TechCrunch
WeHostels Brings Its Mobile App For Booking Hostels To Android
WeHostels launched its first mobile app last September, allowing users to find low-cost accommodations nearly anywhere in the world from their iPhones. Now the company is expanding its portfolio of mobile apps to make its service available on Android devices, as well.
Since we last covered WeHostels at SXSW, the company has seen pretty tremendous growth: Downloads have increased 230 percent since then and bookings are up 480 percent, to more than 200 bookings a day. A lot of that growth has come as a result of WeHostels being translated into new languages, including German, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
Getting the app on Android phones should accelerate its growth, particularly as the company expects the app to appeal to its target demographic. There have been more than 900 million Android devices activated around the world, according to Google, and that number continues to grow. Android also has strong market share in Europe and Australia, which are big markets for WeHostels.
More than that, though, WeHostels believes that many of its potential users — young, increasingly international travelers — use Android devices instead of iPhones. “We definitely know that Android has a higher penetration in our segment of young people,” WeHostels CEO Diego Saez-Gil told me by phone. “We think we can more than double our users with Android.”
For that reason, WeHostels will begin developing new features for Android first, and then updating the iPhone in the future, according to Saez-Gil. Until now, the company has been working to refine the app before moving it to Android. That includes simplifying the booking process, which now takes just three clicks to complete.
It also includes adding hostels in places where major events are happening. That’s something that WeHostels first did during SXSW, and it continues to use events as a way to promote usage. WeHostels now has more than 40,000 properties in about 800 cities around the world.
Surprise! European Startups, We're Extending The Deadline For The Disrupt Battlefield To July 31
Happy mid-summer Monday! To counterbalance the sudden burst of warmth that’s (finally) hitting Europe and is probably making all of you a little less focused on work, we are throwing all you European startups out there some super cool news: we’re extending the deadline to apply for the Startup Battlefield for Disrupt Europe, taking place in Berlin October 26-29.
The new deadline is July 31.
For those of you currently doing your very best imitations of this flame-point Siamese cat, here’s a rundown of what the Startup Battlefield is:
- This is our homegrown, well-known competition for early-stage startups, and it runs alongside our Disrupt conference. Disrupt highlights some of the biggest successes in tech, and as a counterpart, the Battlefield is our way of showing what’s going to be hot in the future.
- There will be 30 of you selected from the online application stage. (And again, the deadline, in case you really are a cat, is July 31.)
- Those selected as finalists from the online application stage get many good things.
- First and foremost, you get to pitch your startup baby in front of a panel of top VCs and other founders, along with our in-person and online audiences filled with other important people.
- Those in the final round (there are two) during Disrupt, get to present a second time.
- You also get coverage and loving attention from TC as part of this. That exposure can go a long way to finding customers, business partners, funding and possibly acquirers but more immediately, the winner gets a $50,000 prize.
This October will be the first time that we are putting on Disrupt in Europe and we are working hard to use the platform to really celebrate the best of what this part of the world is doing in tech. So if you are a European startup that thinks you should be a part of this story, please do apply to be in the Battlefield.
Here are a few other practical tips for the application process:
- We review applications on a rolling basis, so it’s to your advantage to submit as soon as you can.
- Due to strong demand, it’s unlikely that we will review applications more than once, so please don’t submit a draft application before you are ready.
- All submissions are confidential unless otherwise permitted by applicants on the application form.
- PowerPoint slides and video demos are optional but highly encouraged. Show, don’t tell. We reserve the right not to review applications without video demos based on application volume.
We are looking forward to seeing your applications — and having you try out the latest in pet tech in Berlin.
photo: flickr
Hands-On With CE Week's Hottest Wearable Tech
Wearable technology is all the rage right now, and I’m not just talking about Google Glass or Apple’s forthcoming iWatch. Companies large and small are getting in on the trend, and that was made all the more obvious as we roamed through CE Week’s ShowStoppers showroom.
As you’ll see in the video above, we venture from smart watches to bone-conduction musical hats to wearable portable video recording devices and blue-light therapeutic glasses. It’s a wild ride.
We start by visiting Basis, the folks who’ve developed the Basis smartwatch with more sensors than any other smart watch on the market. The company has thrown a little style into the mix with new interchangeable “fashion bands.” Some are leather, some are colorful, and some are made by legit artists. You can check them out here.
The next stop we made was with a company called MaxVirtual, which built a special hat called the Cynaps. The Cynaps uses Bluetooth to connect to an audio source and then pumps that music into the hat, and ultimately into your brain through bone conduction. With nary a headphone in sight, you can enjoy music and the shade of a hat bill all at once. The MaxVirtual Cynaps is available now for $79.
But what’s audio without some video? A quick tour of the Ion Camera station offered up a number of portable recording products, namely the Ion AirPro 2 and the Adventurer. The AirPro 2 bumps from a 5-megapixel sensor to a 14-megapixel sensor, complete with a microphone and one-click capture. The Adventurer, on the other hand, tracks speed, location, altitude, and direction natively in the file. You can check out more here.
Last, but certainly not least, we made our way to the Psio station, where I learned that Clockwork Orange-style stimulation can actually be good for you in the right circumstances. The Psio glasses offer up natural blue light, which helps relieve stress, boost mental acuity and regulate the Circadian Rhythm. The glasses come with 10 preloaded “exercises” and price starts at $399.99.
Don't Forget To Export Your Google Reader Data Today
After withering in the dry heat for the last four months, Google Reader will quietly disappear into the horizon later today. It’s a sad day, but the sun will rise tomorrow, and the Internet will keep on spinning. Thankfully there are a lot of fine Google Reader alternatives to keep feeding your RSS addiction.
For the past month, a daily popup has reminded Google Reader users to back up their data. Google is essentially zero’n the drive tomorrow, ridding itself of millions of OMPL files. Stop procrastinating and take 5 minutes to export your data.
There are several options.
Google Takeout is by far the easiest way to export your Google Reader data. The Google service is designed to export not only Google Reader data, but also data from Buzz, Hangouts, Contacts, Drive, Goggles, and YouTube. If you just choose Reader, the export file should be less than a megabyte and only take a minute or so to process and download. Once downloaded, this OMPL file can be used in most RSS readers.
If you choose all of the services, the process will take a lot longer, but Google Takeout will email you when the exported data is ready to be downloaded.
However, Google Takeout doesn’t export all of your Reader information. As Mihai Parparita explains through his persistent.info site, it leaves behind tagged items, comments, and read items. He created this tool to export everything through Reader’s API.
It grabs:
- All your read items
- All your starred items
- All your tagged items
- All your shared items
- All the shared items from the people you were following.
- All the comments on shared items
- All your liked items
- All items you’ve kept unread, emailed, read on your phone, clicked on or otherwise interacted with.
- All items that have appeared in one of your subscriptions
- All items that were recommended to you
- All items in the (English) “Explore” section
- All the profiles of the people you were following before the sharepocalypse.
- All your preferences.
The tool takes a bit of command line work, but if your Reader data is precious, it’s worth the time and effort. The step-by-step instructions are here.
Alternatively you could just move on from RSS and embrace Twitter.
To Drive More Clicks, Twitter Is Testing A Popular Tweets History Feature [Update: It's Gone]
A little over a year ago, Twitter kicked off an initiative to experiment with different ways of making tweets more interactive — a strategy that has brought us Twitter cards with previews, and shortcodes for embedding tweets elsewhere. Today, one of the latest experiments is adding more data into the mix: a list of sites linking to where a tweet has been embedded.
For now, this looks like only a limited test. [Update: According to Mikko Hypponen, the outspoken chief revenue officer at F-Secure who first brought this to our attention, it looks like like the feature has been turned off, perhaps because of articles like the one you're reading right now, and this one.]
The feature was first brought to our attention by Hypponen. I couldn’t see the links myself but you can in a screenshot (which I’ll show off, in a hat-tip to Twitter, with an embedded tweet instead of a screenshot:)
Has Twitter always shown where particular tweets are embedded on? pic.twitter.com/Th5y94omPZ
— Mikko Hypponen ✘ (@mikko) July 1, 2013
The links went directly to the pages on the sites, not to tweets.
I asked Twitter about what is going on, and a spokesperson pointed me in the direction of this blog post noting tests of “hundreds of variations of new features and designs.”
Regardless of whether or not this feature eventually rolls out to a wider public, listing where a tweet has been used is another sign of how Twitter hopes to continue to make its platform more interactive and less lean-back.
Getting the balance to tip further in the direction of engaged users will mean that Twitter can sell itself better as a broadcasting platform to advertisers hungry to go not just where registered users are congregating, but specifically to where users are logging on, paying attention, and clicking. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that many retweets of a link doesn’t necessarily translate to traffic to a particular page. It seems that many Twitter users, lured in by the fast pace of Twitter, are happy to use it as its chief source of information as well. Offering one more bit of context — in the form of the history of the embed — could be one way of Twitter — and would be users of this service — trying to further counteract that.
You can also see how a list of links may potentially also come to include a sponsor in the mix, taking advantage of the Google-Adwords-style keyword targeting advertising that Twitter has been rolling out.
