TechCrunch
This Is My Jam Team Spins Out From The Echo Nest To Build The ‘Song Graph'
Back in January, it was rumored that hip social music site This Is My Jam might be moving out from under the wing of music data company The Echo Nest, which had incubated the site as a side project. Its creators, Matthew Ogle and Hannah Donovan, have now been given the green light to spin out the site from its parent, and are bootstrapping the next phase of the London-based music startup’s life. The Echo Nest will retain an interest in the newly formed This Is My Jam LLC, as will early Jam engineers Andreas Jansson and Ralph Cowling.
This Is My Jam was born as a sort of hack. Ogle and Donavan built the site because they wanted a place to be focused around songs, not drop off the real-time feeds as they would on Facebook and Twitter.
Despite this scrappy birth, 1.5 million ‘jams’ have been posted to date, and a few clone sites have appeared. The reason? It does one thing very well: single song-sharing. People can share their favorite music track-by-track. This has lead it to become populated with obsessive music fans, instead of lots of casually engaged people (cough, Spotify, Rdio cough, etc). This means it now has quite the engagement metrics.
Because the site is all about what people are listening to now, it has a “live” experience and is more focused than the casual randomness of normal streaming services. The result is a slower, more thoughtful, but more intimate song sharing experience.
“We help you make the song look and sound great, you can customise the imagery and the story around the song and share it to all platforms,” says Ogle.
“You share one song, it lasts for a week. We are gradually building up a “song graph” around users. This is for fans, not people you went to high school with who happen to be also on the streaming music service you are on. So for music discovery it’s been very good as the signal to noise ratio is great.”
“Everyone else competes on Catalogue, but we have this core of popular songs,” he adds.
Ogle was formerly head of web product at Last.fm back in 2010, but took up a post of evangelist in Europe for The Echo Nest and “skunkworks” guy, prototyping new products. Unusually, Ogle and Donovan have been working together since university, and were part of the original Last.fm team that grew the service from 0.5 to 40+ million users. They also created accidental hit Drinkify.org at a hack day.
Ogle says: “Our users have told us ‘this is my favourite song in the world right now’ over a million times. This is data we didn’t have when we started, but more importantly, the intensity of preference expressed by every jam is unlike anything we’ve worked with previously.”
They plan to launch the site onto mobile platform – but there is no talk of fund-raising just yet.
Circa Releases Version 2 For iOS And Android, Adds Breaking News Notifications
Mobile news startup Circa is releasing a new version of its app with an updated interface for discovering and following news, with a big focus on breaking news. The app will allow users to get push notifications for the biggest news stories, and provide a new way to get updates on all the biggest happenings going on. Oh yeah, and did I mention that it’s also being launched on Android?
The new version of the app represents a major evolution for Circa, which has sought to provide its users with all news they care about, without the fluff. A lot of that effort in Circa 2 has been around how to get users breaking news as it happens, and to keep them abreast of updates as they happen.
The problem with breaking news on many apps, according to co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan, is that many times an app will send users a push notification of big news before there’s anything more than a fragment of a story written. It’s then up to the user to remember to go back and try to pick up on what’s happened since he last visited. And sometimes, the updates are listed in reverse chronological order, putting the news information first. And that’s far from an ideal way to read news.
While the app has always had breaking news, Circa 2 is introducing alerts through push notifications as that news happens. Like other news apps, Circa will break the news and then add updates as they happen. But unlike some other apps, Circa will allow users to follow the story as updates happen. And since the app knows the last thing users read about a story, every time they open the app and go back to it, the app will take them back to where they left off, so they can read updates in chronological order.
In addition to its big push around breaking news, Circa 2 has refined the way it shows story timelines and has improved the way that users can share and follow the news that matters to them. It’s also updated elements within stories, such as pictures and maps — and it provides the ability to link through to other stories to get more information about a certain news story.
But the biggest part of the release for Circa might be its availability on Android devices, after being iOS-only since inception. The Adroid app will open Circa up to a whole new group of users, but it’s not just a port of the iPhone version, according to Galligan.
While the core Circa experience will be the same, there are certain features that are meant to take advantage of the platforms openness, while appealing to Android users. For instance, the ability to swipe left and right to navigate between stories. The Android app will also allow users to follow breaking stories directly from notifications.
As for iOS users — the new version of the app has been optimized for iOS 7 with an updated look and feel that matches the new operating system. All in all, it’s a lot cleaner and fits Apple’s new, flat design aesthetic.
Circa has raised $1.65 million in seed funding from investors that include Lerer Ventures, Advancit Capital, Menlo Ventures, Quotidian Ventures, and a whole bunch of angels that you’ve heard of.
MyTime's Amazing App Lets You Book Haircuts, Massages…Any Appointment
There’s a rare breed of app like Uber, Pocket, and Venmo that make life so much easier, it’s hard to remember how things worked before. That’s how I feel about MyTime. It helps you discover nearby businesses from salons to dentists to auto shops, and instantly book an appointment without ever picking up the phone, at no extra cost. MyTime’s new app could redefine local commerce.
I’m not the only one who thinks so. MyTime won the Launch Conference’s mobile app competition last weekend. And prior to the debut of its web version in February, it raised a $3 million seed round from Mark Suster with UpFront Ventures, 500 Startups, and a slew of top-tier angels. Today it released its breezy iOS app with support for 3000 businesses in San Francisco and Los Angeles. It lets you make appointments on the go without interrupting your life. That’s the whole point.
You can click here or on the demo video box below to see a Shadow Puppet narrated slideshow of how MyTime works.
It’s actually stunning that something like this didn’t exist already when you think about how much people spend on appointments and how annoying it is to book them.
MyTime Is A Digital Receptionist
Normally, you have to find a business’ phone number and call them during business hours. You might have to wade through some phone menus or be put on hold before talking to a receptionist…if you’re lucky enough that they have one. Many local businesses don’t, so if you catch the owner while they’re busy, you have to leave a message, and you might be busy when they call back.
Once you’re finally connected, you have no visual menu of options, need to go back and forth to find an appointment time when you and the merchant are available, and read them your credit card details. That’s pretty backwards for 2013. If a business happens to have web booking, it’s likely a proprietary system you’ll have to learn how to use it and punch all your details into.
Because booking appointments is a chore, you book less of them. You get your haircut less frequently than you should, rarely indulge yourself with a massage, or delay getting your engine checked until there’s smoke coming out.
MyTime changes all of that. Open it up to see a wide variety of local services you can book. MyTime lets you search, browse by categories, filter by price and distance, and see Yelp scores to help you decide. When MyTime onboards a business, it maps out all their options and prices so you can select exactly which type of massage, hairdresser, or other details you want.
The magic happens when you choose your appointment’s time slot. MyTime has built integrations with dozens of calendar and appointment systems so you don’t request a slot and wait to hear back. You view live availabilities and confirm your appointment with just a few taps. You can use your saved payment details across businesses so you only have to enter them once. The whole booking process is delightfully quick and easy.
Afterwards, MyTime can add your appointment to your own calendar or Passbook, and send you a push notification when its time to book again, say six weeks later for haircuts. It adds the business to your favorites list, which can also import your phone’s address book to add businesses you already use.
MyTime can even get you discounts. Since a lot of businesses have open inventory at off-peak hours, they’re willing to drop the price to get people in the door, especially new leads. If a salon is open at 10am but never has $50 appointments booked then, it can drop the price to $30 in MyTime for those slots.
Quick Commerce
So how does MyTime make money? Well most local services are eager to sign up new customers because they have such a high lifetime value due to lots of repeat bookings. Since MyTime is so good at delivering fresh customers, processing their payments, and keeping them coming back, it charges a 40% commission on a user’s first booking with a business. After that, it takes just 3% of each repeat booking so businesses aren’t incentivized to tell customers to call them directly next time.
That initial fee might seem steep, but businesses can recoup that revenue fast. 33% of MyTime booking are repeat customers. And 44% of bookings come in after-hours when the business is closed and might have missed the sale anyways.
MyTime has big plans to expand. CEO Ethan Anderson, who previously sold Red Beacon to Home Depot, tells me the twenty-strong company’s nine sales people are having little trouble convincing businesses to integrate. And it’s got a strategy to go beyond SF and LA. It’s set up two million “thin profiles” for businesses across the US whose calendar systems it hasn’t integrated with yet. If someone tries to book one of these, MyTime calls the business itself like a personal assistant, makes the appointment, and then tries to convince the business to come aboard. It’s got a stunning 70% success rate with that.
If MyTime seems simple and subtle, it should. Uber just finds you a taxi. Venmo just lets you pay back friends. Pocket just lets you save articles. And MyTime just books you any appointment. But the same way most people find themselves taking a lot more taxis and towncars once they have Uber, I’ve already booked two massages in two weeks with MyTime — something I’ve never done outside of vacation.
I’d never download an app for a specific business or vertical I only use a few times a year. But by aggregating all types of local services into one calendar and one payment system, I now have an app for every appointment-based business in my city. MyTime is convenience tech. And you deserve it.
Lavabit Founder Details Government Surveillance Of Secure Email While Documents Disclose Epic Trolling Of Feds
Ladar Levison, founder of secure email provider Lavabit, has posted a Facebook message detailing his current situation in regards to the shutdown of the service. “I simply couldn’t operate Lavabit while my lawyers appealed the demand for our [Lavabit’s] encryption keys without the government agreeing to provide the transparency demanded by my conscience. The ethical implications ultimately prompted my decision to suspend the [Lavabit] service,” he wrote in a post describing the lengths to which the US government wanted to go to police his secure email provider.
Lavabit maintains that the government had no legal basis for demanding it’s confidential information, namely passwords, encryption keys and source code. That providing such information to the federal government would allow investigators to access sensitive information including passwords, credit card transactions, email messages and instant messages. The government would have also been able to detect and record IP addresses, thereby allowing them to track and record the physical location of users as they accessed Lavabit’s services. This access far exceeded the authority given to investigators by the pen trap and trace laws enacted by Congress. Under the law the government only had the legal right to collect metadata associated with the accounts under investigation. Mr. Levison felt that providing such access to the government would have been in direct conflict with the promise of privacy that Lavabit made with its users and “would have violated the 4th amendment rights of people not involved with an investigation.”
In short, the government wanted far more data than Levison had any cause to give, resulting in a showdown that has destroyed his livelihood.
Most amusing, however, is how Levison trolled investigators. After asking him for the sites private SSH keys, he printed an 11 page list in 4-point type, something the government called “illegible.”
Moreover, each of the five encryplion keys contains 512 individual characters – or a total of 2560 characters,” wrote prosecutors. “To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data.”
Sadly Snowden’s fondness for Lavabit is what led to its downfall. As soon as Edward Snowden went public, Feds filed a “pen register” to grab “information about each communication sent or received by the account, including the date and time of the communication, the method of communication, and the source and destination of the communication” of a specific individual. This data, termed “metadata” by the feds, could only be related to one customer of the site. However, in a supreme bit of overreach the government went on to ask for the keys to the Lavabit security system.
The site, while massively important, didn’t seem to be extremely popular. Before it was suspended in August Lavabit provided email accounts for 410,000 registered users and 10,000 of those paid up to $16 a year for encrypted email storage. While there are many alternate solutions – MyKolab seems to be the most popular these days – it also seems important for folks to use PGP signing and encryption on their private emails as a matter of habit and depend far less on the security of cloud providers. Given that Tweets are now considered property of the company that hosts them and not the writer, all cloud services are suspect.
Fans of the service have gathered together to help fund Lavabit’s defense. You can read the unsealed complaint below.
Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Explains How He Built A Web Empire
You don’t need to be a cut-throat jerk to be successful in the business of capitalism. Alexis Ohanian doesn’t stand out in a room; other than being tall enough to play NBA defense, he’s usually the unassuming guy in a corner making new friends with a big smile and a buddy-buddy attitude. Ohanian also happens to have founded one of the most influential websites in existence: Reddit.com, a popular news aggregator, snags over 1 billion page views a month and has the power to turn a news story into a viral sensation.
Ohanian’s new book, Without Their Permission, reveals the origin story of Reddit as the earnest project of a do-good entrepreneur. Most importantly, it proves that there are many paths to unlocking the Internet treasure chest and at least one doesn’t involve selling your soul.
Reason Rules
Before the days of social media dominance, a 22-year-old Ohanian had a simple theory: “the old model for news aggregation, when it was printed on a dead tree, wasn’t suited for the Internet age,” he writes. “An entire building full of editors, no matter how smart or tireless they are, can’t match the speed or efficiency with which” a robust Internet community can discover important news.
The sheer wide-eyed idealism of Ohanian is notable; we see it a lot from fresh-faced Silicon Valley newbies, but it’s still encouraging to hear it spelled out.
“I’m motivated by all the awesome people whose ideas we’ve never benefited from because of where they were born or because of their race, sex, or other characteristics,” he gushes. “All the bullshit that holds amazing people back doesn’t suddenly disappear online, but the open Internet does technologically level the playing field for everyone.”
It’s an imperfect utopian lens. Social media is as famous as it is infamous for the spread of patently false information: rumors of untimely deaths (video below); false information during a school rampage; and Photoshopped images of a catastrophic storm.
The Reddit community, itself, wrongly identified the Boston bombing suspect after some misguided vigilante sleuthing (Reddit execs would eventually ban the practice of crowdsourcing manhunts on the site).
But, none of these disaster scenarios deterred Ohanian from his newfound mission. After being rejected from his university entrepreneurship class, Ohanian bum-rushed noted tech entrepreneur, Paul Graham, after a talk he gave at Harvard. Graham was eventually convinced to seed the idea of a user-controlled content aggregator, which set Ohanian on the path to garage tinkering.
The staple of Reddit, the up and down voting arrows that control the fate of story, were hand-coded out of brute-force simplicity and a dash of intuition. “Neologisms like upvote and downvote came into existence without any forethought—I just liked the way an up-and-down arrow looked.”
The simple tools for crowdsourcing interesting content would eventually help Reddit become among the top 40 websites. President Obama did an “ask me anything” forum, the community helped galvanize a worldwide protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act, and raise over $100,000 for Donor’sChoose.org.
Hypothesis test about marketplace of Ideas: True.
Being A Nice Guy -> Mo-ney, Mo-ney, Mo-ney, Mo-ney…Mon-NEY!
“Look at every meeting as a chance to do someone a solid,” advises Ohanian, who argues that starting a successful company starts with building good karma. Help out as many people as you can, and eventually it’ll come back.
Before Reddit’s fame, he met a Wired reporter, Rachel Metz, who was interested in a story. Metz and Ohanian hit it off over Chinese food, to the point where Metz could no longer objectively cover the growing startup. “That was fine by me. No Wired story came from that, but I got a new friend in Rachel.”
But, that set in motion a very lucrative chain of events. Metz “happened to mention reddit to her editor at Wired, Kristen Philipkoski. Kristen, the wife of Kourosh Karimkhany, was doing business development for Condé Nast and heard from Rachel about a pair of plucky founders in Boston working on something interesting called reddit.”
Eventually, Condé Nast would acquire Reddit for an unknown (but pretty large) sum of money, turning Ohanian from a startup founder to investor overnight.
Without Their Permission reads mostly like business advice; if it can convince more people to make money by being a nice person and believing in humanity, it will have accomplished a noble goal.
Sunrise 2.0 Brings iCloud Calendar Support To Its 250,000 Users
iOS calendar app Sunrise just received a major 2.0 update. Like many iOS apps, the release brings a new design optimized for iOS 7. It doesn’t look anything like the previous version. Gone is the textured background and heavy branding. Now, it’s all about a pure user interface and neat animations. But the most important addition is iCloud calendar support. Now, Google Calendar as well as iOS calendar users will be able to switch to Sunrise.
“I think many people will be disappointed by the native iOS 7 calendar app,” co-founder and CEO Pierre Valade told me. “iCloud support was by far the most requested feature,” he continued.
Launched in February, Sunrise attracted more than 250,000 users in seven months. According to Valade, most of Sunrise’s users like the app because of its design. The infinite feed of events is a very compelling way to get a clear view of what’s coming next in your calendar.
While the orange color is much more subtle in the interface, the app remains very familiar to existing users. Animations, icons and text alignments turn Sunrise into a true iOS 7 app. The update also brings iOS 7-style multitasking. I asked Valade whether removing a lot of the branding associated with the app would make it look like any other iOS 7 app. His answer was that Sunrise users know that they are using Sunrise because it works differently and the animations are delightful.
But until now, many users refused to switch because the app was only compatible with Google Calendar. Most iPhone users probably already use the default calendar app, Fantastical, Calendars 5 or another app. But all of these apps rely on the default calendar APIs. Sunrise syncs everything to its servers and use the iCloud API, allowing the startup to do more stuff with your events. Exchange support is up next.
The fact that Sunrise is a full-fledged calendar service makes it future-proof. The company doesn’t hide on Twitter that it is working on Android and iPad versions. Sunrise could create a seamless experience across all your devices. While 2.0 is an important milestone, the next step will certainly be another major one for the company as well. It will turn a simple iPhone app startup into a ubiquitous calendar startup, the startup on which the sun never sets.
Pakistan's Sindh Province To Ban Skype, Viber For 3 Months Over Terrorist Usage, Demanding More Data Access
Pakistan is known for a long-standing ban on YouTube and occasional blocks of sites like Facebook and Twitter. Today, the government in one large part of the country said that it was planning to block two more social media services — Skype and Viber.
According to a report in the Express Tribune, the government of the Sindh province — home to over 35 million people, including those living in its capital, Karachi — is planning a three-month block of the two messaging platforms because they are being used by terrorists who want to avoid conversations getting monitored on regular mobile networks. To that end, the government apparently also is requesting further access to data being passed through networks like Viber and Skype.
The newspaper reports that for right now it’s just these two services that will be affected, although the ban could possibly also be extended to Tango and WhastApp, the newspaper notes. It does not say when the ban will begin.
We have reached out to both Skype and Viber for comment and will update the story as we learn more.
The decision to ban the networks was made between Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah and officials from the Karachi police, intelligence agencies and others. In other words, it doesn’t sound like there has been much in the way of official dissent. It’s not a great message for freedom of speech in the country, even if those channels clearly are getting abused by some.
In a country with a lot of political strife and distribution with large geographic obstacles, communications networks are a lifeline for many ordinary, law-abiding people, too. Unfortunately, Pakistani residents are no strangers to Internet service blockages. In addition to the periodic outages from sites like Twitter and Facebook, and the extended block of YouTube, it looks like there the mobile networks also get shut down periodically, also to cool down terrorist chatter.
The YouTube ban appears to be more about blasphemous content rather than direct issues related to terrorism. It is currently getting reassessed as part of a wider look at a new filtering program for digital content, much like the one used in Russia today.
Airbnb Says It Will Work With NYC To Collect Occupancy Tax And Clean Up Its Service
While Airbnb continues to grow around the world, it’s run into some pushback in certain areas. One of those areas has been New York City, where last summer it saw one of its members fined for violating the city’s hotel laws. (It eventually won that case.) In a blog post this morning, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky laid out some of the things that the company is willing to do to get into the good graces of regulators and lawmakers in that market.
Airbnb is working hard to get regulators to better understand and embrace its peer-to-peer housing marketplace not as a hotel replacement or alternative, but as a community of regular folks who share their homes — many of whom are doing so to help pay the bills. It’s released numerous studies along the way that illustrate that point in various cities, while also underlying the economic impact of its marketplace to different areas.
In the blog post, Chesky says that New York City is no different. In that market, the company has more than 15,000 community members who list their homes on its platform. According to Chesky, 87 of those are not running peer-to-peer hotels, but rent the home in which they live, and on average fall at the median income level. More than half depend on Airbnb to help pay the bills. Furthermore, 87 percent live outside of the mid-Manhattan hotel corridor, so they’re not exactly competing with the incumbents in that market.
To remove some of the legal hurdles to its community there, Chesky wrote that the company is looking to make a few concessions along the way. First of all, the company urged the jurisdiction to create a new law that would pave the way for regular people — the 87 percent of hosts who live outside of mid-Manhattan, and those who are renting their own homes — to participate in its community.
Along the way, he says that it “makes sense” for members to pay occupancy tax with exceptions for some under certain thresholds, and says that Airbnb will work with New York to streamline the process of collecting occupancy tax from its members. The company is also committed to working with the city to remove so-called bad actors in the community who create a disturbance by creating a 24/7 Neighbor Hotline to service those complaints.
Like other new technology startups that are disrupting existing industry, Airbnb is finding that as it grows, it will be necessary to work with local officials to get its service better understood and to have laws passed when necessary to make it legal in certain jurisdictions. On that front, last year it hired public policy guru David Hantman to lead that charge.
Airbnb is also doing more from a product standpoint to ensure safety and accountability. In the spring it launched its Verified Idenitfication effort to connect users’ online and offline identities. By doing so, it hopes to foster more trust between its guests and hosts.
Secure SMS App TigerText Goes Freemium, Adds New Features
TigerText, the secure SMS platform aimed at the enterprise, is today reshaping the business model. Rather than having one free, consumer-facing version of the app and an enterprise-level, paid version, TigerText is combining the two into a single freemium solution.
In other words, there is now only one TigerText app that is available for anyone to download, but big companies and businesses that want control over their network must upgrade to the paid version (which remains at the same price point as the current enterprise version) in order to maintain control.
For those who don’t know, TigerText brings the ease and simplicity of text messaging into the enterprise world, offering the ability to administer who is included and excluded from a network, which messages need a security pin, and even if certain messages should expire after a certain amount of time.
The app has exploded with big businesses who realize that SMS, an opt-in, shortform version of email, can sometimes be more productive for employees. The app is especially popular in healthcare industries where SMS, as it stands on its own, isn’t compliant and violates the laws based on security and recipient authentication.
That said, TigerText is changing up its platform to encourage even more users to hop on the service and perhaps upgrade (more easily now) to the enterprise version.
TigerText is also introducing a web version of the app, which can be used across all platforms from mobile web to tablet to desktop. The web version syncs automatically and in real-time so you can pick up a conversation right where you left off.
Free users will have access to a number of TigerText features, including secure file sending, delivery and read receipts, and message recall, which lets users retrieve a message whether it’s been opened or not, or automatically after a certain period of time.
Enterprise users, on the other hand, have access to a whole bevy of control features such as easy separation of business and personal text conversations through multiple network access, enterprise data retention (giving companies full, archived control over data sent through the app), employee productivity tracking, and LDAP sync (allowing for an active, always updated employee directory within the network). Administrators can remote wipe or lock out anyone from the network, if, for example, a certain employee resigned.
Enterprise customers also have the option to use both enterprise-assigned or personal devices within the app, as well as the option to enforce a pin lock on messages, or a message life span for texts sent within the network.
According to founder Brad Brooks, TigerText currently has a presence in over 3000 facilities, with over 300 customers with a growth rate of about 10 paid customers per week. “That doesn’t speak to scale, though,” said Brooks. “For every customer, that could be 10 users or that could be 20,000 users.”
The update is a hearty one for TigerText, who plans on migrating existing enterprise customers over to the new platform soon. For now, however, you can learn more about the update on TigerText’s website.
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