TechCrunch
Alibaba Group Acquires Kanbox, A Personal Cloud Storage Service
Chinese Internet giant Alibaba Group has acquired Kanbox, the personal cloud storage service sometimes referred to as “the Dropbox of China.” This marks Alibaba Group’s first personal cloud storage acquisition as the company focuses on expanding its range of consumer-focused cloud computing products. The acquisition price was undisclosed.
Launched in early 2011, Kanbox raised a Series B round of $20 million that year led by DCM with SIG China participating. Kanbox has more than 15 million users who use the service to upload, download and sync files through their devices. About 20% of users access Kanbox through their mobile devices and Alibaba could use it to build a service similar to Apple’s iCloud, enabling customers to access their content and media across different platforms. This will increase the reach of Alibaba’s mobile ecosystem, which centers on the Alibaba Mobile Operating System (AMOS), and help it market products like Alibaba’s smart TV, which it launched with Internet TV services provider Wasu Media in June. Alibaba said that it also plans to enable users to back up their mobile data, including contacts and text messages, through Kanbox.
Alibaba has focused on expanding its cloud computing products since launching the Alibaba Cloud Computing unit in 2009.
“Personal cloud storage will be a fundamental service for mobile users in the future and will serve as an important touch-point to reach a wider user population,” said Florence Shih, an Alibaba Group spokeswoman, in a statement. “We believe this type of service is synergistic with our existing suite of mobile applications and ecosystem.”
Bitcoin-Infused Accelerator Boost.vc Gains Momentum With The Launch Of Stellar Second Batch
Last summer, Adam Draper and Brayton Williams launched Boost.vc, a 12-week accelerator program for early-stage startups. Taking a familiar approach to business incubation, the San Mateo-based accelerator and investment fund offers a handful of on-site services to its chosen companies, including housing, office space, mentoring and seed funding.
To set his accelerator apart in a space that’s become increasingly crowded over the last few years, Draper has looked to take a hands-on approach with Boost.vc. He’s also in the somewhat unique position of being able to leverage his experience as a fourth generation venture capitalist and entrepreneur to give teams access to an active support network of successful entrepreneurs and executives and bring in notable speakers to offer advice on how to navigate the critical early stages of business development.
Since launch, Draper has looked to experiment with the accelerator formula by diving into particular verticals in order to offer more targeted support and acceleration to startups focusing on that market. Having been an early supporter and proponent of Bitcoin — such that he was subpoena-ed early last month — Draper decided to start with digital currency, dedicating half of its second batch (seven startups in total) to companies building products and technologies around the emerging Bitcoin ecosystem.
In a commitment to helping to establish Bitcoin as the next digital frontier for startups, Boost.vc raised a follow-on or “Start Fund” for each of the Bitcoin companies that graduate from the accelerator. So, in addition to the $15K in seed capital that each of the 17 companies receives (in exchange for a 5 percent equity stake), Boost.vc’s Bitcoin startups will receive an added $50K investment at the end of the program. The fund itself is anchored by Lightspeed, Rothenberg Ventures, The Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and Beluga founder Ben Davenport.
Last Friday, these Bitcoin startups were able to tap into their “Start Fund” capital, as the accelerator held its second Demo Day last Friday, in which the 17 startups took the stage to pitch their businesses in front of hundreds of investors.
Draper tells us that the first cohort of startups to graduate from Boost.vc is growing slowly, with the seven startups having raised a couple of million in follow-on financing to date. While they haven’t blown the roof off in the funding department, all are alive and well, he says, including, most notably, Bang With Friends. The founders of the infamous “Facebook for casual sex” initially joined the accelerator to develop a much less provocative dating app, and threw the Bang With Friends site up to amuse themselves while working on their other project, only to watch it take off almost overnight.
With over 1.3 million users, the founders naturally decided to pursue the idea and see where it would take them, and Draper assures us that, while the company has been quiet, it’s still kicking. The team is also rumored to have raised a round of seed capital and is preparing a big re-branding. They’re not ready to share details yet, but stay tuned for more.
The Boost.vc founder also said that Favor, an Austin-based startup from its first batch, has found some promising early traction for its on-demand food delivery service. Putting a spin on the successful GrubHub and Seamless model, Favor is an on-demand, personalized delivery assistant initially focused on the Austin area, but has plans to expand in the coming months.
As to Boost.vc’s second batch, each of its 17 startups are in the process of raising follow-on seed rounds, and 5 of the 17 are putting the finishing touches on their fundraising campaigns. One of the startups in the accelerator’s second class, AuditFile, closed a $300K round of seed funding prior to Demo Day and has already signed on five enterprise clients.
The company has found early interest from investors and customers thanks to its tackling a decidedly unsexy yet underserved market — accountants. The startup is building a secure, cloud-based solution for CPA firms that allows them to run more efficient audits, manage audit risk, track progress in realtime, is peer-review compliant and optimized for BYOD usage.
Another company that’s seen early investor interest is Gliph, a startup and mobile app by the same name, which offers users a simple and easy way to send Bitcoin. The app provides a secure texting and Bitcoin payment network, which can be used to, say, buy or sell on craigslist with strangers while remaining anonymous — and without needing to give away an email address or phone number. Gliph has currently supports over 2,000 Bitcoin wallets within its secure messaging platform.
The two other startups that seemed to be attracting a lot of attention from investors were Dreambox, a 3-D printing vending machine that aims to bring 3-D printing to the masses and CourseOff, a fast schedule planner and schedule sharing solution for students.
But, without further ado (and in no particular order), below you’ll find a round-up of the 17 startups to debut at Boost.vc’s second demo day. Be sure to chime in with your thoughts.
Bitwall: Micropayments for publishers using Bitcoin
There is 36B dollars spend every year on digital content payments, but they use paywalls in order to monetize. Bitwall is creating a new kind of paywall that allows you to pay for one article for 10c, rather than an entire subscription for $20 a month. The company has 10 publishers signed up for their payment method, and their goal is to annihilate paywalls all together.
Noah Karesh, the CEO and Founder tells a very compelling story about not being able to find Guatemalan food in Guatemala, until he stumbles across an avocado salesman who welcomes him to his mothers house for dinner. What AirBnB has done for housing and Lyft has done for driving, Feastly is doing for food.
Cycle: The user interface for the web
The difference between the netscape web browser 15 years ago and the google chrome web browser of today, visually is nothing. Cycle aims to change the way that people interact with their web browser by supplying the best user interface for mobile.
Bitbox has done nearly $400k in transactions over its platform. Making it the number 5 Bitcoin exchange in the country. There is no great way to buy large block of Bitcoin over the internet today, Bitbox is changing that.
CommitChange: Intelligent Fundraising for Non-Profits
Right now the non-profit software that companies use to manage their donations is really complicated. Commit Change changes all of that . They are already being used by 19 non-profits, and they have only been doing this for 30 days. Roderick Campbell, the CEO and Founder, who has a large background in the non-profit space and understands that the technology is bad, explains that its working because of a very simple value add, “Less time drowning in technology, more time helping people.” This is in reference to the $219B online giving space.
Battr: The High Quality Online Food Brand
There is no brand loyalty in recipe sites today. People just search for google and hope that what pops up is high enough quality to cook. Battr plans to change all of that by focussing their recipe website around the chef. Chef’s list high quality pictures and descriptions and fill out a resume of recipes. Chefs need a place to show off their skills, and Battr is the place to do that.
Gneo: Prioritization for productivity
Gneo is launching their new app next week. Their last app already has 250k downloads and has grossed them 125k in revenue over the last 12 months. Productivity is a problem and Gneo is solving it with their focus on prioritization of to-dos.
Bitpagos: Payment processor in Argentina for Hotels
In Sebastian Serrano’s life, the CEO of Bitpagos, the currency has of Argentina has been wiped out three times. On top of that if you currently purchase a room for a night in a hotel in Argentina from the US, 30-50% of the money will be lost due to currency exchange rate and taxes. Bitpagos is changing that. By using Bitcoin, they are allowing hotels in Argentina to retain that 30-50% of the electronic purchase.
Arbiter: Bet Your Friends on Games
Arbiter was created because Andy Zinsser and his brother August built an online betting game, and realized that it’s very difficult to build a game when money comes into the picture. Arbiter is an API that takes care of all the difficult technological and regulatory challenges a developer would have to deal with when building a betting game. Just announced being integrated into a game that has 150,000 users.
AuditFile: The Cloud-based Solution for CPAs
The technology behind doing an audit has not changed in 15 years. Steve Bong and his brother Kevin who has a background in both engineering and accounting decided to do something about it. The space is very compelling. Steven Bong shows a slide of all of the competition in Tax and Book keeping software and how crowded the space is, and then shows the competition in Auditing, and there are only 3 competitors in the space. Audits are about to get sexy.
Verify BTC: Real Time Identity Verification software
In the Bitcoin world, one of the hot topics these days is something called KYC or Know Your Customer. It’s a process to verify the identity of people who have accounts for banks, or even more so, Bitcoin exchanges. Right now the process for online verification is very manual, comparing documents with passports. Verify BTC has built technology that can verify someones identity in real time. Saving both time and money.
Courseoff: The Future of College Scheduling
You know when you are in college and you have to register for 5 classes, and in order to use the software, you have to be trained when you are a freshman, and it take 2-3 hours to make the perfect schedule, and then you miss something, and you have to restart the process. Courseoff has helped 30,000 student create schedules in 5 minutes with their easy to use interface. But the scheduling of classes is just the beginning.
Appfuel: Get Users for Cheaper
Appfuel built an online game application network. They have taken the friction out of sharing games in their network. This cuts the cost of growing a video game on iOS. It eliminates all the middlemen.
Vaurum: Nasdaq for Crypto-currencies
Avish Bhama has founded Vaurum to help online brokerage firms gain the ability to trade Bitcoin. Consumers already trust online brokerage brands, and so this would be a huge step in getting Bitcoin to go mainstream.
Nick Reed, the Founder of Emailbox, found that the reason that innovation doesn’t really exist in the email space is because, “Email suck for developers.” There is no easy way to build email applications to enhance your email. So Nick built an API that takes care of the complex parts of an email client, in order to make it easier to build customizable applications on top of it. 7 applications have been built using the API including an app that alerts you when someone sends you an angry email.
Gliph: The Easiest Way to Use Bitcoin
Rob Banagale started with a secure messaging platform, and found that it was the perfect place to integrate Bitcoin. Now Gliph has integrated into the biggest wallet providers, including Coinbase, Bips and Blockchain.info. They have 20,000 users and 1,200 attached wallets, growing every day. 60% of the new users are people who have not used Bitcoin before.
Dreambox: The Future of the Photograph
Dreambox has dedicated their companies life toward making 3D printing accessible to everyone. Originally that started with a 3D printing vending machine that the Berkeley team built while they were still at school. But one experiment changed all of that. They built a 3d scanner, and in the first day, made $1000. They are building the future of the photograph, trying to capture moments in 3D.
Amazon Introduces Mayday, A Unique And Amazingly Useful Live Tech Support System For Kindle
Live support has always been a dream for major retailers. While chat solutions already exist, today Amazon announced a new support service available on Kindle HD products called Mayday. It is a single-click, hardware-support solution that lets users work with a remote tech support representative to solve problems with their tablets.
The service allows you to see the remote tech support person in a small window on your screen and also displays your screen on the support person’s computer where they can watch what you’re doing online, annotate the screen, and even tap through the interface. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said it’s like “actually very similar to having someone standing next to you” and offering tech support.
The service is unique to Amazon, and the company built a full infrastructure to support it at their HQ in Seattle and on board the hardware. By compressing the video signals, they are able to send more data to the devices from tech support and allow tech support to see the data remotely. Amazon’s goal is a 15-second response time, and they will ramp up staffing around major holidays when Kindles are flying fast and furious under the Easter tree.
While some may be concerned about privacy, rest assured the support person will not be able to see out of your camera, and you can mute your audio at any time. Bezos equated the experience to going into a store for tech support. “If you went to some physical store location to ask for help for your device, they’re going to see everything,” said Bezos. More important, however, is how many people the service will help.
“Are we in charge of our devices or our devices in charge of us? Getting good tech support isn’t easy, but it’s important,” he said.
The service will be available on the new Kindle Fire HDX tablets. You can read more about the service at Amazon’s Mayday page.
Amazon Announces The Kindle HDX 7- And 8.9-Inch Tablets With High-Res Screens, 2GHz Processors
Amazon has upped the Fire tablet ante with two new HDX models in 7- and 8.9-inch sizes with brand-new, high-resolution screens and running an updated Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor at 2GHz. Both models have adaptive screens that change brightness according to the ambient light and a special reading mode that will keep the tablet alive for 17 hours of uninterrupted reading.
The new models are considerably thinner than the original Fire models. For example, the 8.9-inch model is 34 percent lighter than the original 8.9 and is far thinner. Alongside these new models, Amazon is launching an updated OS, called Fire OS, with improved enterprise compatibility for email and secure browsing.
The devices are far faster than their predecessors, and gaming on the tablet was smooth and the graphics were surprisingly detailed. The 8.9-inch model also has an 8-megapixel rear camera complete with a small photo editing app that allows you to tweak brightness and contrast, retouch portions of the photo and even add meme-like top and bottom headers and “whimsical” “stickers.”
Stickers!
The new OS supports some surprisingly cool second-screen tools that allow you to buy music you hear on a movie’s audio soundtrack and even see the actors and characters in a movie. Amazon has partnered with a song lyrics provider to display the lyrics for downloaded music, allowing you to fast forward to certain lines in a song or follow the words along with the melody. The new OS will allow you to download Amazon Prime video for offline viewing.
Amazon has also added Mayday, a 24/7 customer support solution that allows you to ping Amazon support people. The service is ingenious. Remote support folks appear in a little video window and can annotate your screen with arrows and even touch UI items. You can mute them so they can’t hear your discussion and block them from seeing your screen if something… untoward appears. It is a free solution to family tech-support problems, and as long as you’re online you can access the service at any time. It is, in a word, amazing.
The 7-inch model starts at $229 for a 16GB model and $329 for the LTE-enabled WWAN version. The Wi-Fi-only model will ship October 15, and the LTE version will ship on November 14. Pre-orders are available now.
You can pre-order the 8.9-inch version for $379 (shipping November 7) and the 4G version, at $479, will be available in December.
The Kindle Fire HD also gets a slight processor bump to 1.5GHz. It costs $139.
Amazon has completely redesigned the Kindle line in this iteration, adding a glossy back bar to the HDX models and slimming down the HD model. The screen itself is very clear and bright and acceptably readable in direct sunlight thanks to the reactive brightness setting.
Amazon is also offering an improved case, called the Origami, that can fold to hold the device upright or in landscape mode. The 8.9-inch model has a unique sliding system that exposes the rear-facing camera and activates the camera app when initiated.
More interesting for the business crowd is the native enterprise support in Fire OS, offering hardware encryption, VPN-based browsing, and enterprise email support. Given that the Kindle Fire is already a popular “work” tablet given the price and size, it’s clear that Amazon sees a solid new niche for the platform.
Are the new models worth the cost of an update? If you have a user at home who has trouble with their devices, May Day alone could be a godsend. Otherwise, the hardware is nicely updated and very nicely designed. Compared to the original, bulky Kindle Fire, these models exhibit a certain design maturity and far better hardware.
Overall these are solid, incremental updates to an already strong platform and should be a big hit with readerly types and those looking for an inexpensive but powerful tablet from a well-known manufacturer.
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