TechCrunch
Indie Bookstores Aren't Dead Yet
Something magical is happening: Indie bookstores are coming back for a few very interesting reasons. While the rise of digital books has definitely put a dent into the fortunes of bookstores – you can read all about it at your local Borders store – it seems something else is at play here.
The chart below is a bit misleading but it’s a useful signpost to understand the concept. Over the past decade, Indie bookstores closed at an alarming rate until about 2005. Then, over time, the numbers slowly started creeping up leading to positive growth in 2012. While this data represents that growth visually, it is taken from American Booksellers Association membership rolls which might not reflect the true number of indie bookstores.
Given this data, it’s clear that Amazon wasn’t the one that killed the bookstores – it was the rise of the big box players. After all, the first Kindle launched in 2007, a few years after the decline peaked. As Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader writes:
I don’t think paper booksellers are out of the swamps yet but there is one good reason they can stay alive: they act as a community hub and a place for authors to read and sell books. Just as recorded music didn’t kill concert halls, authors need a place to show up in person. If there were some way – and I’m sure there is – for bookstores to get a cut of ebook sales sold in store I think that could reduce some of the doldrums. Booksellers are now mostly coffee shops that happen to sell books. That’s definitely a noble profession and it’s definitely an important part of the bookselling ecosystem. And, thanks to the death of the Big Bookstore we’re almost guaranteed better selection, curation, and intelligence from the indies.
Rent The Runway Begins Mobile Push With The Launch Of Its First App
![Dress Match[1]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sT5r6VFTNnOHJcxw6bmnZAowscVb6ORGbDRKHTqv9jM1b5tHAFMllg96dC59Vs6G2N7YkCODczYfOXLKhw8rMnp55oMwaoqXCJXsmiD1M6NrDb4U36S0OM5Ee7IViNRlNgaU1HozwPqFiwVyOlrnBJr-3uSO-bfSdb=s0-d)
Rent the Runway, the site that has been leasing designer dresses to women at a fraction of retail price since 2009, is launching its first mobile app today. With the understanding that their target customer is an on-the-go kind of woman and that usage is increasingly taking place on phones, a newly redesigned mobile site will follow next week.
“People aren’t necessarily renting because they want a designer dress,” said Rent the Runway co-founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman. “They’re renting because they’re busy, professional, and this is a seamless way to get them dressed for every occasion. We wanted to do mobile that first of all was enhancing the experience of convenience, and that you could really do on a phone.”
The app, which has a flat design created with iOS 7 in mind, has a few features to be aware of. One, called Dress Match, lets users take a photograph of a dress or color swatch they like and uses Rent the Runway’s proprietary technology to identify the same dress or similar styles available to rent. Another, Shortlist, gives users the option to create thematic lists and add dresses to them for later.
With Dress Match, Rent the Runway has essentially created a showrooming app that will likely point back to their inventory as the best value more often than not.
“Certainly our customers, when they’re going into stores, they have downloaded RetailMeNot and their competitor apps. They’re comparison pricing and shopping,” Hyman said. ”For our customers, the #1 adjective they’d use to describe themselves is smart.”
While that’s one potential use case, Hyman pointed out that the primary Rent the Runway user is a woman who is too busy to go into stores anymore. Rent the Runway users are also highly social, she said, and the type to take a photo of a friend’s dress to find a similar style.
The app is helpful for game time (i.e. in-store) decisions about whether to drop $300 on a dress or not. It’s was also designed with boredom shopping in mind. Rent the Runway users are browsing when they’re in a cab, waiting for the subway, or watching TV at night, and they’re doing it on their phones, Hyman said. 25% of use is coming from mobile, and that’s even with a mobile site that Hyman openly said sucks.
To that end, Rent the Runway will be continuing its mobile push with the roll-out of an entirely new mobile site next week.
The new site translates the best of the app into web form, she explained. To keep customers engaged with the new mobile products, the team will be rolling out new features incrementally.
Although Hyman remained mum on the site’s forthcoming features, one of the first will be the ability to track orders. Rent the Runway customers have a particularly high investment in logistics, since their dress usually arrives the day before or day of an event. If they don’t get the dress, they might not have anything to wear, which is pretty anxiety-provoking.
Beyond that, Hyman wouldn’t share further details on the upcoming site, so we’ll be watching for that in the coming month.
Image-Sharing Site Imgur Says It Reaches 100M Unique Visitors Per Month
Meme-heavy image-sharing site Imgur says that it has now grown 100 million unique monthly visitors. The company also says it’s profitable, with paid Pro subscriptions and some promising-if-early results from big advertisers.
“More than a quarter” of its traffic is supposedly direct, so it’s not just depending on other sites that use its image hosting (such as online community Reddit) for its audience. Organic search traffic represents 5 percent. Other numbers that the company shared: It hosts 650 million images, with 1 million daily uploads. And mobile now accounts for 35 percent of traffic.
Imgur was founded in 2009, with recent product launches that include iOS and Android apps, as well as a new meme generator. Back in January, Imgur said it was generating 3.6 billion pageviews from 56 million unique monthly visitors.
Just for a point of comparison, I asked comScore for its traffic data, and the company reported that Imgur’s unique visitors in the United States have gone up from 8.7 million in August 2012 to 14.0 million in August 2013. That’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison, since the comScore data is US-only, so perhaps the more noteworthy point is comScore says Imgur’s US web traffic has grown 60 percent year-over-year.
As for advertising, which often takes the form of sponsored content tailored to the Imgur community, COO Matt Strader told me via email that advertisers include Paramount, GE, Virgin, and Sony Playstation. Strader described Imgur as “still very early and are experimenting” but already seeing results that “outperformed industry norms in every respect.”
Strader said he couldn’t get too specific, but he shared some of the results seen in a couple of those campaigns. For example, a sponsored content campaign tied to the release of the Grand Theft Auto V video game saw 7,000 social interactions (which include votes, comments, and shares), while campaigns for the TV show Psych have seen a 2.1 percent engagement rate.
“We want to keep a high bar for sponsored content because it will be featured alongside the other most popular image content on the web,” Strader said. “Our user community has an expectation of quality content so we want the sponsored content to stand up to that. Therefore, our focus is on partnering with brands that care about content and are looking for new marketing outlets to be creative.”
Disposable Phone Number App Burner Grabs $2 Million In Seed Funding
Before the world was informed of the massive and invasive government spying programs run by the NSA and other countries, a mobile app called Burner appeared on the scene offering users disposable phone numbers which they could use to protect their privacy, or for other purposes. For example, the anonymity Burner provides makes sense for things like Craigslist postings or online dating, for when you need a virtual number while traveling, or for cheating on your…oh, um well, you know…other stuff. Today the company is announcing $2 million in new funding, led by Founder Collective and Venrock, along with a redesign for iOS 7 and updated feature set.
Other investors in the round include TenOneTen, run by L.A. angels Gil Elbaz and David Waxman. David Frankel of Founder Collective and Marissa Campise of Venrock will also now join Burner’s board.
Previously, the company had raised angel funding from 500 Startups, David Cohen, Ted Rheingold, and others, bringing Burner’s total raise to date to approximately $2.5 million.
The app, developed by a startup called Ad Hoc Labs, is today available on both iOS and Android, and is fairly simple to use. To get started, you pick an area code for your Burner number and tell it which phone number to forward things to. The app lets you both place and receive calls, as well as send and receive SMS text messages. In addition, you can set up custom voicemail greetings, and configure different ringer and SMS notifications for each burner number you use.
With the new version of the application, the app has an iOS 7-friendly redesign with a focus on improved usability, Now the dashboard is the primary view in the application, allowing users to better manage multiple numbers, which can each have their own greetings, and voice and text message centers. Other improvements are focused on performance, as related to texting, address book integration, and number lookups.
The company generates revenue by selling packs of credits to users. For free, users get one-time trial for 1 day or 5 free voice calls or 15 free texts. To use the service more, they have to purchase other options that let them use Burner for a week or a month, or to make more calls or send more texts. This is where things can get a little murkier, since you don’t just buy a Burner pack for a set dollar amount, you have to purchase “credits” which in turn can be applied toward the various packs Burner sells.
Competitors have taken advantage of this potential confusion around pricing to launch their own alternative apps. Burner even engaged in some finger-pointing in the past, referring to one competitor, Hushed, as “an obvious clone.” Hushed built on Twilio’s SDK, allowing it to quickly work in more countries, while Burner has instead limited itself to markets where it can offer numbers that look and act “real,” – that is, they respect the formatting and prefixing that some countries require, and they all support SMS. Today, it works in the U.S. and Canada.
While co-founder Greg Cohn declined to share current user numbers, he would say that the company has seen steady month-over-month growth and revenue since making the app a free download, as opposed to a paid app that came with pre-paid credits. These days, when users return to the app after their initial free calls and texts are spent, they have to convert to paying users to continue to use Burner, and many do. (The app ranks just over #200 in the Utilities category on iOS, and around the same in Google Play’s Communications category.)
Cohn also says that what’s interesting about Burner are the long-tail use cases. “We really see everything, from dating and Craigslist and things like that you might expect, to teachers, lawyers, musicians, midwives, people posting lost-dog posters, and even celebrities,” he says. Those who use Burner for Craigslist and other user-to-user transactions represent Burner’s largest customer base, but for a lot of Burner’s users, it’s not just about having a throwaway number on hand. “Knowing you can burn a number if you want to is sometimes more important than actually burning it,” Cohn explains.
Longer term, the focus for Burner is on more than just disposable, private numbers, but on building technology where phone numbers are smarter and act more like software, he says.
The company today has fewer than ten people, and with the additional funding, they will begin hiring immediately, mainly engineers. Plus, having its own revenue streams to tap into will allow the company to also focus on other growth opportunities, including customer acquisition and distribution.
Burner’s funding comes at a time when there’s a surge of growth in the mobile messaging space with dozens of applications fighting to become the software-based alternative to traditional phone behaviors like calls and SMS. These range from consumer-focused, social apps (e.g., Whatsapp, LINE, Snapchat, Viber, WeChat, Path, etc.) to those aiming for business customers (e.g., SendHub, Ansa, etc.), and everything in between (e.g., Voxer, GroupMe, Hangouts, etc.). Burner fits in this large lot as the tool to handle everyday transactions via your mobile phone, where you need to communicate with those who aren’t friends, family or colleagues.
“We’ve barely scratched the surface of privacy and identity on mobile, and carrier telephony is a ridiculously large market that doesn’t do innovation too well,” says Cohn. “There’s a lot of opportunity here, broadly speaking, and we believe our approach to having a voice-and-text communications vector that’s not carrier- or social-network-based is very attractive to a lot of people — as evidenced that people are willing to pay us for it.”
Siri Ex-Product Lead Who Quietly Sold His Startup's Assets To Apple Raises $1M For Unsilo, A Semantic Search Engine
Apple’s acquisition of Siri in 2010 gave the company the technology it needed to build a voice-activated personal assistant for its iPhone and iPad devices. A year later, Mads Rydahl — one of the first employees at Siri as its director of product design — sold something else to Apple: a set of patents, nine in all, from a startup he founded before joining Siri. (Considering how closely the media monitors Apple news, that acquisition hasn’t been reported until now.) Today, Rydahl is working on a new startup: a semantic search engine called Unsilo, which is now preparing for a launch in November backed with $1 million from Danish incubator Oei and Scale Capital, a small VC firm co-headquartered in the U.S. (Palo Alto) and Denmark.
Not quite Wolfram Alpha, and not quite like Enigma, Unsilo gives users — initially enterprise customers in areas like scientific research — the ability to find answers to their questions by aggregating data from dozens of disparate sources. The idea behind Unsilo is that the right answers may not be related to the keywords in your search query, but in how those keywords, juxtaposed laterally as they would be in a human’s mind, might help you think of the right answer, essentially applying the concept of natural language processing to search.
“We’re investing quite a bit [of processing power] in NLP of the content we index,” Rydahl tells me. “We have a statistical and semantic approach. We’re not trying to go for Q&A like Wolfram Alpha, nor facets and filters in the way that Enigma does, and although we also index patent data, we’re quite different from Lens.org,” he says. “They are all, in the end, traditional technologies for indexing and clustering. We have an idea that we can do a completely different type of matching than what’s been done before.” He describes it as extensive query expansion to pick up variations in phrasing and terminology. “Then we detect semantic patterns around the terms that match the user’s query.”
The end result are pages that give users not just lists of documents, but results analogous to the query, grouped by approach, i.e. how they provide answers to the original question posed by the user. You’re allowed to drill down further through the interface, to see refined results.
There is also a cunning, animated visualization that looks like a floating flow chart or organigram, which gives you an idea of how all the different concepts, are literally strung together. The visualization is interactive: if you are searching for common cold vaccinations, and you definitely do not want to see any of the homeopathic-related results, you can remove that concept. Or if that’s what you want to give priority to, you give precedence to results that mention it. The search results reorganize accordingly.
Rydahl says that fields like scientific, medical, or legal research, specifically around intellectual property, “are a perfect market to for their technology.” Specifically, he pinpoints the information publishing industry that traditionally makes a business out of providing data research. “That industry is coming apart at the seams, so we are trying to add a new type of value for them,” he says. “They have an opportunity now to make sweeping changes.”
Unsilo is in talks with Elsevier, Thomson Reuters and Wiley, which might become some of Unsilo’s first paying license holders (none have been revealed yet). The medical focus is also helped along by the fact that last year, Unsilo launched MedQL.com, a research tool that helps geneticists discover hidden relationships between genes and diseases, based on evidence extracted from the 20M+ articles in Medline.
Longer term, the idea will be to take the Unsilo framework and apply it to more consumer ends. “Google does a great job on keywords, page rank, source authority, and personalization, but we believe Unsilo can help users move beyond the keyword or the most popular link,” he says. That’s especially apt in areas like research and legal, where you are “not at all interested in personalization.”
The founder, and his Apple story
It’s not often that you come across an entrepreneur who has been involved with not one but two startups that have ended up with Apple. Rydahl is that guy. (And yes, there are others.)
Originally from Denmark, where he is now based again, Rydahl’s resume is a walk through some of the more interesting developments of the Internet, from the early days of publishing making its first transitions to the computer screen, through to core technologies in search and information design, and snagging in consumer games and apps along the way. (In a way, you could argue that what Rydahl is exploring with Unsilo is a combination of all of these: helping publishers migrate their businesses online, gaming elements with the animated category widget, and of course the search technology itself.)
It was the middle part of that experience spectrum, in search and information design, where Rydahl found his life intersecting with Cupertino.
Sublinks, founded by Rydahl in 2000 and closed down completely by June 2012 (after Apple transferred the IP), was one of those under-the-radar companies focused on developing technologies that were potentially more interesting to other technology companies than to consumers or other kinds of enterprise businesses. It’s hard to find much on Sublinks today, but one person who had been on its board as far back as 2000 described it like this:
“a nascent search technology and innovation company which holds patents for a number of novel methods within the fields of recommendation systems, knowledge management, and information search and retrieval. The company manages a family of patents in The US and The European Union to protect the rights of its inventions.”
Rydahl described its technology to me as akin to what Amazon does in its product searches. “Recommenders are what Amazon uses when it says, ‘if you like this we’ll suggest that to you.’”
In the early days, he says, this relied on overlaps on items of what two people both bought, which later turned into classes of items that were used to build profiles similar to degree-of-interest trees. Presumably, this is an area that his patents covered as well, and is something that Apple could use, for example, in its App Store searches (among other products).
While Rydahl said that this acquisition was completely unrelated to Siri (it happened about a year later), he also added that, under the terms of that deal, he would not and could not talk about how and if Apple implements that technology today. (And before your imagination runs wild, remember that Apple, like others, holds a number of patents that are not related to any products at all but can be used defensively and for other purposes.)
The Sublinks technology, while perhaps never transformed into a fully implemented application of its own, gave back to Rydahl twice, in fact. Apart from eventually selling the patents to Apple, Rydahl says that it was his work on Sublinks that made him approach would-be Siri CTO Tom Gruber (who is only Siri co-founder who we understand is still at Apple, with Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus both moving on).
Rydahl was employee number-three at Siri, where he reported to Gruber as Senior Director of the team that designed and developed “all user-facing aspects of the product, from concept and early prototypes to a polished, robust and well tested product” — the product that Apple acquired just months after it emerged from stealth.
Although Unsilo has several patents pending on its technology — and Rydahl clearly knows something about how to leverage IP — he says there is a higher purpose: helping people solve problems whose answers may lie in what it already known today, just waiting to be discovered in the right combinations.
“We want to make the world a better place, by building the ‘Google of innovation and discovery,’” he says. “No one else is doing search this way. We have a unique mix of approaches that leverage the best of natural language processing, traditional data mining approaches, and long memory-based linear indexes, and we believe we can leverage this to accomplish lofty goals.”
Amazon Faces High-Stakes Challenge In Scaling Mayday On-Demand Support
What happens when it’s easier to call tech support than to Google your problem? Amazon might discover the costly answer to that question depending on how much the owners of its new Kindle Fire HDX tablets use its Mayday on-demand video customer support feature. And whether they behave themselves.
Mayday is available at the tap of a button in the Kindle HDX’s Quick Settings menu. 24 hours a day, year round, it pops up a little video window on-screen showing a support agent. They can’t see you but can hear you, talk to you, draw on your screen to guide you, and even take control of your screen to help you out.
As Farhad Manjoo notes, Mayday might not be able to solve one of the most common types of tech problems: broken Internet. That won’t stop it from answering plenty of other queries from the old, young, and frequently confused. You can watch videos of Mayday in action here.
If Amazon can scale Mayday it would be amazing. Both in the sense that it would make many people’s lives with technology easier, and it would be a remarkable logistics feat. It could become an industry benchmark for premier service. I’d love to see this succeed.
No Barrier To Berating Support
Today, most companies put lots of support info online, but if you want handholding from a human, you have to work for it.
Look at Apple’s Genius Bars. You have to make an appointment, trek out to a retail store, and show up on time. That erects a barrier to use while giving people an option when they really need assistance.
With phone based customer support, you have to look up the number, wade through phone menus, wait on hold, and then explain what you’re looking at to a support agent that is essentially flying blind.
All this friction sucks. So why does it exist? It’s cost-effective.
Having tons of support people available on-demand straight from your device would be awesome…and could be very expensive for Amazon. Mayday could become a big selling point for the device and save the company from losing money to returns, thereby paying for itself. But it’s a gamble on whether people will bash that button too often.
The question is how much Amazon will have to compromise on its vision. The company has told reporters it wants Mayday to let you get support within 15 seconds at any time, even on a busy Christmas morning, and have no limit on how often you can call for help. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went to bat for Mayday, telling TechCrunch that it functions similar to the company’s other call centers. He seemed confident Amazon could pull it off. After all, it’s managed quite a few miracles in ecommerce scaling.
Still, it may need to include fine print that it can suspend Mayday service for abuse. If you Mayday because you’re lonely, or want to show someone your cat photos, it might need to cut you off. If you try to show the representative porn through the screenshare or verbally terrorize them, it might need to ban you for life. But what if you’re just really lazy and call in every day with semi-legitimate questions? Amazon will need to determine where to draw the line.
Maybe the fundamental challenges of scaling Mayday signals Amazon doesn’t have a massive amount of active Kindle users today, as Benedict Evans wonders. Amazon is notoriously secretive about Kindle sales and engagement numbers, so we don’t know what level of HDX devices it might sell and have to support.
But if anyone can figure out how to make this all work and save us from support call menu hell, it’s probably Bezos. Turning cost-prohibitive fantasies into margin-less realities is his specialty. And if the problem isn’t the volume of Mayday requests per customer but the total thanks to high Kindle HDX sales, things could be worse. Just ask the Microsoft Surface.
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