TechCrunch
Shared.Com Takes On Mega, Dropbox With 100GB Of Free Storage Space
Share Media is a four-person, bootstrapped company that aims to take on Kim Dotcom. Their service, basically a way to drag and drop files and instantly share them with others, offers 100GB free with a file size limit of 2GB. As of this writing Kim Dotcom’s Mega has an upward limit is 50GB of storage and competitors are essentially in the same range.
Thankfully files shared on the service are not encumbered by any false download queues or “pro vs. free” speed reductions. You can grab this file without seeing ads if you so desire and the company is sharing 500 million files already. The UI is as simple as Crate’s and is aimed at the IT dev and the casual sharer.
Traffic is still slow but it’s slowly picking up. “We are taking additional time to understand the specific needs of our early adopters and making specific changes to accommodate suggestions from our first group of users,” said Florian Cervenka, CTO of the project.
“Shared.com is the prototype of our robust API that we are rolling out. Developers can essentially ‘roll their own’ cloud storage service and rapidly develop cloud storage apps,” he said. The team has worked in hosting for years, creating flixya.com and other storage-heavy systems.
“We still operate some of those sites. The volume we already are using allows us to purchase cheap hardware and bandwidth and to finance this project,” he said.
You can try the service out for six months with this promo code and they’re constantly looking for feedback so give it to them. Until then, I’m off to share my scans of 19th century postcards featuring semi-nude wood sprites.
Clear Channel Launches iHeartRadio Talk, Letting Everyone From Jimmy Kimmel To Joe Six Pack Be Heard
iHeartRadio is launching into the wide world of talk radio, with iHeartRadio Talk. Along with featuring content (which iHeartRadio calls audiosodes) from top national and local talk personalities such as The Huffington Post, Ryan Seacrest, Univision, and the Wall Street Journal, iHeartRadio will also allow any one in the world to upload their own audiosode through Spreaker.
Spreaker is a service that gives anyone, from musicians to producers to radio personalities, the opportunity to be heard, by uploading their audio to the service and broadcasting it to the world. iHeartRadio has developed a partnership with Spreaker to power the audio capture/recording/uploading of users content on to iHeartRadio Talk.
“We think of iHeartRadio Talk as a middle ground between WordPress and YouTube,” said Brian Lakamp, head of digital at Clear Channel. “Audio hasn’t really been explored when it comes to user generated content, and we want to be at the forefront of that.”
iHeartRadio Talk consists of three main pieces.
The first is show pages. Anyone who uploads audiosodes to iHeartRadio talk will automatically get a show page, to which users can subscribe and find out more information about the personality.
When users submit audiosodes for consideration, they’re first run through an editorial team to ensure high quality content. While iHeartRadio certainly doesn’t want to censor anyone, it’s a tough line to walk when there are plenty of people who will poop out possibly offensive, or simply worthless, content to the platform.
During this beta period, iHeartRadio will work to figure out the best editorial process for allowing audiosodes onto the service.
The second piece of the puzzle is the Daily Pulse, which is a customizable channel filled with all the hottest audiosodes for the day. When a user signs in, they’ll automatically be given a pre-set Daily Pulse, which they can then go in and customize to add their friends’ audiosodes, their favorite sports shows, etc.
Finally, iHeartRadio Talk offers a new way to advertise for iHeartRadio. “We have a huge opportunity to build out branded content, whether its DIY shows, automotive shows, or shows about fashion and cooking,” said LeKamp. “We can do this in a way that resonates with the brands but still offers high value content.”
For the time being, this is a beta launch. Still there are more than 50,000 audiosodes across 20 channels that iHeartRadio fans can tap into. Users can access the beta version of the iHeartRadio Talk service on the web or through iHeartRadio’s iOS or Android apps.
With Plans For The First ‘Programmatic Upfront' Event, AOL Pushes For More Automated Ad Buying
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has been evangelizing for programmatic advertising, where ads are purchased in an automated, data-driven way, usually through real-time bidding. Now the company plans to host what he says will be the industry’s first upfront event on Sept. 23.
Armstrong, along with incoming AOL Networks CEO Bob Lord and other company executives, discussed their plans at a dinner with reporters last night. On one level, it might seem a bit incongruous to hold an upfront event (where advertisers can make large spending commitments with publishers) for an ad-buying process that’s supposed to be real-time and technology-driven. Or as one of the reporters asked: If programmatic ad buying is so efficient, why hold an upfront at all?
From the perspective of AOL (which owns TechCrunch), there’s an obvious advantage to getting large financial commitments up front. But Armstrong said there are reasons for advertisers to take this approach too. First, it means they can incorporate their programmatic ad-buying into their corporate budget cycles. Second, it allows them to integrate the technology at a large scale. And third, it means they can get access to “corporate exclusives” — in other words, if a company knows that someone is going to be a major advertiser, they’re going to provide access to more resources like engineers.
In fact, Armstrong said AOL is starting to get approached by brands and agencies (four in the past week, apparently) that are looking to make upfront commitments of $50 million or $100 million in programmatic buying.
On the other hand, he said the company has also been met with large customers and seen then make “less-than-educated decisions about what programmatic was” so he felt it was important to hold an industry-wide event where advertisers can “sit, listen, and watch” — it sounds like the event’s goals, at least for this year, revolve as much around promotion and education as as they do around making big deals.
Armstrong and Lord repeatedly compared the their aspirations for the Programmatic Upfront to the Digital Content NewFronts, which over the past few years have become an important industry event. Armstrong added, “I would call this the technology upfronts,” because unlike the NewFronts or a traditional TV upfront, advertisers are “committing to tech platforms” rather than committing to content.
The Programmatic Upfront will be held on the first day of this year’s Advertising Week, and while none of the participants have been announced yet, the company is hoping to attract more than 150 attendees. Armstrong said it’s not meant to be an AOL-only event, and that he’s hoping that other big players like Google and Yahoo will participate too. And if this spurs other companies to hold their own programmatic upfronts, even better.
The event’s official theme is “Programmatic Explodes Creativity,” which is one of Armstrong’s main arguments — that by removing many of the manual, inefficient aspects of ad buying, programmatic technology can free the industry to be more creative.
That runs against a lot of the fears around automated at buying, and in another counter-intuitive argument, Armstrong and Lord suggested that it can be good for premium publishers, because it removes a lot of the inefficiencies and unnecessary middlemen. (An AOL slide distributed at the event suggested that due to these inefficiencies, publishers receive only $0.25 to $0.45 for each $1 of advertising spend.) So we might actually see prices for premium ad inventory go up, Armstrong said — not in formats that are “commoditized”, such as normal banner ads, but in areas like video.
London & Berlin - It's Time For The TechCrunch PitchOff For #DisruptEurope
London and Berlin, prepare yourself for a visit from TechCrunch at the TC Meetup + PitchOff events next week. We’ll be hitting Europe to see what it’s made of and to make sure you all know about TechCrunch Disrupt Europe. There will be great networking opportunities, and a battle to the death to see which entrepreneurs can dazzle and excite in under sixty seconds. This will be the (please now imagine a pre-wrestling voice) ULTIMATE TECH CITY STARTUP FACE-OFF!
PitchOff details:
- Participants interested in competing in the pitch-off will have 60 seconds to explain why their startup is awesome. These products must currently be in stealth or private beta.
Application form for London is here.
Application form for Berlin is here.
ONLY FILL OUT **ONE** APPLICATION.
Office hours details
- Office Hours are for companies selected for the Pitch-off, these 15 minute 1 on 1 talks will be held on the day of the event. We’ll hear about your company, give feedback, and talk about the best pitch strategy for the 60-second rapid-fire competition. More information on Office Hours will follow in a post on TechCrunch.
Pitch-off winners
- We will have 3 judges who will decide on the winners of the Pitch-off. First place will receive a table in Start Up Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in Berlin. Second Place will receive 2 tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Third Place will receive 1 ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt.
Venue in London
- Ground Floor – CAMPUS LONDON, 4-5 Bonhill Street, London EC2A 4BX
- Event runs from 3 PM – 6 PM on Monday July 29th, 2013
- We will de-camp to a local bar afterwards, sponsors welcome to support (email sponsors@techcrunch.com)
Venue in Berlin
- The Factory – Rheinsberger Straße 76/77, Berlin, Germany
- Event runs from 7 PM – 9 PM August 2nd, 2013
Questions about the events? Please contact: events@techcrunch.com.
How To Become A Sponsor
- For more information on sponsorship packages and to discuss becoming a sponsor, please contact sponsors@techcrunch.com.
And whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, dreamer or tech enthusiast, we want to see you at the event, so we can give you free beer and hear your thoughts. Come one, come all.
You city isn’t here? We’ll be planning more to come.
Video Texting App Glide Is Going Viral, Now Ranked Just Ahead Of Instagram In App Store
Video chatting app Glide is on a roll of sorts. In recent weeks this mobile messenger for iPhone and Android devices has been climbing the app store charts on both platforms, having gotten as high as #6 overall in the Apple App Store, and #1 in the App Store’s social networking section. Today, the iPhone app is ranked #16 in the U.S., Glide’s top market – just one spot below Instagram, according to AppData’s leaderboards. But on the iPhone App Store on the phone, it has actually bumped Instagram from spot #15 in the U.S.
Glide’s exponential growth appears to have taken off this June, when the viral nature of the app’s invite system began to pay off. The company claims it hasn’t paid for advertisements, or, as Glide Marketing Director Guy Gordon put it, “thank god we haven’t had to spend too much on [user] acquisition – all of our growth is organic and viral,” he says. (Glide currently has just $2 million in seed funding, and the cost to acquire a loyal app user has been anywhere from $1.29 to $1.50 over the past several months, according to mobile app marketing firm Fiksu.)
When we reached out to Jerusalem-based Glide, Gordon was the only exec available to speak because the company’s founders, Adam Korbi, Jonathan Caras, and Ari Roisman, were all traveling throughout the U.S., for various reasons. (Cough, fundraising, cough).
However, some of that “viral” growth may be manufactured, even if not directly paid for. App Store reviews are filled with users who had unwittingly spam-vited everyone in their address book to Glide. The app, by default, checks all your contacts which you then need to uncheck if you don’t want to send out invites to everyone. Plus, the pre-written message the app uses is something along the lines of “I’ve got something to show you on Glide,” making it sound like there’s content waiting – not just an invite to use the app. (You can edit this message, but that may have gone unnoticed.)
Private messaging apps like Glide are always walking a delicate balance between wanting to maintain a sense of privacy, and wanting to blow up big. This too often results in reports of address book spamming from users who pushed the wrong button, so to speak. Path, for example, has been guilty of this more than once, and even had its hand slapped by Facebook, which pulled its “Find Friends” access. Glide could be next if it’s not more careful. That being said, even a wonky invite system can’t keep sky-high valuations at bay, it seems.
But though there are more than a few complaints of the app’s overreach, there are many good reviews as well.
Where Glide Fits In
Glide’s mobile messaging app, or “video texting” app if you will, launched in March, and then later debuted its Android beta at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. The service, for those unfamiliar, can be described as something of a video-centric walkie-talkie, except that it not only allows for live video messages, it also lets you send video messages that can be viewed later on. That puts Glide in the mobile messaging sub-category that includes apps like Tango, which also offers video voicemail (among many other things), more so than it puts the app up against voice and video calling services like Skype or ooVoo, for example.
Recently, Glide made a move which could offer some competition to another group of video sharing apps, like Vine or Instagram, the latter of which, though known for photos, now does video, too. Responding to user demand, Glide quietly rolled out a new feature a few days ago which allows users to share their own video messages more publicly, if they choose. Links to the Glide message can be posted on Facebook or Twitter, or sent to others via SMS or email. The company plans to offer an embed code option in the future, as well.
To be clear, users are only allowed to publicly share their own messages, not those they receive from others. Gordon explains that Glide is being cautious with how this sharing feature is being implemented, because the company doesn’t want to risk its reputation as a private messaging service. “It does not reposition us as a video sharing site,” he says. “That’s a whole other category as far as we’re concerned…But we hope it will help in the viral growth and spread of the app.”
Anti-Facebook Backlash
While the addition of social sharing is notable, it may not be the biggest change the app is yet to see. Glide is also currently facing a deluge of requests from users who want the app to offer an alternative way to login besides using Facebook, which is the authentication mechanism the app currently offers.
Glide’s users tend to be young, ages 13 or 14 through college-aged, roughly speaking. And they don’t seem to care for Facebook.
“Despite the global domination of Facebook – everything thinks that’s the gold standard – we’ve been quite surprised by the animosity and the enmity that a lot users feel towards Facebook,” Gordon explains. “People write with righteous indignation – like, how dare we force them to use Facebook.” He says that Glide’s biggest drop off in terms of conversion rates between those downloading the app, then signing up is due to its Facebook-only nature.
The company has now committed all its development resources to building out an alternative to Facebook, or maybe even a replacement. The concern from Glide is that Facebook is going to pull its “find friends” functionality if the Facebook authentication mechanism gone, and given the situation described above, that’s likely a valid fear.
Whether Glide is the product of attempts at growth hacking, actual enjoyment leading to everyday use, or some combination of both, that’s something only the test of time eventually proves. For now, it’s worth at least keeping an eye on.
The company is planning to disclose additional metrics in a couple of weeks time, but Gordon says Glide is “well into the seven figures” on Google Play, in terms of downloads. (Google Play shows 1 – 5 million installs). And we already know it takes some 23,000 downloads per day to crack Apple’s top 50, as of late. Glide also has more Android users than iOS users – despite the app’s later launch on that platform, it now accounts for 60 percent of the user base.
If the company succeeds in scoring new funding, the plan will be to improve its localization support, and hire more developers for product improvements. Stay tuned.
Ubuntu Edge Smartphone Gets A Pledge Price Drop To Keep The Money Rolling In For That $32M Funding Goal
The Ubuntu Edge is the amazing future space phone of your dreams, which is why UK-based Canonical feels it needs $32 million to make the thing. The Ubuntu creator made some good progress in the initial hours of its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, and is now sitting at just over $4 million pledged, but to stoke the fire it took back its initial promise to up the entry-level pre-order price of the Edge from $600 to $830.
The plan at first was to up the price of the Ubuntu-powered superphone, which is somewhere between a grand tech experiment and a reference device, and it aims to be powerful enough to achieve true computing convergence and replace both smartphone and desktop. But the speed of pledges dipping seems to have encouraged Canonical to change its strategy, so it opened up a number of devices at the $625 dollar level, and also added $675 and $725 tiers. Each has 1250 devices total, with the $625 units selling out at a pretty fast rate already.
Once those are all gone, of course, it reverts back to the $830 level (unless Canonical once again decides to open up more less expensive options). The worry here is that after the initial bump, the Edge will hit a wall and won’t manage the rate of pledges it needs to reach its incredibly ambitious goal in the 29 days remaining in its funding campaign.
Canonical’s goal isn’t completely beyond reach – campaigns on crowdfunding sites including Kickstarter have raised ludicrous amounts of money in less time, like the Pebble, but that only raised $10 million in just over a month, and it was actually seeking about a tenth of that. The Edge sounds like it’ll be the best thing you can get in a mobile device when it finally does become a real, actual thing, but that’s not slated to happen until at least May 2014 per Canonical’s shipping schedule.
Crazy high concept device with huge price tag and relatively unknown mobile OS isn’t exactly a recipe for pre-order success, but the Edge is a mobile geek’s dream. The question is, will enough of those dreamers believe hard enough to raise $32 million in just under a month? Canonical’s clearly willing to give some ground to make that happen, but just how much it will take isn’t quite clear yet.
Nvidia Brings Kepler To Mobile, Offers Same Graphics Power As iPad 4 With One-Third The Battery Drain
At the SIGGRAPH conference going on this week, Nvidia has made a potentially huge announcement regarding the future of mobile gaming: the company is bringing its Kepler graphics architecture to mobile devices via its Project Logan next-gen mobile processor. Nvidia compares this development to the rollout of the first GPU, the GeForce 256, 14 years ago. Logan as a platform, with its Kepler GPU, jumps mobile computing ahead by the equivalent of seven years’ worth of advancement, says Nvidia.
Mobile devices haven’t had GPUs available with true, full desktop feature set support before now, Nvidia says. That includes things like better rendering and simulation techniques, like tessellation, advanced physics and anti-aliasing and the ability to calculate lighting effect rendering in a single pass. All of which is pretty technical, but ultimately means that a lot of the tricks and capabilities available to console gaming will now be brought to mobile devices.
Kepler is already in use in desktop GPUs, and in Nvidia’s desktop designs it can take on general purpose computing as well to help with the processing workload even when you’re not playing Call of Duty. Kepler on mobile can also offer this, which means that mobile apps featuring things like computational imaging, computer vision, AR or speech recognition would be able to benefit from the Kepler GPU and take advantage not only of its processing power, but also its power efficiency.
To demonstrate Kepler’s power, Nvidia released a video which showed a realistic human head model being generated in real-time. The demo itself isn’t new – it was shown off earlier this year on a desktop PC using Kepler. But this time around, the mobile Logan processor with Kepler is powering the rendering, which makes this a pretty stark proof of the kind of effect that Kepler could have on the state of mobile gaming, and mobile computing overall.
Many believe that mobile and desktop gaming are not on a collision course – each will have its place, and serve different functions owing to different graphics capabilities, control schemes and more. But with Kepler, Nvidia is showing that it’s delivering the technology to enable a further blurring of the line between desktop and mobile, and delivering it well ahead of when some people thought that might happen.
Here's The Live Video Stream Of Google's (New Nexus 7?) Announcement
What’s that? Too cool for our liveblog of the mystery* Google announcement this morning? That’s okay. I understand, I guess. [Sniffle]
If you’ve got some sort of super rad job (hurray, funemployment!) that lets you take a few hours off to watch a live stream of Google announcing some stuff, here’s the live video stream.
[* "Mystery" might be a bit of a stretch, seeing as Best Buy just leaked a ton of details on a brand new version of the Nexus 7 mere hours before Google's event is scheduled to begin. But hey — maybe it's a coincidence! And maybe Google has other stuff in store? Who knows! ]
Buffer Adds Custom Social Media Scheduling, Claims 850,000 Users, $1.5M Annual Revenue
Buffer launched 2.5 years ago will a simple but clever idea: an app that makes it easy to automatically schedule social media updates so that they are not only spread throughout the day — thus reducing noise — but will be published at the most optimum times, increasingly the likelihood that they’ll actually be seen.
It was an idea that caught on, seeing the startup go from 1,000 users in its first three and half months to an impressive 850,000 users today. That’s up from 600,000 users in April. And while not all of those are paying customers, Buffer says its now seeing more than $1.5 million in annual revenue. That’s pretty good going.
However, despite plenty of demand from users, one feature that the startup has resisted adding is custom scheduling; the ability to manually program when those buffered social media updates — Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin — will go live.
Until today that is.
The inability to custom schedule update, and instead focus on algorithmic/automatic scheduling, was what originally set Buffer apart from its competitors in the social media management space, while it also ensured that the product remained simple. That’s all and well and good, and it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t the right decision, but it also meant Buffer didn’t cater for the various use cases where manual scheduling might be required.
“You might be working on a marketing campaign, there is an event or launch coming up, you want to schedule a nice message for your friend’s birthday. Those are just a few of the amazing use cases people have been telling us about,” says the company, rather breathlessly, in a statement.
The way custom scheduling works is pretty simple. Whether you’re buffering your social media updates via the Buffer browser extension, Buffer website, Android app, and soon Buffer’s iOS app (once the update reaches the App Store), you simply hit the schedule icon and select the date and time from a mini-calendar and accompanying pull-down menu.
Custom scheduled updates are differentiated from regular buffered updates with a grey background for their timing.
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