TechCrunch
Google Chrome Redesign & New Tab Page Rolls Out To All
If you thought you were safe from the Chrome browser redesign and updated “New Tab” page, parts of which Google previously killed off this spring before it hit the Stable channel, think again. Last week, the company said that the new look was going to be rolled out to Chrome stable users (the default download for the general public), and as of today, that staged rollout is beginning to wrap up. In other words, if you haven’t gotten the updated look already, then you will very soon.
These changes are a long time coming. Google has been testing a New Tab page and other features since last December. Initially, the company did away with the eight links to your most-visited websites which appear as thumbnails on Chrome’s New Tab page. Instead, it offered just four links and a big Google Search box instead. But that particular move proved to be very unpopular. With the latest update, Google responded to feedback by bringing back all eight tabs.
In addition, the company had earlier experimented with adding an “Apps” tab to the bookmarks bar, while removing the usual shortcuts to web apps from the Chrome Web Store from the second page of the New Tab page. This change, however, remains. The second page with all your Chrome Apps is now gone, replaced by the Apps button in the toolbar.
Also gone is the bottom menu you could click to quickly access you most recently closed tabs. Instead, you now have to click on the top-right menu (the icon with the three horizontal lines) to access this feature.
Unfortunately for those who didn’t care for the earlier update, the latest update may generally disappoint. While Google has acquiesced on the number of most-visited sites to display, it has decided to again include the large Google search box above these links, along with the big Google doodle, too. That makes the thumbnail images appear much smaller than before which does take some getting used to. For websites that have a largely white background, for example, you’ll have to look for the site’s favicon at the base of the thumbnail instead of the background image itself, in order to know which is which.
The choice to add the Google Search box to the New Tab page is also somewhat odd, given that one of Chrome’s better features has always been its “omnibox” – the address bar at the top of the browser works as a way to navigate directly to a website if the address is typed in, as well as an alternative to navigating to Google.com to kick off a keyword-based web search. With the update, you now effectively have two search boxes on your New Tab page – the search box and the omnibox.
As Google explained back in December, the reasoning behind this change came from observations of real-world user behavior. Apparently, many people still navigated away from the page to initiate their web searches. What’s left unsaid, of course, is that some subset of those users may have been navigating away from Google to do so, and potentially ended up on competitor’s search engines.
(Side note: Something about being forced to have a less-than functional experience because of having to cater to a large, mainstream user base which doesn’t understand the omnibox’s functionality, brought to mind a favorite scene from Parks & Recreation: Jerry, you don’t deserve the Internet. But I digress.)
When Google announced in August the arrival of these changes on its Chromium Project blog (Chromium is the open source browser project Chrome is based on), the company also noted that by adding the search box to the New Tab page they found the feature was improving the average time from query to answer – meaning, that people were finding what they were searching for more quickly.
When your browser receives this latest update, you’ll know. Upon first launch, you’ll get a pop-up message announcing the changes, and you have to click an “Okay, got it” button to dismiss. This message can also be accessed again from the bottom-right blue link on the New Tab page which says “Chrome has updated.”
Finally, the New Tab page features Google+, Gmail and Images links at the top right, alongside your Google+ notifications. And in another odd duplication, an Apps Tab is present here as well.
Although the changes may be rolled out, or nearly rolled out, to all Stable users as of now, user feedback and behavior will continue to refine the New Tab page’s appearance going forward, as Google remains a data-driven company. So if everyone could please start using the omnibox again, that would be great.
Music App-Maker Smule Finally Embraces The Web With Social Network Smule Nation
Smule has launched a number of popular, music-themed mobile apps, including Sing! Karaoke, Guitar, Ocarina, Magic Piano, and I Am T-Pain. Now it’s turning its website into a social network that it calls Smule Nation, highlighting performances from across all of its apps.
The apps have always emphasized sharing — one of the posts that I wrote about Smule’s first hit, Ocarina, highlighted YouTube videos of some of the best performances. But that also points to one of the things that was lacking — if users wanted to share their performances, they had to do it within the apps themselves, or go outside Smule altogether.
Now, with Smule Nation, the company can highlight the best performances across all of its apps. The website includes a section for the most popular music across the network, as well as the company’s curated picks. If you find a performer you like, you can visit their profile page to see other performances and follow them to get updates when they add new content. Those performers, meanwhile, get a unified presence for their work across the various apps, and if they want to share content, they can now just share a link.
Co-founder and CEO Jeff Smith said Smule previously had a website with some basic social features, but he characterized this as the first serious social push (certainly the web has never been a significant part of Smule’s promotional efforts before this).
Smith, along with Chief Product and Design Officer Jeannie Yang, gave me a tour of the new website, and it seemed like one of their main goals was to highlight the amount of activity that’s already happening in the apps. Sing! Karaoke users are singing more than 20,000 songs per hour, they said, while Magic Piano Users are playing more than 50,000. And Sing!, for example, has actually connected groups of performers (yes, with band names and everything) who never met in real life.
Overall, the company says more than 125 million users have shared more than 1 billion songs. Much of that content, Smith said, is “not especially good,” but he suggested that as users listen to and promote the performances, “Eventually some good content rises to the top.” As that happens, he suggested that the site could become a destination for the discovery of new music — and since it’s all user-generated content, it doesn’t have the big costs of other music services.
Despite that bigger vision, Smith said he has no plans to make money directly from Smule Nation. Instead, he sees it as a way to unify and promote the apps. You’ll still need those apps to create the performances highlighted on the site — Smith said he is interested in doing more on the web over time, but there are some features that “we will only ever be able to do natively.”
Etsy Unveils Major Policy Changes Amid Backlash From Solo Sellers
Etsy is making a major change to its policies today, allowing sellers to hire as many people as they need to run their businesses and to partner with outside manufacturers to produce their goods. While the marketplace for hand crafted goods faced a very public backlash over this issue in a recent GigaOm article, CEO Chad Dickerson has been considering changing the policies for some time now.
Etsy, which currently lists 18 million items for sale and is seeing 60 million unique visitors each month, has been wrestling with what “handmade” meant. In the meantime, guidelines for sellers grew from 4,000 to 14,000 words. The actual language allowed sellers to use “partial production assistance,” but what this assistance fell into a gray area. The rules were confusing, but many sellers came away feeling like they couldn’t expand their operations beyond a one-man shop. In other cases, some sellers began to bend the rules, adding more manufacturing resources. And unfortunately, some sellers left Etsy, says Dickerson. Additionally, sellers weren’t able to ship using outside couriers or fulfillment services–they literally had to drop their items off at the post office each time they sent a purchase made from the site.
Today, Etsy is making things clear in what they see as the most seller-friendly guidelines the company has ever implemented in its history. Sellers can now hire of any amount of staff, have someone else ship their goods, and apply to sell items they produce with manufacturing partners. Etsy is also expanding its rules to allow sellers to hire staff in other locations besides their own.
Instead of a focus on just handmade, Etsy has tweaked the guidelines to require products sold to have authorship with the seller, which basically means the handmade item began with your idea and vision (even if the item wasn’t necessarily assembled by you). Etsy is also admitting that sellers now have an array of methods to create their items, including laser cutters and CNC routers, to manufacturers who do small runs of high-quality items, and it is now acceptable for makers to use these tools and processes to create their items sold on Etsy.
To ensure that everyone is being transparent, Etsy is requiring that any artisan who is working with an outside business to make handmade items apply for review and approval by the beginning of 2014. The application requires sellers to demonstrate authorship of the idea, responsibility that the item is handmade and transparency on who and what is helping create the item. If the application is approved, you can list the items, and information about your manufacturer is made public in your shop’s About page.
As Dickerson tells us, this has been an ongoing conversation internally at Etsy for some time. The firestorm that erupted following the GigaOm article was symptomatic of the unease that everyone, including both Etsy and sellers, felt over the way the current guidelines were established. In addition, Etsy is also debuting 24 hour urgent phone support for sellers.
If anything, these clarifications allow sellers more liberty to grow as business as demand increases. Sellers could also tap into fulfillment services like Amazon’s fulfillment offering to make shipping and packing more seamless. And sellers can start using manufacturing techniques to make their products better. It seems that this move is actually seller-friendly and will only help sellers who are growing in terms of sales to actually grow within the Etsy platform.
RelayRides Ends Hourly Rentals And Device Support To Focus On Long-Term Peer-To-Peer Car Rentals
Peer-to-peer car rental marketplace RelayRides is moving to end support for hourly rentals, due to lackluster growth in that side of its business. It will also stop supporting devices that had been installed in lister’s cars to enable instant access to vehicles. The strategic shift will make it more like Enterprise and less like Zipcar, as it ends support for instant, on-demand car rentals to focus on multi-day opportunities.
RelayRides was founded with the idea of providing instant mobility to everyone, whether they owned a car or not. With the same peer-to-peer, sharing economy business model as Airbnb, the company hoped to solve the problem of making a car available to those who needed one from someone who owned one nearby. To that end, it began installing devices in cars that would allow instant access, and partnered with GM and OnStar to allow renters to instantly access vehicles that they’d rented, without the owner having to turn over his or her keys.
Over the last few years, however, RelayRides has found that its initial ambitions didn’t quite gel with what renters wanted from the platform. While it was set up for short-term, hourly rentals, that type of demand has paled in comparison to the number of users who need to rent a car for multiple days.
Today, hourly rentals account for just 5 percent of the company’s revenues, but it’s been a major source of friction for the company. The company has grown revenues 10x over the last two years, but the hourly part of its business has remained flat amidst that growth. Those rentals typically have to be made in short periods of time, and were part of the reason that the company invested in installing devices into cars to enable renters to access cars without having to meet with the car’s owner to hand off keys.
Meanwhile, the company has seen incredible growth on the daily and multi-day side of its business. That growth has come as RelayRides has opened up its business in a pure peer-to-peer fashion, allowing anyone to list his car, regardless of where it resides.
It’s recently pushed into allowing users to list their cars at airports, taking on huge incumbents in that market. After launching initially in June, RelayRides now has cars listed at more than 230 airports, providing an alternative to traditional airport car rental companies.
With that in mind, RelayRides has made the strategic decision to end support for hourly rentals and instead focus on daily and multi-day opportunities instead. And it’s also moving to end support for devices that it’s installed in user’s cars, as well as limiting the support it provides for OnStar vehicles.
While the company is doing away with OnStar support, RelayRides CEO Andre Haddad says that GM will remain a strategic partner and investor in the company. GM invested $3 million in RelayRides in October 2011, as the company was looking to integrate with GM’s OnStar.
All in all, RelayRides has raised $30 million since being founded in late 2008. Other investors include Google Ventures, August Capital, and Shasta Ventures.
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