TechCrunch
iCloud Alternative Loom Raises $1.4 Million Seed Round
A startup called Loom, which begin its life as the Y Combinator-backed photo-sharing startup Popset, is working to build a better iCloud for both consumers and developers. Currently, the company offers a cloud storage and syncing service, in the form of a mobile application for iOS and desktop app for Mac. And today, Loom is also announcing $1.4 million in seed funding to continue to build on its vision.
The round included participation from Google Ventures (MG Siegler, disclosure: previously a TechCrunch employee and current contributor); Tencent, Great Oaks VC, Overbrook Entertainment (Will Smith), Damon Way (founder, DC Shoes), and a few other angel investors.
The company first announced its follow-up to Popset in May, and then entered into beta this June. At the time, co-founder Jan Senderek explained the team had realized that they were trying to solve the wrong problem with Popset – people weren’t lacking tools for group photo-sharing, but they did need a better way to organize and manage their photo libraries. Thus, Loom was born.
The iOS application is fairly straightforward in its design, in an effort to appeal to a broader mainstream user base. After signing in, you simply start backing up photos to the cloud where you’ll receive 5 GB of free storage. A Mac app allows you to also import photos from your computer, and includes a one-click iPhoto export option. Additional storage requires a subscription, and conversion rates for Loom are now above 3 percent, Senderek tells us. However, the company is not disclosing the number of users or actives it currently has.
What makes Loom useful, however, is not just its file-syncing and online storage capabilities, but that it’s designed to serve as your mobile device’s default photo album replacement while saving you storage space on your phone. To do so, Senderek explained earlier that Loom itself stores photos in their original size on its servers, then creates multiple, smaller versions for access on mobile. Users can then clear out their iPhone’s Camera Roll, but still have access to all their photos in Loom, where they can organize them into albums, or share them with friends.
Alongside news of the seed funding today, Loom is also announcing an iOS 7-optimized app with full RAW support for more than 130 types of RAW formats (meaning it will now store the original RAW files on its servers, to serve up the smaller versions on mobile). More importantly, it’s opening its doors to all interested users as it exits beta.
In addition to building the front-end apps for consumers, the longer-term plan is to bring Loom to developers too as an alternative to the iCloud tools provided by Apple. Other things on the company’s roadmap include video streaming, improved sharing (easy album sharing to Facebook, for example), support for more imports (Aperture, Flickr, Instagram, etc.), and additional, premium plans with higher storage caps. Android support is not in the immediate future.
Beyond product development, Senderek says the eight person team is looking to add a few more engineers with the new funding, and hopes to be around ten or eleven by year-end.
“When Jan presented the idea for Loom, we realized that the idea seemed very elegant and organic, but actually there wasn’t anyone in the market doing ‘photos in the cloud,’ in a very broad sense, well yet,” says David Wallerstein from Tencent, Loom’s largest seed investor. ”Loom is very focused on being the one destination in the cloud for all of your photos, across all devices, and facilitating the sharing of those photos, especially collections of photos, across the Internet. The fact that they are very focused on this particular mission, in this way, set them apart,” he adds.
Of course, Loom is not the only company doing photo sharing and sync. It will have to take on some big names, including Facebook, Google+, Yahoo’s Flickr and perhaps even up-and-comers like Amazon (with Cloud Drive) or Dropbox. It will also have to solidify its value proposition to users who may be content with the free offerings they have elsewhere, which could affect its revenue potential.
Interested users can sign up for Loom here.
Kindred Prints Lets You Create Photo Books From Your Phone, Pay On Subscription
A number of companies today are attempting to bring the photo album to the mobile era, often through apps which let you organize, then print and ship customizable photo books. The latest to attempt to break into this space is Palo Alto-based Kindred Prints, a mobile software company which offers photo printing apps for iPhone and Android.
The company was founded by Stanford grad students Alex Austin, Mike Molinet, and Mada Seghete just this June. Austin led development on three iPhone apps and has worked in startups before. Molinet has experience delivering consumer products to market, and Seghete was previously Director of Product for Yola.com.
Says Austin, the team was inspired to create the Kindred app because they didn’t like sending impersonal emails with attached photos to family and friends. They wanted to offer a more personalized experience, but for “the price of a latte.” Today, Kindred Prints’ books are just $5.00 each.
That price point is what makes Kindred Prints compelling – it sounds almost unsustainably cheap. Other photo printing apps cost at least twice that, if not more. However, the trick is that the books aren’t just $5.00 – Kindred Prints is actually a subscription play. The company also charges users a small monthly fee of $4.95, which allows it to lower the price on each physical book that’s being sent out. If anything, this is about reducing the psychological barriers to entry that come from seeing prices like $10, $20 or even $30+ in other photo-printing apps. Five bucks feels doable, even if you’re technically paying more.
For those who prefer not to commit to the subscription, a one-time fee per photo book is $11.95, which represents the truer cost here.
As for the books themselves, they are soft-cover 20-page creations built using photos from your phone, Facebook or Instagram. The app can also automatically put together a booklet for you of your top recent photos on Instagram and Facebook. Though I don’t have one in my hands yet to speak directly about quality, from the description and photos, they don’t look much different from the other soft-covered books I’ve ordered over the years, generally speaking.
The app itself, though, is well-designed and easy to use. It’s fairly quick to get up and running and build your first book. Kindred Prints pulls in all the photos for you and you just tap through the ones you want before sending. There aren’t a ton of customizations to slow you down, but you can tap on individual photos to add notes, if you choose. Kindred Prints will also remind you monthly to send a book so your subscription doesn’t go to waste.
During a beta period and other testing, the company shipped 250 booklets. Now that the app is live, they have committed orders for at least 300 books over the next month so far.
Going forward, the team plans to open its API to the public so any website or app can integrate with its service, similar to how Sincerely works today. They’re also working on photo book automation tools that will build book using metadata. For example, the app could automatically build books or you and your friend just ahead of their birthday and alert you when the book is ready to ship.
The company is currently bootstrapped and hoping to fund growth off the subscription revenues, but they may consider a seed round at a later point.
Kindred Prints is available for iOS and Android here.
MIT Scientists Create Modular Robot Blocks That Can Self-Assemble & Reconfigure
Looking at these reconfiguring robo-cubes, created by research scientists at MIT in the face of ongoing naysaying, it strikes me that the human race can’t be far off a huge achievement: building a physical version of Tetris that self assembles. From angular chaos, to robot-enabled order. That and giving future Dalek armies the ability to bound up stairs.
The M-Blocks, shown off in the above video, are reconfigurable, modular robots with no external moving parts. The cubes’ ability to move results from harnessing the momentum of an internal flywheel (which can hit speeds of 20,000 revolutions p/m) — allowing them to climb over one another, make jumps, spin and roll around. And do all that without the need for wheels or legs.
Magnets on the corners of the blocks are used for course correction and stability, so that one small leap results in an M-Block snapping tidily into place atop its fellow, rather than going rogue and skittering uselessly off the table — although they can apparently do that, too. Chamfered edges on the cubes enhance the strength of the magnetism as the cubes rotate over each other to take up their new positions.
Reconfigurable modular robots with no external moving parts have evidently been something of a Holy Grail in the modular-robotics community. “It’s one of these things that the community has been trying to do for a long time,” says Daniela Rus, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of CSAIL, speaking to MIT news. “We just needed a creative insight and somebody who was passionate enough to keep coming at it — despite being discouraged.
“Our objective is to design self-assembling and self-reconfiguring robot systems. These are modular robots with the ability of changing their geometry according to task and this is exciting because a robot designed for a single task has a fixed architecture. And that robot will perform a single task well but it will perform poorly on a different task in a different environment,” she adds in the video.
Very long term, the goal of much modular robotics research is to be able to miniaturise modules to such an extent that swarms of self-assembling microbots (or even nanobots) can be created — capable of reconfiguring themselves into different forms, shapes and sizes, and changing their function accordingly. Albeit, that’s far-off sci-fi stuff.
In the shorter term, the researchers behind M-Blocks reckon there are still potential use-cases for their more substantially sized, reconfiguring robo-cubes. They note that large numbers of the blocks could be used to temporarily repair bridges or buildings during emergencies, for instance, or raise and reconfigure scaffolding, or assemble different types of furniture or heavy equipment. Different cubes could also carry different functions — such as a camera, lights or a battery pack — to augment overall function.
The researchers are currently building an army of 100 cubes, each with the ability to move in any direction, and designing algorithms to guide them — with the aim of having the cubes transform their state from being randomly scattered across the floor, to identifying each other, coming together and then autonomously transforming into various forms (chair, ladder, etc.) on demand.
MongoDB Raises $150M For NoSQL Database Technology With Salesforce Joining As Investor
MongoDB has raised $150 million from T. Rowe Price Associates with new investors Altimeter Capital and Salesforce.com. Existing investors Intel Capital, NEA, Red Hat and Sequoia Capital also participated in the round. MongoDB has raised $231 million since the founders started the company in 2007.
The company’s database technology is the most well-known in a field of increasing competition from other NoSQL vendors, SQL powerhouses, in-memory database providers and a new breed of companies that are offering a new form of database-as-a-service. MongoDB and other NoSQL databases use distributed infrastructures on commodity servers and are popular with developer for building mobile and web apps. MongDB’s technology is document-based. MongoDB is a document-based database. Data is defined in data structures, which is essentially encoded to be compatible with different formats such as XML and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). Most popular, by far, is JSON, which is popular with legions of developers who are leveraging those skills to use MongoDB to develop their own apps and services.
The popularity of MongoDB is evident in its global community, which has had more than 5 million downloads. Demand is reflected on the job site Indeed, which lists it as the second most popular search term. It ranks considerably higher, compared to Cassandra, Redis and CoucDB, than all competing technologies.
| MongoDB, redis, cassandra, couchdb Job Trends | Mongodb jobs – Redis jobs – Cassandra jobs – Couchdb jobs |
The new funding will be used to further support the core MongoDB project and to fund its new managed services offering, which includes a suite of tools and services to operate the database at scale. One of MongoDB’s criticisms surround its scaling issues. Orchestration tools have been cited as a gap in the MongoDB service.
The focus on management services also reflects the partnership that MongoDB has forged with IBM. Earlier this month, the technology giant made MongoDB its NoSQL database of choice.
MongoDB customers include Craigslist, MetLife and Salesforce. It is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., and New York with regional headquarters in Dublin and Singapore. The company also has six additional offices in Atlanta, Barcelona, London, Sydney and Washington D.C.
The addition of Salesforce as an additional investor is worth noting. Salesforce has put deep emphasis on developing its marketing cloud and is expected to make a full push into the mobile app space. An investment in MongoDB shows that Salesforce is making a bet that NoSQL technology is worth standing behind in the post-PC mobile world that is now dominating the way we work and live.
The company currently has more than 320 employees worldwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment