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Foursquare Launches Its Windows 8 And RT Apps For More Beautiful Local Exploration
Foursquare first pulled back the curtain on its native Windows 8 app back at Microsoft’s BUILD conference last June and proceeded to keep the project under wraps since then. After quietly cranking away on the app for months, the team is finally ready to show off what they’ve been working on — that Windows 8 app (along with the Windows RT version) are now available in the Windows Store
And here’s the real kicker: they’re absolutely gorgeous.
It’s a far cry from the sort of Foursquare experience you’re probably used to on your smartphone — on mobile devices there’s a solid chance you’re just firing up the app, checking in to a location, and maybe scrolling through your feed to see where your friends have run off to.
All the usual functionality is there in the Windows app too — you can check in, naturally, and add venues and locations to your lists for later in-person perusal. But Foursquare for Windows 8 is a visually sumptuous affair that’s really meant to reach out, grab users, and most importantly, rethink how they interact with the service. Foursquare looks at its Windows app as a base station of sorts, a place where you can more comfortably dig up information on what’s around you.
“It was nice to be able to stretch out a bit in terms of design,” said Foursquare’s mobile bizdev lead David Ban.
Thanks to all that real estate that these larger displays have afforded the Foursquare team, each venue now has its own card that’s punctuated by big, bright, user-submitted photos, as well as a grid of images highlighting the people who are currently there. Swiping left and right allows users to dig deeper into the top-rated and trending joints nearby, and a live tile will join the menagerie that is the Windows 8 start screen.
Searching for things is naturally a crucial part of the Foursquare experience, and it’s simple enough to find few venues from the Windows Search charm. After the app is installed, Foursquare becomes yet another data source for the search tool to cull from so it’s simple enough to find local coffee shops while poking around in a spreadsheet.
With these new Windows apps, Foursquare wants people to do more than just check-in and put their device away. By building the app to be more of a destination for local exploration then a utility, the company is trying to capture a large swath of users who may not have seen much point in constantly broadcasting their location. It doesn’t hurt that the app is fully usable from a consumption standpoint without having to login with a Foursquare account either.
More importantly, it’s one of first times Foursquare has really broached the subject of big displays with a native app — there’s no iPad-tailored version of Foursquare (though the mobile website is rather fetching) and the company only recently added a tablet UI to its Android app. Ban wouldn’t confirm whether or not Foursquare is looking at bringing this sort of visual approach to platforms like the iPad or Android tablets, but he didn’t note that he wouldn’t be surprised if some people would take notice of what was achieved with the Windows 8 app.
“This has opened some eyes,” he said. “It may well serve as inspiration for future projects.”
Ban remained just as mum when it came to the notion of bringing Foursquare to other desktop platforms. After all, now that the company has broken the desktop barrier, what’s to stop them from whipping up a version for OS X? According to Ban the company is carefully mulling over its potential expansion opportunities, but for now it’s more concerned with updating its iOS app for iOS 7 than building another separate desktop app.
Nighttime Urban Parkour Enthusiast? Stay Safe With The Fos
It’s only a matter of time before fashion and tech fully collide. It’s not enough that we now like to buy our clothes on the internet — companies like Google and Nike and Fitbit are determined to make us strap technology onto our faces and arms.
But it stretches beyond even that.
A new phenomenon I’ve noticed lately is the idea of LED-lit clothing, including Adafruit’s build-your-own ties and shoes and ThinkGeek’s Wifi Shirt.
A new Kickstarter project, Fos, is looking for funding to do the same thing with a focus on athletes.
Fos is an LED-illuminated patch of cloth that can be stuck onto other items of clothing, like a jacket or shirt.
Users can program their Fos to display calories burned, how close you are to your goal, etc. Users can even use Fos’ demo application to choose specific graphics or video to display on the 60fps LED patch with 64,000 shades of light. According to the creators, it weighs less than a golf ball.
The idea is not only to look super cool (and trust me, nothing is cooler than electronic clothing), but to stay safe when working out in urban areas. However, founder Anders Nelson admits in his Kickstarter video that it’s not only for the Urban athlete.
The Fos is also for the party animal raver inside all of us. In fact, DJs can even decide to push out custom-tailored graphics to all the Fos bodies in the room to make one giant human light installation. But first, of course, the Fos needs to hit the mainstream.
And before that can happen, Fos needs to reach its $200,000 funding goal on Kickstarter in the next four weeks.
Fleet Management Startup Local Motion Raises $6 Million From Andreessen Horowitz, Adds Steven Sinofsky To Its Board
A new startup called Local Motion is providing the tools necessary for businesses to reduce waste and right-size their fleets of cars, which could save them significant money in the long term. To move forward, the startup has just taken $6 million in Series A financing from Andreessen Horowitz, and will be adding former Microsoft exec and recent a16z addition Steven Sinofsky to its board.
Local Motion, in short, wants to bring the same sort of efficiencies that the sharing economy promises to consumers — the ability to curtail ownership in certain goods and help manage usage to make them more readily available when needed — and apply those principles to enterprise and government entities.
With that in mind, the company has built a combination of hardware and software that will let users gain access to cars in a fleet, while also providing management tools for companies and government agencies to make sharing those cars more efficient. On the hardware side, Local Motion has a small box that connects to a car’s on-board computer to allow users to unlock doors, while providing valuable usage information that feeds back into a SaaS-based dashboard for managing a fleet.
Employees, meanwhile, get instant access to vehicles, without having to worry about having a particular set of keys — they simply grab the nearest available car. And how do they know whether it’s available or not? Well, the system can automate bookings and even has a mobile app for finding unused vehicles in the fleet.
With the improved access to vehicles comes the ability for employees to better share the available cars. No longer is a single car assigned to an individual or a group that only uses it about 20 percent of the time. Instead, the shared pool of cars means drastically more efficient usage across the entire organization. Local Motion estimates that its customers reduce usage by 30 percent within their fleets.
As time goes on, that means that fleets can be downsized so the company is only keeping the number of cars necessary. It also ensures that the cars can be kept on a regular maintenance schedule, and can give data about the energy consumption or speed patterns of various drivers.
And there’s a big opportunity out there: There are about 10 million fleet vehicles on the road today, and they represent between 5 percent and 20 percent of all auto sales, but the companies and organizations that buy them generally don’t have the tools to know how they’re being used. Local Motion estimates that in many cases, only 40 percent of the cars in a fleet are being used, while another 20 percent are broken without a fleet operator realizing it.
Already Local Motion has been chosen by a couple of big clients to help them manage their fleets of vehicles. That includes Google and the City of Sacramento, as well as Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project, which plans to use the technology to manage its fleet of Teslas. But it plans to aggressively expand to capture more of the enterprise and government markets for fleet management.
Founded by John Stanfield, who had been working on an electric car for urban areas that could shared among multiple people, as well as Clement Gires, who worked on Paris’ Velib bicycle-sharing program, the startup is well positioned to bring sharing to the enterprise.
The funding from Andreessen Horowitz should help, as should the advice of new board member Sinofsky, who is no stranger to managing or working with large, complex organizations. Local Motion had previously raised seed funding from investors that include Lemnos Labs, Draper & Associates, Morado Venture Partners, VegasTechFund, and AME Cloud Ventures.
Researchers Build The First Brain-To-Brain Control Interface
Researchers at the University of Washington, Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco, have created a remote, non-invasive brain-to-brain interface that allowed Rao to move Stocco’s finger remotely on a keyboard using his thoughts.
“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said in a release. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.”
Rao has been working on these interfaces for a decade and brain-to-brain control has been achieved in mice using invasive techniques. This is the first time the process has been used on humans and requires a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil to be placed on the head of the subject. The user in control can then send a signal by reacting to something on a screen or in the room. A electroencephalography machine picks up the brain waves and transmits them to the subject who, in turn, mimics the motion of the controller.
Thus far the team has been able to demonstrate how to play a simple video game remotely. The controller plays in the game in one room in the lab and the sensors pick up his hand motions. The signal to initiate these motions is sent to the subject and, in turn, the subject begins mimicking the actions of the controller using the same game interface, essentially playing the game remotely without seeing the screen.
This is not mind control. The subject cannot be controlled against his or her will and neither party can “read” each other’s thoughts. Think of this as sending a small shock controlled via the Internet to trigger a fairly involuntary motion.
The researchers are planning to expand this to more complex motions and try it on other subjects in the next round of testing.
Shopify Launches Point-Of-Sale System To Unify Online And Brick-And-Mortar Retail
Ottawa-based Shopify, the online storefront provider that helps around 65,000 retailers reach their customers on the web, including Tesla, Crossfit and others, today announced a new retail point-of-sale solution that uses iPads for its terminals. The POS solution will enable existing Shopify users to unify their online shops with their physical locations, sharing information on inventory, sales and more seamlessly between both.
This is the second in Shopify’s one-two punch to bring its ecommerce solution up to the next level. The first was the introduction of Shopify Payments, which saw the company take on payment processing on its own, without the need for secondary partners. Merchants can still use other payment gateways, but Shopify now offers its own solution by default for new sign-ups, and has very competitive pricing, especially once you get on to higher-valued subscription tiers.
Now that it has both payment processing and in-store POS, Shopify can own the entire process end-to-end for businesses looking to cash in on bricks-and-clicks trends in retail. More and more, shop owners are looking at online as complimentary to their business, and designing stores around showrooming to supplement their virtual sales initiatives.
“We’re already doing the online thing and this seems like a natural extension,” said Shopify VP of Product Adam McNamara in an interview. “We talked to a lot of our customers, and around 30 percent of them run a physical retail store as well. We looked at this and started talking to these people, and found that most of them had some sort of in-store point-of-sale system that integrates with Shopify, or had nothing at all. But overwhelmingly, what people needed was something that allowed them to run their physical store, and run their online store, and allowed them to accept payments, and we thought ‘Well, we can do all these things.’”
The advantage is clear, and Shopify will have a clear one over and above other competing solutions like Revel since it has a presence with so many online retailers already, and can offer an extremely simple iPad based solution on a subscription basis, complete with online setup support in the form of tutorial videos, as well as in-person technical help, though McNamara thinks most won’t require that.
Shopify has been doing what it does and doing it well for many years now, but the company is really aiming to shake things up with these two bold new launches. It wades into spaces ripe with competition, but does so with a value prospect that’s clear: one retail solution for all a retailer’s needs. That’s going to be hard to turn down, based on the reduction of complexity alone.
Image Tagging Platform ThingLink Grabs Another $2 Million
ThingLink, a platform that enables tagging things inside an image with links to music, video, notes and more, has closed on $2 million in additional funding, the company is announcing today. The new round was led by Helsinki-based VC firm Inventure Oy and saw participation from New York and San Francisco area angels, including Terrapin Bale, former Tumblr president John Maloney, Fremantle Media N.A. CEO Thom Beers, Trimaran Capital managing partner Dean Kehler, SoundCloud CTO Eric Wahlforss, as well as TEKES, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation.
ThingLink’s total funding to date is $3.9 million.
The startup, now based in New York and Helsinki, was first founded in 2008 by Ulla Engeström who was originally inspired to associate online information and other stories with physical objects in the real world. She experimented with sewing on stickers to clothes and other objects, which could be activated with NFC-enabled mobile phones. She called those identifiers “thinglinks,” at the suggestion of a friend, now investor, Eric Wahlforss, co-founder of SoundCloud.
Later, this concept was extended to photographs, and in 2010, a public version of the image-tagging tool launched at thinglink.com, allowing anyone to add content to online images, which could then be distributed across the web.
In the years since, it’s been this tool that found its footing, attracting the interest of digital marketers, business and brands. Atlantic Records, for instance, was among the early adopters of the platform, using it to promote Simple Plan’s “Get Your Heart On” CD with interactive images. To date, ThingLink has worked with brands like Vogue, Xerox, Home Depot, Britney Spears (yes, she’s a brand), Washington Post, New York Magazine, Mercedes-Benz, and more. Meanwhile, others, including Microsoft, CNET, Forbes, Groupon, and Giorgio Armani, have used ThingLink in social media efforts, like on their Facebook page, Twitter account or blog.
In total, the company has more than 220,000 publishers on board, including four of the top 10 newspapers, and 10 of the top 50 global brands. Customers use ThingLink to turn what would have previously been static images into interactive, and sometimes even “shoppable,” content containing in-image hotspots that launch video players, social media links or other third-party applications.
For enterprise customers, ThingLink charges between $500 and $1,500 per month for annual subscriptions. Meanwhile, campaigns are charged a fixed fee based on total views, typically ranging from a couple of hundred dollars to a couple of thousands. Engeström tells us that the click-through rates on lifestyle brands’ campaigns range are, on average, around 10 percent. But music performs the best. “We have not seen a popular campaign from a popular [music] brand which would not see an over 50 percent click-through rate,” she says. “Fans love discovery, and if there’s a chance there’s exclusive content hidden in an image from a band, they’ll hover; they’ll overturn every stone.”
In addition to the Britney Spears brand, whose team recently launched a sneak peek of a video via Twitter, which used animated GIFs that were ThinkLinked, the company has also offered clickable images for bands like Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd, and Gorillaz.
Though predominantly used by brands and businesses, ThingLink has also been going after consumers with the launch of a ThingLink mobile application in May that lets users build their own ThingLinks. “We want to be the destination where interactive images are viewed on mobile,” explains Engeström. The company offers a Twitter Card integration today, as well the native app. She declined to say how many downloads or actives the app has, but noted that half of ThingLink views are now coming from mobile, and the number of users registering through mobile is increasing.
With the additional funding, CEO Engeström will relocate from Helsinki, Finland, to New York City, where former Newsweek/Daily Beast executive Hillary Billingsley, now Chief Revenue Officer, is building up a sales team. The company is preparing to expand sales and customer support in NY, while adding engineers back in Helsinki.
Investor John Maloney, formerly President of Tumblr, says he invested in the company because of Engeström herself. “It’s a tiny team, and they’ve worked incredibly hard. She has a vision and she’s tenacious, and she’s not afraid to adjust strategy and iterate,” he says. “She’s willing this thing into a company.”
As a result of the new funding, the company also expanded its board of directors, with the addition of Entertainment Media Ventures CEO Sandy Climan and former Facebook media sales director Craig Coblenz.
ThingLink competes with startups like Luminate and Stipple, which have also focused on integrating commerce and other links into images.
Though ThingLink is no longer the same product it was in the company’s early days, Engeström sees the connection between the physical tags and today’s platform. “I’m still connecting people with things,” she says. “During the beta, we connected brands with people who loved their products. We’re still doing the same thing.”
Backed By Founders Fund, 500 Startups And Others; Trusted Insight Is An AngelList For Institutional Investors And LPs
There’s no doubt that financial services, even within the banking and investing world, is ripe for disruption. A new startup is debuting today that aims to be an AngelList-like network that connects institutional investors who have over $1 billion under management. What does that mean? Instead of connecting angel investors and VCs with startups, Trusted Insight is a creating a networking platform between fund managers and investment institutions.
Basically any institutional investors who want to raise money (i.e. VCs, private equity firms, real estate companies or hedge funds) can use Trusted Insight to connect with and solicit funding from large endowments, foundations, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds. The startup already has about one-third of the world’s institutional investors already logged into the platform including pension funds, foundations, endowments, family offices, hedge funds, private equity funds, real estate funds, and real asset funds.
If you add up the assets under management of all of the users with profiles on the site, it is in the trillions of dollars. And the company has raised a round of funding from Data Collective, Founders Fund, RRE Ventures, Morado Ventures, Real Ventures, 500 Startups, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Eric Chen, and Marleen Groen.
According to the startup, institutions use the platform to keep in touch with investment opportunities with fund managers. For instance, large endowments (limited partners use it to keep in touch with managers of venture capital funds, real estate funds, and hedge funds who they’ve met). Fund managers have raised hundreds of millions of dollars through these relationships on the site already, we’re told.
But it’s more than just a LinkedIn for investors. The site also provides personalized news feeds on specific topics that interest them. For instance, if an endowment is particularly focused on private equity in emerging markets, their daily feed of stories can be filtered to this. Managers can track their portfolio page by fund, geography and asset classes.
Similar to the way AngeList is surfacing job opportunities, Trusted Insight is also posting hundreds of job listings for positions within these firms. And lastly, the startup is aiming to create a community by throwing regular events for fund managers and institutions, and helps publicize ones of note. For example, Trusted Insight promoted 500 Startups founder Dave McClure recent event for LP’s in Venture Capital firms, Premoney.
Trusted Insight says that it now has 40,000 LP investor professionals on the platform in 98 countries and territories around the globe. And 30,000 institutional investors engage with Trusted Insight each week.
One LP commented on the startup, “Trusted Insight has played a vital role in helping me find new LP contacts,” says Rod Walkey, of Migration Capital, a Fund of Fund in Latin America.
In terms of competition, Trusted Insight is going head to head with Bloomberg, which has long served financial institutions with a high-powered communications, news and financial data terminal. But there’s a compelling opportunity in disrupting the financial services giant, which charges upwards of $24,000 a year per terminal. If Trusted Insight can actually provide some of the same services (and more when it comes to the networking and fundraising), it could be a transforming utility for the institutional investing community.
Social Media Manager Buffer Adds Google+ Page Sharing As It Gains Ground On Hootsuite
Buffer, a popular social media manager, will now allow users to schedule and publish content to Google+ pages. Users will not be able to personal profiles, because Google has only opened its API for business pages.
Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich says Google+ sharing has been the most requested feature over the past two years. He explains that the site was given access to Google’s API about two months ago, and “hopes to be first in line” if and when Google opens its API for personal pages, although he noted that Google would not commit to a date for when that would happen.
Buffer also supports sharing on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and App.net. Widrich tells me Twitter accounts for about 60% of Buffer usage, followed by Facebook at around 20%. He noted that he expects Google+ to account for around 10% of usage.
Buffer is now up to 900,000 users, with about 500,000 accounts used for businesses, and the rest used as personal accounts.
The company made a name for itself early on as one of the best clients for scheduling tweets, but has lagged behind the leader in the space, Hootsuite, for a while. Hootsuite raised a $165 million Series B round earlier this month and has over 7 million users in over 175 countries, including 237 of the Fortune 500. Hootsuite began offering sharing to Google+ business pages over a year ago.
But Buffer has had a very strong year. The company has more than doubled its users in 2013, and now sees over $1.5M in annual revenue. Now with Google+ integration, it offers a strong stable of sharing options for users and could challenge Hootsuite if it can keep growing its user base substantially.
Apple Acquires Swedish Firm AlgoTrim, A Company That Does Mobile Media And Data Compression
Apple has acquired AlgoTrim, a Swedish startup that builds codecs and designs solutions that maximize performance of data, mobile imaging, video and computer graphics while minimizing memory requirements, according to a new report by Swedish emerging industry news service Rapidus, confirmed separately by TechCrunch. The helps Apple in terms of allowing it to build more efficient media deliver for mobile devices, that use less bandwidth while preserving quality.
The last major news from AlgoTrim came out back in March 2012, when it announced that it would be powering a Photo Album app for Japanese carrier KDDI, via a JPEG processor it created that could improve JPEG processing up to six times vs. traditional LibJPEG standard processing tech used in Android devices. AlgoTrim has been around since 2005, and its flagship product, the Code Compression Library (designed to reduce the size of mobile device firmware) has been in use on mobile devices since 2006.
AlgoTrim deals in all kinds of data compression, and promised to deliver imaging solutions that would deliver “modern computational photography” to mobile devices. Computational photography essentially uses sensors, computing, actuators, intelligent lights and other components to go beyond the current limitations of digital photography, which is based primarily on its analog, film-based precedent. The basic idea is to provide much more accurate images, with sophisticated lighting and vastly improved rendering by straying away from a strictly 2D, pixel-based model of image representation.
The work that AlgoTrim is doing in digital imaging could be very useful to Apple as a means to help the camera powers of its mobile devices jump to the next level. Not to mention that the rest of the company’s tech is generally useful, if extremely technical, in terms of helping to improve the overall operating efficiency of mobile devices. In essence, AlgoTrim focuses on getting more out of mobile processors while also chasing ever-lower power demands.
Rapidus reports that AlgoTrim co-founder, CEO and head of software development Anders Holtsberg recently moved to Silicon Valley and is reachable via Apple’s own central telephone switchboard. Calls to AlgoTrim, as well as AlgoTrim incubator Minc, were met with the response that no one was allowed to discuss anything about an Apple acquisition at this time, a standard response for smaller companies snapped up by Apple. Apple itself hadn’t responded to request for comment as of this writing.
An AlgoTrim acquisition is very much in keeping with Apple’s acquisition strategy; the company has already acquired six companies this year according to reports, including a number of startups dealing with maps, transit and location, along with one semiconductor firm. Typically, Apple has pursued lower profile targets in deals that are seldom formally announced, opting to pick up smaller startups that have the expertise needed to accomplish one of its own goals, rather than purchasing larger companies that are extremely successful in their own right and trying to continue to run that product, as Facebook has done with Instagram, for instance.
Update: Apple has confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch along with the following statement:
Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.
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