TechCrunch
Bebo's Founder Michael Birch Says He's Bought Back The Social Network For $1M, Plans To ‘Reinvent' It
Another turn in the twisted life of social network Bebo, which has unfortunately gone in the direction of a downward spiral for much of the last couple of years: the site appears to have been bought back by its founder Michael Birch for $1 million. Birch originally sold the company to AOL (owners of TechCrunch) for some $850 million back in 2008, and has since been a part of the group that has tried to rescue it. He now says he wants to “re-invent” it:
We just bought Bebo back for $1m. Can we actually re-invent it? Who knows, but it will be fun trying…
— Michael Birch (@mickbirch) July 1, 2013
For a pretty tiny pricetag, this won’t be a case of “reinvent or die trying,” but it will be interesting to see if Birch can inject something new into the company, years after Bebo fell well behind the likes of Facebook and Twitter in the race among social media platforms.
The move comes about 7 weeks after Bebo filed for Chapter 11 voluntary bankruptcy protection, at which point it was put under the receivership of the Burke Capital Corporation, which has been handling an auction of its assets.
Confusingly, prior to that Chapter 11 filing, the company had been jointly owned by Criterion Capital Corporation, as well as a consortium of investors that include Birch and his co-founder wife, Xochi. It appears that part of the issue has been that the group was unhappy with how that co-ownership arrangement was working, and so was intentionally trying to move it into a sell-off state, starting in February of this year.
Birch’s strategy has been going to plan so far, but now comes the hard part: trying to figure out if there is any life left for Bebo in an overcrowded market.
We’re reaching out to Birch and other shareholders, as well as Burke Capital, and will update this post as we learn more.
Fly Or Die: Form 1 3D Printer
Early leader in the 3D printing space Makerbot may have just been acquired for $400 million, but we still can’t forget about the Form 1 3D printer out of FormLabs.
It started as a Kickstarter project, which received 6x its $100,000 goal in just one day, topping $1.4 million in one week. Since, we’ve had the chance to review it and pit it against the Makerbot.
However, the two are quite different:
The Form 1 shines a laser onto a metal surface through a layer of resin. Using a process of photopolymerization, the slices are laid down one after the other creating a solid object that lifts out of the resin as it is built. Think of the Makerbot as a stalagmite maker — the material is laid down on a platform — while the Form 1 is a stalactite maker where the object hangs from the platform that slowly moves up.
They also have different price tags: The Makerbot Replicator 2 costs $2,199 where the Form 1 goes for $3,299. However, Biggs found that the Form 1′s resin-based approach offered much more precision and a higher resolution result.
Two flys.
Even At $90 Firefox OS Phones Have To Get Apps Right To Battle Budget Android
The first phone running Mozilla’s Firefox OS phone goes on sale tomorrow in Spain. Mozilla’s nascent open web HTML 5 mobile platform has garnered considerable carrier support already, months ahead of any phones being launched, which just serves to underline the level of concern in the mobile industry about how dominant Google’s Android platform has become.
Smaller handset makers like ZTE and Alcatel are also unsurprisingly taking a punt on Firefox OS. What’s to lose? And with carrier pricing as low as Telefonica’s opening gambit of $90 (a price which includes around $40 worth of airtime for pre-pay customers) a degree of consumer uptake should follow — if only by gobbling up the remains of the feature phone market. As IHS Screen Digest analyst Ian Fogg tweeted today: “Now there’s no price reason not to own a smartphone.”
Feature phones still take considerable share in the emerging markets where Firefox OS is being aimed. And while Spain may seem an odd first choice to debut the OS the Spanish economy is having a very tough time of it at present, with unemployment riding high, especially among the young, so a budget smartphone is likely to find plenty of takers. In that crisis, Telefonica clearly perceives an opportunity.
BlackBerry’s low cost handsets have also traditionally done well with Spanish teens (and in emerging markets generally). So as that company puts its energies into higher end devices running its new BlackBerry 10 OS, there’s a gap opening up for another low cost smartphone to muscle in. Enter Firefox OS: perhaps the best chance yet for carriers to put a little clear blue water between the devices they peddle and Google’s Android at the low end.
How well Firefox OS performs on low end hardware will be key, as there are still question marks over HTML5′s ability to perform on mobile (Facebook famously switched back to native after failing to make HTML5′s performance stick), especially if you factor in the lower powered hardware Firefox OS is going for. These devices won’t need to be super slick, but they will need to be slick enough to compete with similarly budget Androids that are also constrained by their hardware.
After overall performance, app availability and performance are going to be essential. Apps like Facebook and Twitter have been optimised for Firefox OS already but Mozilla and its backers certainly have its work cut out to get in the game because Android has such a head start — and already plays at this budget price-point. ”The challenge for Firefox OS, is that Android is already v v cheap & has lots of content available too,” as Fogg noted via Twitter.
That said, so long as enough key apps (like Facebook) are available — and if carriers bolster those app staples by helping to foster and promote localised app content to differentiate the devices — there is still room to stand out at a feature phone replacement price. It’s a similar strategy Nokia has been deploying with its Asha devices — which aren’t fully fledged smart phones but add in smartphone-like features (such as pre-loaded social network apps and baked in social sharing) to beef up their appeal to budget buyers.
The big question is how easy is developing and optimising apps for Firefox OS? One HTML5 app maker, Atlas CT, which makes a turn-by-turn sat-nav HTML5 app (called EverNav) has been working on its app for two years. It’s optimising EverNav for Firefox — with plans to release it on July 15, hoping to be the first turn-by-turn sat-nav for the OS.
“We began working on EverNav even prior to Mozilla’s announcement on HTML5 based OS. We estimated that having a true cross platform navigation solution will be a major advantage for mobile advertising and also for end users everyday navigation,” the company tells TechCrunch.
“We initially began by adding very basic turn by turn navigation to a mobile webpage. Later on in the development process we added features for both navigation and mobile advertising until we got the full featured application we are releasing. Naturally, we still have a long list of features that will be added in upcoming versions.”
When Mozilla announced Firefox OS in February, EverNav’s developers began work on a dedicated version for the platform — so that’s about a six-month additional development window on top of time already spent on their HTML 5 app. Still, this is not exactly a lightweight app. The company says developing such a time- and location-sensitive app in HTML 5 has definitely been challenging, describing its functionality as pushing HTML 5 to its current limits.
“Things that are trivial in native application development such as utilizing the GPS or running parallel processes are much harder to be done efficiently in HTML5,” it says. “Just to give you an example, one of the hardest tasks we had was to play sounds at exactly the right time to match the driving directions. Something that is extremely easy when developing native applications became a challenge in HTML5.”
With those challenges and limitations in mind, it will be interesting to see how Firefox apps fly: whether they can stand up to real-world use and abuse, how they manage with budget hardware — and most importantly whether HTML5 can hold its own against native Android equivalents at the low end.
Origami Labs Acquires FamilyLeaf, A Competing Private Social Network For Families
Origami, the Y Combinator-backed social network for families which just launched to the public this month, has acquired competing service FamilyLeaf, another YC company. Financial terms of the deal are not being revealed, and for at least the next couple of months, FamilyLeaf is not shutting down. However, it will no longer be supported.
According to Origami founder Vibhu Norby, teams from both companies worked together to create an import functionality that will allow FamilyLeaf users to easily migrate their content over to Origami. They’re also being offered a familyleaf.com subdomain as another encouragement to switch services. (Note to other startups holding onto precious family memories and photos: transitioning plans, not abandonment, is exactly how it should be done).
Origami, which itself grew out of the ashes of a private mobile social networking service called Everyme, offers families a web and mobile platform to share photos and videos and post text-based entries, as well as make announcements and organize photos into albums. It’s a simple networking product with a clean design that ultimately aims to attract those who would have otherwise turned to places like Blogger or WordPress to start their own family blog.
FamilyLeaf, meanwhile, was similarly focused. It, too, offered a way for family members to share photos and messages with others, but it was also more deeply integrated with Facebook, allowing users to leverage their Facebook social graph to help them find family connections who could then be added to the service. There was also an SMS messaging service included in FamilyLeaf, but the company never followed through with native mobile apps like Origami now has.
Norby explains that the acquisition was made for a couple of reasons. “The family sharing space is essentially composed of a range of legacy ‘Web 2.0′ sites, and a huge array of mobile-only solutions,” he says. “FamilyLeaf was interesting to us because they were the only major new player in this market that took a modern and beautiful approach to connecting families like we do. When I first met the founders, their vision and their iterative learning process with FamilyLeaf blew me away.”
He says that when they made the offer to buy FamilyLeaf earlier this year, it was contingent on the FamilyLeaf team teaching them everything they had learned over the course of running the startup, which was launched early last year. Since March, the two teams have been collaborating on the transition, and Origami has taken much of the feedback from FamilyLeaf and applied it to their new product. Norby says the decision to keep the deal quiet until now has to do with the fact that they wanted to make sure they first had Origami and the importing feature ready before informing users of the acquisition.
FamilyLeaf’s full-time employees and co-founders Wesley Zhao, Ajay Mehta, Henry Liu and Brandon Paton have since moved onto other companies and other projects. Paton had exited prior to the acquisition. Mehta now works at Crowdtilt, as does FamilyLeaf’s community manager Mary Yap. Liu now works with YC-backed Verbling. Zhao has his own projects in the works, too.
“I’m personally a huge fan of the product and community Origami is building and think FamilyLeaf will fit in perfectly with them,” says Mehta, “but I didn’t want to join full-time and instead just wanted to help them out with the transition as an advisor.”
Norby says Mehta consulted for a couple of weeks, then Zhao continued on for a couple of months during the transition. None of the employees were offered full-time positions with Origami, however.
The startup had a small amount of seed funding from YC, Start Fund ($167K), and an undisclosed amount from 500 Startups. There were around 7,500 families registered on the service in over 150 countries, 35 percent of which were active. In terms of the financials, we hear that FamilyLeaf was able to return part of the cash they raised from investors.
Zoho Launches Mobile-Ready Survey Tool To Extend Online Business Platform
Zoho has released a new survey tool that allows customers to conduct surveys in customer satisfaction, education, human resources, marketing, marketing research and other areas using custom or pre-built templates.
Zoho Survey, available for web and iOS and Android devices, offers different question types, such as multiple choice, ratings and text boxes. After users create surveys using either the web app or the native iPad Survey Builder, they can preview their surveys to see how they display in a web browser or on mobile devices.
Zoho Survey also supports collaborative survey review. Customers can ask others to review the survey before publishing it. Collaborators can add comments to each survey question, which are synced so the survey creator can see the comments and edits.
The survey technology integrates with Zoho Contacts and Zoho Campaigns. For example, a user can email their Zoho CRM contacts via Zoho Campaigns. Users can also send surveys through MailChimp, which also works with Zoho Survey. The surveys can also be published to Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Zoho Survey offers a variety of built-in reports and interactive charts to make sense of the survey results. Users can also export survey data in standard formats (.cvs or .xls) for viewing in spreadsheets.
Zoho Survey is available immediately. The free edition includes unlimited surveys and up to 15 questions and 150 responses per survey. A standard edition is $19 per month with unlimited surveys, unlimited questions and up to 2,000 responses per survey. A professional edition is $180 per year with unlimited surveys, unlimited questions and unlimited responses.
Zoho has a long list of competitors in the survey space. In particular they are up against Survey Monkey, which earlier this year raised $794 million in funding.
Zoho Evangelist Raju Vegesna said in an email that Survey Monkey integrates with Zoho Campaigns so there is that acceptance that customers use it. In comparison, Vegesna said the value with Zoho Survey is the company can offer it with a complete package of its other business tools.
Trinity Ventures Promotes SaaS And Big Data Specialist Karan Mehandru To General Partner
Over the years, Trinity Ventures has made multiple investments in enterprise startups, with a bit of a focus on SaaS, big data and cloud computing. With that in mind, it’s promoting Karan Mehandru, a specialist in those areas, as a general partner in the firm.
Mehandru has spent the last three years with Trinity, joining in 2010 and leading a number of investments for the firm, including ScaleArc, Act-On Software, and RJMetrics. He’s currently on the board of the latter two companies and also works with Trinity portfolio companies ScaleArc, ShopIgniter, and Taulia.
Trinity Ventures was founded in 1986 and over the past 25 years or so has made investments in cloud and mobile infrastructure, digital media, SaaS and social commerce companies. While there’s a pretty even split between its consumer and enterprise business, the firm has recently made a number of investments in infrastructure and cloud portions of its practice.
With a specialty in topics like SaaS, big data analytics and storage, and next-gen data center architecture, Mehandru will fit right in. Before joining Trinity, Mehandru was at Scale Venture Partners, working on investments in SaaS, data center infrastructure, and enterprise software companies. Prior to that, he worked at companies like Synopsys and PMC-Sierra.
In a phone conversation this morning, Mehandru said there were three things that really stood out about Trinity for him: First, there’s a feeling of intellectual honesty where everyone shares a sense of responsibility for the firm. There’s also a more collaborative view on investing there, where all the partners are well-versed in the entire portfolio. And finally, it’s just a fun environment to be in, according to Mehandru. “You want to enjoy spending time with the people you work with,” he said.
With the promotion, Mehandru will join Trinity General Partners Ajay Chopra, Noel Fenton, Patricia Nakache, Larry Orr, Dan Scholnick, Gus Tai, and Fred Wang. Last fall, Trinity recently raised a new, $325 million fund, which was its 11th since being founded.
To Drive More Clicks, Twitter Is Testing A Popular Tweets History Feature
A little over a year ago, Twitter kicked off an initiative to experiment with different ways of making tweets more interactive — a strategy that has brought us Twitter cards with previews, and shortcodes for embedding tweets elsewhere. Today, one of the latest experiments is adding more data into the mix: a list of sites linking to where a tweet has been embedded.
For now, this looks like only a limited test. [Update: According to Mikko Hypponen, the outspoken chief research officer at F-Secure who first brought this to our attention, it looks like this is indeed a test: the feature has been turned off and on again today.]
I haven’t been able to see the links myself, but you can in a screenshot (shown here in a Twitter embedded tweet link:)
Has Twitter always shown where particular tweets are embedded on? pic.twitter.com/Th5y94omPZ
— Mikko Hypponen ✘ (@mikko) July 1, 2013
The links go directly to the pages on the sites, not to tweets.
I asked Twitter about what is going on, and a spokesperson pointed me in the direction of this blog post noting tests of “hundreds of variations of new features and designs.”
Regardless of whether or not this feature eventually rolls out to a wider public, listing where a tweet has been used is another sign of how Twitter hopes to continue to make its platform more interactive and less lean-back.
Getting the balance to tip further in the direction of engaged users will mean that Twitter can sell itself better as a broadcasting platform to advertisers hungry to go not just where registered users are congregating, but specifically to where users are logging on, paying attention, and clicking. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that many retweets of a link doesn’t necessarily translate to traffic to a particular page. It seems that many Twitter users, lured in by the fast pace of Twitter, are happy to use it as its chief source of information as well. Offering one more bit of context — in the form of the history of the embed — could be one way of Twitter — and would be users of this service — trying to further counteract that.
You can also see how a list of links may potentially also come to include a sponsor in the mix, taking advantage of the Google-Adwords-style keyword targeting advertising that Twitter has been rolling out.
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