found myself wasting more time there than I care to realize — if Isenberg’s cross-platform expansion plans pan out, we could all be in a bit of trouble.
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