Mobile Payment At U.S. Starbucks Locations Crosses 10% As More Stores Get Wireless Charging

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Starbucks is seeing impressive adoption of mobile payments in its U.S.-based store locations, the company revealed during its quarterly earnings conference call last night (via WSJ). Mobile payments crossed the 10 percent mark in the U.S. as a percentage of in-store purchases, indicating efforts like the Starbucks mobile app, Apple’s Passbook and Square Wallet are popular among users.

The coffee franchise is pushing forward with more mobile-focused initiatives, including the installation of wireless charging mats in select locations. The Powermat-supplied wireless charging initiative follows a trial of 17 locations in Boston, and will roll-out in Silicon Valley throughout August. The standard it uses is the Power Matters Alliance variety, which unfortunately doesn’t work with phones that use the Qi standard like the Google Nexus 4. Still, a growing number of companies are joining up with PMA’s standard, and Starbucks’s continued support should help it appear in more devices.

The lesson here is that Starbucks is putting a lot of weight behind its mobile digital initiatives, and those efforts are bearing fruit. Starbucks Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman said on the call that its “various digital initiatives have added demonstrable impact to our U.S. business in the third quarter” and promises to do even more for the company with continued investment.

Pay-by-app in this way kind of defies what many thought about mobile payments in the early days, that it would be enabled by one dominant provider and come in the form of a single wallet provided by a single ruling platform creator, and that it would be enabled by NFC or something similar. The Starbucks method involves a variety of different payment options and uses traditional barcode scanning to function, and yet it’s very popular. This seems to be because it’s convenient, easy to find and carries familiar branding from multiple trusted sources.

While we still mostly pay with traditional methods, the Starbucks example is a good illustration of how mobile-enabled commerce can work if the conditions are right and the source in question has the clout to push it through. But the Starbucks model is an island, which means we could see continued growth in mobile payments on a case-by-case basis instead of as a sweeping trend that trounces cards and currency in one tidal push.

FindIt Launches A Universal Search App For iPhone With A Visual Twist

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FindIt, a new mobile application offering universal search across emails and files stored in the cloud, is today making its official debut. With the FindIt app for iOS, you can quickly connect your Gmail, Dropbox and Google Drive accounts, and then proceed to search by keyword, person, time or file type. But the ability to search for items is not what makes FindIt unique — it’s how you search.

The concept of aggregating a user’s email, local file systems, and various cloud services in order to offer a single mechanism to search across data sets is not a new one. FindIt currently competes with other file aggregators on web and mobile, including, for example, CloudMagic and Younity (which, coincidentally, TechCrunch just took a look at today). But more broadly, FindIt also competes with some of the moves Google has been making in recent months to personalize search. Its opt-in Google Search “Field Trial,” for instance, combines data stored in Google’s more personal services like Drive, Calendar and Gmail, which then becomes searchable through Google.com.

However, explains FindIt co-founder and CEO Levi Belnap, the problem with search, and especially mobile search, is not in the capabilities of the back-end search technology involved. It’s the process of searching and the way that search results can be narrowed and filtered that needs a change.

“Search technology, in and of itself, is actually pretty good these days,” he says, noting that many companies, his included, likely take advantage of the same open-source technologies to power their backends. “But the process of searching on a phone is broken. There’s not enough space to open up advanced search and type in all these different variables. Plus, nobody wants to type anything on a phone,” he adds.

With FindIt, after you connect your accounts during setup, you can then search in a manner that more closely resembles how humans think about the things they’re trying to remember. For instance, if you’re trying to remember a restaurant you visited, you wouldn’t just type in “Italian,” but you may remember that you ate there a month ago, or that you went there with certain friends.

That same concept of drilling down in a more natural way is applied to FindIt’s own search interface, and to get there, you just tap. You can either kick off a search with a keyword then apply filters, or you can start off by tapping on “search by person,” “time” or “type” directly from the homescreen.

After you type in your keyword(s), you then tap on filters to narrow your results, specifying you only want emails or images or presentations, perhaps, or only want to see files from last week or 30 days ago.

This is easier than swiping through a long list of results on your phone, which is what you have to do today when using some competing apps, or even your native mail client, or the Gmail, Dropbox or Drive apps themselves.

In the version of FindIt awaiting App Store approval now, the app will support multiple accounts and will introduce an even more visual way to search through time. (Pictured below.)

Belnap says the idea came to him after having left his earlier work with a clean-tech nonprofit to attend Harvard Business School. He trained his replacement for half a year, but then found out that a month after he started school, the guy had quit. “I learned that he didn’t work with the right people and the right things,” says Belnap.”He just didn’t have the information he needed when he needed it.”

Belnap had, of course, left a wealth of this info in files and folders, but for the new hire, it was a matter of not knowing where to look to find it. This, he says, inspired him to begin thinking about whether or not there could be a technical solution to that problem.

Initially, FindIt was conceived as a web app, but user feedback soon pushed the team, which also includes co-founders Alex Pak and Ben Morrise, toward mobile.

Now participating in TechStars Chicago, the company is planning on quickly adding several more cloud services to FindIt, beginning with ones professionals would need, such as Box or Microsoft Exchange, for example. Longer-term, the plan will be to go freemium, where paid users will be able to access data from more complex, business-focused platforms, like Salesforce.

FindIt plans to move to the Bay Area following TechStars (likely Mountain View/Sunnyvale), and has a small amount of seed funding from the incubator, friends and family.

The app is a free download here in the iTunes App Store.

After Losing Nearly Half Its Users In A Year, Investors Dock Zynga’s Valuation By $400 Million

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It is not a good day to be Zynga, or one of its investors if you held stock in the firm yesterday. Following a decidedly negative earnings report, investors have unloaded the firm’s shares, sending them down around 15 percent in regular trading.

That loss comes after Zynga’s stock price rose in the wake of a very strong quarterly performance by Facebook. Investors had hoped that the strength of Facebook’s earnings indicated that Zynga, too, would have reported a good set of financial and user-based metrics.

It was perhaps a decent gambit, but it was utterly wrong. A small picture of the company’s decline: Zynga’s daily active user count for the quarter totaled 39 million. However, in the preceding sequential quarter, Zynga had 52 million daily active users. A year ago, that figure was 72 million.

Revenue, to cite another statistic, was down by more than $100 million to $231 million. Zynga is a company in steep decline.

And the market docked its allowance. Comparing yesterday’s closing price of $3.50, Zynga’s current price of $3 is a just over a 14 percent decline. In dollar terms, Zynga today shed around $400 million of market capitalization. As you will recall, this is not the first time that Zynga has suffered from this sort of gut punch to its stock price.

This is not Zynga’s lowest point. The company’s 52 week low rests at $2.01 per share, at which point Zynga was worth less than $2 billion. Zynga’s stock peaked in March 2012 at a price of $14.69. At current tip, Zynga’s stock has declined around 80 percent since its all-time high.

Whether Zynga can pull out of its current slide is an open question. Its CEO change provided a large bump in its market valuation, sending the worth of Zynga up $300 million. Quickly, those gains have been erased, and more.

Zynga reported $1.53 billion in cash and marketable securities. The market is therefore valuing Zynga, post cash, at under $1 billion. Zing? Guh.

Top Image Credit: Ben Watts

Rep. Amash’s Amendment To Defund The NSA’s Domestic Phone Metadata Program Fails 205-217

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Today Rep. Amash’s amendment to the 2014 Defense Appropriations Bill failed in the House on a vote of 205 in favor to 217 opposed. When it became known that the amendment would in fact come up for a vote, the powers of the status quo came together to decry its tenets as ham-fisted and irresponsible.

The White House called the amendment a “blunt approach” that is not “the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process.” Naturally, the irony of that specific complaint resonates: The intelligence programs in question were not enacted with any of those forms of debate. To ask that their rescinding be held to a higher standard then their enaction is hubris of a real sort.

Underlining how seriously those who are in favor of maintaining the phone record collection program took the amendment’s threat to yank its funding, General Alexander himself — the good general heads the NSA — gave briefings on the Hill to House Democrats and Republicans, albeit in different sessions.

A formal statement from the White House and face time with the head of the NSA are some of the larger guns available for this sort of court press.

The NSA has come under heavy scrutiny for its collection of both Internet data and telephonic records by privacy advocates, certain members of Congress, and what is sometimes referred to as the netroots — efforts that include broad surveillance of U.S. citizens and the retention of information relating to their actions. Those in favor claim that it doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment and is a key tool in the fight to protect American interests and national security. Opponents directly proclaim that the various NSA data-collection efforts are beyond unconscionable and should instead be viewed as nothing less than utterly un-American given its diametric opposition to hallowed Constitutional rights.

This isn’t a small argument, and it goes beyond our current simplistic ideological dialogue in which there are only two perspectives: left and right. Instead, we’re seeing a number of supposedly small government members of Congress stand behind action that gives the Federal government chronic authority to end the right to privacy. At the same time, the argument that national security can at times take primacy over privacy has been upheld in the past by American courts.

Before the vote, House members opposed to the amendment circulated a letter that included the following text:

 While many Members have legitimate questions about the NSA metadata program, including whether there are sufficient protections for Americans’ civil liberties, eliminating this program altogether without careful deliberation would not reflect our duty, under Article I of the Constitution, to provide for the common defense.  Furthermore, the Amash amendment would have unintended consequences for the intelligence and law enforcement communities beyond the metadata program.

Rep. Rogers was among those signed to the above. From the other end, a different House cadre came out in favor of the amendment, including Rep. Lofgren, who released a letter that said:

In short, this amendment would not prohibit the government from spying on terrorists under Section 215, or from collecting information in bulk about American’s under other legal provisions. However, the amendment would prevent the bulk collection of sensitive information on innocent Americans under Section 215 – and important improvement.

The vote was surprisingly close, with broad bipartisan support in favor of the amendment, and equally strong support opposed; this is a vote that split parties. The final tally was 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats in favor, and 134 Republicans and 83 Democrats opposed.

That the vote was so close all but guarantees that as an issue, the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs will be challenged again, and perhaps successfully.

Top Image Credit: Andrew Malone

Meet Helpouts, Google’s Secret Project That Turns Hangouts Into A Commerce Platform

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While its roots lie in search, today, Google wears many hats. From self-driving cars and wearable technology to social networking and mobile operating systems, there are few industries where the search and advertising giant has yet to make its presence felt. Lately, however, Google’s expansion has taken a noticeable tack in a more singular direction: e-commerce.

With the outsized success Amazon and eBay have had building online marketplaces that seek to remove the barriers around buying and selling on the web, it was only a matter of time before Google decided to pull its chair up to the e-commerce table. Today, TechCrunch has learned via a tipster that Google has quietly been pursuing its marketplace ambitions under the auspices of a new platform that leverages its increasingly powerful cloud services to power live, real-time commerce.

The product, which has reportedly been named “Helpouts” and is currently being tested internally in Mountain View, will take shape as a marketplace that enables individuals and small and large businesses to buy and sell services via live video. With the capacity to connect merchants and consumers on both an immediate and scheduled basis, according to our tipster, the platform will allow sellers to create their own profiles and take advantage of reputation management, scheduling and payment features, while offering robust search and discovery tools for consumers.

As its live video infrastructure is increasingly becoming the unifying backend for its expanding roster of real-time products, Google’s new marketplace will leverage Hangouts to deliver services via live video. To that end, the platform will also come integrated with what could end up being a handful of Google products, particularly its young virtual wallet and payment service, Google Wallet.

From what we’ve heard, Google began internal testing of the product in late June, but may be at least a month away from a public release.

In the meantime, from what we can gather from leaked mockups of Helpouts, the platform seems reminiscent of eBay’s recent efforts to expand its own marketplace with the launch of Secretguru, its concierge-style platform that allows merchants to offer a range of services directly to consumers — from business mentoring to beauty tips.

Part of the reason Amazon has sprinted out to such a commanding lead in the e-commerce market is its growing network of fulfillment centers and distribution warehouses, which allow it to produce that magic, online retail bullet of low prices, convenience and speedy delivery. Without a fulfillment network, Google’s own local shopping ambitions seem to be taking a different shape. With Helpouts, Google, like eBay appears to be leaning into the territory of collaborative consumption marketplaces like, say, Zaarly, TaskRabbit and Live Ninja.

According to our source, Helpouts, like these startups before it, will cover a range of categories, including computers, education, food, health, hobbies and repair. One can then imagine services on Helpouts ranging from health consultations and fitness classes to appliance repair support and cooking lessons.

Google has also apparently partnered with a number of brands during internal testing, including One Medical Group, Sears, Weight Watchers and Alliance Frances, for example. At launch, the platform will also reportedly include an array of individual merchants and instructors as well, from yoga gurus to fitness teachers — all of whom will be able to offer both free and paid services to consumers via Helpouts.

According to our sources, with Helpouts, Google is looking to remove some of the barriers that have traditionally stood in the way of the seamless delivery of live services. For example, using Helpouts, a Spanish tutor from Argentina could offer language training to students in Japan, while a Yoga instructor in New York would be able to provide classes to a stay-at-home mom in Wyoming and an appliance repair shop could walk a customer through fixing a broken fan in their laptop — with an Internet connection being the only requirement.

Under the new, “One Google” Era, the company has begun to prioritize a greater collaboration or interrelationship between its products. With Helpouts, one could also imagine how the platform can act as a logical extension of Google’s core search and ads business. For example, customers could connect to retailers and manufacturers to get recommendations and advice on product purchases — or receive guidance on how to set up their products.

This could work to shore up a nagging gap for Google: When it comes to product searches, people no longer turn to Google. It’s all about Amazon. It also wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Helpouts connecting to YouTube to offer video or lesson playback or integrating with Google’s nerd glasses.

Of course, as with any Google product launch, life could be getting a little bit tougher for its smaller (and startup-y) competitors. There is a long list of businesses that either parallel or would directly compete with some part of Helpouts, whether it be LiveNinja, PowWow (which is, believe it or not, founded by a former Googler), Live Moka, InstaEdu, Shmoop and, perhaps less directly, platforms like Angie’s List, Udemy, Skillshare, TaskRabbit, CreativeLive and Curious. Though, admittedly, some of these overlap more than others.

When it comes to big data or resources that can be thrown into curating a service offering like this, startups are bringing a knife to a gun fight. Firstly, there’s plenty of room for a more polished, higher-quality product in this space and, secondly, Google has video tech that’s already been widely adopted by individuals and businesses. Not to mention, most startups can’t hold a candle to Google’s marketing machine.

Furthermore, according to our sources, Google has been building Helpouts in complete secrecy — well, until now — and few employees at the company were initially aware of the product, which has been developed by a team of two dozen engineers over the past year. Other than that, details are hazy. Perhaps Sergey and his secretive Google X unit are responsible. Only time will tell.

In the meantime, some may be wondering, if Helpouts is destined for YouTube (or at least HangOuts)-level adoption, or whether this is more of an experiment and it will just end up suffering the same fate as Reader or the geek-adored Wave. It’s not totally clear just how much marketing spend Google is going to dish out or whether it intends for this to have mass-appeal, but based on what we’re seeing, I would lean towards the affirmative.

Furthermore, while the type and date of the product’s rollout remain unclear, we’ve heard from sources that Helpouts was recently the subject of a company-wide meeting, which suggests that at least a few Googlers are taking this seriously.

Stay tuned for more.

Additional key sleuthing and reporting contributed by the one and only Mr. Frederic Lardinois, the Maestro of Mountain View. 

On Its 3rd Birthday, The Cloudy OpenStack Is A Marketing Machine, And That’s Just Fine

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OSCON, the open-source conference, is in full-gear today and OpenStack is celebrating its third birthday there with lots of fanfare, self-serving platitudes and an infographic — the tell-tale mark of a “we are awesome” campaign.

While I couldn’t care less that an industry-funded foundation turned three last week and is still celebrating, OpenStack is an important effort enabling anyone to build their own cloud service free from the control of proprietary cloud vendors. However, it also has a high PR quotient that can make any seasoned reporter cringe.

But consider the marketing budgets that companies like VMware have. OpenStack needs to be marketing itself in order to survive. If it can keep the developer interest accelerating then it has a fighting chance against Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and the other players in the market.

The cloud market is just emerging and will take more than a decade to pan out. There is no way Amazon or any other company can build data centers all over the world to fulfill every cloud-computing need. But OpenStack can be a blueprint for any provider to build out their own cloud. They may not get the level of innovation that comes with AWS, but they will get the foundation to create something of their own.

I don’t buy the myth that the vendor-driven nature of OpenStack makes its future a big question mark. They have to make tough decisions such as what Cloudscaling CTO Randy Bias made clear in his open letter this morning. Sure, the competition with AWS, Google Compute Engine and Windows Azure is more intense than ever and poses questions for the cloud strategies of Rackspace, HP, IBM and Red Hat — all major investors and participants in OpenStack. But to capitulate is not in the DNA of these companies.

Instead, they will have to cooperate through OpenStack and compete on that basis with AWS. Krishnan Subramanian, now a cloud evangelist with Red Hat, notes that an organization like OpenStack is a test bed for this new way of competing. Defining the foundation is the first priority.

But becoming too caught up in its own grandeur is OpenStack’s biggest challenge. There are some big egos in this group and they all want to take credit. How many co-founders are there with OpenStack? Ten? More? That says it all.

Piston Cloud’s Joshua McKenty is arguably one of the more brilliant people who I talk to about the cloud world. But you tell me what you take from it after reading his words to his “daughter, OpenStack” that he penned in a blog post last week:

By many popular measures, you turn three years old this week. But when do you actually start charting a life? Was your birth at the PR event in July, or rather the first release of source code (May), the first design summit (June) or concurrent with the birth of the first actual human OpenStack *baby* (Lily Andrews, August 2011).

Regardless of the date, I must say, I’ve never had one of my children grow up this fast. While only three calendar years have passed, Ohloh says that you represent 379 years of effort. My dear, you certainly look good for being 379.

Rackspace even made a mini-documentary about OpenStack and how they started it all:

I am all for the self-promotion. There is this myth that foundations should keep their marketing costs down and instead put the money in the organization. I say that’s a sure path to irrelevance. AWS, EMC, Google, VMware and the rest spend millions in marketing, so why should OpenStack hamper itself by keeping its mouth shut?

So keep it coming, OpenStack. Cut the birthday cake and pour a glass of champagne. The money spent is worth every drop.

Meet Stat, The Startup That Wants To Be Uber For Medical Transport

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I’m getting sick of all the “[new startup name] is the [more prominent startup name] of [random industry]” descriptions that people like to throw around these days, but it’s hard to avoid that with a new startup called Stat. The three-person team demoed earlier today at Dreamit Ventures‘ Health Demo Day in Philadelphia, and long story short, they’ve created something that’s pretty much an Uber for medical transport.

When Stat co-founder and CEO Jason Ervin hit me with his pitch before presenting onstage at the World Cafe, it sounded too good to be true. On-demand ambulances? Why would anyone call 911 again?

It turned out that in my haste to bypass centralized emergency services, I had missed something crucial — the big difference between Stat and Uber is that Stat isn’t for people like you and me to use. Stat wants to furnish its iOS and Android apps to ambulance companies, medical transport fleets, hospitals, nursing homes — pretty much any organization that needs to shuttle patients back and forth on a regular basis. Let’s say you’re nurse and you need to discharge a patient and get him home. That’s no problem if they’ve got a ride from a friend or family set up in advance, but if it happens to fall through, you can’t just stick them in a cab and call it day.

Instead, you fire up the Stat app, tie it to a corporate credit card, select the sort of transport you need, and select the pickup point and destination. Once the request is out there, the closest idle, Stat-enabled ambulance will get the alert and can accept the job — then the person who put in the request can track the ambulance while it’s en route.

The process works for organizations that need to send people to hospitals, too — nursing homes for instance often need to shuttle residents to medical facilities and not all of them can afford to maintain a fleet of vehicles just for that. Enter Stat: after a few touches, the nearest idle ambulance will be en route to make the pickup and drop those people off as needed. It’s a win-win: idle ambulances (and the companies that own them) get more work, and people who otherwise would’ve been stuck at a facility or turned away outright can get their procedures done and get home safely.

As it happens, the service may get a lot more Uber-like in the months to come. There’s no consumer-facing version of the app just yet, but that could change once Stat starts expanding beyond Philadelphia.

“We just can’t wait to get to an emergency,” Ervin said. It’s hardly a surprise — the four-month old company is already generating revenue based off its operations in Philadelphia, and expanding to consumer emergency calls means more transactions to take a cut of. Here’s the thing about Philadelphia, though: if you’re involved in an accident and need immediate emergency attention, you can’t directly call an ambulance company. It’s 911 or nothing. Naturally, that means the prospect of an Uberesque ambulance service won’t fly in the City of Brotherly Love, but that sort of regulation doesn’t exist everywhere.

Currently, Stat has linked up with one prominent Philadelphia ambulance company and is working to rack up a few more partnerships in the area, but one of the team’s big goals is to tap into their native Texas. Cities like Austin and Houston lack that particular restriction, so it would be easy enough to rejigger the app for regular folks to use, too. As downright useful as Stat could be for streamlining hospital operations, bringing quick and timely medical transport to the masses is something really worth keeping an eye out for.

Zuckerberg Says Teens Still Steadily Engaged With Facebook

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Critics claim Facebook is losing its cool amongst kids and expect teens to start tuning out in favor of hip apps like Snapchat, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg says “based on our data, that just isn’t true.” Zuckerberg said on today’s earnings call that “we believe we have close to fully penetrated in the US teen demographic for a while”, and that teens remained steadily engaged with Facebook this year.

Zuckerberg admitted that it’s hard to pinpoint metrics on teens because some people lie about their age. Specifically, kids under 13 aren’t allowed to join Facebook, but there’s no strict verification process of the age users enter when they sign up. Some 10 or 11 year olds may say that they’re 15 so they can join. That means that some people listed as 21 could actually be teenagers.

But whatever their age, people are still spending a ton of time on Facebook. Users spent 20 billion minutes per day on Facebook in June. That’s 17.39 minutes per day per user, or 8.3 hours per user per month.

And that time isn’t just coming in binges. People are consistently addicted to Facebook. Zuckerberg started the earnings call saying he expected fewer of its total users to return each day as it grows, but he’s been pleasantly surprised to find that “the opposite is true.” Over 70% of monthly users in the United States and Canada come back every day and that “stickiness” percentage has kept increasing both domestically and across the globe over the last few quarters.

Many predicted mobile would be the downfall for Facebook. It was originally built as a web service after all, and when it did finally adapt to mobile, its apps were sluggish. Meanwhile, mobile-focused social networks and communication apps like Twitter, Snapchat, and Path threatened to take up users’ time on the small screen.

And they have taken a slice. But mobile has also drastically increased the size of the pie. People are spending more time with technology overall, and Zuckerberg noted that studies by comScore and Nielsen say Facebook’s share of people’s time is increasing, especially if you count Instagram as part of Facebook. Plus Facebook has found ways to monetize these mobile users, generating 41% of its ad revenue this quarter from mobile, or $655 million.

It’s been worries about the flight of teens and Facebook’s inability to squeeze dollars out of mobile that have held down Facebook’s share price since its rocky IPO. With these fears quelled, $FB is up 17.13% in after hours to $31.05 as it seems investors are seeing Facebook for what is, rather than what it might not be. It is 1.15 billion people who have chosen Facebook as the digital representation of the lives and friendships, the place they get their news and gossip, and where they make their voices heard.

[Image Credit]

Perk’s Reward-Centric Mobile Browser Now Blocks Unwanted Ads

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Austin-based incubator Jutera Labs is putting even more of its weight behind Perk, a rewards-centric mobile web browser that blocks out ads when used on tablets.

Perk, which originally started out as a way to give consumers coupons, discounts or airline miles while browsing the web, is now blocking ads. While companies like AdBlock have built up strong web-based businesses with more than 200 million downloads, Perk co-founder Julian Frachtman says that there’s a window of opportunity to do the same thing on tablets, especially as they cannibalize PC usage.

The company partners with affiliate networks to give Perk users deals at about 2,000 online stores. Those stores include big brands like Amazon, Target, Best Buy and Starbucks. There are also deals for frequent-flier miles at airlines like Delta, US Airways and Alaska Airlines and charitable donations to non-profits like the American Cancer Society.

Users can explicitly opt-in to these rewards, and there’s a shopping icon in the app’s top bar that lets users scroll through different rewards available to them based on points they’ve earned by browsing the web.

“When people shop online or when they do research online or take other actions like watch videos and fill out surveys, they can redeem these actions for cash or frequent flier miles,” Frachtman said. He says one advantage of blocking ads is that the browser will load pages faster.

The app is still quite small at this point with 5,000 monthly actives, but Frachtman said that once they figure out the lifetime value of a typical Perk user, they can use performance marketing techniques to grow the base. For now, Perk is only available for iOS, but the company plans to bring it to Android in a month-and-a-half.

Jutera has raised about $1 million in funding and the company’s employee base is split between Austin, Texas and Bangalore, India.

Facebook Q2 Earnings Beat Expectations With $1.81B In Revenue, Up 53%, Mobile Hits 41% Of Ad Revenue

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Today Facebook reported its second-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $1.81 billion. Analysts had expected Facebook to earn $0.14 per share on a top line of $1.62 billion. The company’s revenue figure released today is an all time quarterly high for the firm.

Facebook’s second-quarter revenue is up 53 percent on a year-over-year basis. Analysts had expected a 37 percent increase. In the quarter, Facebook had a net income of $333 million. In its most recent sequential quarter, the first of 2013, Facebook’s revenue totaled $1.46 billion, and it earned $0.12 per share.

Mobile income as a percentage of ad revenue totaled 41 percent, up 11 percent from the preceding quarter, when it totaled 30 percent. In the final quarter of 2012, mobile ad income was but 24 percent of the total advertising top line. Facebook has proven that it can monetize its growing mobile usage in a big way. Investors will be satiated in that concern.

Facebook later noted that mobile revenue will soon outstrip desktop incomes. The company also reaffirmed that Instagram will monetize in the future, largely through advertisements.

Frankly, in my view the 41% figure is quite impressive, and unexpectedly strong. However, we should not take as indicative that all desktop Internet giants will be able to monetize at similar levels in mobile settings. Facebook data on its users is nearly without compare, and likely provides it with a key competitive advantage in how it can deliver targeted ads to users on the go.

The majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising-related income. However, its payments and fee revenue totaled $214 million during the quarter, up 11 percent on a year-over-year basis.

On the usage front, Facebook demonstrated strong growth, with its daily active user tally rising 27 percent on a yearly basis to 699 million. Monthly active users now total 1.15 billion for Facebook, up 21 percent when compared to the second quarter of 2012. Finally, mobile monthly active users were up 51 percent compared to 2012, to 819 million. For more on Facebook’s usage metrics, TechCrunch’s Josh Constine has the fully skinny.

Facebook’s capital expenses were down in the quarter, but it continues to suffer from margin pressure. In the second quarter, Facebook’s operating margin was 31 percent.

During the company’s earnings call, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that teen engagement remains quite high on the social service. According to the company, engagement among teens in the United States, penetration is all but complete, and engagement remains strong. That is against the narrative that teens are increasingly bored with Facebook, in favor of other services.

Facebook ended the quarter with $10.3 billion in cash and short-term investments, leaving it very well capitalized. In regular trading Facebook was up around 1 percent. In after-hours trading, Facebook is massively up.

Top Image Credit: Emmanuel Huybrechts

Facebook’s Q2: Monthly Users Up 21% YOY To 1.15B, Dailies Up 27% To 699M, Mobile Monthlies Up 51% To 819M

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In Q2 of 2013, Facebook grew to 1.15 billion monthly active users up from 1.11 billion at the end of Q1, 669 million daily active users from 665 million, and to 819 million mobile monthly active users from 751M. These totals don’t tell the whole story, though, as much of Facebook’s growth is coming from Asia and developing markets where it doesn’t earn as much money per user.

Mobile daily active users hit 469 million on average for June 2013. Facebook’s mobile-only user count grew from 189 in Q1 to 219 million at the end of June. In June, Facebook saw 20 billion minutes of usage per day, or 17.39 minutes per day per user, or 8.3 hours per user per month. On the earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s data shows that teens are not fleeing the social network, that Facebook has close to full penetration amongst teens in the United States, and that teens remain steadily engaged with the service.

As for the dollars brought in by the social network, Facebook hit $1.81B in revenue, up 53%, and mobile hit 41% of ad revenue. You can see Facebook’s full financial earnings numbers here.

Other highlights from Facebook’s growth include that Instagram saw 5 million video uploads in the first 24 hours after the feature’s release, and recently hit 130 million users. Facebook for Every Phone recently surpassed 100 million monthly active users just two years after the rich, feature phone version of Facebook launched. Facebook’s acquisition Parse announced last month that 100,000 apps have been built on its mobile backend-as-a-service, up from 60,000 when Facebook bought it.

Breaking down its user growth by geography, we see that Facebook grew 2.15% from 139 million in Q1 to 142 million daily active users (DAU) in Q2 the United States and Canada, and 1.53% from 195 million to 198 million monthly active users (MAU). Europe grew even slower, up just 1.67% in DAU, and 1.11% in MAU.

But in Asia and the rest of the world, Facebook is still adding users at a quick pace. In the ”rest of world”, Facebook expanded DAUs 8.33% this quarter from 180 million to 195 million, and MAUs 5.81% from 327 million to 346 million. And in its strongest growth market this quarter, Asia saw an 8.38% DAU increase from 167 million to 181 million, and a 6.26% MAU increase from 319 million to 339 million.

It’s important to understand that aggregate growth numbers don’t necessarily explain what’s happening to Facebook’s business. Much of Facebook’s growth right now is coming from developing markets where it doesn’t earn as high of an average revenue per user (ARPU). Worldwide Facebook earned $1.60 per user, but only $0.63 per user in the “rest of world” geography which is propping up its growth.

Unfortunately, Facebook still isn’t breaking out its mobile user growth by geography. This allows it to obscure whether its mobile growth is predominantly coming from the developing world.

Overall, it was another relatively steady quarter of user growth for Facebook. While it may be running out of users to add in the first-world, it still managed to grow by about 8.3% this quarter in Asia and the rest of the world. Despite naysayers claiming Facebook is bound to lose its cool and hit a wall, it keeps getting bigger and is further solidifying its status as a critical communication utility.

Live From The 500 Startups Accelerator’s Sixth Demo Day

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Watch live streaming video from 500startups at livestream.com

The sixth group of startups from the 500 Startup Accelerator program will be making its debut today in Mountain View, Calif. — and then going on to do demo days in San Francisco and New York City as well. Can’t make it yourself, or can’t wait until 500 Startups comes to your town? You can check out the live stream above, which will be going for the next few hours.

While we’ve gotten some idea of what these startups do, today is their time to shine, as they pitch their products and services to investors at the Demo Day. We’ll be live from the scene, writing up the most interesting companies we see here. In the meantime, tune in to the stream yourself if you want to see what they’ve been up to.

And here are the startups:

Mayvenn
This startup is seeking to boost the amount of money that can be made by African-American hair stylists by helping them to take advantage of the incredibly lucrative hair extension business. That demographic spends $6 billion on hair extensions, outspending every other demo by 3-1. Mayvenn gives every stylist their own e-commerce-enabled website and connects them with supplies that otherwise would be sold at a beauty supply store, helping stylists to make more money.

POPAPP
POPAPP is the “quickest, easiest way to prototype your mobile app,” enabling users to convert a pen and paper sketch of an idea into an interactive prototype. Since POPAPP launched in November, they say they’ve had 70,000 users. The company makes money on a subscription basis, offering two free trials and then monthly fees for individuals and businesses.

Sverve
The company is an influencer marketplace to “make online word of mouth marketing viable.” The secret sauce is a deep database of influencers and a platform to match businesses and PR firms with them. Also tools to pay influencers and track campaigns. The influencers have a cumulative reach of a billion page views, and the startup has more than 350 businesses and PR firms using the platform already.

Floqq
Floqq aims to change online education in Latin America. You can watch instructional videos on any skill from cooking to finance. “None of them know shit about how to sell in Latin America, because we are different!” one of the founders exclaimed about Floqq’s online video competitors, explaining that Floqq uses different payment methods by country based on residents’ preferences.

BOXC
This startup wants to help online retailers in China to sell directly to U.S. customers. There are 2 million Chinese sellers in the market, selling to more than 100 million U.S. consumers, but shipping is typically slow and returns are close to impossible. That means that even at low prices, sellers aren’t making very much money. BOXC helps speed up shipping to 3-5 days without having to keep inventory in the U.S.

Koemei
Koemei makes educational videos searchable and collaborative. The company uses its technology to convert learning videos into text and makes them searchable. Students can have access to the automatically generated text of lectures after classes, and can take notes, share thoughts with classmates, link videos together, and organize their content in one place. Koemei has three major contracts, including from the City University of New York, and so far has six-figure revenues.

AppSocially
The company helps app developers acquire customers through peer referrals, which work best for mobile app conversion. You can use the product with just one line of code, optimize code through A/B testing and increase click-through rates. It operates on a freemium model, with free metrics and customers only paying when they take action and use A/B testing or other premium features.

TR Data
TR Data is the “Bloomberg for emerging markets.” The company has more than 100 companies using them already to make informed trading decisions, as it claims poor coverage of data in emerging markets is costing companies billions in trades.

Credii
Credii is trying to help businesses make smart decisions about the products and services they use. It asks them a series of smart questions about what they need and makes instant recommendations of products and services that fit those needs. It can help them pick and customize products to save them money. It makes money through premium support to customers and highly qualified leads for vendors.

Tamatem
This company is based on the idea that less than 1 percent of online content in app stores is accessible to Arabic users, even though Arabic is the 4th largest language in the world. Tamatem takes popular game app in the U.S. market and converts them into Arabic equivalents that its audience can understand. In one month, Tamatem’s first game saw 650,000 downloads.

Flyer
Flyer is disrupting the way commercial real estate is marketed. It lets brokers drag and drop information into the browser right on their website to build a flyer. Once that’s done they can export to print and PDF, and push everything to social media with one click. It also brings analytics to the market.

Schooladmissions
Schooladmissions was started to simplify the school application process in India. Students can manage the entire process online by using a school-matching engine, admission alerts, networking with other parents and multiple submissions in one click. The website charges schools and parents for membership and listings, as well as for the schools their students are admitted to.

Geekatoo
This company is creating a peer-to-peer marketplace for geeks to provide tech support direct to users, rather than through storefronts like Best Buy. That means it’s cheaper for the customer, and they don’t have to give up their computers. Geekatoo has 3,000 geeks around the country who are certified to provide support. It takes a 35 percent cut of the transaction for connecting customers with tech support providers.

InstaGIS
InstaGIS is a global real-time data platform designed to provide insights and data for marketing campaigns. With a monthly subscription, marketing managers can see where certain demographics are concentrated and discover new insights about different locations. InstaGIS provides this information through government data, social networks and private sources.

WHILL
This hardware hopes to provide the next generation of wheelchair mobility, with a new chair designed to look good and be ultra-functional. One big selling point is a front wheel made up of 24 different wheels to provide full mobility. Really has to be seen to be believed.

Binpress
Binpress is trying to be the “marketplace for commercial open source,” providing monetization tools for those working on open-source projects. It’s a marketplace, connecting developers with potential customers. As such, it takes a 30 percent commission on all sales that happen on its platform.

Reesio
This startup provides up-to-date real estate data through a transaction management platform for customers and agents. According to Reesio, information from publicly traded companies such as Zillow and Trulia can range from two days to two weeks old. Reesio will show transactions from users as they happen, including offers, contract signing, sharing information and more.

Dakwak
Dakwak is a translation and globalization platform for websites. Today, only 27 percent of the Internet population understands English, which means you can reach an additional 1.5 billion customers translating and localizing your website content. Dakwak allows you to control the translation, whether it’s low-priced machine translation or high-quality human translation. The website translation industry is a $3.3 billion business and growing, and Dakwak wants to be a big part of it.

Pinmypet
This compact device will help pet owners keep track of pets with GPS and monitor their physical activities. The U.S. and Brazil are the largest pet markets in the world, with over 200 billion pets combined. Pinmypet attaches to your pet and gives a real-time location, as well as a record of sleeping and exercising habits.

Seat 14A
Seat 14A seeks to simplify men’s fashion by sending customers one email a week. In that email they’ll find one complete outfit, and if they like it they can buy it. All clothes are made to order, so the startup holds no inventory. And since they control the entire supply chain, they can provide options that are cheaper and higher quality. That also means that they’re profitable on every sale, with 50 percent margins on a $150 sale.

Dropifi
Dropifi helps small businesses convert online visitors to customers with a SaaS platform. The application lets businesses see a client’s information and feedback through a profile, as well as collaborate in real-time with the client. After nine months, Dropifi has 7,100 businesses signed up for its service.

Tushky
This company is a marketplace for real-world leisure activities, currently operating in India. It’s looking to connect 300 million Indians with local things going on nearby, not just attractions for tourists. It also allows users to book activities on the platform, and share them with friends.

NativeAD
NativeAD is a new method reaching audiences meant to replace display advertising, since 99.9 percent of audiences don’t click on online ads. The company manages branded content for publishers including Yahoo, MSN, The Huffington Post and Terra.

Tastespace
Tastespace is helping restaurants in Latin America make sales and take orders online. It provides manages restaurant websites, mobile apps, and presence on Facebook through a single platform. Already it’s generated $2 million in sales, and has an order placed on its platform every three minutes. It’s in three of the top five countries in Latin America, and expects to reach 15,000 restaurants in half the time it took GrubHub to reach that number.

PriceBaba
PriceBaba is a platform for mobile phone shopping in India. Most retailers don’t have a point-of-sale system, so PriceBaba compiles prices and inventory to allow customers to see what is available near them, and for what price. The platform also provides mobile phone sellers with relevant and measurable leads with its data.

Unda
This startup wants to provide an alternative to today’s text messages, with video, because “life is bigger than texting.” You can instantly send quick video messages to anyone in your contact list, and when done can start sending another. All videos are stored in the cloud, so they’re always available to users. The company is pushing 1,000 video messages per day already, off of 12,000 downloads.

GreenGar
GreenGar created Whiteboard, a collaborative drawing app with more than 8 million downloads. About to hit $1 million in revenue, Whiteboard connects mobile devices globally through a freemium model. You can synchronize presentations and communicate visually with other users.

KiteReaders
This company is going after the children’s book industry, helping to take it digital. It has a software platform for transforming books into digital titles, and distributing them across multiple formats and multiple storefronts, and is using its own brand and links to cross-promote titles.

Feast
Feast provides a simple platform for beginners learning how to cook. Users receive daily emails with basic lessons on cooking and can collaborate with other students online. More than 40 percent of Feast’s users are opening an online lesson every single day.

Addvocate Raises $2.39M For Tools That Manage Corporate Social Media Operations

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Addvocate has raised $2.39 million for its service that helps companies put some operations management behind its social media efforts. The round was led by Rogers Venture Partners and included angel investor Karen Riley.

A social media strategy is now a mainstream part of sales and marketing. But it has little infrastructure behind it. Addvocate provides a way for companies to have their employees opt-in for sharing company information on their personal social networks. As I wrote in January, people who opt-in to Addvocate can also suggest content to fellow co-workers. Moderators approve, schedule, and direct the content to the people or channels where it will be most effective. Analytics tools show the effectiveness and return on investment of the social media outreach.

Distinctive to the service is Addvocate’s capability to use short URLs and campaign codes to track how customers interact with the tweets or other social media. By connecting the influencer to the customer action, Addvocate allows marketers to understand which content generated the most buzz and which employees are driving influence.

Addvocate works from the browser: in Chrome as a plug-in, and in Firefox and Internet Explorer as a bookmarklet. It is not available in Safari. Mobile apps are coming in the next few months.

Addvocate is another example of how data-driven technologies are shaping the way we work. The ones to watch are the platforms that use analtytics to influence behavior. Identity providers in particular could pose a challenge, as well as companies such as  ZuberanceExtole and Influitive.

Walmart Labs Scoops Up Site-Speed Optimizer, Torbit, To Help It Keep Pace With Amazon

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Josh Fraser and Jon Fox founded Torbit in 2010 after becoming fed up with the amount of time they and other engineers dedicated to the tedious process of managing website performance optimization — by hand. In 2012, the Sunnyvale-based startup launched its first solution, called Insight, in an effort to make the tools they’d spent years developing internally available to the public — without requiring a degree in computer science or 15 developers to understand them.

By allowing any online business to track that critical correlation between the time it takes for a website to load and their core business metrics, Insight attracted the attention of both enterprise players as well as startups like Wayfair, Storenvy, and the Cheezburger Network. By February of this year, Torbit was processing over 6 billion performance metrics a day for its customers.

With each second a website takes to load potentially results in the loss of critical business, something to which big e-commerce properties, like Walmart, are increasingly susceptible. Rather than building these tools themselves, Walmart Labs today announced that it is buying Torbit’s help.

While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, in its announcement today, Torbit said it will be joining Walmart Labs as part of the e-commerce giant’s move to bring some speed and performance optimization to Walmart’s online properties. Specifically, Fox says, Walmart will look to leverage Torbit’s dynamic content optimization technology to enhance the performance and shopping experience for Walmart customers — behind the larger, and perhaps more pressing goal, of helping it keep pace with Amazon.

Following the acquisition, Torbit will continue to keep its site running for 30 days, but will be shutting down for good on August 23. The company will be offering an export process to its customers to prevent them from losing their critical performance data, which readers can find here.

In an effort to meet the expectations of an increasingly digitally savvy consumer, Walmart Labs has been on a mission to develop new commerce solutions to stay ahead of encroaching competitors (and chase e-tail leaders like the ubiquitous Amazon), while enhancing the shopping experience of its millions of shoppers. To do that, the company has been following the Yahoo playbook of late, making a handful of acquisitions to bring startup talent in-house.

Today’s addition of Torbit to its startup roster follows Walmart Labs’ recent acquisitions of companies like Inkiru, OneOps and Tasty Labs, which are all part of an effort to help its parent company become an actual technology company (and not just another e-tailer) and beef up Walmart.com. Buying Inkiru, for example, gave the company access to a mobile-centric point-of-sale solution, while last year’s acquisition of Grabble provided a critical Big Data component, allowing it to improve fraud detection and prevention and in-store recommendations.

With these acquisitions, Walmart.com is now able to tap into and offer key features, like improved semantic search, Facebook integration and better mobile support — which are essential as the company adapts to its increasingly digital user base.

With the acquisition of Torbit’s front-end optimizer, Walmart said that it will be able to add much-needed device and platform-agnostic performance optimization tools and minimize customer attrition thanks to slow loading digital storefronts.

The startup’s technology, Walmart Labs’ Jeremy King said in a blog post today, can “dynamically minimize and compress the files the browser downloads to best fit the browser’s characteristics … and by rewriting the page to best exploit the performance behavior of the Web browser requesting the page, Site Optimization can help each browser fetch and render each page as efficiently as possible.”

With a growing share of its revenues emanating from its e-commerce portals, this kind of image loading is critical to allowing shoppers to find what they need in real time, without the traditional invective directed at their browser.

With the acquisition, Walmart said today that four of Torbit’s engineers will be joining its team, including co-founder Jon Fox.

Torbit’s announcement copied below:

Today we’re excited to announce that Torbit has been acquired by @WalmartLabs. We’ll be joining the team and bringing our Insight / Atlas technology to the Walmart online properties. In addition, we’ll be using our cutting edge Dynamic Content Optimization technology to enhance the performance and shopping experience for all of Walmart.com’s many online shoppers. We’re exited to help make the Walmart online experience even better by optimizing for your device and improving the performance of all of their existing and future sites.

Torbit has been a wild ride and we’ve been truly blessed to work with many great customers. We couldn’t have built any of our performance products without all of your feedback, testing, and patience. I am truly grateful to have worked with all of you. As part of this acquisition, we’ll continue to keep everything running for 30 days, until Friday, August 23, 2013, after which time we’ll have to wind down. We do offer an export process so you can keep all of your performance data. You can see an estimate of your export size here and if you’re interested in exporting your data please email us at [email protected] with a list of sites you’d like to export and we’ll send you instructions from there.

There has been a long list of great people who have helped Torbit along the way and I want to thank each and every one of you. From our investors, advisors, and employees to our customers, beta testers, and friends – we couldn’t have done it without you!