TechCrunch
Bitcoin Falls 15% Following FBI's Silk Road Seizure
Bitcoin is taking it on the nose following the FBI seizure of Silk Road, a popular – and partially hidden – marketplace for drugs and other items generally outside the orbit of the law. As TechCrunch reported earlier today, about $1.2 billion in Bitcoin flowed through Silk Road, resulting in a nearly $80 million commission for the service.
For more on the seizure, head here.
Bitcoin is responding about as you would expect to having a core market that accepted it taken down, and the Federal government hemming in on its slice of the Web: By rapidly shedding value. Bitcoin traded as high as $145 per coin at the end of September.
Today, it’s trading around the $119 mark. RealTimeBitCoin is reporting a buy-sell spread of $118.10 to $119.00. This squares with another data source tracking the Mt. Gox Bitcoin-Dollar exchange rate, which places the current trading range at nearly precisely the $118 level. [Update: Bitcoin is trading around the $113 mark, and continues to decline. To stay up to date, hit the following link.]
Here’s a chart as compiled by Clark Moody:
That’s quite the drop.
And it is not really that surprising: With Silk Road out of the picture for the foreseeable future if not forever, quite a few folks now have Bitcoins burning a hole in their digital wallet. If they can’t use them, what to do? Sell, obviously. And an exodus of that scale pushes prices down.
There is also a factor of fear at play. Bitcoin has accreted to itself a modicum of respectability in recent months, failing to collapse as some predicted, and instead showing off a level of price stability that has almost surprised. Until today, of course.
Bitcoin started the day around at around the $139 mark. At its current level of $118, Bitcoin has lost around 15% of its value. Keep watching the charts, This is a real time story.
Top Image Credit: Hamed Al-Raisi
Bing Adds Pinterest Collections To Image Search
Bing announced today that it has integrated Pinterest data into its image search capability. Noting that computer sorting is a powerful tool, but that individuals can also effectively curate, Bing has added a new image collections feature.
Pinterest is a popular tool that allows its users to aggregate images of any genre and share those “Pinboards” with others. Pinterest is important enough that during the last presidential election, both the First Lady and Mrs. Romney signed up.
Bing, which already allows you to “Pin” directly to your Pinterest board from image search, places the image collections to the right of its normal results. This is what it looks like in practice:
And, when you click through, this is what you get:
Naturally the most important part of the above is the inclusion of the “View on Pinterest” button, completing the circle. There isn’t a copyright issue at hand, if your were curious, as Bing is merely crawling Pinterest the way that it indexes the rest of the Internet.
It’s a neat addition to Bing, and one that could make it more interesting to dedicated Pinterest users. However, it does feel noisy – there could be a more elegant way to bring the collections into the interface.
I would not be surprised to see more integration between Bing and Pinterest in time: Bing has money and Pinterest is working to monetize.
You can run a search here with the integration if you want to see it in practice.
Top Image Credit: mkhmarketing
Vessel's A/B Testing Platform For Mobile Launches Out Of Closed Beta
Vessel, a new A/B testing platform for iOS and Android apps, is launching its service out of closed beta today after testing it with 10 million users, including prominent clients such as RunKeeper and online radio service TuneIn. The service was founded by TuneIn’s former lead mobile engineer Koustubha Deshpande and former Pulse engineer Devendra Laulkar. It offers a number of unique features, including, for example, the ability to roll out the winning test to all of your users with just a few clicks.
Given the competition in the mobile apps market today, it’s no surprise that developers are hustling for every little bit of advantage they can get. Most of them, however, tend to focus on getting as many downloads as possible – and sometimes through shady tactics. Users, however, only give an app a few seconds to figure out if they want to use it and that’s where developers are losing their potential long-term users.
The Vessel team believes its ability to roll out the winning tests to users within seconds gives it a leg up in a market that has seen quite a few new players lately (though Deshpande argues that his company already grew larger during its beta period than most of its competitors). Vessel’s solution, he argues, also offers a far smaller SDK than other solutions and it’s infrastructure has already proven to be scalable, thanks to its work with very popular apps like TuneIn and RunKeeper. After testing the app in closed beta, Deshpande told me, the team has also managed to bring the service’s response time down to just a few microseconds.
Another feature Deshpande stressed when I talked to him is the ability to easily stop tests at any time and target users based on their operating system, location and other factors. The service’s analytics track data like user engagement, funnels and the number of returning users.
Looking ahead, Vessel plans to expand its solution to PhoneGap apps and games that use Unity’s 3D engine. As Deshpande noted, though, Vessel managed to grow as quickly as it did because it released a minimal viable product early and then learned about its users’ needs and implemented the tools they needed. The team plans to continue doing this as the service matures.
Vessel is currently in the middle of fundraising. The company previously raised angel funding from a number of TuneIn, Y Combinator, Hattery and Google alums.
The service currently offers a pretty generous free plan for new users and then works with them directly in hopes of upgrading them to the company’s paid plans, which start at $150 per month and include longer data-retention times, online training and email support.
Gilt Founder Kevin Ryan's New Startup Zola Wants To Reinvent The Wedding Registry
We’ve been wondering what stealthy startup Gilt, AlleyCorp and 10Gen founder Kevin Ryan has been working on after he revealed that he was expanding his empire a few months ago at Disrupt New York. We’ve learned Ryan is staying in the e-commerce space but going in on a lucrative vertical–weddings. Meet Zola, a new startup emerging from a Ryan and a group of former Gilt employees that wants to reinvent the wedding registry.
As Ryan explained to me, he’s been wanting to tackle this space for a few years. He’s always been frustrated with wedding registries online because the poor UI of most e-commerce sites’ registry, and impersonal experience with buying wedding gifts for loved ones and good friends. He knew that there could be a better way of solving this particular problem using some of the knowledge and expertise he’s gained from Gilt.
So he enlisted the help of two of his former Gilt employees, Shan-Lyn Ma and Nobu Nakaguchi. Ma was one of Gilt’s best product managers who helped lead the launch of Gilt Taste, and Nakaguchi worked on design for Gilt, building the flash sales site’s mobile apps. Both had left Gilt a few years back so Ryan wasn’t poaching from within his other company. He continued to assemble an eight-person team, which has six ex-Gilt staffers. Their brainchild is Zola, which is still in private beta, but will be launching in the next few weeks.
So what is Zola and how is it different from the current offerings? In case you haven’t made a wedding registry, it’s a ridiculously time consuming process that lacks any sort of experience (which is in high contrast to the actual experience of planning and going through a wedding). You pick each store at which you want to register (i.e. Bed Bath & Beyond, Macy’s, Amazon etc.), and individually choose items you want to add either in the store or online. When aggregating these registries, you can add them to a Wedding website, but the entire UI of these registries and aggregators like Wedding Channel are clunky and don’t offer the kind of personalized, ecommerce experiences that fit with the importance of an event like a wedding. As Ryan explains, “most wedding registries are stuck in web 1.0.”
Ma describes the goal of Zola as rethinking the wedding registries for a couple in “our generation.” When you visit the site and sign up for a Zola wedding registry, you can do some of the same things you would do with your wedding website, including designing a home page with a customized URL, photos, and more. In fact this experience is relatively simple, on purpose, as Ryan explains that filling in a lot of fields in the first sign-up can turn off users immediately. Zola is also tailored to same-sex marriages, and you can designate this if you want.
The design of the registry homepage is highly customizable, or you can choose to use some of the stock photography that Gilt provides (but this is actual photography you would want to use). You can that create collections of different types of categories you want to set up in your registry, including kitchen, food, experiences, honeymoon, furniture and more. You could even create a cash fund to buy a home and accept donations. The user experience is strikingly similar to creating a board on Pinterest, except you are adding items from Zola.
Within each collection, Zola allows you to simply add items from categories of products to collections. So if you were registering for kitchen items, you could add an array of utensils, china, glassware, kitchen tools, gadgets and more (including those from brands like Cuisinart or Le Creuset). Zola partially operates as an e-commerce site, as they are sourcing all the products from the brands themselves. Of course, you won’t find the kind of selection of home goods you would on a Bloomingdale’s, or Macys.com, but Zola has ambitions to carry and add more inventor (the site currently lists around a 1,000 items to register/buy).. Plus Zola allows you to add additional items to your registry that you wouldn’t find at a traditional store, such as cooking classes, music lessons, gift certificates to KitchenSurfing, bicycles, massages and more.
You can also denote certain objects to be items that groups can buy, or to which individuals could contribute a portion of the purchase price. This is especially useful to high-priced products like furniture.
Design is a big part of this site, and it’s apparent that this resembles a Gilt-like, high end experience, and differs from the traditional retailer online. Basically, as Ryan says, this isn’t your Target.com experience. As Ryan and his team explained to me, there isn’t a great way to let registries reflect the couple’s personality and style but also be easy to use. There’s also an element of curation at play. Zola will feature certain registries, and also curate collections based on theme. Though I have no knowledge of this taking place, you could envision content being particularly useful and relevant here, as brides and grooms are looking for recommendations from experts on what types of pots and pans to buy, whether it’s worth buying china and more.
One of my favorite features is the ability to control when your gifts arrive. For anyone (like me) who has been inundated with wedding and engagement gifts, and lived in a sea of boxes and bubble wrap for months, this is huge. A bride and groom can actually delay getting gifts until after the wedding, when they are less frazzled and can devote the time to unpacking. You can also import all purchase information to make it easy to organize thank you notes.
In terms of business, Zola operates much like an e-commerce site would–they get a portion of the price of the item (something like 20 percent give or take, we’re told). Ryan adds that this is all full-price merchandise. There’s no charge to the couple. To date, the startup has been backed by Ryan completely, but will be looking to raise a Series A of around 3 to 4 million in the next few months.
The site has been in beta testing with around 20 or so couples, and so far engagement has been impressive, says Ryan. He also vouches for the built in marketing aspect of a registry–as more young couple use it for friends, they may want to use Zola for their own weddings.
Eventually Zola will expand to creating actual wedding websites for couples, with the ability to add things like where the wedding is taking place, travel information, and more. Zola isn’t the first company to try to reinvent the wedding registry. RegistryLove launched last year ad a universal registry for couples. There are a number of competitors in the wedding website space, including Brit Morin’s Weduary.
Beyond being easy to use, what could make Zola compelling is that it is visually beautiful and provides the kind of aesthetic to a wedding registry that makes it feel more personal. Ryan has also had experience of running a large scale e-commerce site, which should help the startup operate more efficiently.
Postmaster's Shipping API Now Helps Retailers Pack Their Boxes Smarter, Adds Free Tier
Postmaster, the Austin-based shipping API startup that helps its users send and track FedEx, UPS and USPS shipments, announced a number of new features and a new pricing model today that will make the service free for its users who make fewer than 50,000 API calls and send fewer than 5,000 packages per month.
Customers who send more pay $0.05 per shipment (with discounts for high-volume shippers) and the service now also features discounted rates for shippers who use USPS.
That’s good news for the company’s users, but the new “Box and Bin” packaging feature the company announced today is actually quite a bit more interesting. While being able to compare shipping prices and create labels is great, after all, that doesn’t help users maximize the amount of good they can pack into a box – and the more boxes you send, the more expensive your shipment will be. To help businesses pack as much as possible into their boxes, the company now allows them to optimize their shipments by looking at the boxes in their inventory and creating a 3D diagram that shows them exactly how to best utilize the space.
“One of the problems that a high-volume retailer faces when fulfilling an order is determining the right size box to fit all the items in the order,” said Jesse Lovelace, CEO and cofounder of Postmaster today. “If the retailer uses too big of a box, they will be charged more for their shipment due to the way parcel carriers calculate volumetric pricing. We’re committed to helping ease the pain associated with shipping and logistics today, and are excited to offer even more value to retailers with the new Box and Bin feature, as well as our new pricing levels.”
Online Attorney Marketplace UpCounsel Raises $1.5 Million, Opens Its Patent Practice To All
UpCounsel has spent the last year building out its marketplace to provide its clients with affordable legal services. After serving more than 1,000 startups and small businesses, the company has raised $1.5 million and is announcing a few new products that should lower the cost of patent and real-estate transactions for clients.
The company was founded to connect startups and small businesses with legal help from independent attorneys. Businesses get the help they need without having to shell out big bucks to a law firm, attorneys get connected with new clients and additional work, and UpCounsel gets a small percentage for making the connection between the two. Everyone wins.
A few things have happened since we first wrote about the company. For one, UpCounsel has raised $1.6 million in seed funding from investors that include Homebrew, Bobby Yazdani, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, Haroon Mokhtarzada, and other angels.
The funding comes as UpCounsel has seen growth not just in the number of attorneys on the platform, but also in companies using the service. Since launching 14 months ago, the marketplace has been used by more than 1,000 small and medium-sized businesses.
But as with all marketplace companies, UpCounsel needs to balance demand with supply. On that front, it has been busy getting more attorneys on board, in California and elsewhere. UpCounsel CEO Matt Faustman says that its roster is large enough to rival some of the largest law firms out there. In fact, he believes that the number of attorneys it has on the platform will be equivalent to one of the top 20 law firms in the world within the next six months.
UpCounsel has also been providing its attorneys with tools to better help each other out. While those in law firms can get guidance and help from others in the office, most independent attorneys are on their own. By building out its community, UpCounsel enables attorneys to network, get professional support, and even hire one another when they need additional help.
In addition to its funding, UpCounsel has opened up its international patent practice to companies in any jurisdiction. While most of its legal services are limited to California attorneys and clients, the patent practice had received enough interest that it made sense to make it available to clients elsewhere.
By making patent help avalable to all, UpCounsel is giving startups an opportunity to better compete with large incumbents, while also protecting themselves from patent trolls. According to Faustman, customers can save about 50 percent on patent work done through its platform compared to going through a firm. So far,
UpCounsel is also piloting fixed-fee legal services in its real estate practice. Given the number of jobs done through its system, it’s been able to streamline certain processes and determine how much they should cost. By normalizing the cost structure of certain transactions, UpCounsel believes that it’s able to significantly speed up the process.
For commercial real estate transactions, for instance, the company says that leases are typically processed three times faster and cost 40 percent less than if a company had to choose its own lawyer and have a lease reviewed.
GoDaddy Buys Ronin, Makes More Inroads Into Accounting Services For Small Businesses
Another week, and another acquisition for GoDaddy: the domain registration and hosting company today is announcing that it has bought Ronin, a company that specializes in online invoicing services — helping businesses billing and keeping track of how they get paid. The news is being made public today because GoDaddy has now integrated the service into its existing, SMB-focused accounting business, GoDadddy Online Bookkeeping; but the deal actually closed in April, the company says.
Terms have not been disclosed, but we are trying to find out what they are anyway.
This is the fifth acquisition for GoDaddy in 15 months, and comes just weeks after the fourth was made public. The others were Afternic for aftermarket domain registry services (basically a domain resellers’ marketplace); M.dot to help website owners to create mobile internet sites; Locu to help them organize and distribute their business data to other sites/services; and Outright for bookkeeping. Ronin will sit alongside Outright in the Bookkeeping division and basically will help GoDaddy offer a more complete suite of services. This potentially puts GoDaddy into closer competition with the likes of Intuit and others that aim cloud-based services at small businesses.
“Our customers love our product – but they wanted us to provide invoicing capabilities. We knew Ronin provided an unparalleled experience, so we started discussions,” GoDaddy SVP for business applications, Steven Aldrich, said in a statement. “ It soon became clear – we needed the team at Ronin to be on our team and we needed to seamlessly integrate invoicing into our product. The end result is GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping.”
Like Ronin, the other four acquisitions were also aimed at building out the services that GoDaddy offers for small businesses and sole traders, which make up the majority of its 12 million customers today. The idea here is that by offering extra services to domain owners, GoDaddy can attract more of them to buy and host domains there.
Domain purchases and hosting remain the company’s mainstay for generating revenue, although adding more services like these puts GoDaddy into a position of making more from services longer term. Ronin currently offers a range of pricing tiers, from free to $49/month, depending on how many staff use the service, how many clients are listed, and so on.
Ronin founder Lu Wang is staying on with GoDaddy and Ronin post-acquisition, who clearly saw an opportunity to grow his product by being able to sell it out to a wider base of users. ”GoDaddy and Ronin share a vision of giving small businesses the best tools to succeed online,” he said in a statement. “The ability to reach 12 million customers… is a tremendous opportunity. Joining the GoDaddy team has given us the access to the resources and smart people who we’ve wanted.”
Video Interviewing Platform HireVue Grabs $25 Million From Sequoia For Deeper Push Into HR
When digital recruiting platform HireVue got its start nine years ago, the company actually shipped webcams to job candidates, allowing them to interview for long-distance jobs online. Though today, video interviewing startups are far more common, this was still something of a novel idea at the time. Founder and CEO Mark Newman recalls those early days running his company as 20-year old just out of college, telling people they were going to take a job interview with a webcam. “People’s responses were, ‘what’s a webcam?’,” he says.
How times have changed.
Today, the company is announcing a $25 million Sequoia-led Series D round of funding to continue to fund its growth, the majority of which has come about over the past three years. Sequoia Capital’s Mickey Arabelovic is joining the company’s board as a result of this new round, which also saw participation from Kickstart Fund and the company’s previous investors (Granite Ventures, Investor Growth Capital, Peterson Ventures, Rose Park Advisors).
Salt Lake City-based HireVue now has a team of 140 employees, and services global brands like Vodafone, Xerox, JP Morgan, General Motors, Dow Jones, Walmart, Geico, United Health Group, Hilton, Panda Restaurant Group, Chipotle, ConocoPhillips, Ocean Spray, CDW, Red Bull, and dozens of others. In total, the company has over 300 enterprise customers, including six of the Fortune 10 and 20 of the Fortune 100. These clients spend anywhere from $10,000 to over a million per year with HireVue, depending on their needs.
And while HireVue will still ship you a webcam if you need one, the company’s software is now used on desktops, laptops, iPads, other tablets and smartphones.
Its web-based platform offers different video interview types for different use cases, including both live and on-demand interviews. With asynchronous interviews, candidates can respond with video, written text, or programming challenges. The company acquired CodeEval last year to help with that latter option, and Newman says he’s thinking about ways to partner with other online learning platforms like Degreed and CodeAcademy in the future, as it sees an increasing number of technical hires coming through the platform.
HireVue also heavily invests in analytics and reporting, as well engineering and development in order to ward off competition from a growing number of players in the space.
On the product side, the company is moving into other areas, including learning assessments, which will help HR departments better understand how well training programs work, as well as tools for onboarding and team discovery. With these initiatives, now in beta testing, Newman explains how he wants to bring more of the human element back to HR. With the team discovery piece, for example, new hires can record a series of answers to questions of the “getting to know you” nature. This offering is being launched independently, as well as integrated into Salesforce.com.
The company also announced integrations with LinkedIn on its Sourcing product, allowing HireVue customers to view LinkedIn profile data in the Talent Interaction Platform.
BEYOND THE INTERVIEW
These moves and others highlight HireVue’s ongoing expansion beyond just being a part of initial hiring process, as the company finds other avenues within HR it can explore. “If you think about HR software, it’s: did I get paid, do I have to update my status if I got married or had children, or do I need to change my address, if I moved?,” laments Newman. “We think that the idea of people, and the ‘human’ in human resources, has disappeared because the folks have had to be on reporting and compliance,” he says.
Newman confirms that HireVue is moving deeper into HR with other new offerings as well, but isn’t ready to announce the details of what those may be. However, we do know that while HireVue isn’t thinking about taking on social, collaborative platforms like Yammer or Salesforce’s Chatter directly (it would rather partner there), it does see a place for itself in larger, event-based interactions involving collaboration. HireVue could come into play for things like employee reviews, he says.
Also in the works are international expansions, first to London and then later to an emerging market like India or the Philippines. Newman tells us a quarter of HireVue’s market volume these days involves emerging market hiring.
HireVue is now on track for over $10 million in revenue, and it’s been doubling year-over-year since 2009. “All the growth over the nine years happened in the last three. I guess it just took a bit of patience,” says Newman.
As Its Partner Ecosystem Expands, Box Taps Google Health Founder To Lead Its Cloud-Based Assault On Healthcare
Over the last year, Box has been ramping up its efforts to bring its cloud storage platform into new verticals. That began in April, when the seven-year-old company began making a major push to bring its cloud collaboration and storage tools to the healthcare industry, which, given the mayhem around the launch of the new healthcare exchanges yesterday, seems like it couldn’t have come at a better time.
Behind a roster of healthcare partners, HIPAA compliance and an equity investment in drchrono — a doctor-facing EHR platform built specifically for the iPad — Box has been looking to leverage its cloud collaboration platform and growing ecosystem of mobile apps to give doctors and healthcare providers a better way to do business.
Said another way, Box’s real mission is to become the glue that can help stick a fragmented industry back together. As an increasing number of doctors adopt mobile devices and Obamacare forces the market to move toward a digital future, the lack of interoperability between care providers, businesses and patients has become increasingly apparent. We can thank the “consumerization” of IT — and healthcare — for that.
Through its new secure cloud collaboration platform, Box wants to facilitate this consumerization and help medical teams access health information from a secure, connected cloud. What’s key is that, with Box’s scalability, collaboration and data sharing between doctors and nurses can happen anywhere, which also has the added benefit of removing the fax machine and paper trail from healthcare.
“What we’re really going after is the unstructured data in healthcare,” says Google Health founder and Box healthcare advisor Missy Krasner. “Box can help secure, store and share all those images, video, documents and forms that tend to get lost in the archaic infrastructure and workflow that prevails in healthcare today.”
By that, Krasner means that Box isn’t looking to develop an Electronic Health Records (EHR) solution or fix all of healthcare’s problems itself, but instead invest in the startups that are developing better mobile EHR solutions (a la drchrono) and connect each of these apps in a way that allows it to power collaboration, file transfer and secure, HIPAA-compliant sharing, for example. It’s an unassuming role — literally — which could see a small “Sync with Box” button become the main touchpoint or interface between an app and Box’s cloud. Its infrastructure established, that’s all the real estate it needs to allow doctors to upload their patient data to Box’s cloud, share with other care providers and so on.
A patient’s x-ray, for example, can be instantly stored in the cloud by their doctor within their personal folder, which only they and their doctor are able to access. This is the type of secure, instant access to medical information Box wants to represent, and power, going forward. And not only that, but secure data exchange between doctors and care providers — not just living at the interface between physicians and patients. Box is, after all, is an enterprise cloud.
In another show of its determination to infiltrate the opaque, offline and unstructured world of healthcare, Box is again expanding its roster and ecosystem of partners in an effort to increase the value of its tools for healthcare. Krasner tells us that the 13 new partners will work with Box to help physicians, payers, patients and administrators collaborate and share data across organizations and applications. These new healthcare customers include names like SSM Healthcare, Tri-Counties Regional Center, Cyberonics and Safety Management Systems and join existing customers like Johns Hopkins and Wake Forest Baptist Health that are now using Box to manage patient data and coordinate care.
The list of new partners also includes Care Cloud, a cloud-based practice management, EHR an medical billing systems provider, mobile medical image viewer Nephosity, Qualaris, pharma engagement platform Medikly, VitalHub and physician marketplace Pokitdok — to name a few.
To lead its new healthcare platform, Box is tapping a familiar name to become its new “managing director of healthcare and life sciences.” Miss Krasner, who has previously been acting as an advisor and consultant, will lead the way, bringing her 20 years of experience in the industry to help ramp up Box’s incipient “Health Cloud,” as I’m calling it. Krasner most recently served as an executive in residence at Morgenthaler Ventures, and before that, spent several years at Google, where she was one of the founding members of Google Health.
To help encourage innovation in the space and to get startups tapping into Box’s growing healthcare ecosystem, Krasner and Box have teamed up with national hospital system, Dignity Health, to launch a developer challenge. Through this challenge, developers will be encouraged to help Box build better apps for doctors and hospitals to deliver and exchange content, with the winner receiving a $100,000 convertible note from The Social+Capital Partnership. Twilio, Tokbox, Parse and Firebase will also be providing developers with full access to tools and services to help increase the functionality of submissions.
According to Krasner, the challenge officially kicks off today and runs through January 10th, 2014, with the first place winner not only securing a convertible note, but one month of office space, mentorship from Social+Capital and will be featured in Box’s App Marketplace.
More on Box Healthcare at home here.
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