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CityMaps Announces $1.5M In Additional Series A Funding From A-Grade Investments, Endeca's Founder & Others
CityMaps, a company in the news this week for a new version of its mobile mapping application for iOS, has raised an additional round of $1.5 million in outside funding – an extension of its earlier Series A, this time bringing in new investors including Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s A-Grade Investments, Steve Papa (founder of Endeca, which sold to Oracle), and other angels. This additional round brings CityMaps total raised to date to $5 million.
We recently took to the time to talk to CityMaps about what it’s preparing to launch in the weeks ahead, and how the company will use the funding to further its goal of building a unique mapping product in the shadow of mapping giants like Google and others.
CityMaps has several upcoming features on the horizon, including a developer API, as well as features that could better connect local businesses to mobile consumers by alerting them to deals, promotions, nearby events, daily specials, and more. But more broadly, the company wants to establish CityMaps as defining a new niche in the mapping ecosystem, where maps are no longer read-only creations accessed by users in need of information, but are rather personalized to individual users’ interests and preferences.
A “Loony Idea” Takes Off
Over two and a half years ago, CityMaps co-founders Aaron Rudenstine and Elliot Cohen had an idea for a new kind of mapping interface – one whose focus, they explain, was not just on navigating your way around unfamiliar territory, but where maps became social, collaborative, and better highlighted the places where people spent their time and money, like stores, bars, restaurants, and other local businesses.
“Google Maps is the hallmark of maps. It’s a terrific product,” says Rudenstine. “But our whole vision for maps from day one – when Elliot approached me and said he had this loony idea to create a new map – is that maps should be more than just utilities that help you get from point A to point B.” He likens the idea for a collaborative map to the rest of the social web, where users find and follow others, and where maps become live and dynamic.
To be clear, CityMaps are not collaborative in the sense that OpenStreetMap is, meaning user-built maps of the streets and landmarks around you. OpenStreetMap, however, serves as one the product’s data sources, among others like Natural Earth, Factual, Localeze, as well as some data from strategic relationships CityMaps has made with Fortune 100 companies, which it’s not allowed to disclose. So rather, CityMaps’ collaborative functions are not about building the map itself, but live as a layer on top of the basic mapping data. The idea is that users can build their own maps of what matters to them – like lists of favorite restaurants or stores, perhaps. In addition, it means that friends can suggest places they should add to their lists, too.
After raising $3.5 million over a couple of rounds of funding, the company launched what it now refers to as its “proof of concept” application in early 2012 – the fastest MVP it could put on the market to test whether or not the consumers would be interested in such an idea. This early version of CityMaps worked in just five cities – New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Austin – where it gained “many hundreds of thousands” of users, though less than a million.
But the engagement levels were high enough for the company to push forward – over half (55 percent) of users were opening the app multiple times per week, the company found. The app also received good feedback, even winning the recommendation of the City of NY Dept. of Tourism, and gaining a deal which saw it replacing Microsoft’s mapping software in 7,000 NYC taxis this January.
With the redesigned, revamped iOS app (product review here), CityMaps now includes over 15 million business locations across the U.S., allowing it to work anywhere, not only in its originally supported nearly half a dozen cities.
The company’s local data set includes the business name and location, and other information a user would want to know – like the menu at a local restaurant, what kinds of clothes a clothing stores sells, when happy hour is, and more.
Maps That Communicate To You, Make Suggestions
And in the near future, CityMaps will be rolling out a system to help users see more about what’s currently happening at all these venues, too.
Explains Rudenstine, this system, due out in just a few weeks, will leverage the company’s partnership with business listings service Yext. This will enable local business owners to post real-time messages about whatever it is they have to promote to CityMaps, along with all the other services Yext currently supports.
Launch partners for the new in-map communication and recommendations feature set include Bliss Spa, Aeropostale, Gansevoort Hotel Group and Morgans Hotels (hotel chains), The Vitamin Shoppe, Bond New York, StyleCaster Media Group, and Time Out. Other businesses will also be able to claim their own venues and manage their events and communications in the near future, as well.
Also coming soon is CityMaps’ bigger plans for map personalizations. After users sign in via Facebook, or later connect their social accounts like Facebook or Foursquare, CityMaps will be able to access their profile and/or check-in data to begin making some simple judgement calls about the kinds of things a user likes. As the user continues to engage with the product, CityMaps’ ability to refine those earlier judgement calls then improves.
“Our whole vision is that no two maps should be the same,” Rudenstine says. “When you pull up CityMaps, you should see a collection of logos that represent…businesses that CityMaps deems are relevant to you,” he explains. “At the most basic level, the personalization engine matches what we know about the businesses to what we know about you.”
Developer API Soon
Finally, in addition to the forthcoming launch of the personalization engine and recommendations, CityMaps is building out its API for developers, which would allow them to use CityMaps data in their own products. For instance, if Airbnb homeowners wanted to make a map for their guests of nearby restaurants and stores, they could use CityMaps to do so instead of Google. (Airbnb is not a partner on this, it’s just an example – but it is an A-Grade investment, so who knows). The company is also in discussions with OEMs, and will have announcements surrounding their adoption of the API soon, too.
There’s been a renewed interest in companies building mapping startups, following Apple’s booting of Google from its list of pre-installed apps for a map app of its own, not to mention the $1.1 billion acquisition of social traffic map Waze by Google, which not only helped its own interests in mapping, but also kept that data out of Apple’s hands.
CityMaps seems to think it’s now onto the next big thing in mapping with its personalization efforts, but it’s difficult to ignore the giant in the room, Google. With Google’s ever-expanding Google+ initiative, it could choose to light up maps with more collaborative and personalized features as well, by tapping into all the data it already knows about businesses and users alike.
But Rudenstine is hopeful, saying that the recent events have changed the way people think about maps. “People are now beginning to realize the importance of having a map,” he says. “The story of maps hasn’t yet been written.”
Reebee Launches To Provide A Bridge For Bargain Hunters Moving From Paper To Digital Flyers
Waterloo-founded startup Reebee, a current Y Combinator Summer 2013 cohort member, wants to take digital flyers and make them actually useable, something which a lot of companies have tried but none have gotten quite right. Reebee is mobile first, which is a great start, but it’s got a lot of plans besides that in store for revolutionizing one of retail’s oldest and most trusted marketing channels.
Currently, Reebee is available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry and collects over 300 weekly flyers in Canada. Flyers account for a huge amount of the marketing budget of any brick-and-mortar retailer, even now that a lot of commerce has fled online. The growing number of people shopping online means that flyers need to adapt, but focusing too much on digital means leaving behind older customers and other shoppers who are still very comfortable with the paper flyer format.
Reebee solves the problem by keeping things simple; what you’ll get with flyers that appear in its library is a browsing experience that works seamlessly with touch controls, so that you can swipe between pages and pinch to zoom, but otherwise it’s just like reading a print flyer. This is an MVP, according to Reebee co-founders Tobiasz Dankiewicz and Michal Martyniak, and there are more features planned, but the experience as-is is winning them a lot of fans.
“Even with the MVP model of just the browsing, people are loving the experience and it’s receiving higher ratings than certain branded apps,” Dankiewicz said. “We’ve even heard feedback from people asking us not to change or add any sort of features, so we have to be really careful when we introduce things not to ruin the extreme simplicity of it.”
Feature updates are planned, however, as Reebee wants to make it possible to search through flyers to find the one you’re looking for, as well as create unified shopping lists from various stores. The company also wants to link product pages from retailer’s e-shopping sites in cases where that makes sense, though it’s less useful in cases like grocery stores.
For now, Reebee is adding a lot of flyers on its own, but it’s also partnered with some retailers who are paying for its services. In return, these retailers get access to detailed analytics about their customers, as well as priority placement within the app. Soon, Reebee will also be launching a list where users can sign up to let companies know they’d rather receive flyers via Reebee than through paper mail, and they’ll be sent a sticker or some other way of notifying mail carriers in response. Reebee hopes this will act as a sales tool, showing its target customers that they can reach their existing audience via new, less expensive and more ecologically sound ways.
Reebee hopes to tackle the U.S. market sometime in the next year, but notes that there’s a lot involved with working out what adds to serve for what geographies, a less daunting task in Canada. It’s had a big hand from YC involvement, however, and plans to tackle the challenge of coupons (another huge market) too.
Facebook Brings Home's Lockscreen Replacement To Their Main Android App - A Bad Sign For Home?
Four months after the launch of Facebook Home, which aimed to turn every Android phone into the long-rumored Facebook Phone, the company is starting to bring certain Home features into their primary app with an update today. In other words, bits and pieces of Home are coming to the main app… without requiring anyone to actually download Home.
The first feature make the jump to the main app is Home’s Cover Feed, which lets you replace Android’s default lockscreen with one that brings in photos and posts from your Facebook news feed.
While it’s always been possible to use Cover Feed while disabling other aspects of Home, you still had to at least download Home to do it. Not anymore.
Not crossing over to the main app just yet is the namesake Home launcher (a Facebook-centric overhaul to Android’s core interface, its homescreen) and their platform-wide floaty-head messenger notifications system, Chat Heads. With that said, you can get Chat Heads without downloading Home — it’s built into the Android port of Facebook’s Messenger app.
So the only thing that’s really left to Home as a standalone app is the launcher, which has never really seemed to prove all that popular. For those who do dig the Home launcher, though, three new devices are getting supported as of today: the HTC One, the Nexus 4, and the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Facebook has long used standalone apps as test beds for features, letting the early-adopter audience deal with all the kinks before throwing it at the millions of users who’d never care to go beyond the main Facebook app. In the test case of Home, it would seem that the only thing not making the cut so far is… well, Home.
The update will start rolling out to Android users today.
Hello Moto X
After Google acquired Motorola Mobility last year, I wondered what was next for the smartphone company. It spent ages clearing out its pipeline of smartphones that were already in development before rumors of an X Phone made in America started making the rounds. In those early X Phone days, Rick Osterloh, Motorola’s SVP of Product Management said the team that worked on the device was plopped in front of a whiteboard and asked to describe the product they wanted to make. That brainstorming, plus loads and loads of user testing, came together in the form of the Moto X.
Motorola isn’t the same company today as it was when Google snapped it up last year — it’s smaller, leaner, and if recent reports are indication, gutsier than ever. The Moto X is that new Motorola’s coming out party, and I think they’ve finally got something worth celebrating.
The Details
Before I launch into a lengthy harangue about how this phone makes me feel, let’s dig into the X’s vital statistics. Just about those rumors were true, folks: 4.7-inch AMOLED display running at 720p? Yep. 10-megapixel “ClearPixel” camera with 1080p video recording? You bet. Android 4.2.2.? Check. microSD card slot? Sadly, no. That would all make for a decent, if unremarkable little smartphone, were it not for what the Moto X packs inside its plasticky frame.
The real star of the show Motorola’s X8 chipset, which actually consists of a 1.7GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, Adreno 320 GPUs, 2GB of RAM and specialized processors meant to handle natural language processing and information from the X’s myriad sensors. If that thing sounds familiar, well, it should.
Verizon and Motorola’s recent Droid launch took some of the shine off the X’s more intimate event this morning. Why? A lot of the X8-centric features that seemed to make the Moto X so smart — those always on voice commands, the motion-sensitive Active Display, and the twisty camera activation gesture — will in all likelihood wind up on most of Motorola’s new phones going forward, the Droid Ultra line included.
Oh, and the device is expected to launch very soon. Think the end of August/early September — it all depends on when Motorola’s carrier and distribution partners make their announcements. Speaking of carriers, AT&T and Verizon will both sell the 16GB black and white versions of the X for $199 (on contract, of course) when it launches later this month, but only AT&T customers will able to customize them using the MotoMaker website. Additional caveat: it seems like the 32GB storage upgrade can only be purchased from MotoMaker for the time being, which is frankly pretty lame.
Not a particular fan of either carrier? That’s fine too: the Moto X will also be available for purchase as an unlocked device, and as a developer edition with an unlocked bootloader (for easily hackability), though Motorola doesn’t seem to have locked down pricing for either version just yet.
Easily the most impressive part of the Moto X package though is how users can customize it using Motorola’s MotoMaker web app. When it goes live later this month, users can pick from some 16 colored resin back plates, as well as a black or white front facade, and seven accent colors for your volume and sleep buttons. And in case you were wondering, yes, there is a wood case in the works. It’s apparently undergoing some late-stage testing, but should hit proverbial shelves in Q4 of this year. Throw in the ability to engrave your name (or whatever, really) onto that backplate and you’ve got yourself a pretty tremendous level of choice here.
While we’re talking about how the X is put together, it’s worth pointing out that Motorola isn’t giving up on its global supply chain here. U.S. customers who order customized Moto X’s will get units assembled in Texas (and in four days or less to boot), but the rest of the world will get their X fix from the usual slew of foreign manufacturers.
Motorola is gearing up to make itself a purveyor of a smarter kind of smartphone, but it does mean that there were few surprises to get worked up over this morning. Even so, the X is exciting for what it represents. It’s hard not to think of the X as Motorola’s take on Google’s Nexus concept — the phone itself is a template for Motorola’s vision of mobile computing. But what’s it like to use?
Hands-On Impressions
Motorola’s clearly all about making the phone your own thanks to its MotoMaker customization options, which is a good thing because the untouched black and white Xs look pretty damned dull. That’s not to say they’re ugly — the composite weave pattern on the back is handsome and distinctive, and the whole thing exudes a sort of minimalist charm, but it feels like Motorola’s main concern with these default builds was to keep design from getting in the way of functionality.
The X feels surprisingly small for a device with a 4.7-inch screen since there’s very little physical cruft — there’s only a hint of a bezel running around the display’s left and right edges, and there isn’t a whole of space surrounding the speaker, 2MP front-facing camera, and microphone along the face’s top and bottom. It’s awfully comfortable too, owing largely to considerable curvature of the X’s rear end. Osterloh said that the device’s 2,200mAh battery was specifically engineered to fill up that shapely rump, and he expects the device to last up to 24 hours on a single charges thanks to the X8 chipset’s power-sipping tendencies — we’ll see about that.
And then there’s the software. On one level, it’s all very familiar — the X runs a very lean build of Android 4.2.2, and you could easily mistake it for stock if you didn’t know what you were looking for. And I don’t doubt that a decent chunk of people will use it that way, but there’s plenty to like when it comes to Motorola’s additions.
So far, the touchless controls work like a charm (even those this is technically non-final software). Once a brief setup process was completed, I successfully asked the X to give our video producer Steve a ring and do a Google search for “TechCrunch”. Meanwhile, a few vigorous shakes coaxed the X into firing up its camera, and flipping the thing over and over caused the active display to show off the time and how many messages I had waiting for me. And since Android is largely unencumbered here, whipping through pages of apps and scrolling through webpages was generally very smooth — though it could be smoother.
I’m reserving final judgment on this thing until I’ve had the chance to play with it for more than three hours, but I actually rather like the X. Do I wish Motorola could have pushed the technical envelope further? Sure. I also think the customization angle, neat as it is, is essentially a ploy to make an unassuming phone stand out in a crowd. And frankly, it’s a little frustrating to see that a solid chunk of what the Moto X can do will soon be replicated by — you guessed it — just about every other new Motorola phone in the works.
It’s far, far too early to tell if Motorola has a hit on its hands — especially because the X will ultimately compete with Motorola phones with similar feature sets. If nothing else though, Motorola’s X represents a dedication to creating a smarter breed of smartphones, and I doubt that’s something the rest of the industry is going to ignore.
Soylent Closes In On Finalizing Its Formula, Reaches $1M In Pre-Orders
Soylent, the seemingly wacky personal experiment of 24-year-old engineer Rob Rhinehart, is maturing into a full-fledged business.
Rhinehart and his team, who were running a Y Combinator-backed startup called Level RF last year, did what Paul Graham has called the “pivot of the century.”
Fascinated by inefficiencies in the industrial food system, Rhinehart designed and then started living off a meal replacement he cheekily named Soylent — after the dystopian movie Soylent Green where Charlton Heston discovers that society has been living off rations made of humans.
This Soylent, thankfully, is not made of humans.
It contains an assortment of carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins and dozens of other vitamins that are deemed medically necessary to for a person to live by the Institute of Medicine, plus other modifications Rhinehart made through the testing process.
“I’d like this to be something that is like coffee — a commodity something that’s available everywhere. Maybe a utility like water and power. Something that is ubiquitous and easy to consume,” he said. “I’d like to see it in grocery and convenience stores soon.”
Now Rhinehart says the company will be closing in on a finalized formula by the end of next month — a version 1.0, if you will. They’ll have a party in late August where they’ll invite press and members of the public. Then the company will gear up to do 140,000 shipments in September with $1 million in pre-orders. It costs roughly $65 a week, including shipping.
Most of the customers are young men, but there have also been a few Doomsday predictors and people preparing for a societal apocalypse that have tried to order lifetime supplies of Soylent, Rhinehart said.
The company has been posting updates of modifications to the Soylent formula, including changing the protein source to a vegan one derived from a rice or pea protein isolate.
“In terms of a new food product, this is much, much larger initial manufacturing run than has happened in the past,” Rhinehart said.
A chance introduction got him in touch with the makers of MuscleMilk, Cytosport, who helped him find an factory in Modesto certified by the National Science Foundation. He also started working directly with suppliers; in early versions of Soylent, he would buy components off Amazon or Alibaba.
The taste is pretty bland, kind of malty even. “Soylent is not supposed to be this luxurious thing,” Rhinehart explained.
To be clear, Rhinehart is not necessarily arguing that people should consume only soylent. He’s more of a believer that we don’t really think about or even consciously care about the vast majority of our meals. So instead, his goal is to create a wholly nutritious and inexpensive source of food that he uses for most of his meals. He tries to savor the few non-soylent meals he eats, and says he even appreciates them more as a result.
So is it safe? Well, there are only 50 beta testers at the moment plus Rhinehart’s running journal of his Soylent-based lifestyle.
But all of the components of Soylent are approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Soylent wouldn’t need any kind of additional approval unless there was a new additive of some sort.
“The typical Western diet is pretty easy to beat in terms of nutritional value,” Rhinehart said. “You have to accept the pre-ponderable amount of testing the EFSA (European Food Safety Administration) and the FDA has done on these ingredients. These organizations are very conservative on the quantities of foods that they approve under six-sigma sorts of control.”
At the same time, there are already longstanding meal replacement products out there like Jevity from Abbott Nutrition and Nutren from Nestle, which are targeted at medical patients that can’t consume whole foods or need tube feeding.
So conceptually, medical foods have existed for a long time and they’ve kept patients alive for years. Rhinehart lived solely off Soylent for a month at the beginning of the year, and now he’s probably relying on it for about 80 percent of his intake.
But if you decide to consume it or live primarily off of it, you’re essentially trusting that because the 50 beta testers and Rhinehart haven’t had serious health problems as a result of living off Soylent, you probably won’t either. Because Soylent is also so new, no one has lived off it for years and years either. So nobody fully understands what the consequences of consuming Soylent for years will be.
“No one really worried about me when I had an awful diet of Doritos and fast food. But now that I’ve invented something that’s good for you, everyone is worried about me killing myself,” Rhinehart said. In his month of living entirely off his creation, he claimed his physique improved, his skin cleared, his hair got thicker and his dandruff disappeared.
Rhinehart has five dietitians and medical professionals who work with the company on an advisory basis. He also tests his blood every day for his sugar level and regularly posts panels of tests to his blog to show things like his platelet counts and sodium levels. He tracks everything from how far he can run comfortably to how many hours he sleeps on a regular basis. He’ll also offer a discount to any customers who want to regularly run medical tests on themselves too.
He’s tried to design Soylent from the most elementary level possible with raw minerals and vitamins.
He believes that other previous meal replacement products have fallen short because they mixed together traditional foods, instead of breaking down a person’s daily nutrition needs to their most basic level. Through constant iteration, he’s realized deficiencies in the formula over time. Some joint pain earlier this year led him to add a sulfur source to the mixture.
There is also a very active discussion board on the company’s site where enthusiasts share their own DIY recipes and modifications to the mixture.
“Soylent has taken on a life of its own,” Rhinehart said. “You may have an initial knee-jerk reaction to the name. But when you step back, it allows you to analyze or engage in a reasonable discussion about the nature of food and sustainability.”
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