The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Google’s Response To Facebook’s Response To Google’s Facebook API Ban
- The Stanford Boys (and Girls) Club—In Beijing
- Bon Jovi Uses CrowdStar’s Facebook Games To Sell Digital Music
- TSA Bans Ink & Toner Cartridges From Flights. Next On The Ban List: People.
- OnGreen, A Site Connecting Clean Tech Startups And Investors, Raises $1.4 Million
- DataHug Aims To Map Digital Business Relationships
- Breakable: iPhone 4 Suffers The Most Damage From Accidents
- Now Showing At Video Search Engine Blinkx: Profits
- Backupify Your Data From Facebook Pages
- Quest To Buy Data Protection Software Company BakBone For $55 Million
- Personal Genetics Startup 23andMe Raises $22 Million More From Google, Others
- Google Instant Previews: Get Ready To Be 5% More Likely Satisfied With Google Search
- PayPal Kicks Off Holiday Shopping Season With Exclusive Deals And Free Shipping Offers
- Can The Story Of Electronics End Happily Ever After?
- IBM To Give $50 Million In Tech And Consulting Services To 100 Cities
- Borders Taps Chegg To Power Textbook Rentals Platform
- Zuora Rings Up $20 Million For Billings-As-A-Service Platform
- Movieclips Nabs $3 Million To Catalogue And Mashup Scenes From Movies
- Facebook Finds A New Way To Liberate Your Gmail Contact Data
- My Taptu To Take On Flipboard And Pulse In The Touch Aggregator Stakes
- Behold Opera Mobile For Android: Speedy, Pinch-To-Zoom, Geolocation And More
- Speedy Messaging App Kik Goes Viral, But Is It Cool With Apple’s TOS?
- Kno Tablet Will Start At $599 For Single-Screen, $899 For Dual-Screen
- Mockingbird’s Wireframe Tool Now Sings To The Tune Of Real-Time Collaboration
- A Pivotal Pivot
| Google’s Response To Facebook’s Response To Google’s Facebook API Ban Posted: 09 Nov 2010 09:15 AM PST
That’s a nice swipe there in the beginning, about how they wish Facebook had spent time giving people a way to liberate their own Facebook data rather than building tools to end around Google. That last bit though, about “people should be able to control the data they create” doesn’t quite hit the mark though in my opinion. We’re talking about your Facebook friends list and their email addresses. You create your list of friends, of course, but you generally aren’t uploading email addresses to Facebook, your friends do. Still, I think there are excellent logic arguments for allowing users to download friends’ email addresses, too. More on that later.        
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| The Stanford Boys (and Girls) Club—In Beijing Posted: 09 Nov 2010 09:05 AM PST
The result is that America is giving an unintended gift to countries like China and India, where returnees are teaching locals how to build world-class companies and how to innovate. In almost every high-growth tech company in China, you find returnees in senior management positions. The New York Times reported that it’s the same in scientific research—top research labs have returnees in lead positions, which may give China the edge it has desperately been seeking. China is a long way from challenging America in innovation ability, and if it does make some breakthroughs in cleantech, health care, and science, this is not a bad thing. As I concluded in this piece about China’s entrepreneurship boom, we benefit from innovation no matter where it happens. The problem is that the American economy is stagnant and we’re exporting the people who can help boost it. And we are creating long-term competition for our tech industry. On my trip to Beijing, last week, what surprised me most was the number of Stanford grads that I met and how they had no regrets about leaving the U.S.—and no plan to return. I can understand why so many international students return home from regions of the U.S. that don’t welcome foreigners—these cities always have fewer tech startups and thus fewer jobs. But Silicon Valley is the most open, inclusive place in the world and pays premium salaries to top engineering talent, especially from Stanford. And immigrants thrive in the Valley: they start 52% of its startups. So why are the Stanford grads leaving? I asked five of them to tell their own stories.
Robert says that he would not even consider going back to the U.S. He may visit the Valley for a short time to expose himself to the latest technology and business models being developed there. But, with Twitter, Techcrunch, and his China Stanford network, there really is no reason to return: his costs are ten times lower; market significantly larger; and funding more abundant, in China.
He started a firm called Beyond Tailors that sold made-to-order clothing, and La Miu—now the Victoria's Secret of China and China’s biggest online lingerie seller. It is growing at 300% per year, is negotiating VC financing to help it grow to a billion-dollar business, and expects to go public in two to three years. Lu has no thoughts of coming back to the U.S. He says that China is far too exciting.
He believes that is a historic period of time for China to regaining its long-lost leadership in the world economy and affairs. And that "any Chinese with a passion for entrepreneurship, the right skills, and love for their motherland would jump at the first opportunity to relocate back to China". Settling down back home wasn't easy for Joe at first. There was minor culture shock which resulted from many years of absence from China. But the economic opportunities were endless. He found abundant risk capital willing to fund start-ups, and extensive support from all levels of government.
So he went back to China after completing his Harvard MBA in 2005 and started the Chinese SlideShare, DocIn, in 2007. This site has millions of daily users, of all sorts—from college students to rural residents. Jonathan says this has the societal effect that he hoped, and plans to continue staying in China to build his dreams.
Amy is glad she returned to China because of the wide-open opportunities there. She says that China is definitely more polluted than Silicon Valley, "but it’s on a way of having a clearer sky". Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.        
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| Bon Jovi Uses CrowdStar’s Facebook Games To Sell Digital Music Posted: 09 Nov 2010 09:00 AM PST
So as users play the games, players will be given the opportunity to purchase the Bon Jovi Greatest Hits Bundle which includes a digital download of Bon Jovi's Greatest Hits, Facebook Credits, as well as branded Bon Jovi virtual goods that enable special benefits within the games, and a coupon code for the Bon Jovi online store. The idea of downloading premium music while buying virtual currency is a compelling. It’s definitely a unique distribution strategy for musical artists to start bundling virtual goods, currency and downloads into one package. While it’s unclear how much money Bon Jovi will really be seeing, but the campaign is sure to draw eyeballs, which may be the primary reason for the partnership. CrowdStar’s games have more than 50 million monthly active players, and are competing with the likes of Playfish, Playdom and Zynga. We could be seeing more artists flock to social gaming as a marketing platform in the New Year.        
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| TSA Bans Ink & Toner Cartridges From Flights. Next On The Ban List: People. Posted: 09 Nov 2010 08:14 AM PST
The Transportation Security Administration has banned ink and toner cartridges of more than 16 ounces from both carry-on bags and checked luggage on flights within the United States or in-bound to the United States. You know why: because of that incident from a few days ago where authorities found bombs hidden inside toner cartridges. The TSA is in a tough spot. Does anyone really think that terrorists are going to say, "Shoot, we’ve been thwarted! Let’s stop plotting against the West and instead become responsible stakeholders in the international system"?        
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| OnGreen, A Site Connecting Clean Tech Startups And Investors, Raises $1.4 Million Posted: 09 Nov 2010 07:35 AM PST
The company aims to build the world’s largest database of green technologies and entrepreneurs globally, and to create funding opportunities for these through its platform. Chief executive and founder of OnGreen, Nikhil R. Jain explains:
According to Jain, OnGreen will use the series A capital to launch a Chinese version of its site, build its presence in China and India during the next year, and to launch a patent exchange in coming weeks (Nov. 16, 2010) a collaboration with the University of Southern California Energy Institute. Currently, OnGreen plans to generate revenue through advertising, lead generation, events, custom clean tech and green industry research, and other sources. The company is on target to become profitable by the end of 2011, Jain says.        
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| DataHug Aims To Map Digital Business Relationships Posted: 09 Nov 2010 07:32 AM PST
When I visited Dublin recently for the F.ounders event, I didn’t even get around to attending the bigger event that was happening alongside it, the Dublin Web Summit. I did, however, get a chance to meet one of the co-founders of DataHug, which won the event’s Spark of Genius startup competition (and a prize package worth €30,000). Founded in late 2009 by former consultants Connor Murphy and Ray Smith, DataHug essentially enables clients to “better understand and exploit” the collective company network. Or as one of the judges at the startup competition put it more eloquently: it’s like “LinkedIn on steroids as it not only answers who knows whom, but also how well they know them”. The product, a Web app, is currently in alpha preview mode only and in trial by a select few customers only, but you can sign up for the beta here (and see some screenshots below). Basically, DataHug is building technology capable of intelligently indexing corporate email systems and generating actionable insights about the everyday connections between people based on the gathered data. Which sounds bafflingly useful for any company to my ears. We’ll update on the company’s progress once DataHug gets around to releasing the public beta of its software, which should be before year’s end. My guess is many companies are going to hugely appreciate all the intelligence they can gather about their people’s business relationships. The great thing about DataHug is that the data is already there for the taking – they’re just putting a terribly useful layer on top of it. Keep an eye on this one.
       
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| Breakable: iPhone 4 Suffers The Most Damage From Accidents Posted: 09 Nov 2010 07:31 AM PST
       
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| Now Showing At Video Search Engine Blinkx: Profits Posted: 09 Nov 2010 07:14 AM PST
Video search engine blinkx has been plugging away at video search for years now. Finally, six years after being founded, and already publicly traded on the London stock exchange, it hit profitability for the first time this year. For the six month period ended September 30, revenues doubled to $27 million and it showed its first profit ever of $2 million (or $0.64 per share on a diluted basis). Blinkx has a small but healthy business powering video search for a growing list of partners, including most recently with UK-based IPTV set-top box maker Amino Communications to power search for Internet TV. The total number of video searches per day it is powering is now 31.6 million, nearly triple the 13.1 million daily average in the same period a year ago. Its revenue growth rate is on par with a year ago. If it keeps it up, it will hit $50 million in revenues by the end of this financial year. Blinkx has been moving aggressively into video advertising with its Ad Hoc contextual video advertising and demographic targeting product. The average size for video ad deals is up 40 percent. If it can score more Internet TV partnerships, it might have an opportunity to take what it’s learned in online video over the past few years and apply it to real TV.
       
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| Backupify Your Data From Facebook Pages Posted: 09 Nov 2010 06:58 AM PST
Founded in 2008 by Rob May, Backupify backs up all your data on services like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger, and YouTube. The service keeps all the raw data for you and creates a downloadable PDF with, for instance, all your Tweets, direct messages, followers, people you follow, and profile info. The new version of Backupify for Facebook Pages is targeted towards businesses and government organizations that maintain Facebook Pages and need satisfy compliance audits by providing independent backups of all of a user's Facebook data. In addition to News Feeds, Wall Posts, Photo Albums and Messages associated with any Facebook Page or Profile, Backupify for Facebook also saves any Photos, Videos or Wall Posts that tagged a specific account even if the original poster removes the content. Businesses can maintain a record of all of their Facebook activity, including friends (contacts), Likes, shared content and interactions. Also, Backupify didn’t mention any pricing, so I’m assuming the service will be free for now. Backupify has raised $6 million in funding.        
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| Quest To Buy Data Protection Software Company BakBone For $55 Million Posted: 09 Nov 2010 06:25 AM PST  Quest Software is to acquire BakBone Software, a San Diego, CA-based provider of data protection software. Quest in a statement says it expects to pay approximately $55 million, including the payment of certain debt obligations and net of anticipated cash on hand. BakBone shareholders will receive $0.33 per common share and $1.29 per preferred share following the closing of the acquisition, which is expected to occur in the first quarter of 2011.
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| Personal Genetics Startup 23andMe Raises $22 Million More From Google, Others Posted: 09 Nov 2010 06:14 AM PST
23andMe, the personal genetics company co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, Google co-founder Sergey Brin‘s spouse, has raised $22 million+ in its third round of financing. The Series C round was led by Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation, with current investors participating – including New Enterprise Associates and Google Ventures (ah, family …). 23andMe, which was founded in 2006, aims to help individuals understand their own genetic information through DNA analysis technologies and Web-based interactive tools. The company’s Personal Genome Service enables individuals to gain insights into their ancestry and inherited traits, and “all it takes is a little bit of spit”. Wojcicki briefly commented on the funding round thusly:
That’s great, as long as the company can remember to send the DNA results to the right persons. And stop freaking out our own Michael Arrington with creepy zeppelins.
       
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| Google Instant Previews: Get Ready To Be 5% More Likely Satisfied With Google Search Posted: 09 Nov 2010 06:04 AM PST
As apparently hundreds of you have already seen, Google Instant Previews allows you to see what’s on a website right from a Google Search results page. All you have to do is simply click the little magnifying glass icon next to a result and an overlay will appear to the right of the link, showing you what’s on the page. “This is the next step in the story of Instant,” Ben Gomes, a Google Distinguished Engineer, tells us. He notes that Google has gone from a standard text input, to autocomplete, to Instant, and now we have Instant Previews. This is all about “pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with technology,” Gomes says. And truth be told, the more interesting aspect of this new feature isn’t so much the feature itself — others have done similar things before — instead, it is the technology behind it. Specifically, Gomes says Google is able to pull up these previews in less than 1/10th of a second. And they dynamically update as content changes. And Google will have them for basically every link result in their index. And it’s not just about the preview, it’s about figuring out the words on the page being previewed as well. If you’re searching for a specific phrase, Google can find it and highlight it in these previews. This way you can get a bit more context to make sure this is the page you’re looking for. When I asked Gomes if he thought some content publishers might be annoyed at the notion of this pre-click data, he said he didn’t think so. Instead, he thinks of Instant Previews as almost an advertisement for content sites. The Previews give a taste and draws the users in. Again, as we’re all well aware, Google has been testing this feature out for a while now. They’ve done it both internally with all Google employees, and externally with focus groups and a small percentage of the public. The response has been very positive, Gomes says, with users feeling more satisfied with the results they end up clicking on. How much more satisfied? 5 percent. Yes, Google measured it. Google Instant Previews are rolling live now and will be a standard part of the Google Search experience going forward.
       
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| PayPal Kicks Off Holiday Shopping Season With Exclusive Deals And Free Shipping Offers Posted: 09 Nov 2010 06:00 AM PST
Barnes & Noble.com will offer 15 percent off on all PayPal purchases, plus free shipping; Shoebuy.com will offer PayPal customers $10 off purchases of $80 or more, plus free shipping; and 1-800-Flowers.com will offer 15 percent off, plus free shipping on all PayPal purchases. eBags will offer PayPal customers 25 percent off on all purchases, UGG Autsrialia will offer free shipping, and Newegg and MacMall will also offer special disounts for PayPal Users. Of course, PayPal parent eBay is offering shoppers $10 cash back from Bill Me Later on their first Bill Me Later purchases, coupled with a six-month "no payments" so shoppers don’t have to pay until after the holiday rush. You can find more deals here. It’s no secret the holiday shopping season could be a cash cow for both PayPal and eBay, especially when it comes to mobile payments and transactions. Exclusive deals and free shipping offers can only help boost sales.        
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| Can The Story Of Electronics End Happily Ever After? Posted: 09 Nov 2010 05:40 AM PST
The Electronics TakeBack Coalition— a group that advocates for sustainable design and electronics producer responsibility— joined as a co-producer, framing issues and providing research for the script, working with Leonard’s long time creative partners Free Range Studios. The Story Of Electronics, today, is a tragedy. Its main characters include: executives in charge of consumer electronics companies who allow their designers to use toxic materials and worse; consumers who accept built-in obsolescence and cannot control their appetites for everything from smart phones to high-def TVs; and citizens of developing nations living or working around e-waste, their land and water polluted by PVC, mercury, solvents, flame retardants as a result of another country’s consumer habits. The video (embedded below) covers some startling facts about e-waste including: Typical “fat” TVs, dumped to make way for flat screen, have about 5 pounds of lead in them each It costs more to repair a DVD player than it does to buy a new one today Every year, consumers create 25 metric tons (or tonnes) of electronics waste Computer factory workers, in a recent study, had 40% more miscarriages than the general population (thanks to exposure to toxic materials) A national coordinator with The Electronics TakeBack Coalition who worked on this project, Barbara Kyle, added to that list:
The Story Of Electronics and Electronics TakeBack Coalition websites present ideas about how to turn the tragedy around, thankfully. Kyle suggests: Asking manufacturers to design and make more recyclable, longer lasting, non-toxic products Sponsoring or participating in design competitions (like this one) that encourage sustainable innovation When they’re spent, taking electronics to E-Stewards, recyclers that promise not to export them Supporting legislation that would curb exports of toxic e-waste, at the moment the U.S. HR 6252 Buying from companies that take back electronics when they are broken or obsolete, to dispose of them responsibly
       
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| IBM To Give $50 Million In Tech And Consulting Services To 100 Cities Posted: 09 Nov 2010 05:36 AM PST
Funded via IBM’s philanthropic division, according to an IBM press statement, the Smarter Cities program aims to help municipalities around the world— with populations of 100,000 to 700,000 ideally— solve local problems in any of the following areas: healthcare, education, safety, social services, transportation, communications, sustainability, budget management, energy, and utilities. The approximate value of each Smarter Cities Challenge grant will be equivalent to US$400,000. The company has alrady completed or is currently conducting a series of pilot grants in Baltimore, Maryland; Austin, Texas; and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Other municipalities can apply online via SmarterCitiesChallenge.org, and will be selected based on a number of criteria including their track record of problem solving, commitment to the use of technology and open data, and willingness to provide IBM with access to and time with city leaders. Teams of IBM experts will provide chosen cities with recommendations for better delivery of municipal services, more citizen engagement, and improved efficiency and access to proprietary IBM technology like the company’s CityForward, a kind of social network for city leaders, academics, and citizens that is also a city data analysis and data visualization platform. The grant giving entity IBM stands to prime their sales pipeline by increasing their experience in Gov 2.0, Healthcare and Smart Grid verticals, with their generous, charitable effort.        
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| Borders Taps Chegg To Power Textbook Rentals Platform Posted: 09 Nov 2010 04:57 AM PST
Through the partnership, Borders' customers have access to Chegg's inventory of millions of textbook titles. Chegg will serve as the sole provider of textbook rentals through Borders.com and will be part of the Borders Textbook Marketplace, which includes 1.4 million new and used titles. As an incentive to use the platform, Borders is offering students extra cash by utilizing the site’s used textbook buyback option. Chegg has been on a roll recently, raising $75 million in new funding, acquiring CourseRank, and estimated to bring in $130 million in revenue this year (that’s up from $25 million in 2009). It’s probably wise that Borders chose to partner with Chegg rather than competing with the book rentals powerhouse.        
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| Zuora Rings Up $20 Million For Billings-As-A-Service Platform Posted: 09 Nov 2010 04:25 AM PST
Launched in 2008, Zuora's cloud-based billings platform aims to alleviate the need for online businesses to develop their own billing systems, especially to handle recurring payments like those associated with subscriptions. The startup just released a billing service for cloud providers, Z-Commerce for the Cloud, which automates metering, pricing and billing for products, bundles, and configurations. Last year, Zuora extended its platform to Facebook apps, app developers charge recurring monthly subscriptions for their apps or premium features. The company says that it has seen fast growth in revenue, bookings and cashflow thanks to the shift to the "Subscription Economy" in both the consumer and enterprise worlds. Zuora signed over $1 billion in contracted subscription revenue in the first quarter of its fiscal year, which ended April 30. Plus, Zuora has been cash flow positive since early this year, and has grown in excess of 400% in 2009 and is on track to repeat that in 2010. And CEO and founder Tien Tzuo says that he believes the marketplace is large enough for the company to eventually IPO. Clients using Zuora's service include Rearden Commerce, Ning, Pandora Media, ReputationDefender and HDCloud. The startup will use the new funding for product development, international expansion, and hiring additional staff.        
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| Movieclips Nabs $3 Million To Catalogue And Mashup Scenes From Movies Posted: 09 Nov 2010 03:56 AM PST
Launched in beta last December, Movieclips.com offers a clip engine with over 14,000 different clips from 1,400 titles from the libraries of 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures. And the startup launched a new product, called Movieclips Mashups, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, which allows anyone to make montages of two minutes clips. Along with the studio partnerships (which is half the battle for licensing movie content), the company has also developed proprietary technology that assigns up to 1,000 points of data to every scene, making it super easy to find scenes by actor, film title, dialogue snippet, mood, director, genre, etc. The site also launched a specialized video player and features an API developers can use to integrate Movieclips on other sites; AOL's Moviefone is already using the technology on its platform. One new feature the startup has recently added is "related clips," which recommends similar clips to users in search. So when a user searches for a particular clip, he will be exposed to a wall of 100 related clips "related by" actor, movie, action, mood, setting, theme, director, prop, cinematographer, and many more categories. Movieclips says that since launching this feature, page views have increased by over 200%, as users fall into an addictive click trance from one clip to the next. Another strategy Movieclips will be furthering is content curation and working on developing ways for visitors to find content on the site easily and quickly. This will include more lists of clips by topic and other parameters. While the company only has clips from 1,400 movies, Zach James says these titles are all well-known, A list movies, such as Top Gun, Casablanca, and Wayne’s World. James says the site hasn’t tackled the longtail yet but will eventually expand to include niche movies. The challenge for the site of course is working with the movie studios, who own the rights, to put the movies online. James says that if the movies are legal published on then web, then Movieclips will have the rights to post the clips. James says that the new funding will be used for future product development. The company faces competition from AnyClip. Movie Videos & Movie Scenes at MOVIECLIPS.com       
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| Facebook Finds A New Way To Liberate Your Gmail Contact Data Posted: 08 Nov 2010 11:50 PM PST
Google shut them down last week, restricting API access and effectively blocking contacts exports to Facebook in any automated way. This is, I wrote, the true beginning of data protectionism. Now Facebook has found a way around that restriction. They’re leveraging a Google feature that lets users download their own data for their own use – part of Google’s golf-clap worthy data liberation effort. They’ve hacked a solution around the block by giving users a direct deep link to the download feature. And then users can upload that file directly to Facebook. Can Google block this? One engineer I spoke with says yes, but it will be difficult: “If Google wanted to, they could block it immediately. it’s pretty simple. just put a CSRF token on the url to block deep linking but that might fuck up other CSV flows. Maybe they have an outlook importer or something. facebook really went aggressive here.” It’s also a big middle finger to Google.        
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| My Taptu To Take On Flipboard And Pulse In The Touch Aggregator Stakes Posted: 08 Nov 2010 11:46 PM PST
Well this appears to be the ambition of a new free Android and iPhone app which launches today, My Taptu, and will appear on iPad in due course. It’s also part of the re-invention of its maker, Taptu, which has until now specialised in mobile search and touch-based interfaces for mobile, but is now bringing that expertise to bear on an app which promises to organise your social and content streams in a highly scalable way. And they appear to have the firepower. Currently Pulse only lets you add 20 streams to the app, while Flipboard allows for 21 ‘sections’. My Taptu will let users have have 5000 mixed streams. That is a huge difference. Taptu could well have a chance against Flipboard and Pulse with its new app when it eventually launches on iPad in December.        
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| Behold Opera Mobile For Android: Speedy, Pinch-To-Zoom, Geolocation And More Posted: 08 Nov 2010 11:00 PM PST
Opera Software has released its (second) free mobile browser product for the Android platform. Grab the app, dubbed Opera Mobile 10.1 beta, now in Android Market or here. Yes, Opera was already available for Android, in a fairly limited way. Opera Mini, has been live on the market since July, but now you can also download the company’s full-fledged browser, Opera Mobile, from the application store. Here’s what it’s packing: - speedy page loading compared to other browsers, particularly on slower networks (courtesy of Opera Turbo) - smooth scrolling, zooming and panning (rather than having to tap to zoom in, which is definitely a huge improvement) - Visual tabs for easy tab management —> - Built-in geolocation support - Ability to sync bookmarks across devices - SVG support As I had mentioned earlier, the release of the public beta version of Opera Mobile for Android was just a matter of time, as the product already existed, albeit for the Norwegian company’s OEM partners only. Now that it’s available for direct download for end users, you’d be wrong not to check it out. Fellow TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid installed a build of the app on his Android smartphone this morning and confirmed that it feels snappier than the native browser that came installed on it. Obviously, more robust side-by-side testing is welcome here. The browser is available in Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. Here’s an earlier video I recorded, featuring Opera Mobile & Devices product manager Phillip Grønvold giving me a demo of the app on his Samsung Galaxy S phone:        
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| Speedy Messaging App Kik Goes Viral, But Is It Cool With Apple’s TOS? Posted: 08 Nov 2010 10:58 PM PST
“It’s like you can feel the person on the other side of the chat” says founder Ted Livingston. Of Kik’s 1.5 million users about 620K are on iPhones and the rest are spread out evenly between Blackberry and Android. Hailed by its fans as a “Blackberry Messenger for the rest of us,” Kik is an example of a pivotal pivot. Founded in January 2009, the service was centered around SMS until Livingston decided to relaunch the product as in-app messaging about two weeks ago. The app was designed for virality, making it super easy to send friends an invitation containing the install link via text, tweet or email. It also comes with Kik user suggestions from your contacts baked in, taking away the work of having to manually find them. It’s almost poetic that the feature responsible its impressive stickiness would currently be the subject of contention. A recent Quora thread goes into how the Kik app might be in violation of Apple’s iOS Developer Terms of Service, as it automatically imports your contacts without asking for permission, requires users to share information in order to function and does not give users ready access to its own TOS. Here are the specific app store clauses that were brought up in reference to Kik.
The App Store requires both an explicit “User Permission” function as well as direct access to an app TOS, neither of which Kik has. The app also comes under some GetSatisfaction fire for similar multi-platform privacy holes and the fact that there’s no opt out for it messaging your contacts when you join. When asked about these issues, Livingston, who commented both on the Quora and GetSatisfication threads, said that a fix (like a popup asking users for permission to share their information) was in the works, asap. Livingston, who is concerned about user privacy, was baffled as to why the app had been accepted into the App Store four times without contest if it in fact was in violation of Apple’s TOS, which it looks to be. “It was re-approved by Apple two days ago,” he said, which is days after the first TOS issues were brought up. I am similarly confused, especially since app has been one of the top downloaded free apps in the App Store since it’s relaunch. Livingston joked, “Maybe Apple is letting it slide as a way to crack BlackBerry Messenger’s hold on the market?” Apple has not responded to my requests for more information. Full iOS SDK Terms of Service, embedded below.        
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| Kno Tablet Will Start At $599 For Single-Screen, $899 For Dual-Screen Posted: 08 Nov 2010 08:51 PM PST
When textbook tablet startup Kno raised $46 million in September from Andreessen Horowitz and Silicon Valley Bank, it was shooting to price its dual-screen tablet at under $1,000. On Tuesday, it will announce the pricing of its tablets at $899 for the dual-screen version and $599 for the single-screen version. It will also start taking limited pre-orders for shipping before the end of the year. At $599, the single-screen tablet, will be $100 more than a WiFi-only iPad and the same price as a Samsung Galaxy Tab from T-Mobile without a contract. But the Kno is ginormous. Even the single-paned one, with its 14.1 inch screen, is nearly twice as big as an iPad. That one debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco (see demo video below). Although the Kno has a color touch-screen and runs a browser and learning apps, it is competing less with the iPad than with the extra-large Kindle DX, which sells for $379, has a 9.7-inch black-and-white screen, and also targets the textbook market. What it will come down to, though, is not so much the price of the device as much as the availability and price of the textbooks on each device. Kno CEO Osman Rashid declares that that the number of textbook titles available on the “Kindle Dx won't be more than ours.” By the time, the Kno gets into students hands there will be tens of thousands of textbook titles for sale at 30 to 50 percent cheaper than the print editions. The Kno should pay for itself within three semesters, and students won’t have to lug around a backpack full of paper textbooks. They can also take notes on the Kno. The money is in the textbooks and apps, not in the hardware. “We don't see ourselves as a hardware platform, but as a learning platform company,” says Rashid. In a year or two, it is not hard to imagine that $599 Kno costing only half as much, opening up the world of digital textbooks to even more students. Below is the demo video if the Kno from Disrupt:        
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| Mockingbird’s Wireframe Tool Now Sings To The Tune Of Real-Time Collaboration Posted: 08 Nov 2010 08:30 PM PST
If you’re setting out to design a new website, there are few better starting places than a wireframing service: they let you quickly get a rough idea of what your site will look like, without having to deal with paper cut-outs or endless pencil erasing. And today, one of the better wireframing services is leaving beta with some major new features in tow for its official launch. Meet Mockingbird. The bootstrapped, two-person startup launched around a year ago, offering a clean interface that’s based on the Cappuccino web framework (in other words, it isn’t in Flash, unlike many of its competitors). Since launching in a beta it’s grown to 55k users and nearly 100k projects created. Today, Mockingbird is launching real-time collaboration, which means that multiple people can fire up their web browser (no install required) and start editing the same page layout. This is obviously a big deal given the collaborative nature of design, and in practice it looks pretty slick (you can see it in action in the video below, or you can check out the demo page to try it for yourself). The other big change with this launch: Mockingbird is ready to turn on the revenue faucets, and will start charging for its more robust plans. There’s still going to be a free version available that supports 1 project with a maximum of two users, and premium plans start at $9 a month.
Competitors in this space include Balsamiq, which offers a desktop application rather than a web app, Mockflow, Hotgloo, and a nifty iPad app called iMockups.
       
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| Posted: 08 Nov 2010 07:49 PM PST
But did you know that Instagram almost wasn’t Instagram at all? I detailed some of their transformation from the location-based HTML5 app Burbn to Instagram in my initial preview of the app. But co-founder Kevin Systrom gave more insight a few weeks ago on Quora. Systrom revealed that he and co-founder Mike Krieger actually put in about a year’s worth of work into Burbn, finally culminating in the building of a complete native iPhone app. But it just wasn’t very good in their estimation. So they basically threw the entire thing out and started over. Again, after a year of work. The result, just 8 weeks later, was Instagram. A huge risk. Ballsy. “We actually got an entire version of Burbn done as an iPhone app, but it felt cluttered, and overrun with features. It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram,” Systrom wrote. That element to their story is fascinating to me. I was actually one of the initial users of Burbn after I got a tip about it and was able to sign up before Systrom realized who I was (he quickly emailed me later and asked me not to write about it until he was ready to show something off). I found Burbn interesting because location was getting red-hot at the time, and this was a completely-HTML5 approach that was pretty slick. But I wasn’t sure how such a service was ever going to take off. The reality right now is that we live in a world of native apps in the mobile space. And Burbn would have been coming very late to the game with an HTML5 gamble and with rivals like Foursquare, Gowalla and others already battling for users. But it turns out Systrom and Krieger were thinking the same thing. “Once he [Krieger] joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood. By this time, we had built Burbn into a (private) really neat HTML5 mobile web app that let you: Check in to locations, Make plans (future check-ins), Earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures, and much more,” Systrom noted on Quora. That all sounds great, but again, a crowded-space that was quickly getting more crowded. “We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing. We saw mobile photos as an awesome opportunity to try out some new ideas,” Systrom continued. And so the pivot happened. It’s important to note that Systrom and Krieger had already secured $500,000 in funding prior to the pivot, so they had some cash to gamble with. But not all investors would be happy with such a turn. But as Systrom described it, Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz basically told them that they had some good ideas and to figure out the company they wanted to build from those ideas. They decided that Instagram, and not Burbn, would be that company. Startups pivot all the time. Some are forced to, some are not. Want another good example? Twitter. The podcasting startup Odeo (where, incidentally, Systrom was an intern back in the day) was more or less going nowhere when Evan Williams told his employees to break into teams to brainstorm some crazy new ideas. One of those teams had Jack Dorsey in it, and Twitter was born. Speaking of Twitter, Seesmic started as the “video Twitter” before they pivoted to become a Twitter client. Now they’re sort of pivoting again to cater more directly to the enterprise crowd. It’s something that very well could work. Meanwhile, the Y-Combinator-backed Fliggo earlier this year pivoted away from being another kind of video for Twitter and became Treehouse, an Instagram-competitor. Funny how it all comes around. Will they catch on like Instagram has? Who knows, but if not, the entrepreneurs behind it will undoubtedly be back at it with another idea. Instagram’s story is a testament to the fact that pivots can and do work — even if it means tossing much of what you had poured your life into for a year or more. It’s all about timing, and learning, and vision, and a hell of a lot of courage.        
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