Former Waywire CEO Nate Richardson Joins AOL As President Of AOL Live

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A few weeks ago we reported that Nate Richardson, the CEO and co-founder of Waywire, would be leaving the company as it makes a strategic shift from content creation to content curation. Well now we know where he’s landed: Richardson has joined our parent company AOL* as the President of AOL Live, TechCrunch has learned.

Richardson was one of the co-founders of Waywire, along with Newark mayor and Senate candidate Cory Booker and Sarah Ross. The company originally set out to focus on creating its own high-quality video content, but recently shifted direction to become more of a personalized hub for curated content. Richardson exited the company while the curation site was still in beta, and we’ve heard Waywire is looking to announce a new CEO soon.

We heard rumors that Richardson was being courted by AOL around the time of his departure from Waywire, but apparently he hadn’t joined the company at that time. That said, the decision to become part of AOL isn’t totally surprising, as Richardson has a long history of working in media. In addition to serving as the CEO of Waywire, years ago he had also been the CEO of ContentNext Media, former home of tech blogs such as paidContent and MocoNews.

Joining the AOL team also means that Richardson will be reunited with my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss, AOL Brand Group CEO Susan Lyne. Those two worked together while Lyne was CEO of Gilt Groupe and Richardson held various roles at the company, including Gilt City president and GM of Gilt Groupe’s Men’s section.

At AOL Live, Richardson will oversee the new live streaming video channel that the company is putting together. That channel has yet to officially launch, but the idea seems to be to offer up a continuous lineup of news and interviews that will match the type of content you’d expect to see on the AOL.com homepage. So lots of celebrity and entertainment news, sprinkled with light doses of sports, finance, and quirky lifestyle stories.

There will be lots of opportunity for AOL to experiment with that channel, as the company did when it held an open casting call for anchor auditions. Over the course of two days in June, AOL had anchor hopefuls come in and read the news of the moment, with a hilarious hodgepodge of characters swinging by the studio to try out.

The live auditions weren’t the only experiment that AOL Live will be testing out — apparently the company sees an opportunity to have live brand messages interspersed in the content, in addition to the usual pre-roll ads that will appear when someone starts up the stream.

The hope is that viewers will watch AOL Live in the same way they might leave daytime TV on while going about their day. Lyne told Adweek a few months ago that viewers could eventually get into the habit of leaving a live AOL player on minimized all day at work.

Anyway, it all sounds like an interesting new endeavor for Richardson.

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* While we’ve been told that TechCrunch is an integral part of the AOL franchise, neither AOL PR nor Richardson responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

But hey, it’s the Friday before a holiday weekend. I get it.

Following Mobile Test, Facebook Tries Out A ‘Trending’ Section On Its Desktop News Feed

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Back in June, Facebook said it would be rolling out a number of features for following public conversations, and it looks like the company’s holding true to that promise.

Specifically, the company is testing a section highlighting “Trending” topics that appears alongside its desktop newsfeed. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the test, and it included a screenshot (which you can see to the left) that looks pretty much as you’d expect — a box with a list of linked topics.

A Facebook spokesperson sent me the following statement:

We are running a small test of a unit on News Feed that displays topics currently trending on Facebook. Right now it’s only available to a small percentage of US users and it is still in the early stages of development. We will share more details down the line if we decide to roll it out more widely.

Facebook has been moving towards something like this for the past couple of months. It launched searchable hashtags in June, and those are all about making it easy for people to see related conversations around a single topic. At the time, the company said it would be “rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics.” Then, earlier this month, it started showing trending topics to some mobile web users.

Trend-based navigation is a pretty natural outgrowth of adding hashtags, so it might seem strange that Facebook is taking a while to go from one to another. However, public-private dynamics can work pretty differently on Facebook than on Twitter (where the hashtag/Trending Topics ideas were popularized), so I imagine Facebook is using tests to make sure this approach makes sense with its more private model.

Plair Hater

Plair Hater

I was pretty psyched when I heard about Plair, a sleek little gizmo that plugs into your TV’s HDMI port and promises to sling whatever you’re watching on your phone or computer to your giant screen. But once you start using it, the Plair quickly loses most of its flair.

    



Snowden Leaks $52 Billion Intelligence Budget, Reveals “Offensive Cyber Operations”

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National Security Agency leaker and new Russia resident Edward Snowden has leaked a top-secret $52 billion intelligence budget to the Washington Post. The partially redacted budget reveals the successes and shortcomings of the United States’ sprawling intelligence apparatus, as well as the justifications for top-line budget items.

The CIA and NSA have launched aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations,” writes The Post.

The most notable findings are:

  • Long before Edward Snowden leaked details about telephone and Internet monitoring, authorities were worried about rogue contractors with access to top-secret information.
  • The NSA’s ability to monitor al-Qaeda communications is described as “often the best and only means to compromise seemingly intractable targets.”
  • The NSA has a massive army of hackers, analysts and code breakers in a “sweeping category called “Consolidated Cryptologic Program.”
  • The NSA plants so-called “tailored radio frequency solutions,” which the Post describes as “close-in sensors to intercept communications that do not pass through global networks.” Similarly, the CIA devotes 1.7 billion (12 percent of its budget) to covert programs for collecting radio and phone communication in hostile territory.
  • The U.S. installs ground sensors to monitor construction of nuclear sites in North Korea.

While the redacted budget itself doesn’t reveal any shocking new details (or reasons to put another layer of tinfoil on your head), it is surprising just how much information that independent analysts like Snowden had access to.

Readers can explore the full budget in an interactive graph here.

Remote Work Collaboration Startup Sqwiggle Closes On $1.1M In AngelList’s First Syndicate Round

sqwiggle demo

Working from the couch in sweatpants is awesome (in fact, I’m doing it right now), but there are certainly benefits to working with other people in the flesh. For example, if you can see that your coworker is at her desk, you don’t have to preface a quick question with, “You there?” Little things like that can really make all the difference when it comes to collaborating naturally and getting good work done.

Sqwiggle, a startup that makes a web application that aims to close that communication gap between remote workers, has just closed on $1.1 million in a brand new seed funding round. We’ve written about the San Francisco-based Sqwiggle before, but in light of the new million dollar boost I thought it was a good idea to bring a couple of the company’s co-founders into the studio to see the app in person. Check that out in the video embedded above.

The funding round is also notable because Sqwiggle is the first startup to utilize the new AngelList Syndicates feature, which lets angel investors syndicate deals with each other. In all, about 30 percent of the $1.1 million round was raised through an AngelList Syndicate. This is a brand new feature that is still finding its place, but it has the potential to be very disruptive for both startups and investors. We talked about what the process was like for Sqwiggle in the video above as well.

It’s great to see Sqwiggle get funding to help take its growth to the next level, as it’s a thoughtfully made product with founders who are clearly quite passionate and knowledgeable about the problem they’re looking to solve. Sqwiggle itself was built while the founding team was working remotely, so dog fooding was a way of life as the product was coming together.

It will be exciting to see how Sqwiggle progresses in the months ahead — and what other projects are able to get off the ground thanks to the exciting new funding tools that are available to ambitious developers.

Digg (And Digg Reader) Arrive On Android

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Digg, the Betaworks-incubated social news service and new home to Google Reader replacement Digg Reader, has just arrived on Android, the company announced today. Included in this release are all the stories you would find on the Digg.com homepage, Digg Reader, as well as integrations with over a half dozen other services including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ and more.

According to a post on the Digg blog, an Android app had been users’ most common request over the past two months, following the release of Digg Reader. The company has been working at breakneck speeds to push out its own RSS reader alternative to the now-shuttered Google Reader, which began with a launch of a somewhat unfinished product to the web this June, and a couple of days later, an arrival on iOS.

As on iOS, the Digg Android app bundles Digg’s stories and the RSS reader under one roof, as two complementary parts to the Digg product experience. According to a post on the Digg blog, the new Android app includes several notable features, like the below:

  • Quickly swipe back and forth through Digg’s Top Stories, as well as through any feed or folder in Digg Reader. Choose from either the web view or the parsed text view.
  • Digg or save any story; send it to Instapaper, Pocket or Readability (automatically upon save, if you choose); and share to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, WordPress, Buffer, Dropbox, Google Drive, email, text or any other sharable app on your device.
  • Search Digg Top Stories.
  • Sort your Digg Reader items by popularity to quickly see which of your items are the most talked-about on the social web.
  • Log in to Digg Reader with your Google, Facebook or Twitter account.
  • Search for and add new feeds. Create, organize and delete folders.
  • If you so choose, post your diggs automatically to your Facebook timeline.

However, the app is lacking a few option like a still-in-testing “Show Only Unread Items” view, text size and display mode options, and background updating, all of which are being worked on now for future releases. Digg says updates will roll out steadily over the next few months.

Digg Android users have been fairly happy until now to use the company’s HTML5 website, which remains a decent way to browse the site on other non-iOS or Android devices.

The company had previously explained that it sees Digg as a part of a broader suite of products, where Digg Reader and Digg.com’s collection of popular links are two ends of a spectrum. Reader, an RSS feed reading service obviously built for power users, is meant to serve as ground zero for beginning the news discovery process, while Digg.com’s final link collection is the result of crowd-sourcing voting and other filtering algorithms. In the middle, are things like Betaworks’ also newly refreshed Instapaper, a read it later utility, that saw its first major update this month, which was pushed to the public just yesterday.

The new Digg Android app is here on Google Play.

Here’s Why Microsoft Coming To Foursquare’s Salvation Might Make Sense

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Rumors that Foursquare is looking to take on a strategic investment from a large technology company kicked up a gear when several sources have reported that Microsoft is perhaps the potential suitor, and, to quote Dina Bass of Bloomberg, the talks are “advanced.”

What the hell, you might be thinking, does Microsoft want with Foursquare? It’s not application support for its platforms, that’s already a done deal.

Instead, I think that the investment is being considered for the same reason that Microsoft pumped hundreds of millions into Facebook: Bing. By buying into Facebook as its only corporate investor, Microsoft has locked up a long-term deal to provide mapping and search capabilities for the social giant.

Snagging a chunk of Foursquare is pro-Bing, albeit in a different fashion. Bing competes with Google and Apple to provide local data, and mapping. The two domains are increasingly overlapping as mobile maps become increasingly multifaceted and less about directions, and more about how to live. Bing, of course, on Windows Phone has Local Scout, a tool that combines geolocation and local business information.

Foursquare fits into this by simply having data that Microsoft wants. The startup has spent years accreting information from its users about more than restaurants, hotels, houses, and everything in between. Back that into Bing and it could enrich its offering perhaps past what Google proffers to mobile users.

Bing already uses Foursquare data. That is the reason I think that Microsoft is interested in the stuff: It knows its value. Also, it would hate to see the inflow stop (if Facebook died), or other parties buy it (Yahoo, etc) and cut off its access. The move is a combination of offense and defense. Yahoo, of course, leans on Bing for the moment to power its search technology, but that might not be the case in a year’s time.

This would improve the user experience of Windows 8, 8.1, Windows Phone 8, and the online desktop Bing experience.

Now, why not buy Foursquare outright? I don’t think that Microsoft has to. Foursquare’s last round valued the firm at $600 million. Investors would want a premium, and Microsoft has cash. It would not be a cheap acquisition, even given Foursquare current weaknesses.

But with say, $50 million, Microsoft could bail Foursquare out of its most recent loans, and inject enough capital for it to prove a revenue-fueled future. Microsoft gets access to its data, and doesn’t have to pay a meaningful (it’s quite rich) price for it. And, if Foursquare really does unwind, who would be there to pick up the pieces and pick out the assets that it wants but Microsoft, a current shareholder.

We’re also hearing that Yahoo is a possibility. Let the games begin.

Top Image Credit: Robert Scoble

Anki, Nest, Shasta, And Skycatch To Discuss The Present And Future Of Robotics At Disrupt SF

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Next up on the agenda for Disrupt SF: Robots!

Now, when I bring up robots, you may be thinking about C-3PO from Star Wars, or Rosie the maid from The Jetsons, or something else entirely. But I’m guessing that we’ve got something similar in mind — a machine that looks and acts kind of like a human being, something that’s still years in the future at best.

But after a discussion with Rob Coneybeer, co-founder of Shasta Ventures, we started to think about the ways that robots, or robot-type devices, are already starting to infiltrate our lives: Industrial robots, robotic vehicles, robotic devices in the home, and more.

So we decided to bring together companies that are doing exciting work with machines that resemble the traditional science-fiction robots for a panel titled “These Aren’t The Droids You’re Looking For.” We’ll talk about the work they’re doing (some of them may stretch the traditional definition of a robot, but hey, that’s kind of the point), where they see the most interesting trends, and I think we’ve got at least one cool demo in the works.

Our speakers are:

Rob Coneybeer, who co-founded Shasta Ventures in 2005, previously worked as an aerospace engineer and automotive engine tester. As an investor, Coneybeer focuses on smartphone companies, collaborative consumption, and The Internet of Things, and his investments include smart thermostat company Nest Labs.

Matt Rogers, co-founder and vice president of engineering at Nest Labs. Prior to co-founding Nest, Rogers was part of the iPod software development team and an early iPhone and iPad engineer.

Christian Sanz, co-founder and CEO at Skycatch, a platform for deploying automated drones for commercial use. He was previously founder of DroneGames, CTO at Storify, chief architect at Break Media, and a software engineer for Disney Interactive.

Boris Sofman, co-founder and CEO at Anki, a company you may remember from its onstage racing demo at Apple’s most recent Worldwide Developers Conference. The company is working to bring robotics and artificial intelligence to the real world by, for example, helping machines understand where they are in the physical space.

Disrupt SF will run from September 7 to 11, and the robotics panel will take place at 11:35am on the 9th. General-admission tickets and exhibitor packages are currently available. Buy tickets here.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here [email protected].

With Sinofsky On Board, Box Is Now Capable Of Mounting The First Credible Threat To Office

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Today Box announced that Steven Sinofsky has joined its operations as an adviser. The relationship was kicked off via Facebook message, consummated over pho, and gives Box key talent and experience that it needs to grow its enterprise-facing document storage solution.

And to build its next set of products. The race to store your files online is not a mere struggle for dominance of low-margin cloud document management. Price pressure via increasing competition from wealthy technology companies is already leading to, in some cases, the elimination of consumer storage costs. For example, Flickr will give you a terabyte of space for your pictures, and Outlook.com has essentially unlimited storage.

However, on the enterprise side of things, Microsoft and Box are currently locked in a mini arms race, with Microsoft boosting its SkyDrive Pro business offering to 25GB of storage per seat. Box recently doubled its consumer offering to 10GB, and added a new, $5 per month per seat plan that gives small businesses 100GB per employee.

So the marginal price of storage is rapidly declining, and those savings are being passed to consumers and customers in the form of price cuts that lead to constant pressure for storage companies. Thus, Box will want to expand beyond its current key offering — file storage and syncing — and into something harder to commoditize.

We stated earlier that the struggle to store your files is about more than their mere storage. It works out like this in practice: The company that stores your files is the firm with the best shot at helping you edit them due to sheer proximity and convenience. Therefore, he who holds the files, gets to generate software income from their ownership.

The analog to this situation is a hard drive and a new set of Office apps. The files were on your hard drive, and Office lived in the same environment, making their existence harmonious. Now, cloud storage has moved that content away from Office, leaving Microsoft to scramble to build a suite of web apps to handle the editing work that had begun to slip out of its control.

Box has done a terrific job at signing up corporate clients to its service. Clients that, I presume, are Office users. Eventually, those customers will have the choice of upgrading their Office software, or snagging Office 365 subscriptions for their employees. But if their files are stored with Box, how palatable is that? At best a connection would have to be built between their productivity software, and their files that Box holds. This is not a perfect solution.

What if there were another option? What if Box built a set of editing tools on top of its cloud storage service, moving its business up the value stack, while defending its margins in the face of slipping data-retention fees. To do something like that, it would want to have on board someone with intimate knowledge of Microsoft and its Office products and how to sell productivity software to enterprise customers.

That’s Steven Sinofsky.

Box claims to have 180,000 business customers and expects 100 percent revenue growth in 2013. Those figures indicate that Box could scale a productivity solution to a meaningful size in short order. It would need to be damn good code, of course. I am not saying that this would be easy, more that it is now possible.

Box has hinted that it is working on some internal software that could be construed as indicative that it is working on the above. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Levie stated that the company is testing “some of [its] own applications.”

There are ample reasons for the success of Office, and Office 365 has shown rapid growth in its early stages. The cloud productivity suite is at a $1.5 billion yearly run rate, up 50 percent in a single quarter. If Box generates $8,333 in yearly income from each of its 180,000 business clients, the two are the same size (this calculation is more for fun than any other reason).

I am not saying in any way that Box is an Office “killer” or any such baiting nonesense. The gist of this is that Box has an enviable enterprise install base, a key strategic advantage as being The Holder of the Files, and now the exec that called the Office shots at Microsoft for years. That sums together into an enterprise-facing productivity solution, in my view.

Box is going public sometime soon — I’m trying to get more on that, but haven’t heard much lately — and when it does it will want to tell investors how it will increase its per-seat revenue to ease fears of margin pressure. We know at least one way they could do that.

Top Image Credit: Robert Scoble

Lodgify Launches Its Build-Your-Own Solution For Vacation Rental Websites And Listings

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Barcelona-based startup Lodgify is launching its product today, which aims to be the “Shopify of vacation rentals” according to its co-founder Naveen Sharma. Like Shopify, Lodgify allows small business owners to easily set up an online commerce presence – but this time the target is people who are renting out their homes to vacationers and short-term renters.

Lodgify has some existing competition in the space, thanks to MyVR, a startup that raised $1.4 million in seed funding and came out of Y Combinator in March last year. According to Sharma, Lodgify has some key advantages over MyVR, however, including a better user interface, an instant booking function powered by Stripe and PayPal, website templates that feature responsive design and integration with vacation rental listing sites 9flats and Roomorama out of the gate, with HomeAway coming soon.

Forr the same reason that Hotel owners don’t exclusively list on Booking.com and abandon their own website, VR hosts don’t want to list exclusively on Airbnb,” Sharma explained in an interview. “VR owners can increase their income by having their own proprietary website and by additionally listing on multiple booking channels, such as Airbnb, Homeaway, 9flats, Roomorama, etc. The problem here is that it is very costly and time-consuming to build your own website and manage all these listings on multiple sites manually. That’s where Lodgify comes into play.”

The Lodgify platform allows VR proprietors to combine site building with listing on multiple rental services (including those mentioned above and 20 more channels on the roadmap for inclusion by end of year) at once, saving them time and money with a platform offered on a SaaS basis for plans starting at $9 per month, with no additional fees for making bookings or setup. And while MyVR is a competitor in that vision, Lodgify’s focus is primarily on the UK and Europe, and the built-in “book now” feature is a key competitive advantage.

Vacation rentals are a growing industry, rising faster than hotels and on track to become a hugely important player in the hospitality sector in the next half-decade or so. Sharma says this represents both opportunity and challenge for Lodgify, as it attempts to evolve with the changing demands of an evolving market.

“We’ll have to stay on our toes and closely monitor travel and booking habits,” he said. “We’ll need to constantly develop features and functions to meet the needs of future owners and travelers. Especially our focus on mobile devices and analytics will steadily increase to match demand.”

While MyVR is a noteworthy competitor, it sounds like the vacation rental space is progressing at such a clip that it can support more than a few players. We might see consolidation down the road, but for now, a major European opportunity exists that the bootstrapped Lodgify has plenty of breathing room to capitalize on.

Flickr Grows Post-Relaunch, Tumblr Now 7.2% Of Site’s Referral Traffic

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Yahoo’s efforts at improving Flickr with new pricing plans, acquisitions, and revamped web and mobile experiences appear to be paying off, at least in the form of website traffic and engagement. According to a new report from SimilarWeb, visits to Flickr have been increasing steadily, and are now up by 38 percent since April.

Note, though, that the big Flickr redesign was at the end of May. That’s when the site dropped its Pro pricing tier, introducing instead an ad-free tier and power user option ($500/year for another terabyte of space). The site also got a visual makeover, and updated mobile apps as part of Yahoo’s bigger product push under CEO Marissa Mayer’s lead.

From April to May, monthly site visits to Flickr went from 86 million to 90 million – indicating that Flickr was still seeing some growth, despite what was then a bit of stagnation in terms of look-and-feel and feature set. But post-relaunch, site visits increased to 107 million in June, and then 110 million in July.

In addition, the average time on site grew by 11 percent since April (4.5 minutes) to 4.9 minutes in June, and then to a full 5 minutes by July. Social traffic also increased from 9.7 million in April to 12 million in June, and then to 13.7 million by July, which seems to point to Flickr benefitting from the social media buzz regarding all its changes.

What’s also interesting is that Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr plays a special role here, as it’s the biggest referring website for Flickr outside of search engines and social networks. 7.2 percent of Flickr’s referral traffic over the past three months came from Tumblr (4.75 million visits) – another reason why Yahoo may have wanted to add the site to its portfolio. That referral traffic has remained relatively consistent pre- and post-Tumblr purchase, SimilarWeb tells us. However, many photographers have long since found this to be the case. For instance, at the time of the Flickr overhaul, professional photographer and blogger Thomas Hawk noted that: “already, I get the most viral views on my Flickr photos from Tumblr, more than any other site.”

The crossover between the two social services, Flickr and Tumblr, could leave the door open to some interesting potential integrations in the future. Post-acquisition, Flickr users began brainstorming ideas, thinking up tools that would allow easier image posting to Tumblr from Flickr, backup to Flickr of photos posted to Tumblr, and more.

Of course SimilarWeb, like many third-party, web-traffic analysis products, relies on a panel of users to determine site rankings. In SimilarWeb’s case, it has a large network of unbranded, consumer-facing plug-ins doing this work, while others use toolbars and other means. Numbers then should not be determined to be exact, but rather, when viewed at a distance, are able to tell the story of a site’s changes over time. In that case, it’s worth pointing out that several of these traffic-measurement tools point to bumps in site traffic following the Flickr revamp.

For example, in Flickr’s largest market, the U.S., you can see post-relaunch growth via Quantcast (estimated) and Compete. However, Quantcast data hints that there’s still the potential for the site’s growth to drop again after the initial post-relaunch glow (see third chart from Google Trends) wears off.

Deliv Partners With Mall Operator GGP To Enable Same-Day Deliveries From Its Stores

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Peer-to-peer delivery startup Deliv wants to provide a new way for major retailers to offer up same-day delivery to their customers. And it just partnered with one of the biggest mall operators in the country, General Growth Properties, to begin making that vision a reality.

Deliv is kind of like Lyft or SideCar in that it isn’t building out a big fleet infrastructure of trucks and drivers to make deliveries for it. Instead, it’s looking to crowdsource drivers to make delivery runs in their own cars. By doing so, it massively reduces costs associated with deliveries, while also enabling brick-and-mortar retailers to provide speedy deliveries that beat Amazon Prime.

To make the plan work, Deliv needs to get retailers on board. And that’s where GGP comes in.

GGP is the second-largest mall operator in the country, with 123 regional malls nationwide. And it’s got hundreds of millions of square feet of shopping space, according to Scott Morey, Chief Information and Technology Officer of GGP. In that respect, it’s not that different from a bunch of big warehouses around the country, he said. Which means that retailers can almost use the malls like Amazon uses its various distribution outlets.

The pact will enable a mix of online and offline sales and deliveries to occur through stores that sign up in select GGP malls. In the online case, shoppers going to certain retailers’ e-commerce sites will be able to add items to their cart and then select same-day delivery from the store. At the mall, runners will collect the goods and hand them off to a Deliv driver.

But the partnership will also enable deliveries to be made on purchases made in-store at certain GGP malls. In that way, customers will be able to buy from multiple stores and have their purchases aggregated in one spot before they are delivered. That’ll be perfect for folks who came on shopping trips together with friends or who took public transportation to the mall in question.

In either case, the service is designed to make the deliveries the same price, or even cheaper than, standard shipping costs.

To begin, the service will be available in four GGP malls, including Stonestown Galleria in San Francisco, Eastridge in San Jose, Glendale Galleria in Los Angeles, and Oakbrook Center in Chicago. The whole thing will hopefully be launched around the holidays, according to Deliv founder and CEO Daphne Carmeli.

While Deliv has GGP’s support, though, ultimately it will be up to the retailers to decide whether they want to participate or not. To get them on board, Deliv and GGP have been meeting with a number of retailers to convince them to offer same-day delivery and “out-Amazon Amazon.”

Deliv has raised $1 million in seed funding from investors that include General Catalyst, Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Operators Fund, and PivotNorth.

Three Months After Being Banned From The App Store, Bang With Friends Returns As “Down”

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They’re baaack.

Bang With Friends, the Facebook friend hookup app that seemed to be endlessly engulfed in one controversy or another earlier this year, is returning to the iOS App Store (albeit in a slightly toned-down form) after gettin’ the boot back in May.

For those who missed all the hubbub, even the concept behind Bang With Friends tends to get some people worked up: you open the app, and select which of your Facebook friends you’d want to have over for a romantic steak dinner followed by a screening of The Notebook hook up with. It’s all kept anonymous, unless that same person picks you as a would-be fling in turn.

If there’s a match, Bang With Friends attempts to connect the dots. After a recent update, users can also mark a friend as someone they’d like to “hang” with. Why anonymity is required to say you’d want to hang out with someone you’re already friends with on Facebook, I have no idea.

Back in May, Bang With Friends wiggled its way into the App Store as the moderately more mild “BWF” (on Android, it ditches the acronym in favor of its full name.) Ten days later, however, Apple dropped the banhammer.

As you might expect, the app’s creators — who once tried to remain anonymous themselves, though their identities eventually leaked — protested the decision. They argued that they limited use of the app to adults, contesting that plenty of other apps served the same purpose, just without being quite as blatant.

“We’re working with Apple to get BWF back into the App Store shortly,” promised BWF’s site.

“Shortly”, here, eventually proving to mean “in three months”.

The app returned this morning, though not without its fair share of tweaks and changes to appease the powers that be. Gone are all traces of the word “Bang”; gone is the app’s uber suggestive launch screen imagery. The app is now called “Down”, its namesake “Down To Bang” button now reading just “I’m Down”.

Down to what, you ask? Down to share a pop? Down to go kiteboarding? It’s left open to interpretation (at least theoretically), vague and innocuous enough that it’d be hard to get too offended without already having been offended by the app’s earlier iterations.

The name change also works out alright in a few other ways. After the influx of users from their early controversies, the company had seemingly been trying to steer the app into less of a straight up hookup app into something a bit more broad, like a general dating/friend finding service — hence the introduction of the “Down To Hang” button.

Plus, there’s that whole Zynga lawsuit over the “with friends” trademark. It’s unclear as to whether or not the potential legal battle had any influence on the name change; while it gets them away from using “with Friends” on the App Store, the name remains unchanged for the company’s Android and web variants as of this morning. Their company name in the App Store is still listed as “Bang With Friends, Inc.”

The new, self-censored app is up on the App Store here.

What do you think? Can the app formerly known as BWF carry on in a milder form, in a world awash with Tinders and Grindrs and Let’s Dates and Swipes?

Bug In Apple’s CoreText Allows Specific String Of Characters To Crash iOS 6, OS X 10.8 Apps

Photo Jun 14, 5 18 23 PM

A bug in Apple’s CoreText rendering engine in iOS 6 and OS X 10.8 causes any apps that try to render a string of Arabic characters to crash on sight. The string of characters which can trigger the bug — which was discovered yesterday and has spread around the hacking and coding community — has made its way to Twitter, where even looking at it in your timeline will crash the app.

The issue affects apps on iOS 6 and OS X 10.8 but does not work on OS X 10.9 Mavericks and iOS 7 beta releases. So whatever bug the characters are triggering, they’ve already been fixed in future releases of the engine. This doesn’t help anyone still on iOS 6 of course.

Because it’s a CoreText bug, any apps that access this font framework to render text are affected. This means that any apps that use WebKit like Safari are also affected because WebKit uses CoreText.

This is a picture of the string of characters, not replicated here for obvious reasons:

If you’d care to experience the bug for yourself, feel free to seek out the tweet in the pic above, I’m not posting a link. For the record: Tweetbot appears to be immune to this, though it also uses the CoreText engine.

The characters were discovered and posted on a Russian site yesterday morning. The site claims that Apple has known about the problem for ‘six months’ and has not reacted. There is some evidence of the string appearing on Twitter back in February. The posting includes a request to click the crash report button on any apps affected and report it to Apple.

The malicious possibilities are simple: if you send the characters in an SMS, it can initiate a revolving crash of Messages on both OS X and iOS. We confirmed this on both operating systems. You can also deliver the string of text via a web link.

You could also change the name of a wireless network to the characters and it will crash any device that scans that network to connect.

That being said, this is an extremely specific set of unicode characters, so the possibilities of accidentally coming across it are nil. Unfortunately, once this stuff is out in the wild, it’s all down to who has the knowhow and will to try to use it to annoy or offend.

Looks like Facebook has blocked the unicode string from being posted on walls and timelines: pic.twitter.com/RInKAkDsgY

— NickDe (@nickdepetrillo) August 29, 2013

The Facebook team has already caught onto the bug and will no longer allow you to post this particular string to its site. An error message is presented alerting you that your post contains a security vulnerability.

We’ve reached out to Apple about the bug and will update this post if we receive a response.

This isn’t the first time that iOS and OS X have had ‘DoS’ (denial of service) attack issues that stemmed from bugs. In February, it was found that typing the phrase ‘File:///’ into an app on Macs would cause the app to crash. That bug was tracked back to the NSTextField call.

In addition, in March of this year, several iOS developers were targeted with sustained DoS attacks using large volumes of text and/or large chunks of characters. These would render the iMessage app unusable and eventually cause it to crash. This was attributed to forcing iMessage to render ‘Zalgo’ text and the fact that Apple didn’t limit how fast messages could be sent.

In order to combat that kind of attack, Apple introduced iMessage blocking in iOS 7, allowing users to eliminate any incoming messages from a particular address or sender.

With Its Flickr iOS Update, Yahoo Swaps Out Aviary For Newly Acquired GhostBird Tech; Says It’s Keeping It On The Web

flickr update

Earlier today, a new iOS update landed for Flickr that sports new, enhanced filters and other photo editing options among its new features, and when I wrote about it I wondered aloud if it was the first signs of a speedy integration of GhostBird, a photo app developer that Yahoo acquired in June of this year. Turns out this was right. And it also turns out that, as a result, Yahoo is dropping Aviary as a technology provider on its mobile app, although for now it is keeping Aviary in its web app.

“Aviary is a great partner and we’re excited to continue working closely with them on Flickr for web,” a spokesperson told me. “But with this iOS update, we’ve integrated technology and features from our recent acquisition of GhostBird Software.”

The change underscores a Yahoo very much still in flux as it looks for the right mix of products that will bring in the punters and keep them coming back for more.

Aviary-powered filters

Yahoo had incorporated Aviary technology into its iOS app as recently as December 2012 — an important moment for Flickr and Yahoo, since it was the first update in a year for the app, and a signal that things were going to be different from there on in.

Yahoo’s relationship with Aviary, meanwhile, started back in April 2012, when Yahoo partnered with Aviary to replace Picnik, acquired and shut down by Google. Around the same time that Aviary got added to Flickr’s iOS app, it also picked up Twitter as a user of its photo filter and editing SDK.

GhostBird-powered filter

Apart from things like a basically different user interface (one where the filter tabs are pretty big), the swap means a degradation of some features, and the appearance of others. Red eye removal and blemish fixes are out; light and saturation levels reminiscent of those from GhostBird’s KitCam app are in.

Yahoo wouldn’t say whether it plans eventually to update the Android and Web apps to look like the Flickr experience on iOS with GhostBird-powered editing, except to note, “We’re continuing to update Flickr on every device.”

Its latest Flickr Android app was released on May 20. That will include additions that will go beyond storage and deeper into creation. “At Flickr we know that taking photos is one of our users’ favorite daily habits and we’re continuing to make Flickr available wherever our users are.”

As for what that might mean in terms of relationships with other companies, as Yahoo continues to fill out its ambition under Marissa Mayer as a product-focused company, it makes sense that they’re putting some of their many acquisitions to use and thereby moving off of third-party products where that works.