Category: Tech news

Ride-sharing startup Lyft continues to grow, adding new markets where users can hail a ride via their mobile phones and have a mustachioed car pick them up. With the launch of service in Indianapolis, St. Paul and Atlanta, the company now has operations in 10 markets nationwide.

Today marks the first time that Lyft has announced service in more than one city, launching in three at once just ahead of the Labor Day Holiday weekend. As is its habit with new launches, the startup will have a “Mustache Parade” — whatever that is — in Indianapolis today at 11:30. And the service will be available in Atlanta and St. Paul beginning this morning for “friends and family” with full service launching Friday.

For Lyft, the launch expands it into a few smaller cities, but that’s by design — after adding service in tightly packed metropolitan areas like San Francisco, as well as some very large and sprawling cities like Los Angeles, the company wants to see what traffic patterns and logistics look like in less packed-in, less sprawling urban areas. The Midwest in particular is interesting to Lyft, as Chicago had been its fastest-growing new market to date.

At the same time that Lyft is launching in new cities, it’s also having its second Community Meeting, in which it gathers together drivers and passengers to rally support in one of its local markets. This time, the meeting is in Seattle in advance of a local city council meeting that will address peer-to-peer transportation next week. Seattle has been one of the markets that has been friendliest to ride-sharing startups, but these things are never a slam-dunk.

In California, Lyft, SideCar, and Uber received cease and desist notices from the local Public Utilities Commission last year, and it took some time for those companies to get the regulator to come around. But the PUC here has issued proposed regulations that could legitimize peer-to-peer transportation services in the state. If they are passed, those companies hope to take them to other jurisdictions as an example of a new regulatory framework for their services.

While Lyft has grown a lot over the past year since it officially launched in San Francisco, it’s still playing catch-up to Uber, which just raised $258 million in funding from Google Ventures and TPG. Uber also continues to launch in new cities, soft-launching in Dubai, Cape Town, and Bangalore this week alone. It now has service in more than 40 cities worldwide.

But Lyft hopes to expand quickly, as well. It has raised more than $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund over the last nine months, and also added to its war chest, thanks to the acquisition of its legacy Zimride business by Enterprise Holdings. The company now has more than 100 employees, most of whom operate out of its headquarters in San Francisco.

After promoting former Facebook and Twitter product lead Josh Elman to partner, Greylock is adding another consumer investing partner to its ranks from its existing team–executive in residence Simon Rothman. And as part of this move, Greylock is announcing a $100 million commitment to invest in marketplace entrepreneurs and companies, which Rothman will be managing.

Rothman, who will be on Greylock’s consumer investment team, is uniquely positioned to be leading this new initiative as he worked for a number of years at one of the original marketplaces, eBay. Rothamn joined eBay in 1999 when it was still a small, US collectibles auction business. He helped scale eBay to nearly 200 million users generating over $40 billion in merchandise sales. While at eBay, Rothman led US operations and also founded eBay Motors, which he built into a $14 billion a year global business. Following eBay he also founded Glyde, and ecommerce marketplace for for electronics and more. He also served as a board member of and advisor to Tesla Motors.

In 2011, Rothman joined Greylock as an Executive-in-Residence and ws helping advise a number of the firm’s network effects businesses, transaction-based startups, and mobile apps with a specialty around marketplaces, including Lyft, Wanelo, Poshmark, Tango, and others. He said he joined with the intention of finding a startup that he wanted to join, and help scale the company. But he began to enjoy actually helping individual startups and entrepreneurs. “I used to think that VC was more about money, but from an operators standpoint, being a VC is really about adding value to a startup,” he told us in an interview.

There are huge opportunities to build marketplaces with the current technologies available to entrepreneurs, including mobile platforms, hardware, and social identity, and more. But building lasting marketplaces is a challenge of itself, Rothman explains. These include creating content worthy of drawing a community and transactions, and long build cycles that often take many years.

As part of the new initiative, Greylock is forming an advisory network of executives and leaders in the space and will be organizing a marketplace conference to take place later this year in Silicon Valley. Speakers include: Airbnb CEO & co-founder, Brian Chesky; eBay CEO, John Donohoe & Linkedin co-founder and Greylock Partner, Reid Hoffman.

“We’re pleased Simon will continue on the Greylock team as a Partner,” said Hoffman. “His unique experience of helping to scale one of the most definitive marketplaces in the world has already proved to be invaluable to our entrepreneurs. Personally, I’m excited to support a new wave of innovative marketplaces. With Simon’s leadership and with guidance from committed speakers and friends like Brian and John, we believe we can build out a fantastic network in this space.”

As for the new initiative, Rothman says the $100 million is more of a focus than an actual fund. And the investments made will be stage agnostic, and across Seed, Series A & B and more.

“I believe marketplaces have the perfect business model,” says Rothman. “As they get bigger, marketplace grow stronger and more durable.” He thinks that in the next five years there will be more $1 billion dollar marketplaces than there were in the past 20 years, in areas like transportation, fashion, hotels, and more, with Airbnb kicking of this new generation of successful companies (at last count Airbnb was valued at $2.5 billion).

As for new areas where Rothman believes there could be growth, health care and education provide interesting opportunities for marketplaces. He acknowledges some of the complex regulatory environments and laws in these areas (especially health care), but says that eventually this frameworks will succumb to innovation.

Clearly, many marketplaces such as Airbnb, Uber, and others are flourishing, with multi-billion dollar valuations. It’s no surprise that Greylock is seeing the future potential of this business model, and wants to make a big bet on this. It’s similar in some ways to Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, which was created to spur and fund development around the iPhone.

Back in 2011 Doo closed a $6.8 million round for its big play to attack the world of collaboration and documents. Basically they want to kill off paperwork and make everything digital. To that end they have released an Android app earlier this year and today they have launched their iPhone version, you can download it here.

We have also gained exclusive access to a preview of their upcoming iPad app, see below.

Essentially Doo wants to be the “The Document App” where you can find and edit every Document you have, whether it is stored in Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, you name it. As well as working with documents you can use the apps to scan with OCR, which also comes with auto-tagging, creating searchable PDFs and sending them to your preferred storage location. Doo also has apps for OS X, Windows 8 and Windows Desktop will follow.

It’s ompetitors include Evernote and more recently Quip.

Today enterprise cloud file and document storage company Box announced that it has brought former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky on board as an adviser. The move matters, as Sinofsky has deep experience with both Microsoft Office and SkyDrive, two products that Box competes with.

Box, which today remains storage focused, is widely expected to introduce document editing tools on top of its cloud file system. This would put it in direct contention with Office, a key profit source for Microsoft, and Google’s Docs efforts.

Sinofsky departed Microsoft following the completion and shipment of Windows 8, and the Surface tablet hybrid. It remains slightly unclear to this day, but his quick trip out the door was not exactly voluntary. According to Todd Bishop of GeekWire, the pairing of Box and Sinofsky started with a Facebook message, and was consummated over bowls of pho.

Box, for now, is downplaying the Box-Microsoft war narrative. Box CEO Aaron Levie, in a statement provided to GeekWire, stated that his company would “love to get closer to Microsoft,” instead of growing its competitive surface area with the rival firm.

That’s bunk, but expected bunk. TechCrunch has reached out to Sinofsky for clarification of what his specific duties will be with Box and what areas of the company he intends to focus on.

Sinofksy was a considered candidate by external parties for the CEO role at Microsoft following Ballmer’s departure. It’s safe to say that anyone who had been pulling for a Sinofsky return can lay that dream to rest. Box is increasingly maturing into the company that could mount the first credible enterprise challenge to Office’s decades’ old hegemony.

Top Image Credit: BUILDWindows

Outbox, a startup that digitizes your physical mail and makes it available on the web and via iPhone, Android, and iPad apps, says that it’s now generally available in San Francisco.

After a trial period in Austin, Outbox launched in San Francisco earlier this year, but it was a beta version of the service with a wait list — the company says there are still thousands of people on that list who should get in now that Outbox is available to anyone in the city.

In advance of today’s news, we went on a mail run with Outbox co-founder Evan Baehr and one of the company’s “un-postmen” Francis Sanchez. One of the misconceptions about Outbox, Baehr said, is that its users are “all nerds.” And sure, he admitted that “digital natives” are a big part of the early customer base, but he added:

We actually have a lot of different demographics that have found things about Outbox that are interesting. So we have a lot of moms on the platform who just want to be better managers of their home communication. We’ve got a lot of travelers who are away for businesses, consultants or salespeople, and they want to be able to manage this important workflow when they’re not at their house.

There are, naturally, privacy concerns about having a startup open up all your physical mail. Outbox tries to address those concerns with background checks on its un-postmen, shredding and recycling all the physical mail that you don’t want, and offering $1 million in identity theft insurance.

“We can lay out all the extreme measures we’ve gone through to keep your mail safe, [and] there are certain people out there that just aren’t convinced by that,” Baehr acknowledged. “And you know what, at the end of the day, Outbox isn’t for everybody.”

Baehr suggested that the “best testament to what we can pull off” is that as far as the team is aware, Outbox has not yet had any security breaches. (In the video, it sounds like Baehr is suggesting that Outbox has processed more than 1 million pieces of mail, but a spokesperson clarified that the company has processed more than 300,000 pieces, resulting in more than 1 million images.)

The interview with Baehr and with Sanchez also illustrates some of the processes that Outbox has put in place for collecting your mail. Those are particularly important, Baehr said, because they allow the company to keep costs down and charge customers only $7.99 a month.

Since the launch, the company also raised a $5 million Series A. As for what’s next, Baehr said Outbox is planning its launch in New York City.

Most physical keys have been chased off phones, thanks to the rampant rise of touchscreen technology, but here’s a Kickstarter project that wants to bring smarter kind of physical key to your phone. Pressy is a hardware button that plugs into the headphone jack of your Android phone and can be customised to trigger a range of functions.

So, for instance, if you always wanted a shortcut to snap a photo and upload it straight to a social network you could create that function in the Pressy app. Of course there are apps that can do this sort of thing, but the point about Pressy is that it’s a chunk of hardware that sits within easy reach of your fingers — thereby cutting down on the number of actions required to perform the function you’re after.

The (free) Pressy app will apparently allow a range of shortcuts to be created, based on a combination of short and long presses of the Pressy key. Which all sounds great, so long as you don’t get your shortcuts mixed up — and end up turning on your flashlight instead of taking a sneaky photo, say. Or sending an SMS to your mum saying ‘I’m on my way’, instead of toggling on your Wi-Fi.

The app will also allow for app settings to be customised too, so in addition to a basic photo snapping shortcut you could set up a specifically sneaky photo shortcut that keeps the phone’s screen and flash off and kills the shutter noise. If you wanted to be really, really creepy.

What if you’re using your headphone jack for, y’know, actual headphones? Pressy’s makers have thought of that. The key can be clipped into a small key chain housing, rather than plugged into your phone — and the button on your headphones then doubles as the Pressy key, so you don’t have to fish your keys out of your pockets to trigger your shortcuts.

How much does this smart micro button cost? $17 will get you the basic Pressy. You’ll have to be pretty patient though, as it’s not due to ship til March next year. The project is at least well on its way to hitting its goal of $40,000, with more than $30,000 raised and still 46 days left to run on its funding campaign. Hardware hacking FTW.

Today Facebook proposed a raft of changes to its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Data-Use Policies, two separate documents that govern the way the company handles advertising, user data, and third-party retention of that data.

The updates are “proposals,” Facebook tells me, and so they will accept and review comments on them from its user community. However, I doubt that the company is up for much iteration. As its Chief Privacy Office Erin Egan noted in a short statement, Facebook is “proposing this update as part of a settlement in a court case relating to advertising.”

The proposals are broad and varied, so we have some ground to cover:

Ads

The rewritten section about ads is clear: “You give us permission to use your name, profile picture, content, and information in connection with commercial, sponsored, or related content.” In other words, Facebook can use anything you have uploaded in its advertising algorithms and systems.

This is neither surprising nor out of bounds. That Facebook would employ public information supplied by its users to generate revenue is hardly evil. Importantly, Facebook will respect your privacy choices in how it uses your content: “If you have selected a specific audience for your content or information, we will respect your choice when we use it.” Good.

Legal

Another change to the rules will be of interest to the litigious among you: Legal action against Facebook is now limited to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, or in a state court “located in San Mateo County.” The prior set of rules demanded a Santa Clara court, but the company moved its headquarters, thus requiring the change.

Data Usage

Facebook changed its data-usage rules, as well. The company now claims the right to know what sort of computer or other device you are using. So, it can tell if you are on Android or the like. This is somewhat innocuous, though Facebook does retain the right to — and this is not new — “get your GPS or other location information so we can tell you if any of your friends are nearby.” Big Facebook. That buzzing on your phone is your friend checking into the bar a block away.

Sharing Your Data

Facebook also claims the right to share your public information with others: “We may enable access to public information that has been shared through our services, or allow service providers to access information so they can help us provide service.” In other words, Facebook can vend your public information to others. Lock down whatever you really don’t want out there, folks.

Data Retention by Third Parties

When you sign up for an application, it requests access to your information, perhaps your email address or other datum. It can store that information if it wants, on its own servers, and keep it, even if you have deleted the application itself from Facebook.

Thus, what you provide to an application at the start you should presume to be theirs in perpetuity. When you delete an application, the connection is severed, but their copy — provided that they made one — remains. You can directly reach out to the company and request that your information be deleted.

However, provided that the terms of service of the third-party app or game don’t require them to do so, I don’t see how you have much standing as a single user. That information is therefore in their hands. Facebook has stern rules about how that data can be used, it should be noted. I think the language is strong. Still, I have a slight frown about this. I had never given the issue much thought, and honestly thought that applications merely accessed my information via my permission from Facebook itself — that the data was always on Facebook’s side. That is not the case.

Reason to stop using Facebook? That’s your call. Reason to stop downloading every dating app on Friday night after a few too many gin and tonics and granting them all rights to just about your entire Facebook data set? Yeah, probably.

–

The changes confirm that Facebook wants to use your data as much as possible to generate advertising incomes, and that other parties want as much access to your data as possible. If you feel a creeping sensation on the back of your neck, recall that privacy is evolving, and what cooly irks you today is something that would have made you hopping mad five years ago. Our tolerance for sharing is constantly expanding, not receding.

A section-by-section teardown of the changes can be found here in case you want to get into the weeds.

Top Image Credit: Acid Pix

There will be a very special booth at this year’s Disrupt conference in San Francisco – the Office Hours HQ where TC writers and editors will field your questions, look at your pitches, and chat on all things entrepreneurial. Darrell will also be there if you want to discuss Canada.

Office hours, at least for the first day, will exist on a first-in-first-out basis. We will man (and woman) the booth from 10am until 6pm and writers and editors will change on the hour. You can either pick your favorite writer and go over and chat or you can simply show up and talk. We’re ready and willing to hear all comers.

Do you have a pitch? Pare it down to about five minutes and be ready to show off your slides, iPad demos, and the like. We expect to have a full house and should be an interesting experiment. If things get too crowded we will schedule timeslots on the second and third days.

We’re excited to offer this fun opportunity and we hope to see you at Office Hours. Below is the full schedule.

Monday

• 10:00 — John Biggs & Greg Kumparak
• 11:00 — Alex Williams & Chris Velazco
• 12:00 — Darrell Etherington & Natasha Lomas
• 1:00 — Frederic Lardinois & Sarah Perez
• 2:00 — Stephanie Yang & Ryan Lawler
• 3:00 — Eliza Brooke & Billy Gallagher
• 4:00 — Mike Butcher & Josh Constine
• 5:00 — Ingrid Lunden & Anthony Ha

Tuesday

• 10:00 — Rip Empson & Kim-Mai Cutler
• 11:00 – Stephanie Yang & Frederic Lardinois
• 12:00 — Natasha Lomas & Eliza Brooke
• 1:00 — Anthony Ha & Romain Dillet
• 2:00 — Chris Velazco & Ryan Lawler
• 3:00 — Billy Gallahger & Leena Rao
• 4:00 – Alex Wilhelm & Greg Ferenstein
• 5:00 — Sarah Perez & Alex Williams

Wednesday

• 10:00 — Greg Ferenstein & Rip Empson
• 11:00 — John Biggs & Greg Kumparak
• 12:00 — Matthew Panzarino & Alex Wilhelm
• 1:00 — Darrell Etherington & Chris Velazco
• 2:00 — Stephanie Yang & Anthony Ha

(staffing and times are subject to change)

Welcome to another exciting episode of “You’ve Got to be Kidding.” Today’s star attraction is the BlueBulb, an ordinary-looking LED light bulb whose distinguishing feature is its Bluetooth connectivity.

The transparent SoundSticks, which first debuted at the turn of the millennium, are back. And this time, they’re wireless. Let’s go back to the future.

I dare say Sony’s Vaio Pro 13 is everything you could want in an ultrabook. Until the MacBook Air gets a much-needed screen upgrade, this svelte number from Sony is arguably the best ultralight money can buy.

Funny Or Die has spent the last six years making some of the funniest content on the web, and unlike a lot of the new media companies that have popped up lately, it’s done so without leaning on YouTube for distribution. Instead, Funny Or Die has relied on hilarious, celeb-filled videos to drive content to its own website.

The concept behind Funny Or Die was spawned kind of from Hot Or Not, according to CEO Dick Glover. At the time it was formed, there weren’t all the social media outlets that we have today, and there was no real place on the web to find all the best comedy content. So they set out to build it.

The Funny Or Die headquarters is surprisingly small, but within a constrained space, the writing and production team are able to churn out upwards of . That’s because the team has kept scrappy and small, with a kind of startup mentality you might not expect from a media company that has celebrities dropping in all the time.

“The nice thing about Funny Or Die is that everything is produced in-house, so all of the writers, directors, producers, and editors — they’re all under one roof, literally,” Mike Farah, the company’s head of production, told me.

So how does Funny Or Die get so many stars to participate? Glover says it’s able to do so by giving them the freedom to create content that the can’t do anywhere else. That sort of creative freedom is appealing to celebs who might want to work on something different than what they usually are known for.

“The incentive for them is they can do whatever they want and that’s a powerful incentive,” Glover said. “This is a community where by and large, that’s not the case with them. Yes, they can pick and choose their projects, but once you’re into a project you’re getting notes from six different people and you have demands from other people.”

That’s attracting big-name talent to work with Funny Or Die, which in turn is attracting viewers and outside investment. Last year, it got some strategic funding from Turner.

Check out the video above, which is the last in our series on the new digital media companies in Los Angeles. And be sure to watch all the others that we’ve published previously to learn more about how a whole new video ecosystem is forming there:

• Get Ready For TechCrunch TV’s Tour Of The New Hollywood
• Inside Machinima, The New Video Network For Gamers And Fanboys
• Fullscreen Gives Video Creators The Tools To Collaborate And Make More Money On YouTube
• Meet Tastemade, The YouTube Network For Food Lovers
• Check Out YouTube Space LA, The Company’s Huge Production Space For Local Video Creators
• How YouTube Network Big Frame Focuses On Big Stars With Four Vertical Brands
• How ZEFR Brings Content ID To Content Creators, Media Companies… And Now Brands
• This Is How Maker Studios Scales Video Production For The YouTube Generation
• Inside Funny Or Die’s Celeb-Filled Online Video Production House

Today Facebook ended normal trading with a market valuation of $100.6 billion. The milestone capped a long return to form for Facebook, after a botched IPO and mobile concerns led investors to unload their shares during its first year as a public entity.

Facebook traded as low as $17.55 on September 4, 2012. This makes the achievement of reaching the $100 billion mark today more fun, as it comes almost a year after the company was at its lowest recorded ebb. Facebook has recovered $58 billion in market capitalization since last fall, more than doubling in value since its 52-week low.

Facebook is in fact quite close to setting an all-time high. As TechCrunch reported on the day of the company’s IPO, “Facebook shares opened at $42.05, a 10.5 percent increase from its final price last night at $38.”

Today, Facebook closed at $41.34, up 1.95 percent during normal trading. In after-hours trading, the company is up a fraction. However, Facebook traded as high as $41.94, pennies from an all-time high.

What is causing Facebook’s long boom? The precise opposite of what dragged it down in the first place. The company has proven that it can monetize mobile usage at high levels, driving revenue growth. Facebook has consistently expanded its user base as well, demonstrating functional longevity.

It’s a good moment for Facebook. However, the firm is incredibly richly valued, which might make it ripe for a market correction, or investor profit taking. Google Finance estimates its trailing 12-month price-earnings ratio to be 207.87. Yahoo Finance lists a slightly smaller figure: 187.06. Investors are valuing Facebook as a growth company.

Any slip in its next-quarter earnings report — anything that might indicate that Facebook’s revenue growth will slow — and Facebook could find itself trading a lower multiple. Still, today was a good one for Facebook, snagging 2 percent more value in a day of generally negative trading.

Momentum alone might carry the company to an all-time high tomorrow.

Today Wanelo, the online platform that lets people discover and share things they “want, need, and love,” issued an update to its iOS app that brings two handy new features, search and “stories,” to its mobile shopping experience.

In general, Wanelo has emerged as a powerful player in the social shopping place since it launched back in 2010 — I’m told that Wanelo’s user count just passed the 10 million mark, which reflects nearly 70 percent growth in the past five months alone. The app’s core demographic, young fashion-savvy females, is certainly one of the most lucrative target markets out there — which may be why more than 200,000 stores have added their products to the Wanelo platform.

So this morning, I swung by Wanelo’s San Francisco headquarters to speak with founder and CEO Deena Varshavskaya about all the recent growth and get a hands-on look at the new mobile features.

The search feature is pretty self-explanatory — it lets users look for specific items, such as “black dress” or “pointed toe heels” — across the shops that they follow and the entire Wanelo platform. The “Stories” feature lets users create select and group together products and tie them all together with a short written explanation. It’s a nice addition, as it will let Wanelo users flex their editorial muscles and highlight certain trends.

Wanelo is certainly in a competitive space, as everyone from Pinterest to Polyvore to Vogue is working to be the go-to destination for stylish women with disposable income to burn. Varshavskaya says that Wanelo is set apart from the others in part because of the no-nonsense way that it facilitates shopping’s bottom line: actually buying stuff. “All the problems we’re solving are around shopping,” she says. “There are plenty of platforms… where you can see lots of images. But Wanelo is where you shop.”

VMware announced general availability of VMware vSphere 5.5 and VMware vCloud Suite at VMworld today. The new  version of its virtualization technology includes the integration of Cloud Foundry, the platform-as-a-service that is now part of Pivotal, which spun out from VMware parent company EMC.

Cloud Foundry used to be VMware’s crown jewel. But now it will work as a platform that Pivotal will build for VMware to integrate with its new cloud, vCloud Hybrid Services. Dubbed Pivotal CF, the service will be made available later this year on VMware vSphere and vCloud Hybrid Services. vSphere is designed as an enhanced set of virtualization-management tools for cloud computing. vCloud Suite manages vSphere to help companies pool resources for more elasticity.

Gelsinger highlighted vSphere 5.5 as part of the company’s overall strategy to be the leader in what it calls the “software defined data center.” vSphere 5 represents the compute aspect of the architecture. Its new virtual storage will be wrapped into its newly introduced “virtual SAN.” The networking is embodied in NSX, the new network hypervisor it launched today. The concept is to pool the resources and leverage cloud when need be.

The new versions of the vSphere Suite and vCloud are designed to integrate with VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Services, an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) play that will get investment with new data centers in California, Virginia and later in Dallas. Managed hosting service Savvis will also work with VMware closely in its vCloud Hybrid Services.

VMware will focus on the deep integration between a customer’s data centers and the VMware hybrid cloud, all running on its virtualization technology. The company is not providing compatibility with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which means that customers are forced to work pretty much entirely with VMware if they go with the full integration. That’s handy for the VMware customer that simply wants to connect to a VMware external service. But even if they do, customers will not get the rock-bottom pricing that comes with a service like AWS. VMware has not announced pricing but they have maintained it would not be as low as AWS.

VMware appears to be putting more of a bet on OpenStack, which is now supported in vSphere and can be integrated with Nicira, which is heavily invested as a contributor in the open cloud movement.

One VMware executive at a press conference compared OpenStack to buying a home theater system. A customer can buy the VMware package deal that comes with vSphere and vCloud’s hybrid integration or they can use the OpenStack framework with VMware technology.

There are a number of customers who are starting to build out on OpenStack. Cloud Foundry has some general acceptance in the market, but none of this is plug-and-play which benefits the consultants most of all.