TechCrunch
Authy Makes Using Two-Factor Authentication Easier By Connecting Your Phone And Mac Over Bluetooth
Authy, the Y Combinator-backed security startup that aims to make two-factor authentication as secure and easy to use as possible, launched a new product today that makes using it quite a bit easier. Authy now lets you connect your phone and Mac (Windows coming later) over Bluetooth to get your authentication code from its app without the need to type it yourself. Authy simply puts your code into your computer’s clipboard and all you have to do is paste it into the right form to log into sites like Gmail, Dropbox and others that support two-factor authentication.
The system, Authy founder Daniel Palacio told me, uses Bluetooth 4.0 low energy to ensure that this won’t drain your phone’s battery. The main idea here is to remove even more of the hassle of using two-factor authentication. The Authy team believes that while users are often aware of the (greatly) enhanced security they get by using technologies like this, the complications that comes with using Authy, Google Authenticator and similar tools often keep them from using them.
To get started, you simply install Authy’s desktop tool and then pair your Mac with your phone. Then, whenever you need a code, you just open the OS X desktop toolbar, select the site you want to log in to and your code is automatically copied to your clipboard. Users, of course, can also still just type in the codes from their phone if it isn’t paired to the computer.
To ensure that nobody can intercept the communication between the phone and computer, Authy uses elliptic curve cryptography to encode the data. This, Palacio said, is faster than using more standard cryptography schemes over Bluetooth and still provides a very high degree of security.
In the near future, Palacio told me, users will be able to skip pasting their authentication codes into their browsers and Authy will just do this for them if the phone is connected to the computer.
After almost exactly a year on the market, Authy now protects more than 100,000 accounts, and the company says it’s talking to a lot of enterprise customers and potential partners to bring its technology to more people in the near future.
Yahoo Acquires Lexity, Will Keep Ecommerce App Platform Running But Rebrand It
Yahoo has just acquired ecommerce app platform Lexity, a startup founded by former employee Amit Kumar. Lexity says all services will remain running, but it will eventually be renamed with Yahoo branding. This isn’t just another talent deal. The startup, formerly called Vurve, had raised $5.7 million to help merchants build apps for customer acquisition, retention, and monetization.
Lexity’s flagship Lexity Live app would analyze a merchant’s store and provide insights about how to improve sales and other metrics. The company writes that “All Lexity products, services and initiatives will transition seamlessly and get even better, faster and stronger.” This support includes integrations with Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and other ecommerce tools, as well as developers building on the Lexity platform. There are also no plans to change Lexity’s pricing model.
AllThingsD reported last week that Yahoo was eying the startup for its 19th acquisition since Marissa Mayer became CEO. Terms of the deal weren’t immediately disclosed.
The startup explains its progress to date, saying “Four years ago (to the day!) we founded Lexity with the goal of helping small businesses succeed. Since then, we’ve built an amazing set of simple, affordable and effective apps―some our own, some by our developer partners―and made them available for all merchants, including those hosted by our ecommerce platforms partners. Today, we serve tens of thousands of customers across 114 countries.”
Lexity has a detailed FAQ about how the transition will impact its customers.
Unlike its other recent buys which have mainly been talent deals designed to reinvigorate Yahoo with fresh blood, it will actually continue running Lexity. That means it will have to find an intelligent way to integrate it. That might mean convincing Lexity merchants to buy ads through Yahoo or run their blogs through Tumblr. Either way, Yahoo’s scope gets a little bigger today, and the company gets a bit more complicated for Mayer to run.
RealNetworks Gets Serious About Social Casino Gaming With $15.6M Slingo Acquisition, New Sweepstakes
RealNetworks, a Seattle-based publicly-traded company that runs RealPlayer and has a gaming arm, is digging into social casino games with a deal to buy Slingo for $15.6 million. It’s also launching a new kind of casino game that involves a $100,000 sweepstakes called Gamehouse Casino Plus.
The two moves are meant to revitalize RealNetworks’ gaming business, which brought in $13.9 million in the quarter ending in March of this year.
Slingo is a combo of bingo and slots and has more than 4.5 million people monthly active users on Facebook, plus more on mobile platforms and on physical slot machines in casinos. The game launched on Facebook back in February of last year, and reached a peak of more than 50 million monthly active users. It also came to Android and iOS through Slingo Supreme, a paid app. The physical game, which is in Slingo-branded slot machines, is played in more than 300 casinos in the U.S. and RealNetworks says that more than $1 billion Slingo-branded tickets have been sold through other lottery games.
“Real money gaming in the U.S. is not going to become a mainstream thing anytime soon,” said RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser. But he said he believed that studios can still innovate on the social casino genre, which has become increasingly competitive over the last two years.
In Gamehouse Casino Plus, players play your typical casino games — like slots, video poker, blackjack and roulette — but they also win tickets to participate in a $100,000 sweepstakes every month.
Backed By A16Z, Google Ventures And Others, Le Tote Is A Personalized Fashion Stylist For Everyday Wear
There are way too many instances when I purchase a clothing item, wear it once and then leave it neglected and relatively unworn in the back of my closet as I have moved on to the newer, shinier, trendier item. Le Tote, a new Y Combinator-backed startup, is launching to let shoppers like me have my cake and eat it, too. Le Tote is a fashion rental service for women’s apparel and accessories, but with a twist.
The startup differs slightly from models like Rent The Runway, in that it operates on a subscription model, and focuses on providing personalized clothing for everyday wear versus special occasions.
Here is how it works: customers fill out a style profile asking about style tastes in clothing and jewelry, sizing and more. Then a Le Tote stylist chooses three garments and two accessories personalized to the style of the customer that arrive via mail. The customer can keep the items as long as they like, wear them as much as they want, and can even purchase one or more of the items. Le Tote will provide a pre-paid box to return the clothes so all the customer has to do is drop the “tote” in the mail.
Once the items are returned, a new tote is chosen and mailed. This happens as often as the customer likes, at a cost of $49 per month, plus any costs for the clothes you keep.
Founders Rakesh Tondon and Brett Northart tell me that the clothing is priced moderately, with dresses around $50 and shirts priced at $30 (these items are discounted). Jewelry, scarves and belts cost from $10 to $30. While no cleaning or ironing is required for returned clothing, you can purchase an insurance plan that will cover any stains or tears on clothing. Additionally, you can browse through hundreds of clothing items and accessories on Le Tote’s site and add it to your closet to be sent in the next shipment, and also favorite the item so the startup’s stylists will put similar items in your totes. The more you interact with the site and the service, the more personalized your “Le Tote” will be.
Another point worth noting — Le Tote will clean all clothing, and polish jewelry and resend this to other customers (as long as the quality has remained), so you may not be receiving an item that is 100 percent brand new.
Le Tote launched its service nine months ago in private beta and already has more than 1,000 paying subsribers and a wait list of more than 18,000. The company sends out over 100 totes a day to customers in 48 states. The startup has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Y Combinator, the YC-VC fund, 500 Startups, Andreessen Horowitz, Lerer Ventures, Google Ventures, and several angels.
Startups applying the subscription, e-commerce model have had their fair share of troubles over the past year, but Le Tote could be on to something interesting. Combining the rental aspect of the clothing, with styled picks is compelling enough that women may feel like they are getting a good deal on customized styling without the Bloomingdales or Neiman Marcus sticker price. Le Tote isn’t the only startup to try to tackle this space. JewelMint and RocksBox are also offering a similar model, but the services are both focused on jewelry.
E-Commerce Platform StackSocial Redesigns Site, Expands To Gaming And Design Products
StackSocial, an e-commerce platform that provides its users with discounts and special offers on software and hardware, has launched its redesigned site to display increased inventory and help users discover products more easily. CEO Josh Payne tells me in the coming weeks the company will implement more community features, such as the ability to “want” or “heart” a product, as well as add gaming and design products to its catalogue.
While there are several other services that offer deals through bundling, such as NimbleCommerce and AppSumo, StackSocial is focused specifically on technology. This specific niche is especially handy for reaching a larger consumer base through related publisher partners. Payne says he expects to see sales from partners reach 80 percent in the near future. Several publisher partners are also focused on gaming and design, which explains the expansion into selling those products.
A large challenge facing StackSocial is maintaining consistency in users. The startup has over 425,000 registered users across all its sales platforms, which isn’t a huge amount considering its potential customer base, and the fact that customers are coming in from more than 20 sources.
“One of the ways we are going to look to scale is by having inventory that persists, as well as having inventory that’s more self-serve from vendors,” Payne says. “Just as companies like Gilt and Fab are beginning to evolve into more of a marketplace as opposed to a flash sale type of model, I think we are beginning to do something very similar.”
The company has also announced a partnership to sell products through Apple-centric blog TUAW, which is owned by AOL. While Payne says it wasn’t a part of the original plan, the startup sells merchandise through 24 publishing partners, which accounts for about 50 percent of sales. Each publishing partner uses a StackSocial-powered platform to sell related tech gadgets at a discounted price. Readers get direct access to relevant products, and publications receive 30 to 50 percent of product sales. Partners include Cult of Mac, Digital Trends, 9to5Mac, VentureBeat and more.
“If we don’t have any differentiator between ourselves and say, Amazon for instance, there’s not much of incentives for a user to purchase from us. So we’re really looking to [provide] those unique, trending, maybe independently developed products that not everyone has heard of yet,” Payne tells me.
Founded in 2011, StackSocial has over 400 affiliate partners and 330 vendor partners, and raised a seed round of $800,000 in 2012.
Canopy Launches To Make Amazon Shopping More Social, Shareable And Beautiful
I’m an unabashed Amazon addict, but I’m not thrilled about the cluttered and unappealing visuals on the site. A new startup called Canopy with a team split between Toronto and San Francisco aims to vastly improve the Amazon window shopping experience, with a Pinterest-style sharing and networking experience that keeps the focus on commerce and enables users to actually buy the things they find with a minimum of fuss.
Canopy allows users to see product recommendations from other users, or to add their own via simple copy and paste of an Amazon link or with the help of a handy Chrome extension. Canopy then does a nice job of automatically formatting the product for a nice clean presentation like you might see on more design-focused marketplace sites like Fancy.
New members can follow their friends, and automatically follow an editor account when they sign up so that they aren’t greeted with absolutely nothing. The editor account is maintained by the founding team, and focuses on providing a human-curated collection of interesting products to highlight what’s possible on the platform. Users can also create their own collections, and recommend items to other users.
Early on in product development, Canopy focused on recommendations, but recently made it possible for users to add things to collections without having to also recommend it. That makes it easier to curate general lists of a type of item, say camping gear for instance, and still adds the benefit of allowing a user’s friends to recommend that product for them. This can inform buying decisions, and make Canopy about soliciting reviews and recommendations as well as helping users offer them up to others.
Canopy is invite-only for now, but there’s a good reason for that, according to co-founder Daniel Kaplan. “We still do want to manage the quality of the products on our site and keep things controllable in terms of how many users we have and what kind of information we’re tracking at this stage,” he said in an interview. Canopy’s intent isn’t just to be an Amazon re-skin; it’s about curating the now massive ecommerce site, and for now controlling membership helps further that aim. Asked why Canopy stuck to just Amazon as a source for its product recommendations, Kaplan explained it’s about keeping things consistent for users.
“[Limiting to Amazon] means not everything sold on the Internet can be recommended on Canopy, but it also means that we can be confident that when someone finds something they love on Canopy, it’ll be super easy for them to buy it,” he explained. “Competitors that allow users to post items from anywhere on the Internet (like Svpply, Pinterest, and Wanelo) have limitless catalogues, but this has some frustrating downsides. You can find an amazing product on Pinterest, for example, but if the link is broken or it’s sold out on Etsy, you come away from the experience disappointed.”
Amazon’s Affiliate program supplies Canopy with its revenue stream, and that’s going to provide plenty of fuel for it to grow. The startup notes that Wanelo has that as its primary business model, for instance, and recent valuation puts that company’s worth at around $100 million as of February.
Canopy has lots of new features in find that should help with user and product discovery, and with highlighting both user-generated and Canopy-curated collections, the team tells me. They’re definitely combining some hot current concepts in online shopping with sound design principles, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes next in terms of setting the site even further apart from similar, more established competitors.
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