TechCrunch
After A Week Of iOS Dev Site Downtime, Apple Creates Status Page To Show Which Services Are Back Online
It’s been more than a week and Apple’s developer website is still down, following what turned out to be a hacking breach (which may or may not have been caused by this guy). Late yesterday Apple emailed its developers with an update on the situation. It’s also created a status page showing which services have been restored — the vast majority of which remain offline at this point.
The developer update (embedded below) says the company is “working around the clock to overhaul [its] developer systems, update our server software, and rebuild our entire database”. Apple also notes that updates will be rolled out and software downloads restored, in that order, but does not give a timetable for the actions. The fact that Apple has created a status page showing which systems have and haven’t yet been restored in itself suggests the downtime is going to rumble on for a while yet.
Currently (as of a 4:48 PDT update) two services have been restored, according to Apple’s status page — namely iTunes Connect and Bug Reporter — but the remaining 13 services are still offline:
TechCrunch was tipped off to the update by an iOS developer who wished to remain anonymous. It’s unclear how much iOS developers are being hampered by the dev website downtime on average but the individual tipster did note that “the dev downtime has not hindered our development or iTunes store submission”.
Apple Working On Location-Aware Battery Management For iPhone
Apple has been tinkering with ways to make the iPhone better at managing battery life intelligently based on usage pattern, a new patent filing published by the USPTO today (spotted by AppleInsider) reveals. The application describes a system that learns your habits, evaluates how much power is needed between your usual charges and does everything it can to keep the phone running when you’re away from power sources.
The invention involves using location data combined with the kind of activity that a user is actually engaging in with their smartphone to give a more complete picture of when they need to be stingy with power and when they don’t. It’s a little like how your Mac can detect when it gets plugged in and then change its power profile accordingly, adjusting things like display brightness and time until sleep. The mobile version would be smarter, however, and even estimate the amount of time a user will be away from a power source and modify energy usage accordingly.
Thus when a person is at home, the phone will know that and not worry too much about longevity. But when a user is traveling long distances, the phone would adjust “characteristics” to compensate. Those power saving strategies could include limiting data fetch intervals, turning down display brightness, turning off open applications or even preventing some from running.
The automatic component of the system would involve the iPhone storing a number of regularly used charging points and estimating time between those points based on daily habits, but users could also directly input specific information, like how long they thing they’ll be away from power for instance. Users could also select from different types of power profiles, the application suggests.
In another neat trick, the system would detect what kind of source is being used to charge and adjust the charging rate accordingly – charging faster when it knows it’s in a car and only available to power for a limited time, for instance, but slowing down at home to decrease the effect on battery health.
Power management is one way to tackle the needs of battery-hungry users who often find that to be the limiting factor of their smartphone devices. In place of sophisticated new battery technologies, this could be what Apple turns to to make iPhones balance ever-increasing processing power and energy demands, and it is a logical development for mobile computing in general.
Trover Raises $2.5M Funding Round Led By Concur To Expand Its Travel Photography Community
Trover, an app and website for travel, culture and photography enthusiasts, today announced that it has raised a $2.5 million funding round led by Concur Perfect Trip Fund. The company’s existing investors, including General Catalyst Partners, Benchmark Capital and the company’s co-founder Rich Barton, as well as a number of its original angel investors also participated in this round. Concur’s co-founder and senior VP Michael Hilton will join the Trover board.
In total, Trover has now raised $5.4 million, though the funding story is a bit unusual. The company was founded out of the remains of Travelpost, a travel review site that shut down in January 2011. At the time, Travelpost still had $2.9 million of the roughly $9 million it had raised in the bank and that was used to fund Trover. Because of this, the Trover team refers to today’s round as its “Series One” round because they were essentially already working from Travelpost’s Series A money.
As Trover’s CEO Jason Karas told me, the service, which launched back in 2011, currently sees about 120,000 unique users across its iPhone app and website. Most of these, Karas says, are “amateur and aspiring travel photographers who love to socialize in the Trover community and learn from each other.”
The company plans to use the new influx of capital to accelerate the growth of its community and improve its apps and tools. Trover also today launched the latest version of its iPhone app, which offers a streamlined navigation and more ways for users to find each other and share information about their travel experiences.
At first, the service may feel a bit redundant in the age of Facebook and Twitter, but it’s got a very dedicated user community (I’ve been a member since it launched) and the photography on the site is surprisingly good.
Bigcommerce Raises $40M From Steve Case's Revolution Growth To Help SMBs Manage E-Commerce
Bigcommerce, a company that provides e-commerce software to online retailers and merchants, has raised $40 million from Revolution Growth, the firm founded by former AOL CEO Steve Case. As part of the funding, Case will join the Bigcommerce board. This new round will bring the company’s total funding to $75 million.
Launched in 2009, Bigcommerce provides a comprehensive SaaS for retailers and merchants to manage e-commerce online. Bigcommerce helps small businesses power anything and everything related to an online storefront from search to inventory to online payments to marketing and SEO. Features include multi-channel retailing, automated email marketing, inventory control, an online storefront, and more. The company has 35,000 clients and was profitable as of last year.
As founders Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper explain, for as little as $25 a month merchants can set up a storefront and make their first sale within 48 hours. As ecommerce continues to grow in an Amazon-dominated world, Bigcommerce wants to be the layer for SMBs to operate a various sales channels. So a merchant could sell on Amazon, and eBay but have Bigcommerce be the platform from which they sell these goods.
“Bigcommerce is the big equalizer,” Case said of the company. “Now every entrepreneur can have Amazon-like e-commerce capabilities, in hours – not months or years.”
This is Revolution Growth largest investment to date. Case explains further in an interview that he found Bigcommerce to be an attractive investment because it has the potential to be a billion dollar global platform. “This is the bottom of the first inning for Bigcommerce, and this next era is where we can be helpful with partnerships and more.”
Machaalani says that the company is focusing on making Bigcommerce the go-to platform for merchants to access all retail channels. The startup is also focused on expanding the developers building off the platform. Last year, Bigcommerce set up a $2 million fund to support third-party developers for submitting their integration and application ideas for Web, mobile or desktop apps that make use of the Bigcommerce API.
To date, Bigcommerce has taken 17 million orders and powered $2 billion in online sales. The company says revenue has nearly doubled each year. In 2013, the company launched over 30 new app integrations (now with over 100 apps like Mailchimp, HubSpot and SumAll).
The new funding will used to further expand the platform, product development, brand awareness and international expansion.
While it’s still early days in Bigcommerce’s future, it should be interesting to see if it follows in the path of newly public Channeladvisor, which provides ecommerce software to companies.
Business Messaging Startup Moped Adds Mac Desktop App To Its Arsenal
Moped, a startup based out of Berlin, is an app and platform that lets you send IM-like private messages which allows for photos, maps, you name it. It’s simpler than using an app like GroupMe for privately sharing in groups. It’s also integrated with Dropbox. The startup has now pivoted towards the business/enterprise and today launches – alongside it’s iOS and Android apps – a Mac desktop app you can download here.
This makes sense because while consumers are mobile, workers spend a a lot of time in the office. The mac desktop app simplifies the experience down to focus on private individual or group messaging. It also integrates Dropbox’s file chooser directly into the apps so you can access all your stuff from within Moped. (iPhone only today, coming to our other apps soon.)
You can now browse your entire Dropbox from inside Moped’s iPhone app, so no more copying and pasting file links into an SMS or email. Moped is also integrated with IFTTT to create Moped friendly recipes.
Given that in the “productivity/enterprise space,” you’ve got Files (Dropbox, Box), Tasks (Wunderlist, Any.do), Notes (Evernote), messaging hash’t really been addressed. Plus, “Team chat” products are too much about internal communication, but files often require sharing externally. Those are the sweet spots Moped is going after.
The Berlin-based startup has $1 million from SV Angel (Ron Conway), Lerer Ventures, Betaworks and Earlybird Capital.
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