Category: Tech news

Apple may be testing changes to its iTunes App Store ranking algorithms, which see it taking into account app ratings and other new factors in the App Store Top Chart rankings. Whether or not the changes are more experimental in nature or indicative of a larger overhaul of how apps are ranked in the Top Charts is not yet known. However, these changes have resulted in apps losing and gaining in position without a corresponding increase or decrease in app downloads.

Boston-based app marketing startup Fiksu was the first to notice this trend in late July, having seen apps with ratings of four stars or more receiving a ranking boost, which they’ve maintained throughout August. Meanwhile, apps with fewer than three stars dropped down in the charts, and haven’t moved back, despite downloads remaining relatively consistent. Mid-rated apps of 3 to 4 stars have not been as affected.

Previously, the App Store took into account download volumes and velocity as the two largest factors that determined an app’s rank, the firm noted in its report. But now how well consumers actually like the app could be coming into play.

There’s also some evidence that the rankings for the newest version of the application may have more influence than those for older versions, which would make sense in this scenario, given that an app publisher may roll out an update to a historically well-reviewed and highly ranked app that’s a dramatic and unwelcome change causing a surge in negative reviews.

Another major shift that Fiksu has seen for several weeks now is a slowdown in how often apps change their position. In the past, apps’ ranks would update every 15 minutes, allowing developers to really see the impact of their new installs. Lately, though, app positions are changing every three hours on the consumer-facing App Store.

This latter change would go a long way to help prevent app developers from using automated means to game the App Store charts. Potentially, the slowdown would give Apple time to identify “short download bursts,” explains Fiksu, which are often associated with robotic downloads and other inorganic means of acquiring downloads. In theory, the delay could allow Apple the time to look for anomalies in download patterns, and prevent apps from entering the charts when their “growth” had been bought and paid for.

It’s interesting that this change came around the exact same time when an app called Glide was climbing the App Store charts, reaching No. 1 in social networking and No. 16 overall, despite numerous reports from users claiming the app was spamming their contacts to acquire downloads, a now all-too-common behavior. (Glide’s user interface made inviting contacts to Glide an opt-out instead of opt-in behavior, and used other techniques that left users surprised, then angry, about its methods.)

Glide is neither the first nor the last to attempt to “growth hack” its way to the top of the charts, of course, but it’s a good example of the kind of app that would have been kept out of the rankings by such an algorithm change. As angry users filled the App Store with negative reviews and one-star ratings, the new algorithms could have possibly prevented the app from ever reaching the top 20 in the first place. Fiksu says it’s currently unclear whether the actual reviews (volumes or validity) are being taken into account here as well, but that it would make sense if they were.

Engaging Apps Rewarded, Too?

According to Ouriel Ohayon, CEO of app discovery and marketing service Appsfire, some developers are also noticing that Apple is taking into account refunds and is processing revenue data differently for free-to-play games, as well. He had specifically noticed changes in the Top Grossing Ranks, noting that Pandora and Rdio had never been so high. (Pandora is now No. 1).

However, Ohayon cautions that this change won’t mean that Apple has eliminated publishers’ ability to game the charts entirely. “Ratings are still massively gamed, and the boost of ranks can still be achieved via many ad networks, even if the pace is decreasing to three hours,” he adds.

Meanwhile, MobileDevHQ CEO Ian Sefferman, whose company keeps more of an eye on app search results than rankings, says he’s noticed some recent changes affecting another aspect to the App Store as well. The search results are different when searching for iPhone apps from the iPad, when they used to the same as when you searched from an iPhone. Combined with Fisku’s data, this seems to indicate that Apple is focusing on improving app discovery overall, rather than just ranking tweaks.

That seems to be the case, as Niren Hiro of SearchMan, notes they’ve been hearing anecdotal reports from developers in both the U.S. and Japan who say that new user engagement (time spent, day 2 opens, ongoing opens, etc.) are also now increasingly affecting category rankings, and that as of August 5th, this change took place globally. (One example below, in the chart).

As with any App Store algorithm change, it soon becomes a game of whack-a-mole. Apple has to soon try to work around the tactic that developers come up with in order to limit the damage from whatever new metric could cause their apps to decline in the charts. In the case of ratings, that appears to be a method where app users are diverted to third-party tools to leave their negative reviews, allowing developers to send only positive reviews to the App Store.

While anecdotal reports aren’t enough to go on, tracking engagement would be a promising change. If it was a factor in rankings, even developers trying to game the App Store through the methods described above would find their plans foiled. Then, the best way to reach the top of the charts would be to build a quality, engaging app…just as it should be.

YouTube today announced a significant increase to courtesy Data API limits, which regulate how many videos app developers can upload and how many read and write operations their apps can perform. YouTube’s quota system previously gave developers access to 5 million units per day, but now they will have 50 million units to play with. In addition, YouTube is reducing the cost of uploading a video from 16,000 units to just 1,600 units, so a developer could theoretically now upload almost 100 times more videos than before (for a total of close to 30,000 per day).

The Data API – now in its third version – basically gives developers full access to virtually all of the features YouTube offers on its own site. Developers can use it to fetch search YouTube results and “to retrieve, insert, update, and delete resources like videos or playlists.” Together with the Player API and Analytics API, Google says, the Data API “lets your application provide a full-fledged YouTube experience that includes search and discovery, content creation, video playback, account management, and viewer statistics.”

As a Google spokesperson told me, when YouTube first launched the API, it decided on a moderate limit to ensure that everything worked properly. Now that it has been tested more broadly, the company decided it was time to expand the limits to ensure that developers “have what they need with our APIs.”

YouTube’s somewhat unusual quota system has long been a source of some confusion among developers. A read operation that just retrieves the ID of a resource costs one unit, for example. A write operation is a bit more costly at 50 units. Developers who hit their quota limits can always petition Google to increase them, but Google can always deny these requests, so today’s update should give many developers the reassurance that they can scale their apps without hitting YouTube’s limits anytime soon.

On Monday, an app called Hollaback! relaunched in New York City with an unveiling in Brooklyn by Council Speaker and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn. Since its release in 2011, Hollaback! has created a crowdsourced map of street harassment incidents directed at women and LGBTQ individuals with the hope of putting a stop to catcalling and other forms of sexual harassment.

With the updated app, users can opt to report harassment directly to City Council district representatives. Emily May, the Executive Director of Hollaback!, told me that the goal is to gather enough stories to prove to lawmakers that street harassment is an issue that merits legislative action.

That could take the form of public service announcements, education workshops in middle and high schools, and even improving street lighting.

While workplaces have developed workshops and policies for gender-based harassment — a good step, although it persists nonetheless — catcalling on the street is still alive, well, and largely unacknowledged as an issue. But for many women, honks, whistles, and comments on how good they look in that dress are part of the fabric of everyday life. Living in New York, I’ve been told to “Smile, baby” more times than I can count.

When Hollaback! got started in 2005, it was a blog that collected harassment stories, often in the form of photos that women took of their harassers. Building a community around street harassment was an empowering way for those who have been subjected to it to understand it as a widespread problem.

“People came into Hollaback! and said, ‘There this really crappy thing that happened to me,’” May said. “Putting it online helped them contextualize and move it outside their individual experience, and also help them understand that it wasn’t their fault. Their responsibility to end it doesn’t lie exclusively with them, or changing what they wear.”

And Hollaback! isn’t the only organization of its kind. Groups around the world have been building apps, Tumblrs, and community websites geared toward crowdsourcing street harassment stories. In 1999, New York’s Street Harassment Project launched a now-defunct website that shared and archived women’s stories.

Like Hollaback!, Egypt’s HarassMap collects anonymous reports of sexual harassment — anything from ogling to assault — and bundles them geographically into red dots on a map that are proportional in size to the number of complaints. Since the mobile app launched in 2010, they have received 1,243 reports.

For HarassMap, this data is more useful for informing their own offline volunteer efforts than it is as evidence to bring to the Egyptian government.

“We have been in contact with some government agencies, but our experience shows us that so far there has been no real political will to address the issue. A public approach to sexual harassment, in the context of Egypt at least, has been much more effective than an official, governmental one, or one that focuses on advocacy for new or improved legislation,” said Noora Flinkman, a member of the HarassMap team. “We believe that political and legislative change in terms of sexual harassment will only come when the issue has become socially unacceptable and people themselves demand change and action from the government.”

Holly Kearl, founder of the nonprofit Stop Street Harassment, said that although the term “street harassment” came out of the rape crisis movement of the 1970s and was addressed by pockets of activists in the 1980s and early 1990s, sharing and documenting the problem through online and mobile tools is what has allowed it to grow.

After piloting its new reporting system in New York, Hollaback! aims to extend that service to the other cities it operates in stateside and internationally. Kearl is currently fundraising to conduct the United States’ first national study on street harassment. If self-reported data gathered on apps isn’t enough to push legislation, a formalized study could have more sway.

“People in power typically don’t experience street harassment so it’s not on their mind or a priority but those who are impacted by it can now tell their stories on social media, on blogs and keep attention on the issue,” Kearl said. “Social media has also been a great way to educate people who don’t understand this issue because they can read through stories easily. I especially encourage people to share stories with men in their lives who may not otherwise know this is happening.”

Today Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that within 12 months, he will exit as the company’s leader. A special consortium at the company will work to find his replacement. And that person won’t be Steve Sinofsky or Bill Gates so calm down.

The news, announced before the bell this morning, has sent Microsoft’s stock up. Not as high as you might think, but just under 7 percent. At the time of writing, Microsoft is trading at $34.55 per share. It closed yesterday at $32.39. Doing a simple valuation calculation, Microsoft is now worth $18 billion more than it was yesterday.

Call it the Ballmer bump.

Investors are essentially betting that Microsoft, under a new leader, will be able to move more quickly on its plan to leave software behind, and instead become a company that vends its vaunted “devices and services.”

However, Ballmer’s exit is perfect in a way, given that he stuck it out until a number of things were sorted. New business model for the company so that it can face the future? Check. Moving into the OEM space to grow revenue in a new market? Check. New mobile platform that proves itself in the market and will soon reach eight-figure unit volume quarterly? Check. Move Office to a subscription product based on the cloud? Check. Incubate new enterprise-facing products to build new revenue streams? Check. And of course, re-tool Windows for touch, and then re-tool that version of Windows to work? Check.

Microsoft’s long-languishing stock price and history of products such as Internet Explorer 6 and Windows Vista are darker marks on Ballmer’s tenure. However, he is leaving on a high note. And I can respect that.

Now. Who is next?

Top Image Credit: Microsoft Sweden

Ottawa-based BlackSumac may not be the first startup to try and revamp the home security system, nor is it the first to use a crowdfunding platform like Indiegogo to make it happen. What this batch of Canadians did do however is create one of the sleekest-looking bits of security hardware I’ve seen. The Piper is to security hubs what the Nest is to thermostats.

But what does it do?

The Piper unit itself is about the size of your average desktop computer speaker, and it’s hard not to look at it without being drawn to the user-controllable camera pod (complete with fish-eye lens) right smack in the middle of the thing. More importantly though, the Piper itself is loaded up with temperature, humidity, and motion sensors, and can also act as a base station that communicates with different external sensors thanks to its included Z-Wave support.

It’s also got a bit of an IFTTT streak, as users can tap into those sensors to create custom rules based on what they detect from the Piper iOS and Android app. Did something just make a loud sound in your apartment? You can create a rule that automatically kicks on the lights (assuming you’ve got some Z-Wave friendly controllers installed). Is something (other than Fido) moving around the bedroom? Piper can automatically start recording video, and if you spring for the cellular model, it can also fire off a text message to let you know what’s going on. Of course, different situations require different sets of rules, so the Piper app allows users to be lumped into categories for when you’re at home, at work, or on vacation.

Now is this thing going to replace a more traditional, professionally installed security system? No way. If anything, Piper is likely to find its niche among renters and tech-savvy home owners who want some level of security without having to shell out for a full-blown home monitoring scheme. BlackSumac has at least one notable competitor to do battle with in that space — Canary is yet another Indiegogo darling that wants to simplify home monitoring, but its lack of Z-Wave support means the system isn’t nearly as extensible as Piper.

And the Piper already seems to have to struck a chord — it’s only been two days since the Canadian startup behind it launched an Indiegogo campaign and the project has already made it a third of the way to its $100k funding goal. Just be warned if you decide to take a plunge on this thing: the cheapo early backer spots have all been filled, so you’ll have to shell out at least $209 to trick out your flat.

Bitcoin exchange service Mt. Gox‘s financial troubles are even more worrying than anticipated. On Monday, GigaOm reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had seized $2.9 million from Mt. Gox’s Dwolla account. But The Genesis Block found out that Mt. Gox’s Wells Fargo accounts were seized as well, adding $2.1 million to the frozen assets. In total, $5 million was seized as Mt. Gox failed to register in the U.S. as a money transmitting company.

In May, the Department of Homeland Security issued a seizure warrant for Mt. Gox’s Dwolla account. As a consequence, its users couldn’t use Dwolla anymore to exchange USD to Bitcoins and Bitcoins to USD.

$2.1 million was seized on June 19, just one day before suspending U.S. withdrawals.

Yet, the most surprising move happened in June, when the company announced that it would suspends U.S. dollar withdrawals. While the feature was supposed to come back two weeks later, withdrawals have been sluggish ever since.

The latest warrant tells us why Mt. Gox couldn’t keep up with demand. $2.1 million was seized on June 19, just one day before suspending U.S. withdrawals. With $5 million in frozen assets, the company simply didn’t have enough funds in dollars to convert Bitcoin to USD.

Even when U.S. authorities planned to seize Mt. Gox’s Dwolla account, they already stated that Mt. Gox’s Wells Fargo accounts were the real issue. In order to accept funds in dollars, the company opened a Wells Fargo business account for Mutum Sigillum LLC (Mt. Gox’s American subsidiary). But it declared that Mt. Gox was “a business not engaged in money services.”

In particular, president and CEO Mark Karpeles answered ‘no’ to two important questions: “Do you deal in or exchange currency for your customer?” and “Does your business accept funds from customers and send the funds based on customers’ instructions (Money Transmitter)?”

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the Bitcoin exchange service should be considered as a money transmitting company. More recently, New York’s top banking regulator confirmed this view — according to New York’s Financial Services, all Bitcoin firms should respect the current financial regulatory guidelines to “root out illegal activity.”

Here are the seizure warrants obtained by The Genesis Block:

The final shoe has dropped in the massive, wholesale re-organization of Microsoft. It began in July and saw all the department heads changed in an effort to focus on hardware and services and make the company’s various product groups work more closely together and be more cohesive. Yes, CEO Steve Ballmer is out, having announced he will retire within 12 months.

Say what you want about Microsoft, but the company has held on through a time of tumultuous change in the technology industry. When Ballmer took over the CEO role from founder Bill Gates in 2000, the company was dealing with one of the largest anti-trust battles in U.S. history, due to having used its dominant position in the PC market with Windows to take out competitors, like Netscape’s Navigator web browser, which competed against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Microsoft today has some successes in gaming, the enterprise and cloud, to be sure. For example, as TechCrunch noted earlier this month, Microsoft’s cloud computing product, Azure, recorded $1 billion in revenue over the past 12 months it was reported in April, and Office 365 is currently generating revenue at a run rate of $1.5 billion per year, and growing. And the Xbox 360 is far from dead.

But the company has been struggling to shift with the sea change that is the end of the PC era and the shift to mobile. PC shipments were down 14 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of 2013 — their worst decline ever — and they were down by 11 percent the next. Meanwhile, tablets may begin to outsell PCs by Q2 2014. But Microsoft’s own entrant into this space, the Microsoft Surface, hasn’t been selling. The company even had to take a giant $900 million writedown last quarter because of unsold Surface RTs, the ARM-based version of the Microsoft Surface tablet computer.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s performance in mobile computing still leaves much to be desired, as well. The Windows Phone operating system, and the devices from the leading Windows Phone OEM, Nokia, are seeing expanded shipments, but the OS is still competing for third place in a smartphone market dominated by Apple and Google’s Android.

While Ballmer may have gotten Microsoft through its days of antitrust battles still intact, instead of having to split up into different units, he hasn’t been able to help Microsoft take a leading position in the emerging post-PC era. To be fair, anyone running a company like Microsoft would have similar issues. This is an enormous organization, and a business which thrived at at time when putting a PC in everyone’s home was a real and achievable mission. Microsoft led that march. But now, computing is everywhere — people hold the world’s information in their pockets and expect a suite of complementary services to help them access and manage their work, life, and entertainment while on the go.

To be successful in the new mobile-first era, a company needs to have a cohesive strategy across all the devices that users carry. Yet Microsoft is not known for the interoperability of its internal units — a problem the recent re-org aimed to address.

As Ballmer wrote at the time of Windows head Steve Sinofksy’s dismissal, it’s “imperative that we continue to drive alignment across all Microsoft teams, and have more integrated and rapid development cycles for our offerings.” He later appointed former Windows co-leader and a then favorite for the CEO position Julie Larson-Green to lead the Windows engineering group, citing specifically her “proven ability to work across product groups,” among the reasons for the change.

Now a new CEO will step in, and potentially shake things up again, leading some to wonder if all the changes just introduced are now only temporary.

The antitrust days were a tough time for Microsoft and Ballmer, but whomever steps in to fill Ballmer’s shoes will be left to deal with a lot of problems of their own. Microsoft lost a lot of ground to Apple, Google and Samsung by being late with Windows Phone, which launched in fall 2010 as Windows Phone 7, before transitioning to a new kernel two years later. The market has barely gotten a taste of Windows Phone as it’s meant to be. But now the strategy has to include not just trying to compete at the high end with Apple and flagship Android devices like the Google Nexus phones and the Galaxy line from Samsung, but also on the low end where Microsoft could win share in emerging and developing markets. This is no small undertaking.

Today, out come the short lists of possible CEOs capable of taking on these challenges. Names that come up repeatedly include COO Kevin Turner, (downgraded by re-org); EVP of Marketing Tami Reller; EVP Tony Bates, former Skype president now head of BD; and EVP Satya Nadella, president of Servers and Tools. And there’s all that speculation that maybe Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, was actually sent over to shape the flailing smartphone maker into Microsoft’s next mobile hardware division. Whether that was really the case, Elop has done just that. That could be a big surprise, and definitely a shakeup, to bring him back into the fold.

But all we know right now is this: one person who won’t be the new CEO is Bill Gates.

You’d be forgiven for mistaking the Huawei Ascend P6 for an iPhone 5 — particularly if viewed from a distance. With its distinctive rounded bottom, an all-glass front, and a brushed-aluminum backside, the P6 definitely borrows a design cue or two from Cupertino. Pick up this world phone though, and you’ll quickly realize the similarities end there.

It can’t compete on volume or clarity with similarly-priced speakers, but the B?m Boom Box does have an attractive design, good battery life, and excellent Bluetooth chops.

I want to jump higher. What basketball player doesn’t? Getting up is good for rebounding, shooting, lay-ups, and, of course, the big daddy of all sports moves—dunking. Not that I can dunk. What I can do though, is lace up a pair of Athletic Propulsion Labs basketball shoes, which have a unique distinction: They are banned by the NBA for their ability to improve a player’s vertical leap.

With Bitcoin’s promise of frictionless transactions, particularly across international borders, it’s inevitable that a team would use the math-based currency to attack the global remittances market.

The World Bank estimates that migrants will send about $515 billion to relatives in developing countries by 2015, which is about 10 times the size of the U.S.’s budget for foreign aid.

The old stand-bys like Western Union can charge around 10 percent for transactions in the market, an amount that Buttercoin co-founders Cedric Dahl and Bennett Hoffman find obscene.

But Bitcoin, which is a pure math-based currency that allows for anonymous and irreversible transactions without the need for a third-party facilitator like a bank, promises transactions at a substantially lower cost.

Buttercoin plans to open in India within the next three months and then to operate in six countries in nine months’ time. Their model is to open a local Bitcoin exchange in each country. When they enter a market, they pair with local money transfer businesses to have legal compliance in the country. But these local partners don’t touch the Bitcoin-to-local currency transactions; they merely get a 50 percent cut of Buttercoin‘s fees in exchange for having the proper licenses and relationships with regulators.

The pair got into Bitcoin after a several year hiatus, during which they built a hacker house in Austin and filmed a documentary on Parkour. They had previously sold an analytics company and while at Microsoft, Dahl managed a $120 million budget and worked on applying analytics to marketing.

But Bitcoin intrigued them.

“We realized somebody had to put the big boy pants on in the space, do the tech right, and be compliant,” Dahl said. “Someone had to remove the existential risk in Bitcoin.”

They initially started with a mining operation called CoinHarvest. (Bitcoin has to be “mined”; people actually have to buy hardware to expend a huge amount of computational power to have a chance of winning some Bitcoin as the currency’s supply expands at a predictable pace.)

But they then started considering opening a white-labeled platform for creating Bitcoin exchanges, before settling on the remittance market. Their product isn’t launched at this time, but they’re planning to release it within the next three months.

To do that, they’ve raised about $1 million from investors including Google Ventures’ Kevin Rose and Chris Hutchins, Floodate, Initialized Capital and Rothenberg Ventures. They brought on an economist in Kevin Zhou, who worked at Standard & Poors, and set aside about half the capital for market-making.

This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, we have Menlo Ventures’ Managing Director Mark Siegel in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.

Siegel joined Menlo Ventures in 1996 and focuses on investments in data storage, cloud computing, big data, and digital advertising. His active investments and board seats include Dropcam, eXelate, Invidi, Media6, Mixr, Pluribus Networks, Tintri and Voltage Security. Some of his previous board seats include 3PAR (acquired by HP), Pliant Technology (acquired by SanDisk), RNA Networks (acquired by Dell), BlueGill Technologies (acquired by Checkfree), and Rubric (acquired by Broadbase).

Prior to becoming a VC Siegel was a product manager for Oracle’s Massively Parallel Processing Group and then managed a consulting group at Oracle dedicated to serving early customers of this product.

Siegel has some interesting thoughts on The Right Now Economy, and some of the startups that are capitalizing on this in mobile, social, cloud computing and data. I’m curious to hear more about his thought process and how startups can expand on the potential new opportunities in this “economy.”

Please send us your questions for Siegel here or put them in the comments below!

Powa Technologies, a UK startup that’s been working on an integrated mobile payments and e-commerce platform with some augmented reality thrown into the mix, is today announcing its first round of outside funding — and it’s a doozy. The company says that it has picked up a Series A round of $76 million to take its technology global, and to a retailer near you with what CEO and founder Dan Wagner describes as the ultimate “killer app” for commerce.

The funding is coming from a single investor that Powa has declined to name, describing it only as “one of the largest investment management funds in the world,” but well-placed sources tell us it is Wellington Management, a Boston-based investment specialist with billions of dollars under management. Prior to this round, Powa’s growth was funded privately, largely by Wagner himself investing under $20 million to date.

Powa first emerged into the public eye in June 2012, looking like another Square-style mobile payments clone (complete, even, with some contentious use of photographs with hands that looked suspiciously like those used in Square’s promotional photos). One exception was that mPowa, as the service is called, was aimed early on at bigger corporations, as well as the small businesses that have been the focus of Square, iZettle, PayPal’s here, SumUp and the rest. Since last year, mPowa has inked deals with companies like Portugal Telecom and First National Bank in South Africa to resell the product.

But the bigger plan, according to Wagner, will go well beyond mobile payments.

It will extend to include a wider transacting platform that brings together online and offline retail transactions with a further product called PowaTag. This has yet to be released, but Wagner describes it as a technology that can recognize “any image” taken on a mobile device and subsequently send a user to a site to buy it. Wagner says that those who have signed on for the full Powa platform include Electrolux, the BBC, and Harper Collins, among others. “We were always dangerous to competitors,” Wagner told me in an interview. “Now we’re deadly.”

The company is nothing if not aiming very high. Part of the funding will go towards staffing up the company, currently at 130 but soon hiring 250 more in the UK and 200 more employees elsewhere in the world. (One executive that’s getting announced at the same time as the funding: George Thaw, the former COO of SAP, who will be the CEO for channels, overseeing Powa’s re-seller and system integrator initiatives. Wagner tells me there are some more interesting executive recruits to be announced soon.)

It’s a piece of news that is good enough in these teetering-economy times that no less than the UK’s prime minister, David Cameron, has provided a statement endorsing the company:

“We have seen some great British success stories in technology lately, as well as more encouraging news for the economy. So I am delighted that Powa is further contributing to that with the creation of 250 jobs to expand their growing business,” he said. “E-commerce is vital to our economic success. One in five of our small businesses export. If we could change that from one in five to one in four we would wipe out our trade deficit at one stroke. That is why this expansion of Powa is such good news – helping British Business increase trade both at home and abroad.”

Powa is not giving an exact valuation except to note that the $76 million values it in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Wagner also says that this is his first step to raising the profile of the company en route to a public listing — whether that would be in the U.S. or UK has yet to be determined. He says he chose to go the route of an investment management company rather than a VC or private equity house so that he could continue to have “complete freedom” to make business decisions. Powa retained Barclays to help find a backer and eventually help prepare Powa for listing.

For as crazy as such a large investment sounds for a company that may only vaguely ring a bell, Wagner is not someone to be overlooked. He’s a serial entrepreneur with pretty extensive e-commerce and analytics experience, who well understands that one of the holy grails for a lot of businesses has been a solution that integrates everything, including legacy and new streams of revenue, in a way that is painless for everyone involved.

Wagner’s first company, the market analytics startup M.A.I.D., was sold to Thomson Reuters many years ago for $500 million; his second company, Venda, has developed e-commerce sites for companies like Tesco, Orange, and the Universal Music Group — which could give some clue to where he holds contacts today and who Powa may count as clients in the future.

Third time’s the charm.

We’re here (yep, still) at Y Combinator’s Summer 2013 demo day, covering the wide range of 49 startups pitching their wares to a large crowd of investors, fellow founders and members of the media.

So far we’ve met an augmented reality glasses company, seen Sergey Brin’s little brother launch a restaurant menu company, and seen a baby giggle at a Robot toy. But it’s not over yet.

Batch 3: Go!

BloomThat: Uber for flowers

BloomThat is positioning itself as an “Uber for flowers,” providing on-demand delivery of flowers and making it as easy as sending a text message. The idea is to provide a better product than is currently available today online, delivering more beautiful flowers in just 90 minutes.

The cut flower business is an $8 billion industry today, but BloomThat thinks it can be an even bigger opportunity if its service catches on. More than 40 percent of its orders come from existing customers, with some ordering once a week on average. In other words, by providing a better product faster, the company is generating new demand. Imagine if it were available nationwide.

Check out further coverage of BloomThat right here.

Crowdery: A/B testing for physical products

A/B testing is a crucial step for people who create software in deciding how an app will look and feel. Crowdery wants to power a similar A/B testing process for companies that create physical things — like clothing items and accessories — to determine what customers will want to buy before the brand puts things into physical production.

Crowdery works by leveraging the “power of pre-orders” that’s helped Kickstarter launch so many successful products. Ultimately, Crowdery’s aim is to help companies like J. Crew make more products that people will want to snap up right away — and prevent them from creating things that will languish on shelves for months and ultimately end up in the discount bin.

If you want to check out further coverage of Crowdery, head on over here.

DataRank: Social media analysis

DataRank offers companies a social media analytics dashboard that helps them analyze conversations online about their brands and competitors. They say their quality score algorithm is much more accurate than what you’ll see from rivals.

They’ll factor in data points like the commenter’s influence, how much a comment was shared, any kind of demographic data like the commenter’s age and location and recency.

Reebee: An app for flyers

The in-store promotion flyers you get in newspapers and at the door of big box stores are a critical way for local businesses to get people inside their brick-and-mortars. But the decline of the print industry and rise of mobile are a threat to the store promotion flyer industry…unless it changes. That’s Reebee’s goal.

It takes those flyers and lets you access them from your phone or tablet. Reebee does this itself for free, but also partners with big retailers and gives them premium placement and analytics on who views their flyers in exchange for a fee. While there are others trying to take flyers mobile, it plans to innovate with flyer personalization and coupons.

Head over here to learn more about Reebee’s flyer app.

Hackermeter: Rating hackers

Hackermeter wants to become the go-to marketplace for companies to find great talent. The company believes that resumes are broken, in part because they don’t tell companies how good developers are before they hire. Hackermeter seeks to solve that, especially for employees that are early in their careers. The company does that by allowing developers to take challenges and create portfolios, and then match up the best developers with the right jobs.

It’s a two-sided marketplace, with companies on one side and developers on the other. It already has 14 companies signed up, including names like Square, Asana, and Mixpanel. On the developer side, it’s already gotten more than developers to do more than 4,000 challenges. It hopes to make $10,000 to $20,000 per developers hired using the platform, which means a market opportunity of up to $2 billion per year in the U.S.

Check out further coverage of Hackermeter right here.

Panorama Education: School surveys

Panorama has a big ambition: To bring data analytics to every school in the United States, by powering polls of students, teachers, and parents and logging and analyzing the results.

The startup started small, as a side project for Panorama Education’s three co-founders during their junior year at Yale, helping out school districts in the New Haven region with data analysis. By the time the founders graduated this past May, Panorama had evolved into a much bigger entity, having earned more than $500,000 in revenue. And the growth keeps coming — more than 3,600 schools nationwide are now paying customers of Panorama Education, and the company is profitable. Going forward, Panorama endeavors to power “a national dataset that every school will use to improve its performance.”

Check out even more coverage on Panorama Education right here.

Casetext: Replaces LexisNexis and West Law

Casetext is attacking the duopolistic hold that WestLaw and LexisNexis hold on the legal research market. It was co-founded by the heads of Stanford’s Law Review and Harvard’s Law Review who got together to actually code the site together.

They say that clients no longer want to have legal research fees passed onto them and top law firms are looking for cheaper alternatives. Casetext leverages some of the crowd sourcing techniques that Wikipedia has used to generate the annotations and analysis that have made LexisNexis and WestLaw so indispensable.

You can find even more coverage on Casetext right here.

Buttercoin: Bitcoin exchange

Sending money across international borders is a huge $500 billion a year remittance industry characterized by exorbitant fees.

Buttercoin aims to disrupt it by letting you send money quickly, inexpensively, and legally via bitcoin. The company says its technology lets it send bitcoins 200,000 times faster than its competitors, and the whole thing is legal thanks to partnerships with licensed financial service providers in each country.

Buttercoin has found a way to transfer money at no cost to itself, and only charges a small fee to competitors when customers convert money into or out of bitcoin. By drastically reducing the fees people pay to send money home or transfer it around the world, Buttercoin is trying to become the default for international remittance. While it sounds complicated, we’re told Buttercoin is the real deal

CoreOS: Google’s infrastructure for all

CoreOS provides a new server operating system for running thousands of servers themselves. The company is made up of server infrastructure experts who had previously worked at Google, Novell, and Rackspace, and now they’re looking to package up a new Linux distribution that will allow others to build their own massively scalable server infrastructure.

The company has already gotten two signed evaluation agreements with large enterprises, and see itself as an alternative to existing enterprise linux vendors and cloud service providers. Previously only Google needed this type of scalable infrastructure, but now others can benefit from the software that CoreOS has offered up to them.

Lumoid: Try-before-you-buy electronics

In the same way that Warby Parker sends several pairs of glasses for you to try before you buy, Lumoid is a service that sends you several consumer electronics products to test drive before you make a buying decision.

The idea is that gadget reviews like the ones provided by Engadget, Cnet, and TechCrunch are great, but nothing can quite replicate the experience of trying something out for yourself. Users pay a fee of around $10 per day to try out a gadget — if they decide to keep it, the amount they’ve paid so far goes toward the purchase price. Lumoid is launching with a focus on cameras, but eventually plans to branch out into other gadgets.

Senic: Measurement on phones

Senic is a startup that is trying to revolutionize the market for ultra-precise measurement tools in construction and home projects.

Raised in a family that built a measurement tools company in Germany, the company’s co-founder Toby Eichenwald recognized that the industry was moving in a different direction with the advent of the smartphone. So they’ve built an laser rangefinder that can measure distances up to 200 feet with an accuracy of about 2 millimeters. They’re retailing it for $99.

You can head right over here to check out more coverage of Senic.

Additional reporting by Colleen Taylor, Kim-Mai Cutler, Ryan Lawler, and Josh Constine.

In fear of Big Brother, award-winning technology law blog, Groklaw, has decided to shut down. TechCrunch, however, will not be following its lead. There is always a risk that an abusive government agent may try to intercept or intimidate our sources, but it’s the kind of risk that every media outlet has faced since the printing press and will continue to face into the foreseeable future.

In a heart-felt blog post, beloved Groklaw progenitor, Pamela Jones, explains that the only way to avoid the possibility of being monitored by the National Security Agency is to go completely off the grid. “My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it’s possible. I’m just an ordinary person.” Since Groklaw’s (impressive) brand of source-driven journalism was heavily reliant on email and online chatter, Jones claims, “The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can’t do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.”

While I’m no fan of secret spying, the decision to shut down has struck some journalists as rather odd. Any media outlet worth their salt regularly deals with confidential sources, often in a legal grey area that threatens both big businesses and the government itself. This most definitely poses risks. Recently, in the most extreme case, British spy agencies have detained journalists and destroyed hard drives to prevent further leaks of information.

But, this shouldn’t deter us. As the reporter tied to classified government leaks, Glenn Greenwald, explained after his partner was detained in Heathrow Airport, “If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further.

The logic of Groklaw seems to imply that all media outlets should shut down. There’s a few holes in this logic.

First, there are secure ways to communicate over email. Journalists can use end-to-end encryption, which is mostly spy  proof (probably how Greenwald communicates with his source, Edward Snowden). It’s true that some secure email providers have shut themselves down, but that’s only because the government can force them to turn over emails with the senders knowing. Individuals can and do send encrypted messages all the time that are stored on their local computers. Indeed, one secure communications provider, Silent Circle, shut down, in part, to “drive” users towards these independent types of communications.

Second, it is highly unlikely the NSA would care about a journalist like Jones or any of her sources. Jones informs people about tech law. The British government got in enough trouble when they detained their biggest threat for 9 hours in an airport; attacking the thousands of writers who deal with sensitive government matters is just plain impossible in a democratic state. Unless Jones has a scoop on some new super-secret government project, she’s just one of thousands of journalists the U.S wouldn’t target, even their wildest anti-Democratic dreams.

So, unless you believe we’re on the road to North Korea, it’s difficult to imagine why any media outlet should should shut down. I fancy myself a tad neurotic, but I won’t stop writing anytime soon and have no fear for myself or any of my sources. So, please come back Jones; the Internet hearts you.