Category: Tech news

Google’s Gmail application for Android is being updated today with a new design which will bring Google’s now preferred “card style” user interface to the Conversation View within the app. This layout, which Google popularized through its Google Now search application, has become the new go-to design paradigm at Google, arriving across other Google products and services, including Google Drive, the new Google Wallet apps, Maps, Google+ and elsewhere.

It mimics the idea of using index cards, and fits somewhere between minimalism and skeuomorphism, as Fast Company’s recent deep dive into Google’s design process explained.

In Gmail, cards will be used to better highlight multi-person, threaded messages in the app’s “Conversation view,” allowing for a “new, cleaner design,” states the company in a post on Google+ this afternoon.

In addition, the app will include other design tweaks, like checkmarks for multiple message selection which makes it easier to see which emails you’re about to move, delete or archive en masse. And the app will alert you in your inbox if account sync is turned off for some reason, to help keep you from missing messages.

Though some users are already seeing an app update in Google Play, not everyone is seeing the updated design just yet. The rollout is a staged one, so your mileage may vary, as they say.

News of the updated Gmail app comes on the heels of some serious issues which affected Gmail’s delivery times for an entire day on Monday. Even now, it seems the damage to the Gmail brand continues – many people have called me today, for example, saying, “oh, I thought I’d dial you since I just don’t trust Gmail right now.” That may be why now is a time for a little good news from Gmail… well, good news if you actually like the card-style layout, that is.

Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, has acquired file-sharing service Cloudup, which launched in beta in June. The acquisition will help Automattic improve two features of WordPress.com in particular: the media library used for uploading visual content and post editing to give multiple users the ability to edit at one time.

Cloudup is an offshoot of ed-tech company LearnBoost, which was founded in 2010, meaning it includes the same team and existing investors. LearnBoost co-founder and CTO Guillermo Rauch said the classroom management service will continue to operate under Automattic, as well.

Out of the gate, the Cloudup team will focus on revamping the post editor and replacing WordPress.com’s media library with Cloudup. Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg said that the service is much more advanced, elegant, and intuitive than WordPress.com’s current media uploader. ”Not many people say their favorite [WordPress.com] feature is the media library,” he noted.

It was an understatement. Cloudup’s technology will enable multiple parties to edit and write at the same time, meaning a writer could be drafting the text while a photographer uploads images to the same post. The service also allows for sharing a file before it is done uploading, meaning that a second party can begin viewing the file before it is complete.

Mullenweg said that he sees WordPress.com’s forthcoming co-editing capabilities as different from services like Google Docs. The latter fundamentally treats documents as documents, he said, whereas a blog post or page is a much richer experience due to its video, image, and gallery features.

Mullenweg did not give an estimate on when users will see the fruits of the integration, but he said their intention is to have it up as soon as possible.

According to Rauch, the Cloudup beta is a complete product, as some of the open-source technology that powers the system has been in development for years. Still, Mullenweg said there will likely be significant work to be done in scaling the Cloudup infrastructure and integrating it with WordPress.com and with Jetpack by WordPress.com.

Cloudup, which has accumulated around 10,000 active users since June, will continue to be available independently of WordPress.com. Automattic will continue running it and adding new features, and the service will soon be open to the public.

Although it would be an easy source of revenue, Mullenweg said that there are currently no plans to monetize on the service.

“We think Cloudup is something intrinsically useful to have in the world, and Automattic’s core businesses in WordPress.com, VIP, VaultPress, and Akismet are doing more than well enough for us as a company,” he said.

Mullenweg has said before that his goal is to see WordPress.com power the majority of all sites on the Internet — they are currently at just over 20 percent market share — and that the first step toward that end is simply improving WordPress.com as a platform. Cloudup helps accomplish that. For sites like TechCrunch, which uses the platform, the ability to co-edit a post and upload photos faster would certainly be an improvement in the flow of using WordPress.

This is Automattic’s 12th acquisition after Lean Domain Search, Poster, Simperium, CodeGarage, After the Deadline, Blo.gs, PollDaddy, IntenseDebate, BuddyPress, Gravatar and Plinky.

Mullenweg said the acquisition was for both talent and technology, as he had been aware of LearnBoost’s open source ethos and had followed Rauch’s work for a number of years.

This acquisition brings Automattic’s total employee count to just over 200 people. While the majority of Cloudup employees are San Francisco based, three are international. One will be Automattic’s first Brazil-based employee, which extends the company’s reach to 29 countries.

Growing the Automattic team to the intended thousands of employees will be 95 percent hiring, Mullenweg said, with only a small percentage coming from acquisitions like this.

Today Instacart, a grocery delivery service, added an initial set of recipes to its service, helping customers purchase groups of items that combine into finished dishes. For the non-chef among us (hello, my name is Alex), this is a boon.

The news is small for the day: Instacart has curated a list of recipes that its users can access. However, the company told TechCrunch that it intends to greatly expand that list, and eventually allow its users to upload their own recipes.

Instacart is a physical grocery delivery service that is expanding its digital platform. Recipes are an interesting addition and an anti-pivot of sorts. Instacart customers want to quickly order food that can be used to feed themselves and others, and recipes make that a simpler process.

If Instacart can grow its recipe list in an inexpensive way, and effectively bake it into its search process, I can see it being a popular option. Also, I am likely willing to buy more total items – thus increasing Instacart’s revenue – if I know where they are going. When I buy only what I need for the day, I spend less per order. Instacart doesn’t like that.

This won’t be the last non-ordering function that Instacart adds to its platform. Recipes are a natural expansion of ordering foodstuffs, and this addition to the platform could improve its unit economics. That and its recent expansion into Chicago, which I spoke about with Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta. When we first spoke about it, I was skeptical. Could the company’s model work in Chicago, with its aggressive weather and huge land area?

But according to Mehta, in the first few days of Instacart’s arrival in the City Warm Forgot, it is already a larger market than Mountain View, Palo Alto, and the East Bay combined. That’s good news for Instacart, as Chicago is its first market outside of the larger San Francisco Bay Area.

Top Image Credit: normanack

Apple has just announced a series of Tech Talks for developers building apps for iOS 7. This is a relatively common occurrence as Apple likes to get evangelists out to talk to developers and help them on a more personal basis than just WWDC.

The talks are important because Apple sold out its main developer conference extremely quickly this year, leaving many developers in the lurch. Now they’ll be able to get lab and talk time with Apple engineers in order to hopefully get the most out of iOS 7.

The talks will be held in San Francisco, NYC, Tokyo, Shanghai, Berlin and London and — for the first time — are split between ‘App Developer’ days and ‘Game Developer’ days. Typically the subject matter had been interleaved in one rolling session. Now, Apple is splitting it out.

This actually makes a lot of sense because the technologies used in games and apps do differ quite a bit. A regular app developer might never have to tap into Game Center, Sprite Kit or OpenGL ES technologies, where a game developer is steeped in those frameworks.

Note that you cannot choose to attend both the app day and game day programs, you must pick one or the other to attend in each city. There will be videos of the event presentations posted shortly after the last event on December 18th, so even if developers don’t get in, they’ll be able to see the program. These events typically hold around 400 attendees per session.

You can apply if you’re over 13 today or earlier, and attendees are randomly selected from qualified applicants. So this isn’t a time-sensitive draft like the WWDC ticket fiasco, where they sold out  in around 90 seconds. Apply and you have a chance to go.

If you’re a developer looking to go, you can see the full schedule of talks for each day and apply here.

You didn’t really need a Google+ account until now. You might have one whether you wanted it or not. But YouTube’s new commenting system requires a presence on Google+. And there’s no real alternative to YouTube for video. Google+ may have mattered before in theory, but now it matters in practice.

Google+ is really a social identity data layer designed to help Google personalize all your products and improve ad targeting. The more it knows about you, the better it is at giving you a good experience and making money. Long-term, social is not an option for the search giant. It’s a necessity.

Before Google+, Google knew who you emailed and maybe Gchatted with. Depending on whether you browsed while signed in to a Google account, it would know what you searched for and mapped. If you were on Android or used its other products, it might have known a bit more. But it didn’t know or had to guess about your age, education and work history, interests, and social graph.

So Google+ launched in 2011 under the guise of a social network. That’s a convenient way for a company to get you to volunteer a ton of information about yourself. Personalize a profile with biographical info, add friends and colleagues, follow brands, and +1 and comment on your feed.

Sounds great, seven years late. Facebook and Twitter handled much of this and had already built strong network effects. You could go elsewhere for social networking, so didn’t you need a Google+ account yet and Google wasn’t getting the juicy data it wanted.

Google began requiring a Google+ account to sign up for Gmail at the start of 2012. Many would argue that Gmail is the best email provider, but there are alternatives. And if you did end up with a Google+ account (though not yet required for Gmail users), there wasn’t anywhere it was mandatory to use. Even passively, though, having a G+ account lets Google start tying usage data from across its products to your identity.

Google went a step further pushing G+ when it unified Google Talk (Gchat) with Google+ Messenger into Hangouts which requires a Google+ account. Still, there’s plenty of other messaging options like SMS, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

But if you want to watch home-made cat videos, or music videos, or viral videos, you’re going to YouTube. It dominates the space. Sorry, Vimeo and Dailymotion. And if you want to comment on a YouTube video, Google announced yesterday you’ll soon need a G+ account.

The whole YouTube (and Blogger) commenting system will shift to be powered exclusively by Google+. All comments must be tied to an account.

Helping Users…

For users, this change will likely be wonderful. First, it should banish some of the trolls spewing racism, sexism and homophobia. The anonymity of a one-off YouTube account created a safe haven for filth. People will still be able to create a pseudonymous G+ account and comment from that, but having to switch back and forth between that and their real accounts could be enough to silence some of the slurs. A more compassionate Internet, ahoy!

Relying on G+ will also give YouTube signals for ranking and sorting conversations in comments. Up top above random strangers, it can show comments from people you know, who are famous, that you’ve whitelisted, or who replied to one of your G+ posts. [Disclosure: Nundu Janakiram, a YouTube product manager on comments, is a friend and former roommate, but he’s had no influence or input on this article.]

…Help Google

But for Google+ itself, becoming the backbone of YouTube comments makes it mandatory for a much wider audience, and could breathe life into what many consider a ghost town.

It’s not a ghost town. There are some lively, in-depth conversations going on between some smart people on Google+. But for many, their feed looks more like the occasional link post from a friend and a stream of photos, stemming from the social network’s early support for high-resolution shots and its new native Snapseed filters.

There’s no denying that despite Google saying Google+ as an identity layer has 500 million “users”, the G+ stream could do with more and more engaging content. That would convince people that their profiles were worth filling out, quenching Google’s thirst for data.

Initially, the YouTube integration will drive Google+ sign-ups from a critical demographic — the youngins who spend all day on YouTube. Capturing that audience is crucial to G+’s social network avoiding a reputation of being old and boring.

With time, the integration could fill G+ with more content — something sorely lacking due to low visitation and the lack of a real write API for letting users push content there from other apps.

You’ll easily be able to syndicate comments you leave on YouTube to Google+, effectively sharing the video you were talking about, too. Those comments on YouTube or shares to G+ could inspire replies you’ll come back to check, generating more engagement. Knowing who you converse with about videos will strengthen Google’s understanding of your social graph.

The move could also bring more celebrities onto Google+. Recruiting public figures has been a fertile strategy for Twitter and Facebook. Since video uploaders get comments on their own videos ranked high, you might see more celebs uploading YouTube clips from their own accounts, and commenting on those of their famous friends to get more exposure. Normal folks might gravitate to Google+ if it means getting close to the stars they love.

We can only guess how the all-seeing, all-knowing Google will use our YouTube viewing history to target ads now that its tied to our identities. If you watch a lot of videos tagged “cycling,” perhaps it might know to show you more ads for local bike shops and events. It could also use viewing data to put you in a cohort and show you ads that worked well when blasted at other people who watch the same videos.

It’s been over two years since Google launched Google+, what it internally refers to as its “social spine.” The goal always seemed to be to weave it through all of Google’s products cautiously enough and with enough added benefits to avoid epic backlash. True traction and engagement has been slow, though. YouTube holds a huge growth opportunity, yet its users are among the prickliest in the company’s ecosystem.

But by using the power of social to sanitize YouTube comments, one of the dirtiest corners of the web, Google+ may win a place in the hearts and identities of millions.

Instagram has been updated for Apple’s iOS 7 today with a new design that puts photos front and center. The app has not been re-written or torn down for the logic of iOS 7 so much as trimmed and tucked to fit with the aesthetic.

Instagram’s previous designs had already been winnowed a bit to make them feel more in line with the Android app, so the design didn’t have to pull a full 180. Instead, borders were removed to take the images full bleed, buttons were flattened and menu bars trimmed of borders. The new profile view shows off the app’s adherence to iOS 7′s new default white background as well.

What you won’t find here, however, is a major change that takes into account iOS 7′s new layering features or its heavy use of dynamics and physics. There is certainly lip service paid to conventions like the circular profile pictures, but this isn’t a complete turnover of thinking with iOS 7 in mind. It must be said, however, that not every app needs to make design decisions that use every tool in the toolbox. Instagram is about the photos and the team says that the changes it made are designed to put your photos first, which makes sense.

To that end, they’ve also increased the display resolution of images and tweaked the grid to make images bigger.

“We led our redesign with a focus on clarity to keep the feel of Instagram clean, simple and grounded in the photos and videos you discover and share,” says a company blog post.

Nonetheless, it should make Instagram feel more at home on your iOS 7 device. Notably, Instagram’s very three-dimensional icon remains the same, and still sticks out amongst all of the other re-thought apps on my springboard.

Following the announcement of SteamOS, Valve just unveiled the long-anticipated Steam Box — sort of. Instead of releasing a Valve-branded Steam Box, the company will actually work with multiple manufacturers to release a series of Steam machines for your living room.

Yet, Valve also presented a specific prototype, a Steam machine designed by Valve. This particular machine is closer to what everyone expected. For now, only 300 copies will be produced and sent to lucky beta testers. The company doesn’t say whether those prototypes will eventually become the Steam Box, but it wouldn’t surprise anyone.

As for the Steam machines, Valve promises “an array of specifications, price, and performance.” It could be pretty similar to the Chromebook lineup. Customers will be presented with multiple performance tiers — it should make it easier to buy a traditional gaming computer. Hardware will be hackable and you will be able to install another operating system for example.

As a reminder, SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system for your living room. It is optimized for gaming, movies and music. While many games are not available on Linux, SteamOS allows you to stream your games from your Windows or Mac machines using your local network

Today’s announcement is very short and doesn’t say which OEM will actually build Steam machines. All we know is that they will ship in 2014. The Valve-branded prototype could come to beta testers earlier as the company will select beta testers on October 25th.

On Steam’s website, users can find a teaser page with three icons that represent three different announcements for the living room — SteamOS and the Steam machines were only the first two announcements. Valve hints at a new input method for the third one. On Friday, Valve should answer the last standing question — which game controller will ship with the Steam machines?

Rapidly growing mobile events application platform DoubleDutch raised $10 million in Series C funding TechCrunch learned, in an oversubscribed round led in large part by Byron Deeter of Bessemer Venture Partners, who will now join the company’s board. Previous investors from DoubleDutch’s A and B rounds, Floodgate Fund, Bullpen Capital and others also participated.

The funding comes at a time when DoubleDutch has moved to singularly focus on developing its mobile event technology, while abandoning its other products including a fairly popular mobile CRM application known as Hive. When speaking with CEO Lawrence Coburn this morning about the funding, he characterized the decision to shutter Hive as one of the toughest he’s ever had to make – especially considering that previous rounds were raised based on Hive’s promise and potential. Ultimately, however, Coburn said it was the right thing to do.

Hive, which closed this January, had 1,000 or so free customers and a small number of paying users. Meanwhile, the events product had been growing at 40 to 50 percent per quarter, including deployment, users and revenue.

“On the CRM side, we were squarely in Salesforce’s radar,” explains Coburn. “The one thing I couldn’t get my head around was how did our mobile CRM give us a defensible position against Salesforce? Really, it was a beautiful UI [user interface] that sat on top of Salesforce,” he says. “It was a presentation layer over their tech.”

The concern was that if Salesforce decided to focus on this, DoubleDutch could be dead in a year. So Hive closed down, and the business which did have both growth, revenue, and “a similarly sized market with better characteristics,” as Deeter puts it, remains.

A SOCIAL, DATA-DRIVEN EVENTS APP

The DoubleDutch Events application is sold to event organizers as a white label product with a bit of co-branding (“powered by DoubleDutch”), allowing customers to not only transition away from paper-based event guides, but also to do more with the data collected within the mobile technology platform. From a product perspective, the app’s architecture has been built from the ground-up with a focus on social and networking, which differentiates DoubleDutch from some of its competitors.

“Every event has a dedicated activity feed. We have game mechanics deeply built into the app. We have the concept of user profiles and connections – all these things you would expect to see in a social networking platform – are the foundation of our app,” says Coburn. “Every other player in the category, their inspiration was the paper event guide.”

By having an event platform built in this way, DoubleDutch’s app can take advantage of the data it has on hand to do other sorts of things, too. For example, since users have profiles and make connections using the app, DoubleDutch is able to make recommendations of people to follow. It’s also developing a business model around leads data, by transitioning exhibitors away from clunky, hardware-based badge or business card scanners to mobile.

The company’s leads package has been used at over half a dozen events so far, letting exhibitors use a scanning feature in the app that also does real-time scoring around the value of the leads using a variety of signals. This tells the booth rep immediately who they’re talking to, and whether or not they should grab a senior exec, for example. But what’s even more interesting, is that DoubleDutch is able to surface leads of those who didn’t actually come to the booth, as well. To do so, it figures out who may be good leads based on things like who you’ve traded contact info with in the app, what sessions you’ve attended and nearly a dozen other signals.

While pricing for the lead package in an app varies, revenue from this data-based upsell is a multiple from the data made by licensing the app. For instance, at a recent event with 50,000 people and 500 exhibitors, 200 exhibitors bought lead packages at $300 each. That means the customer (the organizer) made $60,000 in revenue just off the data. DoubleDutch takes a revenue share of this data, which it doesn’t disclose.

A SAAS PLATFORM, NOT A THROWAWAY APP

Leads are only the beginning of DoubleDutch’s plans, too. Coburn says that the goal is to make DoubleDutch more of a platform, where its APIs and SDKs allow developers to build other custom features. Deeter adds that there are also huge opportunities for the company to monitor and manage other event-related sales and marketing activity, and tie into communities beyond the event to keep them engaged. “In those two broad buckets, there’s a decade of product roadmap here,” he notes.

While the company isn’t revealing revenue specifics, DoubleDutch is reporting 40 percent quarter-over-quarter growth and nearly 500,000 event participants who have used its apps to date in north of 1,000 events. Its clients have included many big-name brands, including Cisco, American Express, Box, IDG, SAP, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and others. Revenue is “deep in the millions,” and growing well over 100 percent year-over-year.

The event business is a competitive space, with incumbents like QuickMobile to take on, companies like CVENT going public, acquisitions aplenty including EventBrite’s snatching up of Lanyrd, apps building networking tools around the experience (e.g. Bizzabo, Bloodhound, etc.) and several freemium offerings.

But Deeter sees huge potential in what DoubleDutch in particular has on hand. “Paper is just going to go away in that business. The transition over the next couple of years will be massive…there’s no reason to go back,” he says. “It’s a massive market that’s ripe for transition, and DoubleDutch has the opportunity to play in the leadership position right out of the gate.”

With the new funding, the plan is to continue the product development described above, expand to Asia via a Hong Kong office opening this year, transition to a SaaS-based business model, and grow the 62-person team to about 90.

Automated investment services company Wealthfront has made its name as an alternative to traditional financial advisory services for individuals, especially “Generation Y” techies just starting to pull their nest eggs together.

Today, the company is looking to expand its user base in a different direction with the launch of Wealthfront.org, a site that will provide investment advisory tools to non-profits. While Wealthfront’s core product gives free services to accounts with less than $10,000 in assets, the non-profit product bumps that up to the first $1 million in assets. Above that, Wealthfront.org will charge its standard 0.25 percent fee.

Wealthfront COO Adam Nash said in an interview this week that while Wealthfront.org is not itself a non-profit, the company is looking at this as a philanthropic endeavor. “This is not a revenue-motivated play. This is not build to be new business line for us,” he said. “We look at this as one way for us as a company to give back.”

While major non profit organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation often have their own asset managers on staff, there are hundreds of small- to medium-sized 501 (c)(3) organizations who have endowments that could benefit from being professionally managed. But because non-profits must be conservative with their capital, it’s a space that most traditional financial advisory firms don’t work to address.

At launch, Wealthfront.org has signed up several non-profits including the Wildlife Conservation Network and R.U.S.H for Literacy, among others.

The .org launch comes as Wealthfront is seeing solid growth in its core product. The company, which has raised $30.5 million in venture capital, now has $350 million in assets under management — a nice ratio for a startup with a full time staff of just 30.

There are, of course, a number of competitors in the space who are looking to become the next-generation financial advisory platform of choice, including Betterment, Personal Capital, and SigFig. But today, the launch of Wealthfront.org is a nice way for this company to show that it’s thinking of more than just its own profits as it looks to grow.

Twitter is rolling out a new system called Twitter Alerts today that lets you choose to receive special alerts from emergency accounts, government organizations and NGOs. The system is designed to expand on Twitter’s ‘Lifeline’ service which was offered to those in Japan suffering from the earthquake last year.

That service connected users to emergency twitter accounts during the earthquake, and Twitter says that it’s now expanding this kind of emergency function out to the rest of the world. Twitter says that this will help users to get “important and accurate information from credible organizations during emergencies, natural disasters or moments when other communications services aren’t accessible.”

The system is available now, and a few organizations are already participating in the U.S., Japan and Korea. But anyone anywhere can receive the alerts. Some of the US agencies include the American Red Cross, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Federal Emergency Management Agency  and the US Geological Survey.

The move is an interesting one from Twitter, and fits in with the general uses that people are already putting it to during emergencies and natural disasters. The US Department of Homeland Security has already recommended networks like Twitter and Facebook over phone lines in order to keep those clear for emergency workers. Building out the uses of Twitter as an emergency channel is as safe, publicity friendly and clear a bet as you can imagine. It’s not part of Twitter’s TV or social agenda, but it dovetails nicely with its standing as a secondary communication channel. Establishing Twitter as an indispensable communication channel and emergency alert system couldn’t hurt when it makes its pitch to shareholders. 

To subscribe to alerts, you can visit the alert page of an organization at Twitter.com/[account]/alerts/. If you want to see if an organization is enrolled, check their profile page to see the alerts badge along the left hand side. A link there will let you sign up.

YouTube currently offers more than 150,000 audio tracks on its site that video producers can use as background music for their videos. Those tracks, however, can’t be downloaded or remixed, which makes it hard to use them in creative ways. For users who want to do a bit more with their background music, however, YouTube today is expanding this library with a selection of 150 new royalty-tracks. The music in this new YouTube Audio Library can be downloaded, remixed and used for free forever.

The tracks, which are available as 320 Kbps MP3 files, YouTube says, can be used for “any creative purpose” – even outside of YouTube. The team says it searched “far and wide” for musicians and producers to work with on this project. It’s also soliciting submissions for additional musicians who would like to add their music to the collection.

Overall, the quality of the music is a step up from most of the 150,000 other YouTube audio tracks. There’s a decent mix of genres ranging from ambient and classical to pop and R&B, and songs are also classified by moods (angry, dark, happy, romantic etc.).

With 150 songs, this is obviously still a very small library, but it does give its users more options to use high-quality music for their videos without running into the kind of copyright issues that have long plagued the service.

Zoho has launched a service that centralizes contacts for customers, helps them share them across different groups and manage related tasks. As part of the effort to reach small business owners, the CRM company and business services provider is also letting customers set their own price after a 30-day free trial.

The service is designed for the small businesses that find a CRM systems overwhelming but still need a system to share business contacts, said Zoho Evangelist Raju Vegesna in an email interview. Most of them end up sharing contacts through spreadsheets. ContactManager is basically aimed to bridge this CRM-Spreadsheet gap where business users can use the app to share contacts with colleagues.

Vegesna compared the new service to the company’s contacts app for managing personal contacts that comes with Zoho Mail. Zoho ContactManager is the equivalent for small businesses. As the requirements grow and for mid and large-size businesses, customers can move up to Zoho CRM.

The service is pre-integrated with multiple data sources like CrunchBase and Facebook. It is also integrated with Google Apps and is available through Google Apps Marketplace. It has mobile support, including apps like Card Scanner and ContactManager.

And then there is the pricing. Zoho lets the user choose what they want to pay. That’s a pretty good deal for a small business owner or any company looking for a way to better collaborate on leads. Or is it? The sophistication of mobile CRM services, task management offerings and contact management services allows small business owners options that go beyond what a commodity priced service will offer.

But then again there is the full gamut of what Zoho provides as part of its network of 30 apps. The question, then, is less about price and more about the quality and the product’s fit with the customer.

Many brick-and-mortar merchants in the real world just want customers, but don’t have the time to learn the nuances of the various performance marketing tools and other programs at their disposal today. They just want new customers, or they just want to increase traffic during the slower parts of the day, for example. A new service called CardSpring Connect, launching today, now helps with that. The platform offers a self-serve online dashboard that allows merchants to easily create campaigns, connect apps like Foursquare, Trialpay, Thanx, MOGL, OnStripe and others, then sit back and watch as the analytics update in real-time with each swipe of a customer’s card at checkout.

CardSpring Connect is the latest from CardSpring, a payments infrastructure startup founded by former Netscape engineers as a means of connecting online and mobile applications to payment cards via APIs.

Foursquare had previously partnered with CardSpring and First Data earlier in 2013 to offer Visa and MasterCard cardholders discounts and other deals when they check in at particular venues. And in May, CardSpring partnered with VeriFone, integrating with the company’s PAYware Connect payments gateway to enable developers to build card-linked services for point-of-sale systems.

Until today, though, CardSpring was focused on letting developers build card-linked applications that trigger when a customer pays by credit or debit cards, but not on merchant-facing solutions. CardSpring Connect changes that.

Now, the company is targeting merchants via their financial partners and processors, offering them “set it and forget it” tools that let them build their own campaigns that they can then switch on or off with a click of a button going forward. By default, CardSpring will handle the campaigns on its own, automatically distributing the promotion requests to all the supported services, but merchants can choose to get more granular and restrict which programs are used.

In an online dashboard, merchants can access their account, connect apps to their business (like Foursquare, Trialpay, Thanx, MOGL, Roximity, Moblico, OnStripe, etc.), and track transactions. Here, businesses can see whether customers are new or returning, transaction amounts, the estimated lifetime spend for those customers and the cost merchants paid to the related service to bring those customers in.

To give an example of how this may work: say a business wants to target Foursquare to bring in new customers. They could go into the campaign manager and click through a form to create an offer (e.g. a dollar amount or a percentage off, or whatever deal they may want to run), restrict it to Foursquare, and click to turn it on. As the customers come into the store and swipe their cards at checkout, the dashboard is updated with the transaction data. Though customer names and personal details are anonymized, the merchant now has a better understanding of how well that campaign actually performed. And they only pay for the actual purchases redeemed, which is what’s meant by “performance marketing.”

“One of the things we hear most from people who use Foursquare is how much they love using our app to find great deals,” said Steven Rosenblatt, Chief Revenue Officer at Foursquare about the integration. He says the company is looking forward to the launch of CardSpring Connect because it provides an easy way for merchants to create card-linked offers that helps Foursquare users save more money.

CardSpring Connect itself is an open and neutral platform, allowing retailers to essentially turn their point-of-sale terminals into their own local marketing solutions, says Walther, who refers to the platform as a “local commerce operating system.”

“For the first time you can really see from all these providers, if they sent you new customers,” explains CardSpring CEO Eckart Walther. “That was one of the challenges with Groupon – something like 40% of the people who bought a coupon were not new,” he adds.

“Our whole value proposition is that we go out and help these old, traditional folks turn on our system…There’s really nothing like it in the offline world,” he says, explaining that, offline, there hasn’t been an easy way to identify which customers were new, which service brought them in, and what they’re spending.

With CardSpring Connect, merchants can use the system with any point-of-sale system. The system is typically white labeled, so companies providing the merchant’s credit card services (e.g. First Data, VeriFone, or local processors, etc.) could switch it on for their business customers. On this front, CardSpring plans to have additional announcements in the near future.

Getting other to partner with the company will be a critical step in CardSpring’s growth, since its business is built on a licensing model where publishers pay to use the platform. Walther explains that it charges similarly to the way credit cards are charged today – a small fixed fee, and if there’s a redemption, there’s sometimes a small percentage of that redemption. Generally, the charges are around 10 to 30 cents, he says. “It’s a fluid business model,” he says.”We charge when we create value.”

Following today’s launch of CardSpring Connect, the company will be announcing more partnerships with other financial institutions, payment networks, and point-of-sale makers that will help CardSpring gets its platform in front of more merchants. Interested customers can learn more here on the company’s website.

As more and more companies enter the home automation market, Belkin isn’t letting its successful WeMo lineup stagnate. The company’s latest product, the Light Switch, lets you control any standard (switched) light in your house from anywhere in the world.

Today the AP reported that the President’s promised NSA review panel is channeling the entity that it is supposed to inspect, hiding behind layers of government bureaucracy and obfuscating its work.

The AP states that the review panel is lodged in offices provided by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Even more, the DNI is running its media strategy, vetting requests through its own press office. Any whiff of independence that the group might have hoped to to engender is now certainly gone.

Not that it got off to a good start. The panel was stacked with, as I reported in late August, ”a slurry of insiders, former insiders, and a previous colleague of the President.” So, it was hardly the “high-level group of outside experts” that the President had promised.

Now, ensconced inside the entity that it is supposed to vet, surrounded and apparently managed by those very organs, the panel is rapidly approaching punchline status.

The AP has more, almost comically. I quote to preserve the dryness of its writing:

James Clapper, the intelligence director, exempted the panel from U.S. rules that require federal committees to conduct their business and their meetings in ways the public can observe. Its final report, when it’s issued, will be submitted for White House approval before the public can read it.

So, in short, Clapper, the head of the DNI, exempted the group that he is currently housing, that is supposed to be vetting his work, from rules requiring their work to be public. Transparency! And, whatever they come up with will of course have to approved for publishing.

“We need new thinking for a new era,” the President stated when announcing that the panel would be formed. We do, he’s correct. But when those hired to think are old friends of either the agency in question or former associates of its boss (the President), and whose thoughts are potentially withheld from the public, we don’t make any progress at all.

The point of hiring “outsiders” to vet the NSA and our lager surveillance activities is that they don’t have allegiance to the folks inside. We didn’t get that. But to top that failure off by absconding the panel behind the very curtains it was supposed to cast open is simply disgraceful.

At least we have something to laugh about over lunch: “Remember when they said the panel was going to be full of outside experts, and provide a real check to the NSA’s views on privacy?” Ha ha.

Top Image Credit: Zoe Rudisill