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Social Bill Payments Service PayDivvy Sold To Higher One To Expand Its Education Payments Platform
Back in February of this year, PayDivvy, a platform that lets people split bills for utilities and other services and each pay their share, announced that it had been acquired and that it was no longer accepting payments on its platform. We reached out at the time and Mike Melby, the co-founder and CEO, said that he would be able to tell us more when the time was right. Today, nearly six months later and now that the deal has finally closed, the company has finally come out with buyer’s name: it’s Higher One, the publicly-traded universities and students payments and financial services company.
Higher One is not planning to reopen PayDivvy’s service as such, but it will be integrating PayDivvy’s technology into its platform and offering it to its target student customers.
“We’re excited about the foundation that PayDivvy has created to allow consumers to easily split and track their bills and share expenses,” said Whiteny Stewart, the VP of product for Higher One. “We plan to incorporate these new features into our student account offering so that students can focus on the important stuff, like study and graduating while we help them get their shared expenses paid more easily.”
There is also a possibility that Higher One may eventually extend its services for users beyond those at university. “They are focused on universities but when people graduate they don’t have lose them as customers,” Melby noted today.
Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but what Melby has done is give us some insight into how this deal came about. He says that in fact PayDivvy had been involved in a year-long sale process, with more than one offer falling through before finally connecting with Higher One. The reason for a sale was simple: after first launching in 2011 at Finovate, PayDivvy raised around $2m of angel funding but started to get offers for a sale at the same time that it was starting to explore raising a Series A.
That would have been a route to pursue, but as Melby told me, “payments are really hard.” Not only were there already other players out there trying to do something similar — specifically WePay and Venmo — but then Venmo was sold to Braintree for $26.2 million, and WePay has raised significantly more ($19.2 million) than PayDivvy had.
“Location was a disadvantage, too,” Melby says. “I was told by investors if we were had moved from Newport Beach to Silicon Valley, we would have raised twice as much and sold for lots more.”
More importantly, there were yet more companies jumping into the social payments space. And yet “no one has done anything extraordinary,” he says. “No one has the magic to overhaul the existing payment system,” which is still reliant on Visa and Mastercard networks. Dwolla is one that Melby thinks could possibly have a shot.
So because of all of that, PayDivvy pressed on with a sale, finally getting success on that front. “Higher One has proven to be a great partner,” Melby notes. “Aside from the fact that their strategy and customer base is a perfect fit for our technology, the team is super intelligent and picky about the assets they look to acquire.” Higher One is a publicly-traded company but is still run by its original founders.
While Melby and his co-founder Ray Tamblyn have both moved on to other places — Melby is back in private equity, as VP for New Evolution Ventures; Tamblyn working on something new — PayDivvy’s engineering team will continue to work with Higher One.
But the experience of starting a company, raising money, then deciding to exit the venture through a sale, and then having a sale fall through more than once, and then eventually, after months, get completed, is one that Melby will not forget soon. It’s the other side of the exit myth, in which a company like Yahoo quickly swoops down and scoops up small startups to beef up its talent and IP. For any startups out there who may be thinking of a similar route and wants to talk to someone who has been there, Melby says to hit him up.
Codementor Is An Open Marketplace That Provides Developers With One-On-One Programming Help
It’s a scenario all programmers are familiar with: you are coding alone, only to have something go awry and no one to ask for help. Codementor wants to prevent developers from going insane by providing an open marketplace where they can ask experts for one-on-one programming and design help. The site just launched in private beta and the first 100 TechCrunch readers to sign up through this link will receive a $10 credit.
Founder Weiting Liu says the goal of Codementor’s platform, which features code/screen sharing, video and text chat, is to replicate the reassuring feeling of having an experienced programmer beside you.
“We are working hard to bridge the gap between the experience of asking public questions on an Internet forum and having a real mentor sit right beside you,” says Liu. The site currently has 300 mentors based in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Liu says that urgent questions can be answered within two hours, while other queries will get a response within 24 hours. Codementor’s goal is to eventually have mentors available immediately for all types of requests.
Y Combinator alum Liu is a veteran founder of startups including stock investing community SocialPicks, which was acquired by Financial Content Services in 2009. He says Codementor is the tool he wished he had as an individual developer and business manager.
“Oftentimes, if developers are relatively inexperienced, they’d run into technical issues that none of us could solve,” says Liu. “As a business manager, you’re willing to pay thousands of dollars just to make those urgent show stoppers go away. If Codementor had existed before, we wouldn’t have had to pay thousands of dollars for certain issues.”
Codementor isn’t just meant for urgent issues. The platform also wants to help coders train with developers who are experts in certain programming languages, giving them in-depth mentoring and live help that’s missing from Web resources like Stack Overflow or Codecademy, and serving as a cheaper, more accessible alternative to offline developer bootcamps.
There are two ways to ask questions on Codementor. The first is to post your question directly on the site, which will match you with mentors. For example, if you need help with Ruby, Codementor will show you which Ruby experts are currently online. The second method, still in beta testing, will allow programmers to embed widgets on their blogs so followers can ask them questions directly from posts.
Developers are accepted into Codementor after a vetting process. The startup’s team looks at each potential mentor’s codebase on GitHub and also takes participation in Web communities such as Stack Overflow into consideration. Mentors set their own rates and are scored after each session by their mentees on a five-point system. Liu says Codementor, which offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee, will drop mentors with consistently low ratings in order to ensure quality.
Codementor currently monetizes by taking about 15% to 20% of each session’s overall fee. It has received initial funding from TMI and will be a member of TechStars Seattle‘s next class.
Facebook News Feed Event Aug 6 Will Give Much-Needed Rankings Explanation And Reveal What's Next
Facebook plans to clear up confusion about what appears in the news feed, announce a ranking algorithm change, and preview the future of the feed at a press event on August 6. The Menlo Park HQ session will be live-streamed to Facebook’s London offices to keep European reporters in the loop. Hopefully users will gain better understanding of how to banish boring and distant acquaintances.
In an invite to American reporters for the event at 10 a.m. PST Tuesday, Facebook said that it will “be talking about News Feed, and taking a deeper look at the ranking algorithms that determine which stories appear at the top of your feed. We’ll be discussing a specific update to organic ranking that’s coming up.” And the European invite notes “We’ll also be talking about what’s coming next for News Feed.” Though not as hyped or secretive as some other Facebook press events, the fact that it’s being live-streamed to Europe denotes greater importance than Facebook’s other “whiteboard” press meetings.
The “Friend” Problem
Now 9.5 years old, Facebook has run into a problem. As we accumulate more “friends” and the definition of the word expands to include family, co-workers, and people we’ve met once, our feeds are getting cluttered. We’re fascinated by the daily lives and photos of people we know and love. But pics of the kids spawned by that guy from accounting and the relationship drama of a high school classmate make Facebook’s news feed feel like a waste of time.
Most people don’t understand the way Facebook chooses what to show you. The news feed ranking algorithm, unofficially known as “EdgeRank,” uses how close you are to someone, how popular a post is with others, how recently it was published, and many other signals to decide which of the huge numbers of posts and actions that your friends generate appear and how prominently. Articles by The New York Times’ Nick Bilton and BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel have brought up how opaque and sometimes unpredictable EdgeRank can be.
Without EdgeRank understanding, most people don’t get the importance of using the tools to refine and customize their feed — that is if they can find them. There’s the readily available feedback buttons, such as Like, comment, and share, that tell EdgeRank you’re interested in someone. But the options to “hide post,” “do not show in news feed”, “show only important posts”, and hide specific story types are hidden within drop-downs, hover cards, and the “Friend” button on people’s profiles. They require multiple clicks to use, making it a huge chore to modify the feed presence of multiple people. Yet these options are critical to quieting or muting annoying people without having to defriend them or never accept their request in the first place.
Meanwhile Facebook has struggled for years to get users to build Friend Lists of their closest chums and people with traits in common, which are now easily viewed as custom news feeds thanks to the feed selector launched at a glitzier press bonanza in March. Lists could help people keep track of their favorite friends despite the noise if only people would use them.
And then there are businesses. Many still don’t understand which of their fans see their news feed posts, and why they’re being asked to buy “Promoted Posts” to reach fans they already earned or paid for.
EdgeRank Enlightenment
Facebook has a ton to gain from this event. Proper education could finally get everyone to explicitly help the social network to refine their news feeds. It could boost confidence of Page admins and advertisers, as well.
Facebook did recently test out the ability to say why you were hiding someone’s news feed post, which could give it insight into whether to hide that post from other people too, or review it for terms of service violations. I’ve got no idea exactly what will be revealed at the event, but hopefully this and more efficient feed presence options will appear eventually. At the very least it should look to make the desktop feed tools more accessible on mobile where users are increasingly accessing the service.
The news feed is Facebook’s lifeblood. Its ambient intimacy keeps us coming back day after day, and it’s where Facebook shows its most lucrative ads. The social network is now competing for our attention, as a parade of other mobile apps try to entertain us. To stay center stage, Facebook will need to lift the curtain on EdgeRank, give us an acting class, and let us play a role in choosing what we see.
Andreessen-Backed Tutor Matching Service Is Working With Colleges To Upend The Tutoring Industry, Starting With Cost
Of the many ways that technology is disrupting education, one area that’s changing a lot, is rife with potential, but doesn’t get as much play as it should is tutoring. Mostly, this involves the attempt to make high-quality, local tutors accessible to a wider range of students online, without having to turn to traditional channels, like Craigslist or those pesky, expensive SAT-focused private networks.
There are a million marketplaces for tutors, and many startups that have joined in the struggle to make connecting with quality tutors possible, from Tutorspree, IAC’s Tutor.com and the increasing number of services like StudyBlue to WyzAnt and Chegg. But a new startup is launching out of beta today with backing from Andreessen Horowitz and others that wants to help push the space forward by creating a tutoring marketplace that is not only affordable for students but is a sort of official “Tutor List” for universities.
What does that mean?
In other words, Blake Miller and Ethan Friedman founded Tutor Matching Service to both increase student access to quality tutors and one-on-one education, which, unsurprisingly, is something schools are increasingly turning to as they look to increase graduation rates and learning outcomes. Both schools and teachers have begun to realize that they are going to be judged more on how students perform (and hopefully, how they perform on more nuanced assessments that prove mastery and not just the ability to take a standardized test).
Schools want to improve student graduation and success rates, and one-on-one tutoring is a great (and effective) way to do that, however, at most colleges and universities, there are few tutoring options for upper level chemistry, physics, math, languages and so on. College learning centers are asked for help in this regard by parents and students all the time, so Tutor Matching Service began by piloting (and sponsorships) from the career centers, learning centers and student governments of schools like CalTech, Purdue, NYU Poly and Kent State University.
The startup is attempting to establish a real tutoring marketplace, through which tutors can connect to students who need help in each subject, whether they want to volunteer or offer paid services. The founders initially started with a proof-of-concept Facebook app, but at launch, Tutor Matching Service is a web app that no longer requires you to use Facebook to log in.
The startup is now working with over 30 schools to offer tutoring services both online and on campus — and that’s what founder Blake Miller says is their real differentiator. The company has thus far grown organically by word of mouth, but is now on a mission to begin spreading the word. To incentivize schools, the service offers the ability to tap into data collection and analysis tools to map student progress and learning paths, giving those types of tools away for free.
So that means the service, when all is said and done, is a free service for schools, including that data on what students are booking, searching for, paying for and so on. To survive themselves, the company will withhold 10 percent of the fees that students pay to tutors — if a tutor charges $10/hour, the startup will take $1 and the tutor receives $9. For those who volunteer, no fee is applied.
Cost-wise, this could be comparable to digital solutions, or not, it really depends, since Tutor Matching Service is going to let tutors set the going rate of their services. But the company is putting emphasis on being truly affordable — not just another company that says it’ll be affordable and three months later is right up there with everyone else.
Today, having spread to 30 schools, the average price is $12/hour. Compared to “brick-and-mortar” tutoring services, that puts Tutor Matching Service in the “extremely affordable” category. At Tutorpedia, to name one, the price per hour is $105/hour (while tutors make $20-$40/hr), Stutors, a tutoring company in downtown Palo Alto is $96/hour. Their overhead requires them to take a huge cut and the stigma around tutoring — in other words, the fact that everyone and their mother expects tutoring to be expensive and a pain in the ass.
The other keys to Tutor Matching Service, which it hopes will make it appealing to high school and college students, if not differentiate it from others in its camp starts with offering both in-person and online tutoring. The other is that most tutoring companies which take the Kayak or lead-gen approach are really referral sites, potentially getting paid to send customers to particular companies.
Tutor Matching Service wants to be a marketplace, allowing people to contact tutors before booking, view mutual friends on Facebook and the network, and other features like this that can help add some transparency to the process. Lastly, for the campuses it’s working with, the startup is becoming an official “Tutor List,” that is to say the schools put links on their school websites, have flyer on campus, sending them traffic direct and acting as their advertising and marketing funnels, if you will.
Oh, that and the fact that it offers a 100 percent guarantee on the quality of its tutors, and more than 100 of its tutors are certified by their universities (which includes faculty recommendations, training and taking courses at the school).
There’s a long way left to go before Tutor Matching Service becomes the official tutoring network for higher ed in the U.S., but it’s certainly moving in that direction. There’s tons of competition and plenty of private tutoring companies will be up in arms if/when they begin infringing on their territory. But, really, it’s the Uber model at work, as local tutors can join the service, get certified and begin building reputation scores and seeing more students (and revenue) as a result. That could be hard to resist.
The New Motorola Is Focusing On “Very Few” Devices, And A Low-Cost Phone May Be Next
Motorola has never been the most prolific smartphone maker, but there’s no question that they’ve churned out a lot of hardware over the years, but now that Motorola is flying under Google’s banner, you can expect to see some shifts in the company’s hardware strategy, and it looks like that scattershot approach to making phones is getting the ax.
According to Motorola Corporate VP of product management Lior Ron, the company is going to be trimming down the number of phones it releases so it can better focus on the ones that are really worth it.
“We’ve done a lot of devices before,” Ron told TechCrunch in an interview earlier today. “Now we’re going to do a few — very few. Everyone of those devices is going to really matter for consumers.”
Those are some pretty bold words from the man who headed up the Moto X project, but it isn’t the first time that we’ve seen the company try to embrace a more streamlined product strategy. Sanjay Jha, CEO of a then-unified Motorola, basically said the same thing a year-and-a-half ago, citing the woes “incremental innovation” as the big drivers behind his decision. At the time, it seemed as though Jha’s words struck a chord with at least one other beleaguered Android device manufacturer, as HTC publicly committed itself to producing a smaller number of “hero” devices just a few days after Jha did.
According to CNET, the next of those “very few” devices that Motorola is reportedly working on is a lower-cost device meant to expand Motorola’s position in cost-conscious global markets.
Ron declined to explain just how dramatic this change in focus is going to be for the company, but that’s not to say that Motorola will be without its share of repeat customers. Motorola confirmed to CNET earlier this month that the company is slated to become the sole manufacturer of Verizon’s popular Droid line of Android devices. Previously, companies like HTC and Samsung were allowed to pitch in as well, but it now appears that Motorola will run that show entirely.
Then again, the “more wood behind fewer arrows” approach presents some potential issues, too, and HTC serves as proof. Despite the fact that the HTC One received near-universal critical praise, the company that made it recently reported quarterly profits down a whopping 83 percent from the year before. On the other hand, many have argued that Google’s interest in Motorola was based purely on the value of the company’s patent treasure trove — it’s not hard to look at any revenue that Motorola brings in from hardware sales as icing on that cake. And Google (naturally) seems all for the strategy, despite the potential pitfalls it entails.
“Our mandate from Google, from Larry, is really to innovate and take long-term bets,” Ron said. “When you have that sort of mentality, it’s about quality and not quantity.”
Employer Tipped Off Police To Pressure Cooker And Backpack Searches, Not Google
In what might be Medium‘s first widespread Twitter moment, music writer Michele Catalano used the platform to blog details of an unexpected visit to her home yesterday, from six men she identifies as members of the “joint terrorism task force.”
Catalano asserts that the visit was likely prompted by her husband searching for the term “backpacks” in close conjunction with her searching for the term “pressure cookers” and her son reading the news. Or something.
Turns out the visit was prompted by the searches, but not in the way most speculation asserted – by a law enforcement-initiated, NSA-enabled dragnet of the couple’s web history. It turns out either Catalano or her husband were conducting these searches from a work computer. And that employer, “a Bay Shore based computer company,” called the police on their former employee.
The Suffolk County Police Department has just released the following information related to the case:
Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”
After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject’s home to ask about the suspicious internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk County Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature.
Any further inquiries regarding this matter should be directed to the Suffolk County Police Department
From what we can glean from LinkedIn, the computer company referenced above may be Speco Technologies, where Catalano’s husband Todd Pinnell worked as a product manager until last April (we’ve called Speco to confirm). This should be a teachable moment to anyone who thinks that their workplace computers are somehow not being tracked.
While a PRISM-backed system, or Google itself, tracking user activity wasn’t the cause for this specific incident, the fact is that Google does comply with law enforcement to hand over user data. Can the FBI or local police provide a search warrant to Google, and can Google comply with such a request? Yes, and the company publishes the requests in a report every year. This is nothing new.
And, according to that transparency report, “widespread” requests, like the months of search history that would be needed to figure out the pressure cooker and backpack coincidence, often result in a push to narrow the scope of the investigation from Google’s end.
But, according to an industry source, it doesn’t work the other way around i.e., Google isn’t flagging searches for “pressure cooker + backpacks” for police.
It’d be crazy if it did though.
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