TechCrunch
Microsoft Increases Windows 8 And 8.1 App Roaming Limit To 81 Devices
At its Build developer conference earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it planned to increase the roaming limits for apps purchased in its Windows Store. As the company announced today, that limit is going to be 81 (and yes, that’s Microsoft trying to be funny). Starting October 9, users will be able to install all Windows Store apps on this many devices – provided they are all associated with a single Microsoft account.
For all intents and purposes, that means users can install their apps on as many Windows machines as they want to. Even the most hard-core Windows geeks are unlikely to have 81 Windows 8 PCs in their houses, after all. Microsoft could have just gone ahead and told people there was no limit to the number of devices they could use an app on, but then it would have missed a chance to work the upcoming Windows 8.1 release into today’s announcement.
Microsoft says it made this decision based on the “growing feedback from many developers and from our most enthusiastic customers” who complained that the previous limit of five devices wasn’t enough. The company also argues that this change could bring more revenue to developers of ad-supported apps.
Developers will still have the option to limit the number of devices their apps will run on. Microsoft offers an API that will allow developers to build a service-side verification system to set those limits for their users.
Apple currently allows its users to install a single app on up to 10 devices.
Gillmor Gang Live 09.27.13 (TCTV)
Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session today at 1pm Pacific. Like us on Facebook at facebook.com/GillmorGang
Ebay Acquires “Content Meets Commerce” Shopping Site, Bureau Of Trade, As Its Personalization Efforts Heat Up
Online marketplace for men’s shopping, Bureau of Trade, has been acquired by eBay, the company announced today. Founder Michael Phillips Moskowitz is joining the eBay Marketplaces team, where his focus will be on helping eBay improve their personalization efforts. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it was an all-cash deal and an “acceptable” and positive (if not stellar), outcome for Bureau of Trade’s investors.
The startup had raised $1.2 million in seed funding in a round led by Foundation Capital, with contributions from Founder Collective, FFAngel, Courtney Holt on behalf of the Techfellows Fund, and other angel investors.
The deal speaks to eBay’s increasing efforts to modernize its website by experimenting with new kinds of shopping experiences. The first results of Moskowitz’s work at eBay will be seen as early as this fall, we’re told.
Though Moskowitz declined to discuss Bureau of Trade’s sales or user numbers, he said that the company’s blending of content meets commerce had proven to drive up the sales price for items on the site. “The average good on eBay will sell at X purchase price. That same piece of merchandise when covered by the Bureau – when written about by us – created in many instances a 50 to 100 percent price increase. That’s profoundly valuable,” he says.
He hints that there’s something interesting in the works with what he’s learned through Bureau of Trade that’s now coming to eBay, but couldn’t provide details. Bureau of Trade remains online for now, and will have some sort of “big surprise in store this fall” with regards to its future. Sometime in either November and December, the site will introduce “something you’ve never seen before,” Moskowitz teased. (TechCrunch has seen quite a lot, actually, but he swears it will be new.) In fact, Moskowitz says he can’t even tell us his title at eBay, because it’s a role that has never before existed and would give away too much.
eBay, he notes, now has his startup Bureau of Trade, plus other acquisitions like Svpply and Hunch which he describes as a “triumvirate that’s uniquely positioned to do something catalytic and game-changing later this fall. We’re all working together symbiotically,” he says.
As you may recall, eBay had first announced a Pinterest-inspired redesign last October, which featured an image grid and improvements to site search. That revamped homepage was then rolled out to all U.S. customers in February, with eBay touting the more individualized feel it offered consumers, with product feeds that included items, brands and trends that matched up with users’ own interests and passions.
Moskowitz’s previous experience before Bureau of Trade, includes time at Palo Alto design firm IDEO and as co-founder of menswear label Gytha Mander. Going forward, he will remain in New York, where, says eBay, he will “be helping eBay’s 120 million active users (as of June 30, 2013) discover items that match their individual tastes and preferences.” Five of the ten-person Bureau of Trade team will also join eBay.
Said Richelle Parham, CMO for eBay North America, eBay will now benefit from Moskowitz’s perspective of “exceptional goods with a story” in-house.
For background, Bureau of Trade launched last September – around the same time eBay launched its new homepage. The startup was an experiment in wrapping together content and commerce, to see if doing so would boost sales. According to investor Charles Moldow of Foundation Capital, whose firm led roughly 90 percent of the startup’s $1.2 million seed round, that thesis was proven correct: content absolutely helped drive sales, and at higher prices. Whether or not that could scale, however, would have taken more time and investment. At the time of the acquisition, the company was trying to grow its audience, which was in the six figures.
Moldow said that Bureau of Trade’s unique position – one he said somewhat reminded him of the J. Peterman catalog parodied on Seinfeld – was why his firm even took the risk on Moskowitz’s content/e-commerce business. It wasn’t really an e-commerce company, he said. E-commerce businesses have high acquisition costs, low product margins and high churn. “That type of business would not interest us, but this was a social company, a content company, and a media business – it had a commerce element for monetization,” he explained.
Moldow facilitated the introduction between Moskowitz and eBay, after meeting with Devin Wenig, eBay’s President of Marketplaces. Wenig was already aware of and liked what Bureau of Trade was doing, probably because a majority of the merchandise the startup listed on its site was sourced from eBay sellers.
We reached out to eBay to find out more about their plans with Moskowitz, but the company has so far declined to provide much beyond what they’ve already said publicly. All eBay would say for now is that later this fall, it will be rolling out additional updates and new features to the eBay homepage, which will involve some of Bureau of Trade’s learnings.
“Michael and his team are playing a pivotal role in this next phase, working closely with our product team to ensure these changes offer the optimal shopping experience combined with an editorial viewpoint for our global community. Stay tuned,” an eBay spokesperson told us.
Currently, Bureau of Trade website remains online, and does not include a mention of a forthcoming closure, acquisition or transition plan. Moskowitz says he didn’t realized eBay was making the announcement today. But when the time comes to announce Bureau of Trade’s next steps, it will be broadcast on YouTube, on Esquire.com, and on the Bureau website itself.
More to come.
TechStars London First Cohort: Our Three Favorite Startups From Demo Day
The TechStars inaugural London Demo Day boasted an impressive group of companies, but we put our heads together and came up with a consensus decision on our top pick, as well as a couple of runners up for the show.
The best presentation and interview went to OP3Nvoice, a startup that’s getting some decent early traction with around a dozen b2b customers that reach around a million users.
Winner
OP3Nvoice
The OP3Nvoice platform offers APIs that make voice and video data searchable by translating its audio to text. It’s targeting this very broadly at developers and businesses that want to be able to turn any unstructured audio data — recordings of meetings, for instance, or audio books, phone calls, conferences, interviews, and so on — into data their business can analyse and act upon, rather than leave untapped.
OP3Nvoice is effectively acting as a connecting layer between these business clients and a range of “hard science” companies that have developed automative speech recognition (ASR) technology — providing the glue (APIs) to stick the two together.
“We licence the ASR engine — the thing that takes the audio and turns it into text,” confirmed CEO Paul Murphy in an interview. It’s effectively a partnership at this point, with OP3Nvoice feeding data back to its ASR providers so they can continue improving their technology.
“These hard sciences are coming out of universities, they’re coming out of research labs and these guys don’t actually understand how to make their stuff accessible,” Murphy said. “And there’s a massive market for this stuff. Because the idea of being able to just make audio and video content searchable — this is the first thing we’ve done and the response has been amazing. People say, ‘yes we’ve always wanted this but we’ve had no idea how to do it.’”
Murphy said the idea for OP3Nvoice actually came out of another business (which still exists) that he founded in 2011, called CallTrunk. That was a phone call recording platform for consumers. But while users liked the service they complained they couldn’t find their call recordings — so the idea for building an audio search was born.
Organising the world’s information and making it searchable is of course the mission of a very large company former startup now based in Mountain View. But OP3Nvoice’s b2b focus means it’s not going to come into direct conflict with Google, said Murphy.
“Google will do this for public data — there’s no question about it. The thing is that so much of this data is private,” he said. “We actually have a very deep stack. Our platform can make phone calls, our platform can make recordings, our platform can manage and distribute the audio and video. These are all things that private companies need because it’s just hard to do.”
“We’re not going to index YouTube because there’s no point. Google will do that. That’s great. But once YouTube’s indexed then everyone else is going to want to index their stuff,” he added.
While there’s huge potential in making audio and video recordings searchable, with so much of that type of data now being generated and stored online, Murphy hints that there are other areas it could also expand into in future.
“One of the thing we’re really good at is taking hard science and making it useable,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re working with a lab in Germany right now that does emotion detection. They built this stuff for one use-case, and we looked at it and said, ‘hang on — there may be hundreds of people who want to be able to do something with this data but you can’t just give them a spreadsheet full of numbers, you need to give them an API that a developer can deal with’. So that’s potentially another thing that we could expose.”
Runners Up
Indie gaming is a growing trend, which currently accounts for around 68 percent of all mobile gaming, according to PlayCanvas. This startup, from former Activision and Sony Computer Entertainment developers, aims to profit from that trend by providing developer tools that live in the cloud and make cross-platform browser-based collaborative game development a reality
PlayCanvas already has the support of Activision, Mozilla and ARM, and has built a tool that makes it possible for artists, developers and other game design professionals to work together in the browser to make fully playable HTML5 games, which it then publishes on the web. These games can be played on any device, so there’s an instant result already in place, but the larger opportunity here is enabling the somewhat fragmented independent development community to come together despite physical and location barriers to build things collaboratively with a cloud-based development platform that has no barrier to entry.
This startup earns a mention because it could enable the future of games development, providing a way for devs to work together no matter their end publishing goal, once the startup starts supporting other languages. It also already includes a number of different monetization tools, so that indies can be making revenue from day one for their work.
Gaming might be just about ready for its Google Docs moment (it’s already happening for hardware design and 3D drafting), and PlayCanvas seems to have the team, expertise and user acquisition model to make it happen.
On the web and increasingly on mobile, it’s relatively easy to see real-time analytics for products via any number of providers, but the same has not been true for TV broadcasters and advertisers. That’s what iptvbeat wants to address with its platform, which it calls “Google Analytics for digital TV.
With iptvbeat, any provider of satellite, cable, IPTV or any over-the-top solution can track viewers in real-time and see all activity related to what shows are being watched, how many people are viewing and what the rate of churn is in real-time. The existing dominant TV analytics provider is still Nielsen, which requires that specially designated “Nielsen families” install hardware in their homes and use a special Nielsen remote to actually track their viewing, which results in an incredibly small sample population speaking for all viewers. iptvbeat estimates that in the UK, there are around 60 million TV viewers currently, with only around 5,000 Nielsen households total, of which only less than half are even using Nielsen setups to watch.
That results in “out of date” and “inaccurate” info for broadcasters, which is received a full 24 hours after a program is actually aired, in a CSV format that’s not easy to parse immediately. By contrast, iptvbeat shows them 100 percent of their viewership, in real-time, via web-based reporting tools that show the info digitally in easy-to-read graphs and charts which can be adjusted based on a client’s needs.
iptvbeat CEO Robert Farazin explained in an interview that the company relocated from the U.S. back to Europe to pursue deals with smaller regional carriers in markets where there aren’t just a few massive, dominant players in order to build traction. The plan is to continue with that strategy until they reach critical mass, and then re-enter the U.S. market and approach the big fish like Comcast and AT&T.
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