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Yobongo Co-Founder Caleb Elston Aims To Reinvent Customer Feedback With New Startup Delighted
Early last year, the team behind mobile chat app Yobongo was acquired by calendar- and photobook-printing company Mixbook, where it led development efforts for Mixbook’s iPhone app Mosaic. Now Yobongo co-founder Caleb Elston is announcing that he, along with two other members of the Mosaic team, is working on a new startup called Delighted.
Elston said Delighted is trying to solve a big problem — the fact that businesses don’t get any feedback from most of their customers. Usually, they’ll interact with the 5 to 10 percent who need customer support, or who post complaints and questions on Facebook and Twitter, but from everyone else there’s silence.
As an example, Elston said that if you visited a restaurant and the food was a little too salty, you’re probably not going to say anything. Instead, you’ll just leave slightly disappointed. Meanwhile, the owner of the restaurant wants to know you felt that way, and the chef probably wants to know too. So Delighted is developing new ways to collect that kind of feedback from customers.
“The huge latent opportunity point is that so many people don’t interact, but they’re the super majority of you’re business, and when they leave, they won’t tell you why they’re not coming back, they just silently disappear and go to a competitor,” Elston said. He added that as more and more businesses move online, the landscape is going to divide between high-end, customer-focused companies and that focus on low margins. “Those companies in the middle are going to get squeezed. … We’re selfish, because we like using high-quality products, and we want to help in the demise of companies that are not customer-focused.”
He didn’t provide too many details about Delighted’s actual product, since it’s still in development, but he said the general approach is to design something customers actually want to interact with, to constrain what’s being asked so they don’t have to fill out a giant survey, and to be “really humble with where customers are going to want to interact with you.”
Delighted was founded by Mark Dodwell (a senior engineer on the Mosaic team), Mike Gowen (Mosaic designer as well as product designer at Yobongo), and Elston, who said they’re approaching this as an opportunity to take a difference approach to building a company. They don’t want to raise a lot of money and make a big splash with the press, he said, because it puts you in a position where you have to “grow extremely quickly or die.” Instead, Elston wants to be smarter about growth.
“Our goal for this is to grow the team very, very slowly and to have a great deal of leverage per person, so that we can ensure that the company stays focused,” Elston said. “Hypergrowth is not the important bit, building great things is. It’s so exciting to be able to focus on that instead of all the other stuff.”
If that’s the approach, you may be wondering why Elston is bothering to talk to TechCrunch at all. He said it’s because he was tired of keeping things secret — once there’s a post, he can talk more openly about what the company has been up to.
Comparing Yammer And Salesforce Chatter With Deep Analytics From Applause
Applause is a new service that analyzes data from top app stores to help businesses understand how their mobile apps compare across user reviews from different marketplaces.
We looked at the Applause service in January. Developed by uTest, the Applause service is primarily a tool to compare how different branded apps are faring in the market. Platforms like this illustrate the way businesses are becoming ever more data-driven and highlight the need to look deeper at how apps compare when deciding which ones to use.
Applause analyzes data from the world’s top app stores. In its view, skimming three-star ratings and pages of app store reviews does not help very much in analyzing what improvements are needed to make an app a success. What results is a lot of guesswork, and the company says explicit analytics of mobile apps have become a massive blind spot.
Applause crawls every rating and review for an app, synthesizing user feedback into what it calls an Applause Score, which measures user satisfaction, app quality and how well it is faring in terms of the “applause” it is generating.
The Applause score considers all the past reviews of the app to make its ranking. Overall, the service pulls from 80 million reviews from the different store marketplaces. It weights the reviews within the app category and ranks them on a 0-100 scale. The past data determines the score, but only if there is sufficient data, underscoring the value of user reviews for analytics purposes. If there is not sufficient data, an app developer can use Applause to look at reviews and make comparisons to other similar apps. As scores are determined by reviews so it’s up to the app owner to find ways to get more reviews for proper ranking and updated reviews from people who may have been unhappy with a prior version of the app.
To illustrate, I asked the team at Applause to help compare two popular services in the enterprise: Microsoft’s Yammer and Salesforce Chatter. The analysis, from May, showed that Chatter’s reviews were better than Yammer’s.
However, since May, Yammer has improved its ranking, and Chatter is showing a drop in user satisfaction. Today, Yammer’s Applause score is up six points to 53 on the iOS platform. Its ranking increased from 29 to 32 on Android. Chatter has dropped six points on iOS to 56 and is down one on Android, scoring a 38 Applause ranking.
Applause is the kind of service that enterprise shops should be using to get analysis. Those that do pay attention can provide a better user experience, which is critical in today’s market.
Hack Combines Philips Hue And IFTTT To Change Lights Via Text Message
Philips graciously released an API a few months ago for its Hue smartphone-controlled smart lightbulb to let developers tinker, and already there are a number of apps taking advantage. Today, mobile design firm Fresh Tilled Soil is showing off the hack it put together using that API and the IFTTT service for simple web-based programming to allow users to control their Philips systems via text message.
As you can see in the video, it just requires that you send messages to a number assigned by IFTTT with the color you want the lightbulbs to change to, and that info is passed on to the Philips router connected to your Internet connection to relay the messages to the bulbs themselves. You can specify the flicker pattern, and use the Philips Hue iPhone app to do a bunch more neat stuff, like change the lights to match the background color of a picture taken with the phone, for instance.
Fresh Tilled Soil provides a step-by-step guide of how they made this work on the site, so enterprising Hue owners are free to try it at home for themselves, and it doesn’t look too difficult thanks to the ease of using IFTTT. Philips is moving quickly in this space, probably to block out startup competitors like Lifx, but that competition is opening up lots of opportunities for devs and smart hacks like this one. It’s a very good time to be in the smart home space, as this seems like a crucial turning point that could lead to much wider mass market adoption of said technologies.
SmugMug Launches Redesign Of Its Photo Sharing Website
SmugMug has revealed the new design of its photo sharing site, aimed to increase web customization capabilities and photo organization. The website now features new templates and themes, customization tools, a new photo organizer and responsive design to make SmugMug fit any screen.
Current users still see their old SmugMug sites upon login, but they can start using the new version by transferring all their photos over and customizing their layouts. The layouts will remain private until users chooses to reveal their new sites. Customers pay $5 to $35 a month to use the website, and new users can test it out for free for 14 days.
Founded in 2002, SmugMug is a bootstrapped company that has been profitable for more than three years. SmugMug also has an app comparable to Instagram, called Camera Awesome, that had more than 7 million users in 2012.
SmugMug has arranged a live demo at its office in Mountain View. This post will be updated with more details on the new website soon.
Samsung's Android Dominance Visualised By OpenSignal - Data Also Shows Droid Device Diversity Has Tripled In A Year
Crowdsourced cell phone signal startup OpenSignal has crunched data on 682,000 devices using its app to produce a visualisation of the diversity of the Android ecosystem. And despite showing growing device diversity — and/or fragmentation, if you prefer to think of it that way — the above graphic really drives home how dominant Samsung continues to be in the Android space.
The Korean mobile maker accounts for almost half (47.5 percent) of the Android devices using OpenSignal’s app. Compare that massive green square to HTC’s small purple one, and the size of the task facing the Taiwanese mobile maker is instantly apparent (although it’s worth noting that HTC’s portion has actually been split up into different regional variants, so its share is not quite so tiny vis-a-vis Samsung).
The graphic also underlines the power of certain U.S. carriers — with Verizon devices cutting a ZTE-sized chunk of the pie. Google also manages a decent showing for its Nexus-branded Androids, roughly equal to Motorola/Moto’s share — although it’s possible there are some natural synergies between savvy users of OpenSignal and in-the-know Android fans who buy direct from Google.
OpenSignal’s data ranks the now-defunct Sony-Ericsson joint venture brand in second place, as the most popular brand after Samsung, with a 6.5 percent market share. That’s a poor and doubtless dwindling second place, with less than a sixth of Samsung’s huge slice, which you’d expect now that Sony is going it alone in mobile (so also carves out its own, for now smaller, portion of the pie).
Despite Samsung’s dominance, OpenSignal’s data indicates device diversity in the Android ecosystem is on the rise. This isn’t exactly surprising, given Samsung’s strategy of maintaining a growing portfolio of handsets and slates itself, before you start factoring in all the other Android OEMs keeping the platform’s global market share (circa 75 percent ) growing, buoyed by rising smartphone ownership in developing countries.
OpenSignal records a tripling of device diversity vs. the data it grabbed in July last year, with 11,868 distinct Android devices spotted this year vs. 3,997 last year.
Samsung Flagship Diversity
Looking specifically at Samsung devices, the data indicates the company has successfully managed to spread users across multiple flagships, such as the Galaxy SIII and Note 2, but that has meant it no longer has such a large concentration using a primary flagship. Last year’s data showed the Galaxy SII as a clear leader — of Samsung’s portfolio, as well as of all Android OEM devices:
Whereas the 2013 data indicates that the current Samsung flagship Galaxy S4 has not yet replicated the ‘hero role’ in Samsung’s portfolio that the Galaxy SII was able to attain. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for Samsung, given its iterative device strategy. But it’s an interesting transition nonetheless, and one which means Android developers need to be thinking about catering to multiple Samsung/Android flagships — even more so than in the past:
All those Androids
OpenSignal also found eight versions of Android still in use among its app users, but well over a third (37.9 percent) are using the most recent Jelly Bean versions of Android. This compares to closer to a third (34.1 percent) using the very long-in-the-tooth Android 2.3 Gingerbread version, and just over a fifth (23.3 percent) using Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
As Android is the dominant global smartphone OS platform, it’s not at all surprising to see such huge and growing diversity. Nor is it necessarily such a headache for individual app developers as critics of Android “fragmentation” tend to make out, since most apps are already targeted at particular sub-groups of users in the ecosystem — whether that’s users from a particular region, or a demographic that might mostly use a particular sub-set of devices.
As OpenSignal notes, app context is likely to impact development far more than the absolute diversity of the overall Android ecosystem.
“It is also important for developers to think about the impact of contextual fragmentation, the variety of differing contexts in which devices are actually used. What is relevant for one region may not be to another, and developers need to take into account differences in network performance and reliability when designing their apps — as well as the level of Wi-Fi access for apps which are particularly data heavy,” it comments.
“Another relevant factor is battery life; while one day’s battery life may be acceptable in the developed world, it may well not cut it in developing markets. It is important to remember that the criteria against which app performance is judged can change by region, not simply by device.”
Lifelogging App Saga Adds Social Features, So You Can Share Every Life Detail With Your Friends
Saga, an app created by Seattle startup A.R.O., is introducing a social layer in today’s update. In other words, all the data that Saga collects about you can now be shared with friends who are also using the app.
The Saga app quietly tracks your location and activity through your smartphone sensors (it’s available for both iPhone and Android, and CEO Andy Hickl told me the team has worked hard to bring battery usage down to 1 percent per hour) and by integrating with outside services like FitBit, RunKeeper, and TripIt.
“The iPhone is giving me all this great data, but in the end, I’m just a boy with my data,” Hickl said. With Saga, he wants to unite disparate pieces of information into a larger, more useful story about what you’re doing and what you care about — and now users can also share that story with friends and family.
You might question the need for something like this, especially since social media is already criticized for highlighting the minutiae of people’s lives. However, Hickl noted that when you post something on a social profile, it is, in part, “a performance” — when you check-in somewhere on Foursquare, you’re making a point of telling people, “Hey, I’m here at this cool event!” Since sharing on Saga is more comprehensive and automated, it can present a picture of you that’s more authentic.
The sharing features also include the ability to share “bundles” of specific locations, for example all the spots you visited during a vacation.
Of course, when you get into this kind of sharing, privacy is a big concern. As demonstrated to me by Hickl, Saga handles that by giving users a lot of control over what gets shared and with whom. For example, you might choose to only share your location after a delay, or only after you’ve left town. The model seems to be inspired, in part, by the Circles in Google Plus — you can set up different rules for what’s seen publicly, what’s seen by acquaintances, and what’s seen by close friends.
Now, I’m not totally sure whether this model might require a little too much work — after all, I thought Circles sounded in good in theory but in practice I found them exhausting — but it does seem to strike a balance between giving users a lot of control without overwhelming them. More importantly, Hickl said the team will be monitoring usage closely and will make adjustments as necessary.
Plus, if you’re really not interested in sharing, the default setting within Saga is to keep everything completely private.
On a broad level, Hickl also emphasized the importance the importance of user privacy, saying, “We’ll never sell individual users’ data” and pointing out that users can delete their entire account and records (not just in the app itself but anywhere their data is stored in the Saga ecosystem) whenever they want.
When asked whether this is the kind of personal information that the government might become interested in at some point, Hickl added, “We want to be good stewards. I really can’t say what they’re going to be interested in and not interested in, but even before we wrote a lot of line of code, we were asking ourselves, ‘How do we make sure somebody can feel safe as they can?’”
A.R.O. is backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
Bradley Manning Found Not Guilty Of ‘Aiding The Enemy,' Found Guilty On 19 Lesser Counts
Today Judge Denise Lind announced her verdict in the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the young solider under prosecution for his alleged leaking of classified documents to the Wikileaks organization: not guilty of ‘aiding the enemy.’ Manning was found guilty on lesser counts, for a total of 19 charges. Four of those had been plead to lesser infractions.
Though Manning manged to avoid the heaviest charge set against him, the book was tossed and squarely hit him.
According to early reporting, Manning was found guilty of five counts of espionage. The sentencing portion of this trial now begins. Both the prosecution and the defense are expected to call as many as two dozen witnesses.
The information that Manning is generally accepted to have handed to the controversial journalism outfit included a film clip now known under the moniker “Collateral Murder.” That video contains footage that includes the killing of innocents. The government, during the trial, chose to describe the clip as instead “actions and experiences of service members conducting a wartime mission.” Sometimes the odor of a situation is exacerbated by the sterility of the language used to describe it.
The trial of Manning has been part of a larger conversation on government secrecy and the right of the public to understand the workings of their elected and unelected officials. Regarding Manning specifically, the question of whether or not he “aided the enemy” by leaking military information has troubled many, as its implications may be far-reaching. If a whistleblower leaks information, and it is published, it is all but certain that the “enemy” will have access to it.
Given that, the leaking of any classified information regarding any topic near to national security could have led to painfully oppressive prison terms if Manning had been found guilty of the specific charge. This would discourage others from stepping forward when it was appropriate to do so. It is perhaps time to update the Espionage Act, under which Manning was found repeatedly guilty.
Manning is going to prison for a long, long time.
Top Image Credit: Patrick Slattery
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