TechCrunch
GoPro's Action Cameras Get More Social With iOS, Android App Update
It now takes even less time to show off your mad shredding skills. With the latest update to the GoPro companion app, owners of the popular action cameras can now view, edit, and, most importantly, share content from a smartphone or tablet.
The app is simple enough. It connects to GoPro cams through a WiFi signal, giving owners a large set of available tools. The cameras can be viewed and controlled from a smartphone or tablet, for one –this includes adjusting the dozens of available settings on each little guy. Owners can also view, manage and download content from the camera to their phone. From there, it can be shared like any other media. Upload the action to Geocities or FriendFeed like you would any other picture.
This update again shows how GoPro has long maintained its dominance in an increasingly competitive market. From offerings from major brands like Sony to upstarts building options for smartphones, the action camera market is getting awfully crowded. But GoPro has steadily released substantial updates to both its hardware and software to keep the products fresh. Combine that with the very aggressive targeted marketing and it’s clear how GoPro stays on top.
This update is available now and is compatible with the GoPro Hero3 and Hero2 cameras once updated to the latest firmware.
Hublished, The Platform For Expert Webinars, Goes Live
Hublished started as a twinkle in the eye of a few college students, but has now received more than $150K in seed funding, part of which came from Lawrence Lenihan, partner at FirstMark Capital and an NYU professor.
Lenihan taught a class that Ben Borodach, Hublished co-founder, was enrolled in, and he treated the entrepreneurial class like a competition, the winner of which would walk home with his salary for the semester. That company ended up being Hublished, a webinar-focused startup that helps brands and publishers connect with their audience.
In terms of getting users on the platform, Hublished’s strategy is simple. “All brands already have customers,” said Ryan Kuhel, co-founder. “We are simply asking brands who come onto the platform to leverage their existing customer base to engage further on Hublished.”
The company was recently accepted into the NYC Seed Start accelerator, an enterprise-focused accelerator in New York.
“There’s no place to aggregate everything,” said Kuhel. “You have Quora to establish thought leadership, SlideShare to share your slides, Eventbrite to register attendees, and YouTube to show your video later, but nothing that brings together every piece. It’s time to have a site dedicated to the webinar lifecycle.”
The team hasn’t figured out the exact business model, but they have declared that experts going to Hublished looking for expert content will never pay to be on the site, and the site will never show advertising. Today, the company launches with five brands, from lawyers to universities to marketing firms.
If you want to check out the site, head on over to Hublished.com and sign up.
Firefly, Which Handles Co-Browsing The Web For Customer Support, Partners With Olark
Firefly, which took funding from First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund, is partnering with YC-backed Olark to give customer support specialists the ability to co-browse the web with clients that might be having trouble.
Firefly has built a way for any website to insert a snippet of Javascript so that it can be “co-browsed” with someone else. “Co-browsing” is kind of like screen-sharing, except it’s limited to the browser and doesn’t include surrounding applications that might be run in the background.
The startup is laser-focused on co-browsing for customer support, in case a person is having trouble with a website or signing up for a service. A Firefly user might be able to help a lost customer by highlighting where to go in the browser, or even by taking control of the browser to help them fill out forms.
Olark is a natural fit since it’s also a customer support-focused startup: they build live chat widgets so specialists can talk to customers in real-time. Now Olark users will be able to see what their customers are seeing too.
Firefly, which was founded by a group of current students and recent grads from the University of Pennsylvania, built their co-browsing product so that it doesn’t need any kind of application download. Already, the startup is on track to make in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue this year and Firefly is deployed with about 6,000 different businesses, according to co-founder Dan Shipper. The Olark partnership brings Firefly 5,000 customers.
Bitly Hires Former AOL And Outside.In Exec Mark Josephson As Its New CEO
Bitly is announcing that Mark Josephson (pictured), who was most recently senior vice president of Patch Labs at AOL, has joined the link shortening and tracking company as its new CEO.
Peter Stern, who served as CEO for about a year, stepped down in March to “pursue other interests.” (Chief scientist Hilary Mason also left recently to become data scientist in residence at venture firm Accel Partners.)
Josephson joined AOL through the acquisition of local news startup Outside.In, where he was CEO. He told me he was excited to take the new job because of the “worldwide global scale” that Bitly has achieved, with 2 billion clicks on its links every month. He also noted that he’s known Bitly’s investors, including Beatworks’ John Borthwick and Sam Mandel, for a long time.
Josephson said one of his immediate goals is to help get the company’s new audience intelligence product out the door. According to Mandel, that product is the first illustrating a broader shift in Bitly’s strategy. The company has long had access to vast amounts of data, he said, but “the change in direction is that just having that data isn’t really enough — we need to put a layer of science and intelligence on top.”
So with the audience intelligence product, Bitly can give customers more data about “who is actually interacting with their content,” for example by telling them on the other types of content those users have clicked on. There should be new products for individual power users (as opposed to large companies) too, Mandel said.
He added that he has been working with Bitly for the past four months to improve product, execution, and sales, and to “bring back a little more of a startup culture and energy.” Mandel said Josephson was “our ideal candidate” for the CEO job.
Josephson left his position at AOL last week and will take a few weeks off before joining Bitly full-time. The company is also announcing that it has hired Andrew Beranbom, co-founder of Extole, as its chief revenue officer.
Social Media Dashboard Bottlenose Raises $3.6M
Bottlenose, a web platform to organize social media streams, has raised $3.6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by ff Venture Capital and joined by Lerer Ventures, Transmedia, Advancit, Stage One Capital, Social Starts, The Social Internet Fund and several angel investors. Including a seed round in 2012, this brings Bottlenose’s total to $4.6 million.
The last time we talked to them in 2012, Bottlenose was about to launch its public beta and had about 50,000 users. Bottlenose beta allows you to sync multiple accounts so all news streams are aggregated in one place. The free version is available online, and uses its sonar tool to make connections between tweets, mentions, hashtags, images and other media. CEO Nova Spivack says all new funding will go to scaling its engineering, sales and marketing operations in preparation to publicly launch its new product, Bottlenose Enterprise.
Bottlenose Enterprise expands on trend and real-time data analysis, with features to view audience response, sentiment, impressions, volume and correlations. You can list topics you want to track, and the program will automatically keep tabs on its activity, connections, media mentions and more. The goal is to help marketers and brand managers determine trends as they are happening and capitalize on popular topics and events.
“There are other tools that don’t really show you what’s going on in real time. They’ll show you what happened yesterday and in the last hour. It’s static,” Spivack tells me. “Other tools basically give you a lot of data, but you have to figure out what’s important. And we’re doing the next step, we’re helping you figure out what’s important.”
Spivack has been involved with several other startups, including EarthWeb, Radar Networks, The Daily Dot and StreamGlider. He says he has had experience building search engines, and helped in the original technology that eventually became the iOS personal assistant, Siri.
Bottlenose isn’t the only company that’s adjusting to meet the needs of real-time marketing. Another startup, Awe.sm, measures social media campaign effectiveness by monitoring media channels for advertisers. However, Bottlenose Enterprise is less about gauging effectiveness and more focused on getting ahead on the most viral trends. While the previous version of Bottlenose is comparable to social media managers such as HootSuite and TweetDeck, the new edition is focused on analyzing data from thousands of sources. Now it faces competition from media analysis platforms such as Networked Insights, which has raised almost $30 million in funding and has worked with companies like Samsung, MillerCoors and MTV Networks.
Bottlenose Enterprise is in private invite beta, but is scheduled to launch publicly in the fall. Spivack tells me its target customer base is Fortune 500 companies, of which they currently have dozens of users in pilot and as customers. Bottlenose beta serves about 100,000 professional marketers, and the enterprise version is being used by brands like Pepsi, FleishmanHillard, Razorfish and DigitasLBi.
Fab Lays Off 150 European Employees, But Its “Chief European Officer” Had Already Resigned
It’s been a tough week for Fab. Yesterday, word came that the company is being sued for trademark infringement and unfair competition by shoes and apparel site Just Fab, and today Fab is announcing over 100 employees will be laid off from its Berlin offices. The company, which just last month announced the close of $150 million in Series D funding, says the layoffs are meant to reduce redundancies. However, the company notes that it will have over 600 employees by the end of today’s actions, and is still hiring for more than 70 positions globally.
TechCrunch has also heard that Fab.com’s “Chief European Officer” in Germany, Maria Molland, had actually resigned at the beginning of June, though her LinkedIn lists her still as a Fab.com employee. We’ve also heard that the “over 100″ employees being laid off is actually closer to 150.
Up until recently, Fab had been essentially running two separate flash sales businesses, explains CEO Jason Goldberg in a blog post about today’s layoffs — one in the U.S. and the other in Europe. But alongside the news of the funding raise, the company had also announced that it was pivoting its business model (yes, again) away from flash sales, in order to focus on where more of customers’ dollars were being spent — in its online “lifestyle shop.” Fab had said that two-thirds of its sales were not coming from flash sales, so it had needed to rebrand. It seems Fab.com was really becoming known for home goods, which account for 50 percent of sales.
Goldberg basically says today that the flash sales model was difficult to scale, noting that Fab wanted to sell the same products globally to its customers. “That was hard to do with flash sales, as products would come and go from Fab daily,” he wrote in the post. “The nature of flash sales dictates that products are not kept in inventory and are thus very difficult to ship fast or for free. However, fast and free shipping is possible with an inventory-planning model,” he says. The company is now working toward that.
With the change to Fab’s business model, the company says it now plans to consolidate most of its merchandising, marketing and operations teams into a single global team in New York. It will continue to operate local customer service, returns, shipping and logistics, finance, IT and HR positions in Europe at both its Berlin and Eindhoven offices.
Meanwhile, the company is planning to double its engineering team and hire in its sourcing and planning departments.
More than 30 people in Fab’s Berlin office are being asked to move to New York, while others are being laid off immediately or asked to remain in a transitional phase. Seventy of the employees began their “garden leave” (the approximate German term for paid leave) this week. Fab says it had 696 employees worldwide, which means the layoffs accounted for roughly 15 percent of its current workforce.
Europe is a big market for Fab.com, and especially the U.K., which generates nearly 40 percent of its sales in Europe and is its fastest-growing market outside the U.S. The company is also going after Asia, which is why Fab brought on Tencent and Itochu as partners, which was also alluded to in today’s announcement.
Growing the business to a worldwide scale is Fab’s overarching goal here, which means it will have to make strategic cuts like this when needed. Goldberg had previously said that there are only four e-commerce companies in the world that are valued at more than $10 billion: Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, and Rakuten. He wants Fab.com to be the fifth. But to do so, Fab has needed to invest in enhancements to its supply chain, logistics, customer service, technology and merchandising, and it’s also now bringing more product design in-house. Fab expects to reach profitability in its U.S. and European operations by Q4 2014 or Q1 2015, Goldberg also noted a few weeks ago.
The layoffs also come at a time when some reports have been critical of Fab.com’s missteps, as well as its company culture, where, as Bloomberg found, “employees are asked to send e-mails in a certain font, use high-quality paper and always ‘be Fab.’” We’ve also heard that the culture at Fab has not been great. Goldberg fought back against Bloomberg’s claims, but many of the bullet points in that earlier post ended up confirming the original reporting.
Games Monetization Platform Playhaven Gets Into Handling Push Notifications
Playhaven, which works with mobile game developers to maximize the amount of revenue they earn from their players, is getting into push notifications.
Push notifications, or those little pop-ups or messages you get from games while you’re not actively playing them, are an important tool that studios use to keep their players engaged long after they’ve initially installed the game. They’re sometime egregiously used by studios that want to keep their players coming back to water virtual crops or defend from attacks. But when used in a targeted way, they can be quite powerful.
Playhaven says its messaging service lets developers target their users on about 11 different parameters from the time they last played the game to how much they’ve spent to their location and type of device.
“You can get as specific as you want,” said CEO Andy Yang. “You can reach people who have spent more than 10 hours in game, live in China, use an iPad and the first time they ever played your game was two years ago.”
Playhaven isn’t the only one that is building a business off managing push notifications. Portland’s Urban Airship, which has raised nearly $50 million in venture capital, is probably the biggest player in the space, although they cater to far more than game developers. They primarily focus on working with big brands.
Playhaven, in contrast, is a gaming-centric company, and they’ve built a business around helping studios retain and monetize their players through customized messaging and in-app promotions. This company had to pivot at least two times before finding this business model, but since then their network has grown to include 5,000 games, more than 520 million unique users and 130 million monthly active users.
The new push notification product can send players to specific in-game locations. The product is also free for now during the beta, and the company plans to price it tied to how well it performs in terms of generating revenue. Many other competing push notification services are priced around how many active users a developer has, not how actively they use the product, Yang said.
The company already has a handful of studios in the beta including Glu Mobile, FDG Entertainment, The Game Boss, Gamelion Studios, Noodlecake Studios, Turbo Chilli and Game Circus.
Unikey's Kevo Smart Lock Uses Bluetooth 4.0 To Let You Unlock Your Door By Touching It
NFC-powered door locks are already a thing, allowing owners of compatible smartphones (or NFC rings) to get into their house with a tap of their gadget. But NFC is not the only transfer tech capable of powering a smart lock (plus, if you have to dig your NFC phone out of your bag, that’s not necessarily much quicker than using a traditional key). Well, Unikey has come up with a smart lock system that uses Bluetooth 4.0 to turn compatible smartphones into proximity-sensitive keys.
Their version of the smart lock — called Kevo — doesn’t require the phone to be tapped to the lock. Rather the phone-owner only needs to touch the lock with their finger to gain entry. The crowdfunded Lockitron smart lock also uses Bluetooth 4.0 — but that device is also continually connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi, allowing owners to lock or unlock their door remotely from anywhere. Which may or may not appeal to you, depending on how paranoid/security conscious you are. Being Bluetooth-only and lacking a continuous hook into your home Wi-Fi, the Kevo smart lock doesn’t support a remote-unlocking use-case. But that does mean you can’t accidentally unlock your door when you’re miles away. The eKey owner has to be standing next to the door to lock or unlock it.
How else does Kevo differ from Lockitron? Its creators have crafted a slightly slicker looking and smaller smart lock — which also includes a visual coloured LED indicator, so you can confirm by eye that the door has been locked (or unlocked). Kevo’s lock also supports mechanical key rekeying. But it’s also a little more expensive (at least than Lockitron’s reserve price of $179).
As well as being compatible with iOS devices, the smart lock system works with a dedicated key fob, for people who don’t have a phone or other device capable of running the Kevo app (which is currently iOS only). Whatever you’re using as your eKey — i.e. the key fob or iOS device — can remain in your pocket; you only have to tap the lock with a finger to lock or unlock it, as demonstrated in the below video.
Importantly, Unikey says its technology is able to detect whether the authorized user is standing inside or outside the house — which is rather, er, key, in terms of preventing an eKey-less stranger from gaining entry from outside if there happens to be a nearby eKey inside. The company doesn’t go into detail about how they detect exactly where the eKey is located but say their technology is patent pending.
Aside from enabling people to get in and out of their home without fumbling around in a bag or pocket for their keys, the Kevo lock supports other features — such as the ability to share multiple eKeys, including single-use keys that can only work within a given period, and also generates a record of when your door is locked and unlocked, and by whom.
On the security side, eKeys can be deleted via a web portal or by signing into your account on another device — in case a smartphone or key fob is lost or stolen. And the system can send you notifications when the door is locked and unlocked.
Compatible iOS devices are the iPhone 4S and 5, the fifth generation iPod touch, and third gen or higher iPad and iPad mini. Kevo’s creators say they plan to make the app available for additional platforms once they are able to support Bluetooth 4.0. — noting that app development for Android and Blackberry is “currently underway”.
The Kevo lock is currently on pre-order, due to ship in September, with a price-tag of $219 from Kwikset in the U.S. The retail package includes one deadbolt, one key fob, two mechanical keys and two smartphone eKeys available for download. Additional eKeys can be provisioned via the Kevo app.
The Transit App Launches On Android, Will Find Out If Users Need A Tool Beyond Google Maps
Montreal-based startup The Transit App is expanding its mobile domain after a strong showing at the Founder Fuel demo day earlier this month. The app offers real-time transit directions, notifications and route planning, and on Android brings most of the features from its iOS counterpart to devices running Google’s mobile OS, with full feature parity planned to arrive in earnest.
The Transit App offers a great experience for regular commuters looking to check schedules and stops for their regular and nearby bus and subway stops in major cities around the world that support open data initiatives. Transit App founder Sam Vermette explained in an interview that more and more companies are realizing the benefits of making that data public, since it means outside sources can help them develop insight on what needs changing with their own transit systems. Mexico City and Paris have recently opened up their data, which enabled Transit App to add them to their database.
“We’ve been working on it for the past two months, and we’re really excited to see how it’s received,” Vermette said. “The fact that Android already has Google Maps pre-installed on the phone is definitely going to give us a good idea of what it’s like to compete on a platform that already has a great poly-transit solution.”
That’s important as Vermette is anticipating that Apple will introduce transit directions to its own mapping app after acquiring HopStop last month. iOS and its lack of native transit directions in the Apple Maps app have helped propel The Transit App to some impressive early milestones, but it’s one thing to capitalize on a huge gap in a native platform offering, and another to compete with a built-in, widely respected transit direction service.
Vermette believes that what his company offers is something that’s different enough from Google Maps to attract an audience of dedicated commuters, however. Transit App is designed from the ground up for people who use public transit daily, and surfaces immediately useful information right when you launch the app. That’s very different from how transit works in Google Maps, for instance, which mostly is about route planning, or with Google Now, which surfaces nearby stops but not necessarily the ones commuters are looking to use.
The Transit App is free to use on Android, and supports a wide range of devices, which Vermette says is one of the advantages of expanding to Android, as the user base of Android devices covers a wide range of demographics vs. iOS. At launch, the Android version lacks real-time tracking of bus and train position, but that and other features from iOS will be coming soon, as Vermette said getting the app up and gathering feedback was top priority for his startup’s small team.
Facebook Announces New Mobile Game Publishing Effort
A few weeks ago, we reported that Facebook was experimenting with becoming a mobile games publisher by offering distribution to studios in exchange for a cut of revenue.
Today, Facebook is formally announcing that effort at the Casual Connect conference in San Francisco and they’re putting a call out for developers that are looking to participate. They didn’t disclose the revenue share they’re asking for.
The company says its publishing experiment is “a new pilot program to help small and medium-sized developers take their mobile games global.” The thinking is that it’s become prohibitively expensive for new mobile developers to find an audience as the top grossing charts have become a lot more stable over the last year. With more than 800 million mobile users every month and more than 260 million people playing games on Facebook, the company says it’s in a unique position to help developers target high-quality gamers.
Already, they’ve racked up about ten developers including educational game maker Brainbow, Kiwi (which said it just raised $9 million led by Sequoia Capital yesterday) and the U.K.’s Space Ape, which is run by veterans of social game maker Playfish, which sold to EA for at least $275 million in cash.
While sources hinted to us that the program was really for indie developers, who have fewer resources to compete with the multi-million dollar marketing budgets of big studios, there are a few larger ones in the program. Gameloft, which is a publicly-traded French gaming company worth $652 million, was also in the program with a game called Kingdom & Lords.
Facebook is embarking in mobile app publishing at a time when it is trying to figure how much revenue it can wrest from the app ecosystem it supports with access to the social graph and ads. The company said 41 percent of its advertising revenue in the most recent quarter came from mobile platforms — or about $656 million. This is up from virtually nothing in the same quarter a year ago, when Facebook only started to turn on sponsored stories in the mobile news feed. If you annualized that, Facebook’s mobile ad business is now worth at least $2.6 billion per year.
Yet, the company hasn’t been able to tap into the rich in-app purchase revenue that game developers generate on Android and iOS. That’s because Apple and Google both control the world’s two major smartphone app stores and already take a 30 percent cut on digital transactions. So asking for a revenue share up-front in exchange for distribution through ads is a way of indirectly tapping into this.
Facebook’s thinking is that publishing is a very, very old model that goes back to the world of console gaming, so it’s a structure that is already familiar for gaming studios. In the console era, a big gaming company would market, distribute (and often edit) games from smaller studios that lacked the resources to promote their work. Facebook isn’t going to be hands-on with the content of the games, but it will help with ads and analytics.
Grid, An App That Helps You Organize Ideas And Projects, Announces A Seed Round From Jerry Yang, Phil Libin And Others
Grid, an “Excel minus the equations” app that helps you plan and organize more effectively and beautifully, announced today that it has raised a seed round. The app, made by a former Microsoft Excel designer, is an interesting take on the way many people use Google Docs or Excel spreadsheets.
Investors in the round are Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote), Jerry Yang (founder of Yahoo), Yuri Milner (founder of DST Global), Innovation Endeavors, Founders Fund Angel, General Catalyst, Dan Rose (VP of Business Development at Facebook), Joshua Reeves (CEO of Zen Payroll), Jared Friedman (Founder of Scribd), John Suliman (Managing Partner at Step Partners), and Salesforce.com.
While Grid founder Josh Leong tells me he raised the round shortly after finishing Y Combinator Summer 2012, he didn’t announce the round until today. Terms of the round, including the amount raised, were not disclosed.
Leong says the money will go toward engineering talent, as the team is currently Leong and three engineers. He adds that users will probably see monetization features, likely a premium version available on a subscription basis, by the end of the year.
We covered Grid when it launched last summer in beta, but the version that went live in the App Store a couple of weeks ago looks much more user-friendly. You can see a video for one of Grid’s most practical uses, planning the logistics of a trip with friends, below.
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