Category: Tech news

Earlier this week, we learned that Facebook would soon let you edit the automatically-generated “Look Back” videos the company had made to celebrate Facebook’s 10th anniversary.

Sure enough: they just launched the editor.

Almost immediately after launch, many users were complaining about the photos that Facebook auto-selected. Some had too many photos of their exes. Some had sad photos that they’d rather not remember as a milestone. One of my friends’ Look Backs prominently featured a picture of a rock, sans explanation or commentary.

A quick visit to the Facebook Lookback page now shows a shiny new edit button.

The editor might not be quite as feature-rich as some might have hoped; you can’t choose ANY Facebook photo to replace those that you don’t like — you can just select from a wider array of pre-picked photos/status updates.

How To Edit Your Look Back:

• Go to the Facebook Lookback page
• Hit the edit button
• Pick your new photos/posts from the pre-populated selections
• Hit the “Update” button at the top of the page
• Wait a few minutes for Facebook to generate your new video.

It’s unclear if the edit feature has been launched to all users, or if it’s being rolled out over time. We’ve checked on around a dozen accounts now, however, and each one had the new button.

[Huge thanks to Draconius Grey, Michael K., Akshat M., and many other people who tipped us this morning about this! ]

Piper is not just a security camera that streams live video to your iPhone on demand. It’s also a weather station, a programmable motion- and sound-detecting device, a data-visualization tool for your in-home habits, a wireless hub for controlling other devices, and a futuristic way to pull pranks on people.

On Facebook, life begins at conception. “We’re expecting!”, your parents post. You don’t have fingers but you’re already accruing likes. A shared sonogram means hundreds have seen you before you’ve even opened your eyes. You have a Facebook presence despite lacking a physical one.

Think about that for a second. Like it or not, in 10 years Facebook has changed everything. Each phase of this life is playing out simultaneously right now across a billion people.

You exist in limbo until you turn 13. Your parents can post whatever they want about you, but you’re not supposed to sign up. But perhaps your curiosity wins out, so you fake your age and create a profile. Quite possibly the first in a long series of adolescent rebellions and lies about your age.

From then on, every action you take and thought you think will be accompanied by a little background decision to be made: “Should I share this on Facebook?” Every sunset, surprise, and sexy face. Yes, you are thirteen years old and deciding which photo you look least ugly in so you can set it as your profile picture. When your parents walk in, you switch to another website or hit enter over and over until your chat history climbs out of view.

Each person you meet must be classified. To friend, or not to friend? Will their life provide enough entertainment? Will this weak tie generate opportunities down the road? Will connecting online make you more likely to connect offline again someday? The decision is not yours alone. It is theirs, but also society’s. The social contract demands courtesy. Accept their friendship, don’t break their heart. Then you’ll spend five seconds every year from then on either deciding not to wish them a happy birthday, or doing so as efficiently as possible.

You grow to become an actor in the success theater. Put on a good show and people will think you’re beautiful and accomplished. Refuse to take the stage and acquaintances will forget about you. Implode in the spotlight and they’ll all think you’re broken or desperate for sympathy. Your real friends will see through the statuses, though, and ask how you’re doing…really.

Eventually, something truly spectacular will happen to you. Rather than share it intimately with those geographically and socially closest to you, you will share some shadow or slideshow of your story with all your friends.

And they will congratulate you. They will like and fawn and comment and cheer and share your moment. And while you haven’t seen most of them in quite some time, their little tokens of appreciation will fill you with pride and joy and gratitude. These clicks can never recreate a hug, but that doesn’t make them worthless. Those resentful of your good fortune will scoff. And though you’ll never know exactly whose blood was boiled by your luck, a smug smirk will consume the corner of your mouth because you showed them, finally.

You’ll one day meet someone so attractive you can hardly wait to escape their presence so you can stalk their every publicly available tidbit of information. You never got their phone number, but with a combination of savvy search parameters you’ll pluck them from the billion-human haystack. You’ll message them something flirty you’d have been too scared to say on the phone and you’ll become “friends.” Before your first date, you’ll know all their favorite bands, the places they’ve travelled, and what their ex looks like. You’ll learn more about them alone than you could in a half-dozen dinners together. You’ll meet up having never heard their voice since that initial encounter. And you’ll fall in love with someone you would have lost but instead you found because you both live a Facebook life.

Your relationship will be condensed into a series of moments. A vacation together, a formal party, an anniversary dinner. No one will know about the fights over work/life balance or the creeping worry they’ll get bored of you, because those don’t make likeable posts. But you’ll send stickers to convey the complex emotions when you’re at a loss for words, and they’ll understand what you mean. You will accumulate a Timeline full of happy memories, and when you scroll through, you remember why you fell so hard in the first place.

You’ll create a secret Facebook event to set everything up. Friends with telephoto lenses stationed halfway across the park, a serendipitous string quartet. You know this moment isn’t just for you two. It’s a public expression that you’ll do anything to make them happy. You get down on one knee and the photos are being uploaded before they can even stop crying to say “yes.” You hold hands as you change your relationship status to “Engaged.”

You will see ads for wedding photographers, for caterers, for florists. You will seek nothing because the intent you’ve revealed and the money in your pocket are enough to make marketers salivate with the thrill of the chase. You will send a “Save The Date” via Facebook but not the invitations because this is special. You won’t change your relationship status to “married” at the altar because that’s tacky, but will do it as soon as you two are alone together. A modern consummation.

You will be anxious because people will share photos from the wedding with the friends you just weren’t close enough with to invite. They will be offended but comment “wow, looks like so much fun” and you will feel awful, but you’ll all get over it.

Soon it will be you posting that you’re expecting. The birth will see you struggle to reconcile experiencing the moment first-hand and documenting it for friends. No matter what anyone tells you, you’ll swear everything your child does is monumental and worth sharing. Your friends will privately loathe this but publicly humor you with “aww cute” and “they’re growing up so fast.”

Then one day your kid will join Facebook and you’ll have to choose if you’re their “friend” or not. You’ll be terrified they’re on there sharing sexed-up selfies and fodder for identity theft. You’ll demand to see their profile and realize they’re just talking about how much homework sucks. It will take you a while to realize that the scandalous stuff now goes down in other apps, not Facebook.

You’ll embarrass your kid by commenting on their posts. When some snot-nosed brat bullies your kid in their statuses, you’ll calmly message their parents telling them to teach their children better netiquette. But you’ll also seek revenge by reporting the little jerk to Facebook, hoping it’ll shut down their account and assassinate their digital existence.

And when you grow old, your family will ask their friends to keep you in their prayers. But when you pass, you won’t disappear. Your profile will become a memorial page, a shrine to the moments of your life that you converted from atoms to bits. And once again, you will have a Facebook presence without a physical one.

San Francisco-based Munchery, the startup that offers prepared gourmet meals on demand, is in the process of raising a new $20 million funding round, multiple sources familiar with the deal have revealed to TechCrunch. The new round adds to its existing $4 million Series A, and $700,000 in seed funding.

The startup currently counts Sherpa Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthos Capital, e.ventures and individual investors including Matt Mullenweg, Randi Zuckerberg and Eric Ries as backers. Founded in 2010 by Tri Tran and Conrad Chu, the point of Munchery was to make it possible for busy professionals to have a convenient meal option that wasn’t just your garden-variety fast food or greasy takeout.

Munchery plays on current trends in diet and nutrition, providing meal selection based on categories including “dairy-free,” “vegan,” “low carb” and more. All meals are made from scratch and will be delivered same-day within the SF Bay area upon ordering. You just choose the dish and the delivery window (in one hour increments), enter delivery and payment info, and your food will be prepared and ready by the end of the day.

The value proposition isn’t just fresh food that’s relatively healthy: Munchery has a buy-one, give-one system through which it provides another meal for those in need for each one ordered, plus it uses eco-friendly packaging and uses professional local chefs for meal preparation. That kind of attention to detail can’t come cheap, which probably partly explains the need for more cash coming off its A round, which was announced in November 2012 but only officially closed in September of last year. Last fall when that round closed, Munchery was claiming a 20 percent month-over-month growth rate in its business.

Then in October, Munchery redesigned its web-based menus, rebuilt its mobile apps and introduced wine, beer and cider ordering. It also hired Bridget Batson, a three-star chef, as a step in building out its roster of in-house culinary talent. Those kind of product and organizational moves don’t come cheap, so it isn’t surprising to hear that the company is looking around for fresh funding.

As with any offline service business, expansion for Munchery is going to be expensive. Given what it managed to accomplish with its existing $5 million or so, however, we could see growth accelerate rapidly once it nails down this funding, complete with Munchery making its way out of its Bay Area crib.

Social advertising company Unified just launched the new version of its “social operating platform” today, and it sounds like the biggest change is the addition of business intelligence — basically, more customizable, big-picture data to help advertisers see how they’re doing.

The company already offers ad-buying tools, as well as a system of record for monitoring different ad-buying systems. (It also bought social ad startup PageLever last year.) With the new version, Vice President of Marketing Dave Donohue said Unified is the “only social marketing platform with fully integrated BI.”

To be honest, I wasn’t totally clear at first about how this is different from the data that Unified was already providing its customers, but co-founder and Chief Product Officer Jason Beckerman told me this is much more about tracking general trends and benchmarks, not just a few social metrics around an individual campaign. He added that a lot of this data is currently trapped in Excel, while Unified can bring it together and make it accessible in real-time.

For a more concrete example, Donohue said a large auto manufacturer could use Unified’s BI tools to bring up different visualizations about how their awareness campaigns are performing, broken down by car model and region.

Other features in the new version include one-click sign-in to all of Unified’s applications and global currency support.

The company, by the way, says it works with more than 500 customers, including Lenovo, Edelman, and PBS. One of the keys to its approach, Donohue said, is the way that it can bring together different agencies and teams, as well as organic content and paid advertising.

“If you have organic content that performs well, you basically have a 24-hour window in order to amplify that content [with advertising],” he said. “Absent [Unified’s] social system of record there’s no way to do it within a day.”

Holy shit did venture capitalists spend a lot of money in January.

Investments in new companies shot to $5.8 billion by the end of the month up from $3.5 billion over the same period last year, according to data from CrunchBase.

It’s only one month, not a full quarter, but it seems like venture investors are setting the stage for a very, very active year.

Software investments led all categories with just over $1 billion committed to deals, up from $597.3 billion last year. But hardware companies, e-commerce startups, mobile technologies, financial services offerings, and health-related technologies all attracted significantly more cash, CrunchBase data showed.

It’s also worth mentioning that while the total amounts that investors committed went up in most categories, the number of investments made by venture capitalists actually declined in six of the top 10 investment sectors by capital committed compared to last year’s figures. This lends credence to the notion that prices for companies continue to climb.

The pace of investors’ commitments has caused some industry watchers to wonder whether the market is heading for some sort of reckoning.

“As soon as people start pouring money into a sector, that’s when we say we better slow down,” said one investor at a multi-billion-dollar venture capital fund. Meanwhile, limited partners are especially concerned about later-stage valuations, which seem… frothy.

“The later stage stuff is getting scary on the multiples,” said one investor at a large fund of funds. The last time venture investors put this kind of money to work in deals was in 2010, when VC-backed companies raised over $5.9 billion in deals.

Investments from VCs keep rising even as the amount of money venture investors raise from limited partners continues to slide. Data from Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association pegs the amount of capital that venture firms have raised at $16.7 billion in 2013, down from $19.6 billion in 2012.

Meanwhile, investments into startups climbed in 2013 to $29.4 billion, up from $27.3 billion in 2012 and nearly level with the $29.7 billion committed in 2011, according to the NVCA.

Still investors are loath to define the market as a “bubble” despite the return of hedge funds and rising valuations.

A lot of this can be attributed to a movement from earlier stage to later stage deals. As the chart below shows, a lot of the money from the biggest spenders in January went to companies that had raised at least two or three rounds of financing.

Some of these later-stage fundings — like the $101 million round raised by virtualization technology developer Nutanix, the $250 million Dropbox raised, or the $112 million for One Kings Lane – are all later-stage deals. The $30 million second tranche of a Series A for healthcare startup Oscar, or the $122.5 million for shaving company Harry’s, seem a little less… typical.

As other industry professionals have noted, there’s a bifurcation in Series A financing that’s happening, as well. Even the amount of money that early-stage investors are spending for angel, seed, and Series A round deals is increasing, according to data from CrunchBase.

These numbers may just be an anomaly, but if investors keep up the pace, 2014 could signal a new beginning for an industry that had been trying to find its footing – or it could be another sign that VCs are walking closer to the edge.

Buzzy mobile video app Flipagram is raising $50 to $60 million in funding at a $300 million valuation. We’re hearing from a source that Sequoia is in the round.

The WSJ reported recently that Flipagram, which creates short video sets from photos set to music, was raising cash at a $300 million valuation. Here’s an example of a Flipagram.

Flipagram is part of Cheerful, a company founded by Farhad Mohit. He sold Shopzilla in 2005 for $569 million and went on to start DotSpots and Gri.pe (both of which are TechCrunch Disrupt companies). DotSpots hit the deadpool, but Mohit went on to create Cheerful Inc, bringing Gripe and mobile app Chee.rs together under one roof. Flipagram is the latest app from the studio.

The WSJ reported that as of December, the free app — which has been likened to RockYou for mobile — was reaching more than 10 million users per month. This is what the final product looks like, in its most basic form, it’s a slideshow culled from your phone photos and set to music.

Sequoia has been leading a number of deals on fast-growing consumer mobile startups, including QuizUp and Whisper. Roelof Botha was on both of these deals for Sequoia but it’s unclear if he’s the lead on Flipagram.

We’ve contacted Flipagram for comment.

Zynga broke a lot of hearts when it announced it would be shutting down YoVille, a virtual world online game that’s been running since 2008. The game’s players have been building their simulated communities for many years now, but they only have until March to say goodbye. Unless, that is, YoVille’s original creator and his new game studio have their way.

Big Viking Games, which is headquartered in Toronto and counts Albert Lai as its other co-founder, is looking to acquire the YoVille property from Zynga to help it avoid an early grave. That’s something the community definitely seems to support. Right after the announcement, a petition popped up from YoVillians threatening to boycott all Zynga titles if the closure went through (the Facebook group currently has over 15,000 members) and there have been some surprisingly emotional responses to the decision posted not only on Facebook, but to YouTube as well.

There’s a good reason why Zynga was looking to shut down the property, however: It has only around 500,000 active users per month at this point, which is off tremendously from its roughly 20 million actives during its peak popularity. Zynga said that it made the decision based on a need to redirect time and energy to new games, rather than to maintaining some of its older ones.

Still, Big Viking sees a lot of value left in the property. Lai explained to me in an interview that the company is in advanced talks with Zynga to take over the game.

“YoVille’s a massive virtual world not unlike Second Life (but not “adult” in any way) that at its peak was one of Zynga’s top-3 money-makers, and far, far bigger than Second Life ever was in user base,” he said. “Mark Pincus is involved in getting it back to us at Big Viking.”

Pincus of course is a Zynga co-founder, and was the company’s CEO from its inception until July 2013, when Microsoft exec Don Mattrick took over the role. Pincus remains at Zynga as Chairman of its Board of Directors, however, and as Chief Product Officer of the gaming company. His support isn’t the only sign that Zynga prefers this outcome: Lai says the company has been “amazingly good” throughout the purchase discussion process.

“We’re in dialog with them right now and ironing out technical and legal issues,” he said about the state of negotiations. “We are hoping it will happen soon, but it’s hard to put a number on it. The game serves a huge community of players that rely on it daily, from elderly players that are homebound and find it an outlet to socialize and ‘walk around,’ kids finding an outlet and support group. Also Zynga is at a scale that makes it hard for them to give it the level of focus and TLC I think we are able to.”

Lai says that Big Viking thinks its telling that there were once tens of millions of users on YoVille. That reflects the fact that it fills a need, he said, one specifically aimed at “casual social community” rather than “hack and slash” or other types of game mechanics currently in vogue. He won’t talk about what kind of price might be in discussion, but notes that Big Viking has been “quietly building a small war chest over the past two years” for exactly this type of scenario.

For its part, Zynga isn’t commenting on any potential YoVille deal at this time, but if it does go through it’ll mark the first time the casual gaming giant has sold back one of its acquisitions. That could benefit all parties, too, since while the game’s audience has shrunk, it remains numerous and dedicated.

Microsoft crowned a new leader today, with Satya Nadella taking over the reins from exiting CEO Steve Ballmer. Bill Gates will spend a portion of his time at the company assisting with product choices.

While Nadella was essentially the unanimous choice of those outside the company — your humble servant included — his clippings have become too nice. Let’s take a moment instead to focus on what could go wrong for the new CEO.

To be plain, Nadella’s new role is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, jobs in technology. Microsoft is still pulling its re-org together at the same time it is changing its business model. This puts Nadella in the helm partway through two key and coinciding changes to the company.

The following list is a sample of the issues and challenges that Nadella may face during his tenure as CEO of Microsoft:

Windows Phone growth stalls, failing to reach the 10 percent mark in the next two years

Windows Phone’s excellent 2013 was capped by a disappointing fourth quarter sales figure of Lumia Windows Phone handsets. If that presages a broad slowdown of Windows Phone sales, Microsoft’s mobile momentum could stall, pushing that magical 10 percent market share figure further and further out into the future.

That would harm developer interest in Windows Phone, and by extension, the larger Windows ecosystem, thus harming the still nascent Windows Store. That’s not to diminish the fact that Windows Phone itself needs all the developer attention it can muster. Falling growth is anathema to such dotage.

The PC market could face materially worse returns than expected

The global PC market is expected to contract a few points this year, and then bottom out in 2015. That might not happen. If the PC market sees continued weakness akin to what happened in 2013, PC unit volume could decline until key partner OEMs bow out.

And PC volume has been the savior of the Windows 8.x platform as it has slowly arranged its ducks in a row. Without that key influx of new devices, Windows 8.x’s store is all gussied up with no one to dance with.

Worse-than-expected PC sales would also harm OEM revenues for Microsoft, both from consumers and enterprises. This brings us to:

Enterprises refuse to give up Windows XP

A huge chunk of the PC market remains on Windows XP. Nearly 30 percent, to be precise. For an operating system that Microsoft wants to go dark in April, that’s downright depressing.

As Windows XP ages, it holds off future PC purchases and makes companies that use it less secure. Microsoft would prefer more secure customers running shiny new Windows 7 or 8 boxes. There has been a presumption that XP users would make the switch. That doesn’t appear to be the case. That’s Nadella’s new problem.

Windows 8.x fails to garner significant tablet market share, despite updates

Surface had a solid fourth quarter in 2013, taking in $893 million on revenue. However, that was during a quarter in which Microsoft spent heavily on advertising for the two new devices it had just launched.

I don’t think that anyone expects Microsoft to beat that number in the current quarter. A better question is how well the larger set of tablet devices running Windows 8.x sell. Microsoft is preparing an update to Windows 8.x that is mostly focused on improving the Mouse And Keyboard experience, not its touch brother.

So the Windows 8.x we have for mobile today is likely the Windows 8.x for mobile we are going to have for some time. Whether consumers are willing to buy those devices has thus far been a mixed bag. Nadella needs to find a way to increase tablet sales, a device class that I suspect uses Windows Store apps on a larger per-unit scale than other form factors.

Surface Continues To Lose Money

Despite more than doubling its revenue in the period, Surface lost tens of million of dollars in the past quarter.

Microsoft has been strident in the past in stating that it intends to have strong margins on the Surface line of products. But the mere cost of Surface revenue was more than the revenue itself, meaning that the larger Surface loss for the period was much larger than you might think.

Spending heavily to support your new business model is a good plan. But at some point Surface will need to flip to the black. It’s up to Nadella to ensure that the Surface project can finally be taken off financial life support and walk under its own steam.

Office 365 revenues fail to match declining traditional Office revenues

Office 365 has seen very strong growth in its early stages. Microsoft reported, for example, that Office 365 Home Premium has collected 3.5 million subscribers during its most recent earnings call. A fine figure, but one that only points to a third of a billion dollars or so in revenue.

Microsoft also sells Office 365 to businesses large and small, governments, and educational customers. What isn’t clear — and may not come to pass — is whether there is enough market space for Microsoft to replace its traditional Office revenues completely, and then grow the sum. So far, Microsoft has shown good momentum, but Nadella could find himself with a substitute product that can’t generate as much cash as its predecessor.

Azure could slip against Amazon’s AWS with Nadella’s leadership tied up elsewhere

Windows Azure, Microsoft’s IaaS and PaaS cloud computing could services slip given that Nadella’s attention will be now more broadly distributed. Nadella is synonymous with the cloud for a reason.

If Microsoft cedes ground to Amazon, or more precisely fails to grow its share of this market, it could harm its ability to promote its own software products, not to mention see a key new revenue source stagnate.

Another economic slowdown could harm business buying cycles that have been key for Microsoft’s growth

The economy remains fragile. That is a material risk for Nadella. For example, it was corporate spend that kept Microsoft’s OEM revenues from falling heavily in its most recent quarter. As TechCrunch reported:

Critically, Windows OEM revenue for the period only declined 3 percent, a figure that was cushioned by 12 percent more OEM revenue to commercial customers. So, large companies offset weak consumer demand, mostly.

This is a more general risk, but a portion of Microsoft’s recovery thus far is due to macroeconomic conditions outside of its control. That flips and Nadella has a new problem on his hands.

Poor integration of Nokia’s tens of thousands of workers

The Nokia deal is about to bring a huge chunk of new staff into Microsoft’s business roughly at the same time that it is picking up a new leader. That could go poorly. Nadella will have to welcome droves of people into a culture that he will be only freshly in charge of.

And, given that Stephen Elop was tipped as a leading CEO candidate, some could be unhappy that their guy did not win.

Nokia’s hardware division drags on Microsoft’s margins and net income

Nokia, when whole, was not a particularly profitable company. The piece that Microsoft bought isn’t much better. I’ve done most of the leg work already on what impact Nokia could have on Microsoft’s earnings, and it looked slight.

But, in the harsh afterglow of Google’s Motorola purchase and sale, you have to wonder what might happen.

Executive exits

And finally, it has been an assumption that Nadella will have full avail of Microsoft’s cadre of executive vice presidents. That may not be the case.

Now that the dust has cleared on the CEO question, those who hoped for the role and did not get it could exit. Also, while Nadella is generally considered to be well-liked internally, he can hardly be universally popular. If key talent departs, he could find himself lacking down-ticket leadership in key areas.

–

Much of the above is completely theoretical. But so is the future. Nadella is a strong CEO pick, but his job will be industrial strength. Let’s see what happens.

Sony is apparently looking to shed the dead weight that is its PC business. According to Reuters, relaying a report by Nikkei, Sony is in talks to sell its personal computer business to investment fund Japan Industrial Partners for up to 50 billion yen ($490 million).

A new company would be formed to sell the computers, with Sony retaining a small stake in venture, the report states.

Just last week, another report surfaced stating that Sony was talking to Lenovo over a joint venture. Sony flat-out denied this report. Still, when there’s smoke, there’s often fire. And Sony’s VAIO brand is burning a hole in Sony’s ledger.

This move shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sony’s PC division has long been a weak link in Sony’s chain. Besides, when Kazuo Hirai took over Sony in 2012, he didn’t list personal computers as one of Sony’s cornerstones. Instead, Kaz pointed to digital imaging, gaming, and mobile on which rebuild Sony, a strategy clearly present as of late.

Sony has released innovative and, frankly, killer products in the three aforementioned categories. Still, despite making amazing products, Sony is trailing others in those spaces. By ridding itself of a forgotten appendage, perhaps Sony can better compete with the likes of Samsung and Apple.

FarFaria, which has built a children’s subscription book service for the iPad, is announcing that it has raised $3.25 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Inventus Capital Partners, with Inventus’ Manu Rekhi joining the board of directors. The firm, which recently raised a $106 million second fund, touts its ability to connect Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with “India’s natural advantages,” but in this case FarFaria CEO Ajay Godhwani told me that he plans to stay focused on the U.S. market for now. (In the FarFaria funding release, Rekhi also said digital subscription services are a “key theme” for the firm.)

Godhwani argued that offering a curated library of books through a subscription model is ideal for children’s books, because it means bookworms can read title after title without having to pay for more books, and parents don’t have to worry whether the content is appropriate. (Other children’s book subscription services include MeeGenius and Reading Rainbow.)

He also said FarFaria adds five new books every week, with 600 books in the library already — 20 percent is licensed from traditional publishers, while the rest comes from independent creators. The content that’s most-liked by readers is also “the most heavily rewarded,” Godhwani said.

Other features include a “Read To Me” feature (so parents don’t have to be there to read to there kids, though they can if they want to) and a map-like menu for finding books.

“The layout, the design, the colors — it’s less Silicon Valley, more like what Disney or Hollywood do,” Rekhi said. Noting that Godhwani used to work with Disney Interactive, Rekhi added, “It’s a good marriage between his experiences.”

Next, Godhwani said he wants to continue growing the library and add more devices.

FarFaria offers one story per day for free — beyond that, a subscription costs $3.99 per month. You can download the app here.

Y Combinator-backed Taplytics is launching its A/B testing platform for iOS applications today, which allows app makers the ability to test different experiences and quickly push out minor fixes, like visual bugs or typos, without having to wait on the App Store’s slower release cycle.

The company was founded around nine months ago by Cobi Druxerman, Aaron Glazer, and brothers Andrew Norris and Jonathan Norris. The team, who has known each other since high school, came up with the idea for Taplytics based on their own experiences building apps together over the last couple of years. For example, before Dropbox rolled out its own automatic photo uploader, members of the team built a handy app called “Cloud Photos,” which let you easily snap and save your photos to the cloud.

“We’ve been building mobile apps for a while and kept running into different problems – whether that’s the need to A/B test, or the need to get updates for apps out a lot quicker, or managing the process between dev and design,” explains Taplytics co-founder Druxerman. He says they ended up building interfaces for their own apps to help manage these concerns, and later those ideas grew into what has today become Taplytics.

The product itself is designed to be very simple and straightforward to use. Developers download the SDK, then it’s just a line of code to get started. After setup is complete, anyone tasked with tracking engagements and conversions can manage the A/B testing campaigns from a web interface.

To use Taplytics, users pair an app on a development device to a web dashboard where they can then tap on any part of the app to select it for changes. From there, they can create variations, turn them on or off, and run experiments. These could include previews of experiments you want to trial before pushing out updates to the App Store, as well as making immediate changes to live apps without having to first re-code and redeploy them.

Nor do you have to pre-plan for your A/B testing – you can decide what you want to test for after the app is already live.

“Everything is managed in our web interface,” explains Druxerman. “That really allows you to push for every aspect of your A/B test, whether that’s changing of the elements, the changing of your flows, or the setting up of your goals,” he says. Being able to change which views buttons display when pushed is something no one else is currently doing, the company notes.

There are a number of A/B testing services on the market today. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have all built their own internal systems, and there are a bevy of startups too, including Arise, Pathmap, Vesel, and Leanplum, for example. There’s even a competing company, Apptimize, which recently raised $2.1 million and which also came out of Y Combinator.

Asked what makes Taplytics unique, Druxerman says they have a very specific focus on simplicity and ease-of-use. “The whole concept of the one-line code integration and not needing to code any other part of the experiment is what sets us apart,” he says. “Some other platforms may go a bit deeper in other areas, but we feel that, if it’s not extremely simple to use, people just aren’t going to get the full power of the platform.”

The platform itself is $20/month for 10,000 monthly active users and goes up to $150/month for unlimited users. A free tier is available for apps with up to 5,000 monthly actives. The Palo Alto-based company currently has 250 customers, including 500px, Frank and Oak and Pivotal Labs.

Today, however, is the “official” launch for the service, which is available now to any interested iOS developers. Later this year, an Android version will also be introduced.

Barack Obama’s presidency was supposed to usher in a new wave of data transparency. And, with the exception of the NSA, the administration has pioneered groundbreaking open government initiatives, from maps of stimulus spending to the vaults of consumer energy use. But, as the Senate pushes to make federal spending transparent to the public, forces inside the White House are silently defang-ing the most powerful provisions without any explanation.

“The Obama administration talks a lot about transparency, but these comments reflect a clear attempt to gut the DATA Act,” Senator Mark Warner told FedScoop. “DATA reflects years of bipartisan, bicameral work, and to propose substantial, unproductive changes this late in the game is unacceptable.”

The DATA Act, which had overwhelming approval in the House of Representatives, would essentially allow citizens to monitor federal spending. Right now, groups such as transparency advocate The Sunlight Foundation, argue that federal spending is nearly impossible to track.

Remember when taxpayers footed the $823,000 bill for a government agency to party it up in Las Vegas? The DATA Act, would, theoretically, make this type of accounting available in a format that could be monitored and analyzed by experts.

The powerful Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has made unusual efforts to centralize authority in making spending transparency. A proposal to gut the most important provisions of the DATA Act was leaked to the Data Transparency Coalition.

The leaked document reveals OMB wants to strip rules requiring standardized data from all agencies and would significantly delay the implementation.

“The stance taken by OMB in the leaked document does not reflect the administration’s stated values, but it does reflect OMB’s shoddy history of commitment to quality spending data.” writes the Sunlight Foundation.

I work with the White House on a lot of open government stories, so usually I can just email a few folks and get an explanation. On this, I’ve gotten nothing but a cold shoulder and boilerplate responses.

“The Administration believes data transparency is a critical element to good government, and we share the goal of advancing transparency and accountability of Federal spending. We will continue to work with Congress and other stakeholders to identify the most effective & efficient use of taxpayer dollars to accomplish this goal,” was the answer I got via email.

I followed up with my sources, who are usually quite forthcoming about open data. Nothing.

The thing is, the DATA Act has the support of transparency advocates who previously worked in the White House. “It’s an act of law that makes people do things,” says former US Inspector General Earl Devaney, who was tasked by Obama to oversee Data.gov. I interviewed him a few years ago when the DATA ACt was being debated. The benefits of transparency, he continues, “can be codified best by a piece of legislation like the DATA Act.”

Someone within the ranks of the White House, most likely at a senior level, is torpedoing a bill and no one seems to know why. If there was a legitimate reason, someone could just walk us through the arguments and we could have the debate out in the open.

We will continue to investigate and hope the White House is more forthcoming with the American people.

[Image Credit: Flickr user Daniela Vladimirova]

We have all heard of the story of Airbnb. They’re a successful company that made it through their infancy by “bootstrapping by credit card.” They ran out of money early on and rose to the occasion by brute force and now they’re a billion dollar company. That sounds great, in theory. In practice it sucks. Here’s my tale of woe. It’s a cautionary tale and it’s not quite a tale of triumph but if you’re going through what I’m going through, I think it will be valuable to know that almost everyone hits bottom and all we can do is keep fighting.

I made a system for hiring the greatest designers in the world. I had designer buy in and I was familiar with the space. I began fleshing out the product and then moved ahead with the business. Until officially launching in June 2013, I lived in the cloakroom of our first tiny office for 7 months with no kitchen and no shower. I slept on a tiny mattress while building 1000designers. I was chasing designers, developers and customers. Right across the street was a badminton hall and I remember bribing my way in to be able to use their showers, confidently claiming I was overhauling my bathroom. After three months they sort of understood that I didn’t have a bathroom and I was able to use their facilities for free which to me was a huge win as it meant not having to abuse my entire fleet of credit cards I used to fund my newborn company.

I’m not one of those who wants to own 100% of my company out of greed or pride. I simply think that if you have the ability to do it yourself, and you believe in your idea why not do it without rushing for funding? I wanted to really try and prove that my idea worked and then I could raise money. Also the embarrassment of failing is considerably milder. However, the problem is that when you’re doing it yourself without outside funding your most valuable asset is time.

And time is expensive.

My biggest mistake when founding 1000designers was renting an office. I knew that it was a stupid idea, and it is a stupid idea according to any book – especially books on how to bootstrap. But I did it anyway simply to be able to look good in the eyes of our clients. The office was newly renovated, quite large (could fit well over 20 people) and looked very exclusive. The downside was that there was no shower or kitchen which was bad news for me as my idea was to live there as well. Also, it was very expensive, rent alone costing me $2,500 per month. Then I had to hire developers, lawyers, and accountants and then I had to pay off old credit card bills and before I knew it I was burning $10,000 a month.

Luckily, and to my big relief, when we’d finally launched our product, getting customers proved to be rather easy once we started chasing them. Restaurants, physical boutiques and local businesses were desperate to get a better website than their competition and after a few weeks of cold calling and emailing, customers from all over our hometown were starting to line up, literally begging us for our services. I finally thought the nightmare and stress from all the credit card bills were finally over. But of course I was wrong.

The problem was that our designers just so happened to be some of the most sought after designers in the world. And I was soon to learn, they were no strangers to turning down offers left and right from what in our industry is called “low quality clients.” Basically they kept turning down the exact type of clients I had spent precious weeks approaching and acquiring simply because they were easy sells. Out of 20 sure-things only five projects were accepted and completed via our platform – and that was probably because we had to beg our designers to help us for the simple reason that we had already collected (and, of course, spent) our commission.

What soon hit me was that our designers were absolutely more than willing to carve out real quality time for projects in which they knew they could excel. But now all of a sudden we had the problem of supplying them with “the right kind of client”, which meant we were going to have to dig seriously deep, pinpoint, and successfully approach clients who would help them build their own brands as designers.

Two months post launch and we had only completed seven projects via our platform, and we were now seriously running out of time with a stack of overdue bills growing. We had to switch our sales strategy. We would go from easy on-the-spot-sells to extremely long sales-cycle clients if we wanted to maintain our initial concept of 1000designers and not lower our prices. Somehow we were going to have to miraculously transform ourselves from easy-going fun-loving startup-guys selling a-brand-in-a-box to Granny’s Flower Shop into hardened sales professionals pursuing high-profile companies.

And selling a brand-in-a-box to an enterprise client just isn’t going to happen. There’s a reason a logo can cost as much as $100,000, and that is because of the immense amount of overhead that goes hand in hand with swapping your old logotype for a new. It requires a team of several people just to document the process and make sure that the brand-assets will be managed the right way for the foreseeable future. And I can’t really tell you how we pulled it of, because it will sound too easy. “Your dreams are on the other side of your fears,” someone once said. We were fine because I was really scared.

I started cold calling major companies. Calling a company in another country, or even on another continent and not even being a native english speaker freaked the hell out of me. But this was exactly what I did. I picked up the phone and I called some mid-enterprise company based in the U.S. I reached their customer service line and within 30 seconds I hung up the phone out of sheer embarrassment. The woman on the other line kept telling me “Excuse me, sir? What was that?”

The second, third, and fourth call didn’t do my self-esteem any good either. The sixth or sixtieth (?) call (I was so pumped up I can’t even remember) was better, and I managed to get to speak with a managing director, asking if I could send a proposal on how we thought their website should look. And I contacted one of our designers via our platform and asked him to make them a proposal that I could send to the client.

It worked. But they wouldn’t pay us what we asked.

And so it went on for another month and I called and emailed over 3,000 businesses, startups, enterprises, improving each time I picked up the phone or spoke to a potential client over Skype, learning what I should and shouldn’t say, what made them tick, and what ticked them off. And so eventually we had a well-funded, very high-profile Silicon Valley startup on the line asking us for a specific service ASAP. Thanks to two months of endless chasing and making complete fools out of ourselves, we finally had our very first large customer and they were even so pleased with the results that they printed out and hung the work one of our designers had produced in their office.

The following months were better thanks to a boost of confidence and morale gained from the success from our first large and delivered project. This even enabled us to set up something that could resemble a real advertising budget and within a few weeks we had managed to secure a 6-month contract with another even larger client.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, with enough grit, your breakthrough will come. It’s not all rainbows and puppies over here yet, but that’s fine. We powered through. I think anyone with that much on the line can pull it off, too.

Why you shouldn’t fund your business by credit card

• You have no idea of what lies in store for your product or business strategy. You may have to make drastic and time consuming changes very early on and when bootstrapping by credit card, time is so valuable you’d consider giving your right arm for more of it.
• Absolutely no time for recreation when bootstrapping by credit card. Zero. And if you “find time”, you’ll be sure to hear from your friends how distant you are. You’ll constantly be gathering energy to unleash towards your customers and product because every day is a grand prix.
• Expect your family to be even more worried than you are since they don’t know all the details of what’s going on and how much progress you’re making all they’ll see are the overdue bills.
• Expect immense and terrifying stress – It’s not fun going to bed knowing the debt enforcement agency could come knocking on your door in the morning taking your personal belongings.
• Expect yourself to age immensely
• Expect your lows to be lower than ever
• You’ll be truly desperate for customers, and they’ll notice, so your conversion rate will be considerably lower
• It requires super human strength to shift your focus towards your products.
• Credit cards are not really enough to support the development as most of the money is channeled to paying off debt.

Why you should (but please don’t)

• You’ll have money to spend on building and supporting a small team as well as some budget for advertising
• Crash course in how to close a deal. (close, or you’re screwed)
• Work your ass off out of fear.
• Expect your highs to be higher than ever. I’ve cried like a baby over won business

Living on a 100 percent maxed out credit card on a monthly basis for almost one year is truly an exhilarating, terrifying, and exhausting experience but I’d do it again in a jiffy. I wouldn’t recommend it to the faint hearted. I’m still not sure I’m going to make it, but dammit I tried.

This is a guest post by Philip Lindblom, the founder and CEO of the marketplace 1000designers that is gathering the 1000 greatest product and graphic designers in the world to build the world’s most high quality marketplace for product and graphic design.

If you’re not familiar with Shark Tank, it’s a show on ABC that has a set of entrepreneurs presenting their products or companies before a panel of investors. They’re there to secure funds for expansion or whatever purpose from a group that includes billionaire Mark Cuban, fashion giant Daymond John, Internet mogul Robert Herjavec and a variety of other participants.

The show is a US version of the ‘Dragons’ Den series that originated in Japan, and the format remains relatively similar. The hopeful entrepreneurs come on, pitch their product or service and argue it out with the sharks, who decide one-by-one whether to invest in the product or not.

A few months ago, Garrett Gee, founder of Scan, got a call to come on Shark Tank and pitch his startup to the founders. Gee was looking for $1M for a 5% stake in the company and — long story short — the sharks didn’t see the vision in the company. That turned out ok, because Scan ended up announcing a $7M round from Entree and existing investors just a day before the episode aired on TV.

But I spoke to Gee a bit about his experiences on Shark Tank, which I found really interesting. The hours of shooting time are boiled down to a 15-minute segment and apparently they really drag you through all of the permutations when you’re on deck.

One of the stipulations that you’re given when you go on the show is that you’re not allowed to show a URL on screen during filming. Gee and his team had to design a special version of their logo that omitted the ‘.me’ from ‘Scan.me’ just to go on. As a part of his presentation, which you can see below, there was a large QR code presentation board that was used as a demo of what the company is doing with them.

If you’re reading TechCrunch, you’re probably already seeing the implications of banning URLs but allowing a full-on configurable QR code on screen are.

“They ban web addresses from all of the materials,” Gee told me, “Yet they were totally cool with me having a QR code, a forever update-able URL.”

When Scan created the QR code for use on the show, it originally pointed to a dummy URL that went nowhere, and monitored it on their dashboard just to make sure the demos would work. In fact, all of Gee’s devices were in airplane mode during the filming, so they wouldn’t have gone anywhere in the first place.

But, months later just before the episode aired, Gee got a sudden inspiration. Scan had just launched a new feature which allowed companies to point users to their Instagram accounts for easy subscriptions. So he tweaked the code’s destination to point to his Instagram feed and smacked the update button. Then he promptly forgot about it.

“My intention wasn’t to ‘hack’ their system or break their rules,” Gee says, “but…to my surprise, as well as everyone else’s, people actually scanned it.”

The next morning, Gee found over 3,100 scans waiting for him in the dashboard, and a host of new Instagram subscribers as well. Users began commenting on his photos, saying that they’d downloaded the app (despite no download links being shown) during the episode and scanned the code — jumping to his Instagram feed.

Over the next few days, Gee saw bursts as people watched it on DVRs, subscriptions or ABC.com.

“I accidentally used our newest product in a very successful way,” Gee says.

There were a few other benefits from the airing. Scan’s app popped back to number one paid app in their category. Every subsequent re-run also nets a burst of downloads and reviews. And, Gee says, it was a great experience overall — even if it was a significantly different one than actually getting their investment was.