TechCrunch
Interlude Lets You, The Viewer, Decide The Outcome Of A Video With Treehouse Launch
If you have a human, emotional heart, chances are you’ve felt an intense longing to change the outcome of a movie or TV show. When Ned Stark is up on that platform, with King Joffrey ordering his death, I’ll bet you wanted to grab the remote and magically command the television to let him live. I can’t tell you how many times I hoped against hope that Jack would live through the night as he froze in the Atlantic, the Titanic sinking below him and Rose comfy on her floating door.
While a company out of Isreal, Interlude, can’t change the outcome of our favorite movies and TV shows, it can promise a webapp editing suite that lets users transform linear videos into interactive videos, wherein the viewer can choose the direction of the video.
Think of it like “Choose Your Own Adventure” but for video.
For example, users can choose the question they wanted asked in an interview, or choose which instruments they want to see played in a music video. Eventually that can translate to which ending they want to see in a movie.
The product is called Treehouse, and it’s a self-service editing suite that not only lets users map out and build their video, but publish that video on web, mobile and social platforms.
Interlude was founded back in 2010, and originally made its own videos with its own crews. Today, however, the company turns self-service with the introduction of Treehouse.
Check out the finished product:
To start, Treehouse will be free to all personal users, with no limit to video uploads or publishes on the platform. Commercial use of the platform comes in two per-project payment tiers: Commercial, which comes at $1,000 plus hosting fees and includes metrics for one month, and Commercial+ for $2,500 plus option fees, which includes unlimited metrics and removes the watermark from images.
“Because we’re coming from creative backgrounds, we wanted it to be as simple as it can be for people unfamiliar with video editing,” said founder Yoni Bloch. “On the other side, we wanted it to be as broad as possible for those who want to get in-depth. The challenge is to find the sweet spot in between.”
Interlude has already set up partnerships with various film schools, as well as the Tribeca Film Festival, advertising holding company WPP, and Bedrocket, along with production firms like Pulse Films, Prettybird, and m ss ng pieces.
The company raised a total of $16 million in funding from investors like Sequoia, Intel Capital, NEA, Innovation Endeavors and more.
Treehouse is available now by visiting the Interlude website.
With HarperCollins Deal, Scribd Unveils Its Bid To Become The Netflix For Books
The latest company making a bid to bring the subscription model to the book world is one that may already be familiar to TechCrunch readers — social publishing service Scribd.
Scribd first launched in 2007, offering users a platform for users to share documents and other written content. We use it ourselves as a way to upload and embed documents that are relevant to our stories. For Scribd, moving into the subscription books business doesn’t seem like a huge leap, and several of the most important pieces are already in place.
For one thing, the company actually launched an e-book market back in 2009. And it already has users paying a subscription fee for access to premium content — in fact, co-founder and CEO Trip Adler told me the company “soft launched” this service in January by adding books to its premium offering, and that the service has been growing 60 percent for each month since.
Today Scribd its making its ambitions on this front clear, in part by announcing its first big deal with a major publisher — HarperCollins. The companies say that the “majority” of the back catalog for HarperCollins US and HarperCollins Christian will now be available in Scribd’s subscription service, with featured authors including Paolo Coehlo, Neil Gaiman, Marian Keys, and Elmore Leonard. That means Scribd subscribers won’t have access to most of the newest HarperCollins books — but the publisher’s full catalog, including new titles, will be available for purchase on an individual basis.
Adler emphasized three main points that characterize the Scribd system (and may help distinguish it from other “Netflix for books” competitors like the recently launched Oyster).
First, readers only pay $8.99 per month and can read unlimited books — Adler said this is a pricing model that has “worked incredibly well for videos and music.” Second, because the subscriptions are integrated with Scribd’s existing social platform, it facilitates book discovery in new ways. Third, Scribd’s approach is device agnostic, with iPhone, iPad, and Android apps, as well as a website that works on both desktop and mobile browsers.
To demonstrate the last point, Adler gave me brief demos on a MacBook, an iPhone, and a Kindle Fire. The reading experience was synchronized across all three devices, so he could stop reading on one, then when he opened the book on another device, it would bring him to exactly where he left off. (While tracking where you are in a book, Scribd also tries to distinguish between moments when you’re actually reading and progressing in a book and others where you’re quickly skipping back-and-forth, say if you’re trying to look something up from earlier.)
I also spoke to Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer at HarperCollins, about the publisher’s perspective on the deal. She told me that HarperCollins has done “small subscription pilots” with other services, but that this is the first time it has made so much of its back catalog available. As for why it chose to work with Scribd, Restivo-Alessi noted that the service has already built an impressive userbase (80 million active users, according to Scribd).
How significant will the subscription model be in book publishing?
“I really believe in books we’re going to continue to live in a mixed world much more” than other media, she said, adding that readers already “live in both the physical and digital worlds,” and while digital subscriptions will be a growing part of the mix, no single model will dominate. “Often people compare music and books, but they overlook the unbundling effect [i.e., the desire to buy individual songs versus a whole album] that existed in music. That isn’t actually true in books.”
GoSquared Super-Charges Its API To Take the Real-Time Analytics Fight To Google
Last month Google finally rolled out an invite-only Beta of its real-time API for Analytics that will allow developers to programmatically take action based on the real-time data they get from Google’s service. However, competitor GoSquared, backed by London’s Passion Capital and Fred Destin’s Atlas Venture, has had an API of sorts out in the wild for over 2 years.
Today the feisty old but young UK startup has released a super-charged version of that API, essentially providing developers with the nuts and bolts to build their own analytics service, dashboards, and make automatic data-driven changes to their sites, all powered by the GoSquared platform.
“The old API was a basic way of accessing real-time ‘how many people are online?’ style figures,” says GoSquared co-founder James Gill. In contrast, written from the ground up, the new GoSquared API introduces 10 entirely new API functions, including months of historical data, “and is unarguably the easiest to use analytics API available”, he says. “To anyone who’s tried using the Google Analytics API, the GoSquared API is like a breath of fresh air”.
Fighting words, indeed. But then GoSquared perhaps has reason to be bullish, having grown the paid-for service to 40,000 sites powered by its real-time analytics, as well as rolling out an entirely new version, including an updated Dashboard, and relaunch of Trends to include new metrics around growth stats.
“We’re tracking billions of page views per-month month, huge amounts of data, [and] we’re now handling analytics for some of the largest sites around,” says Gill.
It should be noted, however, that alongside Google the company has another heavily-funded competitor in Chartbeat.
Returning to the new GoSquared API, it lines up as follows:
- Now – Real-time concurrent data about the visitors on your site right now.
- Trends – Historical and trending information about your site, updated in real-time as new visitors reach your site. Also includes growth metrics for your site.
- Account – GoSquared Account speciļ¬c functions for easy administration and updating of settings.
Use-case examples for the API cited by GoSquared include a “trending articles” widget on a publisher’s site, a real-time analytics dashboard for internal use (GoSquared is eating its own dog food here by using the API to power its own offering), a 3D visualisation of where in the world visitors are coming from, or an e-commerce site offering visitors discounts on popular items in real-time.
More ambitiously, a service could provide analytics for its own user-base, letting GoSquared do the heavy lifting instead of building their own analytics engine. “Ultimately, if you can think of it, and it’s data-driven, you’ll likely be able to build it with the GoSquared API,” says the company.
Charity Donation Platform Believe.in Gets A Pinterest-Style Makeover To Be More Flexible
The Pinterestification of the web has claimed another victim. Charity donation platform, Believe.in, is the latest startup to move from a feed-style view on its homepage and user profiles to a tile-based structure — that’s (inevitably) reminiscent of the online image curation site which popularised the look, aka: Pinterest.
Believe.in says its new look tiles package up over 20 different types of content and activity into “distributable blocks” — that are either automatically generated when users are active across the platform, or can be manually created when users want to share a piece of content (such as a link, video, or photo) with their network.
Here’s what Believe.in‘s old homepage view and user profile design looked like:
And here’s its new, tile-based mosaic design:
Co-founder and CEO Matthias Metternich says a tile-based design gives more visual interest to the layout and allows more flexibility in how content is displayed and linked to, allowing for multimedia content to be more easily injected.
He also argues that tiles allow for different types of users to be catered for within the same design — something that’s important to Believe.in, which has both charities and charity donators on its platform.
“There is the challenge, too of individuals not always necessarily knowing what [causes] to support, or what options they have available to them. Tiles helps us present this variety sooner, rather than later, offering a guiding hand to those who are just getting started with becoming philanthropic vs tiles that are relevant to those who have very defined preferences,” he tells TechCrunch.
“We also have different user-types using the platform, which tiles helps accommodate for, e.g. we can bring different tiles to the fore for non-profits vs users vs (later) businesses, with each user-type requiring nuanced feature-sets that are relevant to them and their audiences. A non-profit, for example, will find it useful to have tiles that weave story-telling together with clear calls to action.”
The other big advantage of a tile-based design structure is that it can easily adapt the view to accommodate different device types and screen sizes, which is of course increasingly important as more Internet hours shift from the desktop onto smartphones and tablets and apps.
“I think you’ll find that tiles will increasingly become more common in a multi-device centric world,” says Metternich, adding: ”It’s about ultimate flexibility… We’ll need this as we ramp up toward the release of our public facing API, a more robust app infrastructure and give non-profits further options to communicate and engage with individuals.”
Believe.in is gearing up to add additional apps to its portfolio in future — notably Metternich says it recently won a Cabinet Office bid to take over the U.K. volunteering platform Do-it.org.uk — and those will presumably also be built on the same tile-based technical infrastructure.
So the tile-based design may be derivative — from a design point of view — but it works to simplify future development work. ”It’s a huge technical upgrade for us and paves the way for the introduction of further features and functionality, like additional apps beyond fundraising,” he adds.
Returning to the cause-giving space specifically, Believe.in‘s disruptive recipe is not to charge the charities using its (now) tile-clad platform any fees on donations they receive.
Back in May it announced a tie-up with easy payments API startup Stripe, adding another string to its bow to lure in the non-profits. Its business model is a freemium one, based on selling paid-for add on services such as cloud-based social enterprise software to help charities make the most of social media and the real-time web. At the end of August it launched its first set of free and paid-for tools for non-profits — the first step in its monetisation play.
Asked about early traction here, Metternich will say only that it has “thousands” of non-profits using the Believe.in platform. He adds that it’s also gearing up for a U.S. launch.
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