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Sourcebits-Incubated Twine Launches On iOS And Android To Flip The Mobile Flirting Game On Its Head
Sourcebits, a young mobile development house, captured $10 million from Sequoia and IDG in 2011 for its expertise in developing custom mobile, web and cloud solutions for businesses. Sourcebits has developed hundreds of apps for a range of companies, from Fortune 500 players to startups, including Night Stand HD, Apocalypse Max, FunBooth and Robokill.
Since then, a team within the strategy and design firm split off to begin working on a project called Twine, which essentially sought to create a better mobile solution for flirting and meeting new people. After a year in development and looking to capitalize on the growing popularity of “people discovery” apps like Highlight and mobile flirting apps like Tinder, today Twine is officially bringing its “ice breaking” app to App Store and Google Play.
Apps like Omegle have taken off among young people, because they people who are comfortable with these media to meet strangers, chat with them, and quickly move on to the next conversation. Essentially, it’s anonymous, serial chatting, if you will, a spin on the same principle behind both Chatroulette and Airtime. On the other hand, it’s an extension of mobile chat and texting experiences like WhatsApp, Viber and Rounds, a class of apps that has become extremely popular among young people in particular.
But Twine differs from these in that it’s tackling the “new friend discovery” experience, anonymously matching you with strangers around you, while attempting to remain spam free. The second big differentiator is that Twine is actively curating its user base in order to achieve a 50/50 balance of males to females using the app.
The reason for this is that men tend to be more active users of flirting and dating apps, so the women who are using whatever platform tend to get bombarded with texts, messages and so on. Women also tend to be more selective, while men cast their dating nets wide, so it leads to a disproportionate amount of women not only getting blown up with spam, but rejections and broken-hearted suitors. Round and round that goes, until everyone gets fed up and leaves.
Twine keeps the ratio even and, a la Tinder, puts the focus on chatting and flirting with new people, not dating. It’s designed to be casual. The app also uses an algorithm that matches you with an anonymous chat partner based on your interests and proximity to those users — the idea being to create the most compatible local connection so that you go meet the person in real life if you happen to like them and hit it off.
Twine gathers your “likes” and interests from Facebook, matching you to the closest fit. You can immediately begin chatting, and continue the conversation as long as you want. However, unlike Tinder, their profile picture is blurred so that you can’t see exactly what they look like, the idea being to keep the focus on the chat and getting to know the person — not the blatantly superficial. If you like them, you can hit a button asking them to reveal, if they agree, it will then un-blur their picture so that you can see what they look like.
The idea, again, is to focus on connecting first, not on engaging based on a profile photo, offering users features like its so called “I.C.E.,” which parses the interests of you and your Twine match, generating unique questions you can send to them to get the conversation flowing. For example, if you’re both Beatles fans, the app might suggest “What’s your favorite Beatles song?” to help break the ice.
Twine also limits the number of matches that you can make and receive per day (up to six) in an attempt to ensure that users don’t get pestered with spam and in an effort to have the matches they create result in more meaningful conversations and connections. If you get bored of talking to a person, you can ask Twine to match you to a new person, but again, you only get a fixed number of matches per day — three inbound and three outbound. (That means you can hit the “Twine” button three times yourself, while you may end up as three other peoples’ match as well, if that makes sense.)
That puts Twine in stark contrast to Tinder, which is all about quickly flipping through photos and passing quickly from person to person until you find someone you’re interested in — it’s more like mobile speed flirting. Twine wants you to have some of those features, but to actually dig in, too.
The ice-breaking question auto-generator is a cool feature, but Twine is going to have to offer more incentives. Even if you really hit it off with someone in chat, people use these kind of tools because they’re bored or they want to flirt with someone, and there’s only so much talking you can do with complete strangers before you’ve decided whether it’s a waste of time or a match. I could see people easily using up their three matches and being annoyed when they don’t have the opportunity to find more, especially when there’s a ready-made mobile community that allows them just that.
Also, the cool thing about apps like Rounds is that they allow couples and friends to co-browse together on their phones when in two completely different locations. They can play games interactive games together, browse the Web simultaneously, doodle on whiteboards, send virtual gifts and video chat. These tools are all missing from Twine in its first release, but could be huge additions to the app to add more stickiness and potential engagement to the user experience.
The startup says that a few of these capabilities will likely be coming in the next version of the app and, because Twine is free, virtual gifts could provide a future opportunity to monetize. Or, the company says, it might also consider creating a kind of Twine token that users can buy and then cash in to receive more matches, if they go beyond their first three.
With how popular Tinder has proven to be, it wouldn’t surprise me if people (especially younger users) just flat out prefer the more image-based (or superficial) dating and flirting experience on mobile. But Sourcebits and the Twine team have clearly designed this to be a direct response or counterpoint to mobile dating experiences like Tinder. So, for those who are looking for a little bit more meaningful chat and flirting experience, Twine could be it by striking a good balance between the two.
Plus, in a flirting marketplace like this, there needs to be an equality of supply and demand. The more users, the more opportunity Twine has to match you with someone you’ll actually enjoy talking to and connecting with in a mobile chat room. That’s going to take time, but at the very least, with a run of successful apps under their belt, Sourcebits is a strategy and design firm that knows how to design a good mobile app. For that reason alone, and based on the amount of demand there is for mobile dating and flirting experiences (and how much room even popular apps like Omegle have left in the quality department), Twine is worth checking out.
Yes, The iOS App Store Still Makes Developers More Money
If App Annie’s report released today detailing downloads and the revenue situation for developers on iOS and Android sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The company had found in April that even though the Android app store was growing at a faster rate, the iOS App Store led in terms of monetization – earning around 2.6 times more in app revenue in the previous quarter than Google Play. Today’s number? 2.3x.
In other words, same stuff, different day.
This news comes at a time when Android app downloads have now topped iOS app downloads by 10 percent. With Android now the world’s leading smartphone platform by market share, it’s interesting to see how far it still has to go in order to take the lead in terms of revenue.
Today’s report also noted that several emerging markets stood out this past quarter – Brazil, Russia India. Brazil climbed two spots in the list of top countries on Google Play in Q2 2013 to join Russia and India in the top 5.
Meanwhile, Russia climbed three spots on the iOS App Store in Q2 2013 (up 6 spots since Q2 last year) now making it the only other country besides the U.S. in the top 5 countries by downloads in both the iOS App Store (#5) and Google Play (#4).
The U.S. and China remain the top two markets by downloads, and accounted for around 40 percent of downloads in Q2 2013.
China’s impact on the market was also felt during the quarter, with two of its largest Internet companies, Tencent and Baidu, joining Apple and Google in the top four publishers by non-game downloads on iOS. Tencent arrived in this list this May, and Baidu in June.
On Android, the top publishers were Facebook, Google, Whatsapp and GO Launcher in the top four. That was Whatsapp’s highest ranking of the year, in fact. The app has shown serious momentum of late, which has included bringing its iOS business model more in line with the subscription-based model used on other platforms like Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone.
Games, of course, still account for the majority share of the revenue for both stores – accounting for 80 percent of revenue on Google Play vs around 75 percent on the iOS App Store. But a non-game app, Japan’s LINE, also made a strong showing, with two other LINE apps (a comic book app and a fortune-telling app) reaching the top ten in June.
Video apps grew in popularity in June, too, with Vine climbing up three spots to reach the #1 non-game app rank in the iOS App Store by downloads. YouTube was then #2, Snapchat #3, and Instagram, which more recently added video support, reached #5.
Google Launches New Ad Unit For Responsive Sites
Google today launched a new responsive AdSense unit in beta that is specifically designed to run on sites that automatically adapt to different screen sizes. Now that responsive design has moved from being just a buzzword to something many web designers are actually putting into practice, being able to control how ads appear on these sites has become a more pressing issue for developers and web designers.
The new units use AdSense’s asynchronous ad code, and developers can use the same kind of CSS media queries they are used to from building their responsive sites to build these responsive ad units. This, Google says, means you can “now dynamically specify the size of the ad that will be served, adapting it to fit the way your site renders a page on a particular device.”
The only thing developers need to ensure is that the size of the ad unit they specify for each screen size matches one of Google’s standard ad sizes. So unlike Google’s standard ad units, you can’t just take the code, copy and paste it into your site and know that it’ll work.
As Google notes, one thing that doesn’t work yet is support for screen orientation changes after a page has been loaded. Google plans to address this in the near future, however. For now, Google also can’t provide a breakdown by size for all the ads served by a responsive unit in its analytics tools. That, too, is something the company plans to introduce later.
Given that CSS media queries only work on modern browsers, developers still have to ensure that they set a default ad size, too. Otherwise, users who are still using Internet Explorer 7 or lower may never see an ad on these responsive sites.
Here's Your Chance To Help Rep. Steve Cohen Change The NSA's Secret Court
Representative Steve Cohen wants the National Security Agency’s secret court to be composed of judges who care more about privacy, and he’s crowdsourcing expertise to help craft his bill. The FISA Court Accountability Act would mandate public disclosure of court decisions on NSA monitoring and require any judge appointed to oversee mass surveillance be approved by both the Supreme Court and Congress.
Rep. Cohen is working with us to crowdsource expertise on his bill, via our Project Madison platform, a web utility that allows citizens to make line-by-line suggestions to pending legislation. The best ideas are voted up, so that a congressman’s staff can amend the bills with the best ideas. You can contribute here.
The FISA court, which approves the NSA’s spying requests, has only rejected 0.03 percent of all government surveillance requests. Currently, FISA judges are appointed by conservative Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, which has resulted in an imbalance of 10 Republicans and one Democrat on the court.
“It makes a big difference,” Cohen tells me. “Typically Democratic appointees are more likely to give broader interpretation and concern with due process and the 4th Amendment.” Specifically, the act would require that the chief justice, Speaker of the House, and majority and minority leaders in both the House and Senate get to appoint a handful of the total 11 judges.
Cohen tells me that he’d also like further changes to the bill, which would include a public advocate at the hearings. A similar suggestion was made by former FISA judge, James Carr, in an OpEd to the New York Times last week.
We’re excited to see your suggestions. Please share widely with any experts you know and also let us know if there are experts we should reach out to. The more the public is involved, the better.
Again, the link to the bill is here.
Facebook Enables Embedding Of Public Posts To Seduce Newsmakers, Starts Rollout With Five Websites
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Let newsmakers embed your content and they’ll look to you for material, likely publish more to you, and you’ll have more content to advertise against. That’s why Facebook today begins allowing “public” posts to be embedded on third-party sites, a strategy pioneered by Twitter in 2010 and recently copied by Instagram. Embedding is slated for a full roll out, but for now you can get preview on five sites.
Bleacher Report, CNN, Huffington Post, Mashable and People are the first sites to be allowed to embed Facebook posts, but soon the drop-down arrow on news feed and Timeline posts will include an “Embed” option that lets you copy the HTML into any site or blog. That’s still a bit clunky, considering some sites like WordPress can render Twitter embeds from simply pasting in a tweet’s permalink.
These embeds will come with all the bells and whistles. You can embed posts with text, pictures, or videos; Like and comment, Follow public figures, Like Pages, and click hashtags to go back to Facebook and see related material.
Facebook is going safe and conservative with embeds by only allowing public posts to be pasted off-site. Of course, a fair amount of people post publicly without realizing it so you might end up seeing some funny Tumblrs of embeds of idiotic Facebook posts with no privacy locks. It all means Facebook will need to do an even better job of communicating how privacy controls work.
Why do embeds matter enough for Facebook to open them from Instagram earlier this month and from its own site today? You can tell from Facebook alerting users to the embeds documentation, “which also has best practices for finding high quality public posts on Facebook to embed.”
Similar to Facebook’s embeddable Like button (which was in turn copied by Twitter with its Tweet button), a basic goal is to increase its footprint on the web and create more in-roads to its site. But there’s a longer-term vision here, too. If it can become a popular source of content for newsmakers, they’ll spend more time combing it and may publish their own work and commentary to it more frequently in hopes of getting embedded. Similar to how Facebook courts third-party app developers in the hope that they’ll contribute content, Facebook wants more interesting stuff in the news feed it can show ads next to.
The move comes as Facebook increasingly tries to embrace the idea of public content despite its origins in private sharing. The launch of hashtags was another recent step in this direction. The fact is that there’s huge traffic and influence to be had by hosting breaking news and eye-witness accounts. Its those world-galvanizing moments, and not just private tidbits about our friends, that stir our emotions.
Greylock's Data Scientist In Residence DJ Patil Joins Enterprise Relationship Manager RelateIQ As VP Of Product
Greylock’s data scientist in residence DJ Patil is joining data-focused, enterprise relationship manager RelateIQ, we’ve learned. Patil tells us he will be the startup’s VP of Product.
When Patil joined Greylock from now defunct Color Labs (where he was Chief Product Officer), the role of the data scientist was on the brink of becoming the hot new role to fill in Silicon Valley. Now data-mining experts and talent, especially those who can develop compelling products and experiences around massive amounts of data, are among the most desirable talent hires in the technology world, both at companies and VC firms.
At Greylock, Patil helped many of the firm’s portfolios grow faster using data, and also developed a greater community and dialogue around the data science world (you can read some of his writings here). But he always kept an eye out for the next startup he wanted to work with.
Along the way, Patil reconnected with Steve Loughlin, who had previously founded a social network for alumni groups and trade orgs, Affinity Circle (Patil was on the advisory board of the company). Loughlin told him about his new startup, RelateIQ, which was using large-scale data-mining technologies to automate relationship tracking in the enterprise and CRM world. Patil was immediately intrigued; he invested in the startup and took an active advisory role (along with Bob Cohn of Octel, Lucent and Sequoia fame and current Apple board member and former Intuit CEO Bill Campbell).
RelateIQ focuses on simplicity on the front end, eliminating the manual data entry required to get more insight into professional relationships. Part of this involves using algorithms to try to better understand and glean insight into your actions in the workplace, capturing data from email, voice, social networks and calendars, as well as analyzing language in those communications. For example, RelateIQ could identify words and phrases in an email that might indicate a lead is getting ready to take the next step.
For the past year or so, Patil has been working with Loughlin and co-founder Adam Evans to help hire, develop data strategies with engineers and more. While RelateIQ had previously raised $9 million in funding from Accel, Morgenthaler SV Angel and angels, the company just received $20 million in new funding, valuing RelateIQ at $100 million. This round was co-led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s new, “smart enterprise”-focused venture capital firm Formation 8 and Accel Partners, with Battery Ventures, AMC Cloud Ventures (via Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang), Thrive Capital, Allen & Co. and Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz participating.
Patil’s fit at RelateIQ makes sense. He brings a significant amount of experience in both data mining and data security, areas where RelateIQ will benefit from Patil’s expertise. As LinkedIn’s Chief Security Officer he partnered with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zynga and others to take on hackers, spammers and fraudsters, and worked at eBay as their Director of Strategy, Analytics, and Product. He has also done strategic advisory work for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and Civilian Research and Development Foundation. Prior to that he focused on National Security issues on Counter Terrorism and Bioweapons Proliferation Prevention.
“RelateIQ knows utilizing data is the key to transforming relationship management,” Loughlin tells us. “We are thrilled to have DJ join the team as his abilities are world-class. His background in data science, consumer software, and relationship-focused businesses are a perfect fit for RelateIQ’s mission. He will be key in helping RelateIQ continue to build a platform that enables people to make smarter decisions around their relationships.”
Patil tells us that he believes RelateIQ is part of the next wave of companies that are using complex algorithms to make the enterprise smarter. But this complexity doesn’t come at the expense of the users, he explains further, as RelateIQ is focused on making a product that is simple and easy to use, which fits into the consumerization of the enterprise, he adds.
Apigee Raises $35M For Its API Management Platform
Apigee has raised $35 million for its API management platform. The funding was led by a new investment fund managed by BlackRock, Inc., and Accenture, the global consulting company. Since 2005, Apigee has raised $107 million.
The Series E round opens the opportunity for the company to do an initial public offering. That has to be an option with the total funding it has. The market is also consolidating. Earlier this year, Intel acquired Mashery and Layer 7 was bought by CA. Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor said the funding will help it to extend its mobile offerings.
Apigee has made deep investments in developing enterprise solutions for API management, so the funding from Black Rock and Accenture makes a lot of sense. Kapor said in an email that Apigee and Accenture have similar perspectives about the market. Accenture is one of the largest consulting companies in the world.
API Expert Kin Lane says that it is accurate to say that Apigee’s technology, like that from other API providers, has served enterprise customers well, but there is a shift to using public infrastructure for API management. But companies still need ways to fit APIs with existing infrastructure, opening a window for more solutions-oriented offerings.
Apigee has always been an enterprise provider with its roots in providing secure gateway technology. The company, originally called Sonoa Systems, changed its name in 2010 to Apigee, the name of its popular platform for managing APIs. Several of the API management companies come from similar technological backgrounds. Layer 7 Technologies also has a history in providing a gateway that it transformed into an API management platform.
It’s with API management that Apigee is now extending into the software defined networking market to connect data infrastructure operations. Earlier this year, the company began offering data analytics with data from APIs both internal and that from Google Analytics and other providers.
Disclosure: Apigee’s Sam Ramji is a friend of mine. Last week he bunked at our house during OSCON.
Yahoo Acquires Lexity, Will Keep E-Commerce App Platform Running But Rebrand It
Yahoo has just acquired e-commerce 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 e-commerce 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. Terms of the deal weren’t immediately disclosed on this deal, the 20th acquisition since Marissa Mayer became CEO.
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.
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