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Apple Updates iMac With New Intel Processors, Speedy 802.11ac Wi-Fi And Faster Flash Storage
Apple has just released an updated version of its iMac all-in-one computer. The update is a minor one, unlike the considerable redesign it got at the end of last year, but it brings brand new improved performance and internal specs to the iMac line. New features include Intel quad core processors, 802.11ac Wi-Fi and faster PCIe-based flash storage.
These new iMacs now feature a 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor on the base model, and new Iris Pro graphics. Iris Pro is a new Intel GPU that’s popular on mid-range gaming PCs, and should offer considerable improvements over the previous model. There’s also CTO options up to 3.4GHz Core i5 processors, and NVIDIA GeForce 700 series graphics on the top model, with up to 4GB of dedicated memory.
802.11ac networking means the new iMacs can work with the latests AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule routers, which introduced that wireless standard earlier this year. PCIe-based flash storage should offer speed improvements of up to 50 percent over last-gen models, according to Apple, for faster booting, loading of apps and general system performance. All-flash CTO options now range up to a full 1 TB of storage, with Fusion Drives available in either 1TB or 3TB.
8GB of RAM and a 1TB drive are now standard, with 32GB max configuration options for custom orders. Apple starts selling the new iMac today on its website, and in stores as well, according to its press release. Customers can choose between stand-mounted versions, and ones with built-in VESA adapters if they’re mounting on their own swingarms or other hardware. Prices start at $1,299, and range up to $1,999 for base configurations.
Developer Finds It Takes Just Under 4K Downloads To Break Top 10 Paid iOS Apps, Over 7K To Rank Fifth And Up
The App Store is somewhat shrouded in mystery, thanks a secret recipe that Apple uses to determine what apps shoot up the charts. Downloads play a big, influential role, but they aren’t the only factor. That being said, Readdle, developer of Calendars 5, Scanner Pro and many other apps, shared some data with us today that could help other devs get an indication of what download numbers might lead to top ranking.
Readdle’s Denys Zhadanov says that the company has found it takes between 3,500 and 3,800 downloads per day of a 4.5 star ranked app to break into the Top 10 U.S. Paid iPhone app list on Apple’s mobile software marketplace. That’s based on their experience with Scanner Pro, a universal app which recently cracked the top 10, and Calendars 5, their revamped calendar application recently released for iPhone.
This echoes a study released by app research firm Distimo back in June, which found that a paid app needs over 4,000 downloads per day to reach the top 10 spot for Apple’s paid iPhone list. Apple has been known to change its App Store ranking algorithms, so that could be what’s behind the small discrepancy between Readdle’s experience and Distimo’s findings, but it’s also well worth noting that Zhadanov believes things like ratings and feedback might also affect the threshold at which an app breaks into the top 10.
Based on what they’ve seen with their apps, Readdle can make some educated guesses about what factors affect App Store ranking: In addition to ratings, they say there’s an “inertia” factor at play, which means that some stickiness applies to rankings, so that a dramatic increase or decrease in app downloads for one particular day won’t necessarily move you up or down in the rankings once you’re in the top 10. There also seems to be a bonus for brand new apps, which is eventually counteracted by the so-called “inertia” effect.
“That’s why it’s important to reach the highest rank possible during the first few days,” Zhadanov says. “Because it’ll be harder [to climb] later.”
Some other observations from Readdle suggest that reaching higher spots in the chart requires two times or more the number of downloads it takes to break into the top 10. Around 7,000 downloads per day should result in a #4 spot for an iPhone app, or a #2 spot for an iPad app, based on their experience with a Universal (works on both) software release.
iOS 7 is generating a lot of renewed interest in apps and the App Store from consumers and developers, so it’s interesting to see with this snapshot that the download threshold seems not to have gone up considerably from back in June. It is perhaps a sign that Apple’s ranking algorithm has been tweaked to consider other factors more strongly in its ranking recipe mix.
Game Studio Total Eclipse Raises Seed Round From OpenFund To Expand Its Portfolio
Back at the beginning of this year the Openfund (a five-year-old investment fund out of Athens, Greece) closed its second fund totalling €10 million under management. They set to work putting that to good use, investing in Incrediblue (a kind of Airbnb for private leisure boats which is really taking off) and WorkableHR, a platform for simplifying the recruitment process.
And today they have backed a mobile and desktop casual-game development studio. Total Eclipse announced a $580,000 (€430,000) financing round led by Openfund, along with participating angel investors. Total Eclipse plans to use the fund to supercharge its platform in casual gaming, hiring, and launching new games.
So it seems like the Greek ecosystem is really starting to motor – and this, following our fantastic meetup in Athens at the beginning of the year.
So far Total Eclipse has shipped seven titles in nine years, across different genres, platforms, and markets including the Clockwork Man series (a hidden object/adventure for Win/Mac/Linux set in a Victorian steampunk universe), amongst one of the first games to launch on Steam for Linux. Its latest release, A Clockwork Brain, is a puzzle game for iOS that blends brain-training with frantic puzzle solving and has had over 750,000 downloads so far.
Argiris Bendilas, Total Eclipse co-founder and CEO, says the company has kept the IP rights to all its games and has since gone DRM-free, supported Linux, and launched on Steam. George Kasselakis, Openfund partner, says they invested because it was “a small studio quietly designing world-class games out of Thessaloniki, Northern Greece.”
The Openfund is becoming a case study in how to reenergise a difficult market like Greece with startups that are actually aimed at international markets, using the innate talent in the region combined with the capitally efficient local costs.
Meet Studio, The App That Launched A Million Designers And Counting
There’s no doubt that photo-sharing is hot, but among the hundreds of services out there tackling the space, there hasn’t been an app that has made a splash in photo-sharing in this post-Instagram world. Until Studio.
In one month on the App Store, Studio has hit 1 million downloads with over 1.3 million designs published and 1.9 million social shares generated. But what does Studio do?
Studio lets users lay designs, text, borders, etc. onto photos and share them to various websites. That isn’t all that exciting on its own, but there is also a collaboration feature that’s largely unexplored in the land of social. On Studio, you can remix other people’s designs by swapping out the base photo with one of your own, and then re-share the design.
There are controls for just about anything, with options to rotate and crop the photo, add filters, adjust brightness and saturation, as well as adding the aforementioned text, borders and designs.
For example, my sister could share a photo of herself on the beach with a special border and the text “Hang Ten.” I could then remix that photo and place the same border and text on a picture of my 10 toes hanging over the edge of a surfboard. If I surfed.
“You see, having design software alone doesn’t make it easy to produce great designs – but, if you can piggyback off creative friends with the remix feature you can produce designs above your natural ability,” said founder Joe Wilson. “This is how everyone will become a designer, just like everyone’s now a photographer.”
Studio doesn’t want to compete with Instagram or any other social network, seeing itself as a place for designers at all levels to express creativity. In fact, Studio designs can be shared to Instagram.
Where the UI is concerned, Studio has a bit of a task on its hands. Power designers will enjoy the extended feature set of Studio, while newbie designers or users can explore these tools to learn more. However, it could be slightly overwhelming for those of us who are used to slapping a filter, or maybe a blur effect, on a photo and calling it a day.
Wilson explained that the company is well aware of the complexity of broadening these tools to be accessible to experts and the average Joe, but it’s something the company is working on vigorously in order to find that “sweet spot.”
So far, the company’s shown real traction, with $800k in investment from CrunchFund*, SVAngel, Kickstart Fund, Peak Capital and others, reserving around $200k for hyper vertical investors.
In terms of a business model, Studio will start by offering in-app purchases for specialized design packages. According to Wilson, designers are emailing the company daily to submit design packs to Studio. The company splits revenue from the in-app purchases with designers, and is currently in the process of setting up a system for designers to seamlessly submit their designs.
However, there is an interesting opportunity to introduce native advertising to the platform. Rather than throw banner ads up within the app, Studio plans to let brands create their own design packs which can be promoted, and then used by designers. For example, Nike could create design packs with “Just Do It” slogans and “Swoosh” branding, and then users can upload pictures of their own sport skills to couple with those designs.
Brand-created design packs will be automatically hashtagged, and that hashtag will be included in exports to other social networks.
It’s a powerful form of user-generated content marrying advertising.
To learn more about Studio, check out the app on the Apple App Store.
*Disclosure: CrunchFund, one of Studio’s investors, was started by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who co-founded TechCrunch
With LiveAd, Ustream Customers Can Promote Their Video Content With Interactive Ads
Live video company Ustream has been quietly transforming itself, according to co-founder and CEO Brad Hunstable, who said the company has switched from being an ad-supported media business to a technology provider that makes money from software-as-a-service subscription fees.
Today Ustream is introducing a new service to its SaaS customers — advertising. Hunstable said that as companies start using Ustream as a way to bring their content online, they also need a way to promote that content to the right audience, rather than just sticking a video on their website and hoping for the best.
“Brands and marketers are starting to act like media companies, but they’re not being able to drive targeted viewership for [their content],” Hunstable said.
Ustream’s new LiveAd units allow companies to package their video content into standard display ads. In the examples that Hunstable showed me, the ad is playing video as soon as it loads, but the sound doesn’t start unless you actually mouse over the unit.
Hunstable said companies can use the ads to direct viewers to their site, or they could create a complete viewing experience in the ad itself. They can also add other features to the ad — for example, if they’re promoting video from a conference, they can also include options for viewing tweets from the conference or opening the conference agenda, as you can see in this Cisco ad that ran on TechCrunch.
Ustream works with advertising partners to give those ads reach and to target them at the audience that the customer is living for, Hunstable added. And while the company’s emphasis is on live content, LiveAd campaigns can also be used to find new viewers for those videos after they’re no longer live.
Early LiveAd users include Sony, Salesforce, HBO, radio station hot97, and Cisco. Ustream said their campaigns have resulted in a 10x improvement in viewership and engagement, on average. The average view time has been 12 minutes, the average interaction rates for the ads has been 15 percent, and actual clickthroughs on ads have been “as high as” 1 percent.
As for the broader change in Ustream’s model, Hunstable said it has resulted in “the best year we’ve ever had by far” — the subscription business has higher profit margins, he said, and Ustream’s paid subscribers have doubled in the past year. (The shift did result in a restructuring and small reduction in Ustream’s workforce earlier this year.)
CloudOn Brings Its Mobile Productivity Suite To The Web
CloudOn, the popular iOS and Android app for viewing and editing Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, is coming to the web today. After signing up more than 5 million users through its mobile app, the company has now decided that it’s time to embrace the web in order to become a hub for content editing and sharing.
The service currently works with Google Chrome and Apple Safari. Support for Firefox and Internet Explorer is in the works.
CloudOn always had greater ambitions than “just” being a very popular mobile productivity app. The latest mobile versions already showed some of this with the addition of a basic activity stream for shared documents. Today, it’s pushing this idea forward by adding an even more in-depth activity stream with information about every edit, action and message to its service. This new FileSpace, as the company calls it, is meant to give team members more context about the documents they are working on.
“Over a billion documents are shared by email every day, and users spend an average of 100 minutes every week searching old email for content,” said Jay Zaveri, VP of Product at CloudOn in a statement today. “At CloudOn we really care about how users organize and share documents. This latest launch not only gives users the comfort of accessing CloudOn through a browser but also enables team sharing and editing of docs in a convenient and easy way.”
Just like the mobile apps, the web version integrates with Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and SkyDrive. CloudOn, as its CEO and founder Milind Gadekar has told me in the past, isn’t interested in becoming a file storage service itself, so it’s relying on third-party services for handling files.
Would-Be Alexa Killer SimilarWeb Raises An Additional $3.5 Million
A company out to topple the stronghold Alexa still has on web rankings despite serious questions involving accuracy is Tel Aviv-based SimilarGroup, makers of an online web measurement tool called SimilarWeb. Today, the company is announcing an additional $3.5 million in funding, and the launch of its paid service, SimilarWeb Pro.
The new funding, an extension of SimilarGroup’s Series B, comes from angel investor Lord David Alliance, chairman of N Brown Group, a clothing catalog retailer, and includes participation from previous investors, Moshe Lichtman and Docor International. To date, SimilarGroup has raised $7 million in total outside funding.
The company was originally founded in 2009, and until recently had only been know for its suite of branded browser plugins (e.g. SimilarWeb, SimilarSites), which offer users suggestions of other websites like the one they’re visiting, and other useful information such as web rankings, traffic sources, reach, and more. But SimilarWeb actually has a network involving hundreds of different plugins, CEO Or Offers tells us, whose combined reach today is in the “tens of millions” of end users.
SimilarWeb won’t disclose these plugins by name, however. “We don’t want users to try to manipulate our data, like they’re doing to Alexa,” Offer explains. “That’s one of their weaknesses – their panel is very biased, as it’s based on their toolbar,” he says.
He notes also that with SimilarWeb’s reach, its panel is much larger than competitors like Compete or comScore, which clock in at around 2 million panel users each. And while there are always concerns when measuring through panels instead of directly, the focus for SimilarWeb has been an ongoing quest for accuracy. To this end, it has employed data scientists with machine-learning, big data and statistics backgrounds to help it continually improve its data.
“We have a research team and data quality people, who have a responsibility to make sure the data quality is high in every country we measure,” Offer says.
SimilarWeb is not U.S.-focused, like some of the other measurement firms today are – and in fact, it’s now opening up a new office in London to help it further expand its global presence. There are currently just two people employed in London out of the 40 total working for SimilarGroup, but the company expects to add anther 10, mainly in enterprise sales, across all locations going forward.
The additional hires relate to SimilarGroup’s other major news today – the public debut of SimilarWeb Pro, the first paid version of its web measurement service. This product has actually been in development for a year and half, allowing the time for the company to work with its customers on product features, functions and look-and-feel. In the meantime, it launched SimilarWeb, its free service, to the public.
From the beta period to today’s official launch, the company has already signed up hundreds of paying customers for its premium version, the company claims, and while they can’t disclose some of those by name, their website includes a few testimonials from Taboola, William Hill, New England Business Media, and Fanplayr.
With Pro, a $99/month version offers customers more insights and in-depth analytics than in the free version, allowing for things like competitor benchmarking, geographic breakdowns, referral and keyword tracking, details regarding social visits, access to advertising data, lists of popular pages on a site, and more. In the next step up, a $500/month version allows for 3 user accounts, and offers full lists of keywords (organic and paid), referrals (inbound and outbound), and more, instead of just the top 50 as with the basic plan. Enterprise users can request custom plans for five for more users, and can also segment all data by country. (More details on Pro are here).
The free service will see some improvements in the months ahead, too, especially in terms of making the data more user-friendly, shareable and embeddable. That site today has passed over 1 million uniques.
While no third-party measurement tools are as accurate as the internal data sites collect for themselves, most marketers understand that these panel-based services are meant to be estimates, not exacts, and proceed accordingly. Still, there’s plenty of room for improvement in this space – an industry so challenged by miscounts and inaccuracy that even Offer admits it’s a “tough market.” But, he says, people can look at their own data and compare it to what SimilarWeb provides to come to their own conclusions.
With $3B Under Management, Simplee Lands $10M To Bring Medical Bill Payments Into The Smartphone Era
In 2009, Tomer Shoval went on vacation with his family to Mexico, which unfortunately ended on a sour note — and one with which many travelers can empathize — they all got sick. Back in the U.S. several months later, Shoval and his wife started receiving a series of invoices and summaries of benefits, which seemed to add insult to injury. The bills were expensive, the invoices were complex, and what their insurance covered and what it didn’t was confusing.
Frustrated and beginning to get the sense that he wasn’t alone, Shoval quit his job eBay (where he was an executive) and co-founded Simplee with Roberto Rabinovich and Tom Tsarfati to help both patients and healthcare systems understand and manage healthcare expenses — from the comfort of their smartphones.
Fast forward to 2013, Simplee is tracking and managing more than $3 billion in patient medical expenses and now processes “tens of millions” in patient payments each year, Shoval tells us. Since launching in 2011, the startup has raised $7.8 million from investors like Greylock IL, The Social+Capital Partnership and Embarcadero Ventures, and today, with adoption continuing, Simplee is announcing that it has adding $10 million in Series B financing, led by Heritage Group. Existing investors, Social+Capital and Greylock IL, also contributed to the round, bringing the startup’s total investment to just under $18 million.
Shoval attributes the raise, and the startup’s growth over the last two years, in part, to the rise in consumer-driven healthcare in the U.S. People are increasingly choosing insurance coverage that comes with the pain of high deductibles, which means that patients have begun to pay of the cost of healthcare out of their own pockets. In fact, Shoval says that the average family in the U.S., on top of the cost of insurance, pays an additional $4,000 every year.
Increasingly, patients are confused what exactly they’re paying for and why, while, on the other side, hospitals, practices and care providers have to deal with collecting a growing share of costs directly from these confused patients — rather than insurance companies. To help consumers deal with the hassle of confusing healthcare payments, Simplee launched a platform that combined the financial management tools of Mint.com with a mobile wallet to make the process easier to manage, to track visits, monitor benefits and pay their bills online.
In addition to allowing users to track expenditures by each family member, the app also acts as a payment platform so that users can pay their bills direct, link their spending accounts and alert them to problems with billing — a huge value-add considering the changes that Obamacare will bring to this space. Today, the app offers coverage for 80 percent of insurance plans in the U.S., and Simplee continues to work to expand the list of insurance providers it supports, the co-founder says.
Another factor that has contributed to growth on the business side was the launch of SimpleePAY earlier this year — a B2B-style payment and loyalty platform that gives hospitals the ability to more easily distribute and collect bills, texting and emailing patients simple URLs instead of sending out printed versions. The goal was to enable hospitals to access the same kind of medical wallet it had made available to consumers, giving them a more robust set of features through which they could cut costs, increase revenues and deliver new features, along with a more modern billing experience.
The startup is already working with partners like El Camino Hospital in Mountain View to enable patient payments online, and today, it announced that Emergency Medicine Associates — the largest provider of emergency room services in Washington D.C. — will be deploying SimpleePAY as well.
In the coming months, Simplee hopes to continue expanding its roster of SimpleePAY customers, leveraging its new strategic investment from the Heritage Group — an organization that represents hundreds of hospitals across the U.S., investing in solutions that seek to “reduce cost, improve outcomes and increase the efficiency of healthcare delivery.”
With the new funding under its belt, Shoval says that Simplee will look to significantly expand its team of 30, and continue to invest in innovation and growing sales and marketing around SimpleePAY, which has become its chief source of revenue. But, in the end, he says, Simplee will look to stick to its core mission, which is helping both patients and healthcare providers to reduce the complexity of healthcare payments — even as Obamacare makes that job all the more difficult.
For more, find Simplee at home here.
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