Category: Tech news

While I’m not a big fan of ostentatious watches that cost too much and are aimed at buyers with more money than sense (in short, most of the Hublot line) I will give this odd-looking watch a moment of reflection. It is the MP-05 LaFerrari, a tourbillon watch with a 50-day power reserve, a number almost unheard of in the watch world, and a unique styling that is reminiscent of a certain Arashikage ninja.

The watch itself has a custom HUB9005.H1.6 movement and displays the time in a series of vertical registers. There is a visible tourbillon (essentially a rotating balance wheel AKA the little wheel that “spins” in your average mechanical watch) on the bottom of the watch as well as a winding port on the top. To wind it you use this little power drill. Seriously.

A power reserve indicator tells you how long you have to go before you whip out your little drill gun and the entire thing is designed to look like the cowling on the $1.3 million LaFerrari or, more precisely, Cobra Commander’s codpiece. The watch is completely handmade and you can see more photos here. It comes in a limited edition of 50 and you can expect to pay $300,000 for the privilege of strapping it to your wrist.

Routehappy is about to launch a new way for travelers to search for flights — and TechCrunch readers can actually take a look now.

The idea, as explained to me by co-founder and CEO Robert Albert, is to move beyond the focus on price and schedule that you find on every other flight search site. Sure, those things are important, but as I noted when Routehappy raised seed funding last year, when you suddenly find yourself stuck in a cramped seat without Wi-Fi, you realize that other factors matter, too.

So Routehappy has built a big database of information drawn from “hundreds of sources” — including commercial data providers (mostly for on-time data), reviews, and the airlines themselves. It then looks at the various factors that a traveler might consider and combines them into a “happiness score” between 1 and 10. So if a flight has lots of leg room, a great entertainment system, and WiFi, it should get a high score. And actually, schedule does play a role in the score — for example, there’s a demerit if there’s a long layover or if it’s a red eye flight, because those things will probably make you unhappy.

Albert gave me a tour of the site, where he showed me lots of different searches. His main point: There are plenty of improvements that Routehappy can help you identify that don’t make a big difference in the price. He pointed to flights where the difference between WiFi and no WiFi, or between a personal entertainment system and those crappy overhead TV screens, was only a small percentage of the overall price, or there was no difference at all. He also pointed out that choosing by airline isn’t enough — there are some airlines with a significant difference between the planes in their fleet.

I was particularly impressed by Routehappy’s interface. Although searching by happiness is not something I’m used to (the closest thinge I’ve seen is Hipmunk‘s “agony” ranking), it was easy to understand how to use the site. You can also filter your results based on specific factors (I’m guessing a lot of you would be most interested in WiFi), or, yes, on price — I kind of like the idea of ranking flights by price and then choosing the cheapest one that doesn’t seem totally miserable. There are also nice little touches, like Routehappy’s ridicule of planes that still have overhead entertainment systems — “What is this, the ’80s?”

Routehappy explained in 90 seconds from Routehappy on Vimeo.

As for how reliable this data is, well, there’s definitely some acknowledged uncertainty. On the WiFi front, there are flights that are simply listed as “yes” or “no”, but also others that say “maybe” or “test”.

Albert said some airlines are actually happy to work with Routehappy, because “they don’t want to be commoditized,” but he noted that even their data can be wrong, and that he’s tried to help them correct their own information at times.

When I asked how he can know be sure that Routehappy’s data is better than the airline’s, he declined to get specific, saying that this is part of the “secret sauce.” (Actually, he offered more details than that — see update below.) Still, he insisted that it’s the most accurate information out there. He also acknowledged that there’s a small chance that you could still get surprised, particularly if an airline switches planes, but he said that happens less than 5 percent of the time.

“There’s never an absolute guarantee, but [if you use Routehappy] you will have done everything that a human being could do to optimize your experience,” he said.

If you want to try out Routehappy for yourself, the site should go live at around midnight Eastern tonight. Until then, you can visit this page and use the password “flyhappier”.

Update: Actually, Albert was more forthcoming about the company’s data collection process than I suggested above — he did refer to the secret sauce, but he also offered some details, which he elaborated on via email:

We’ve done three important things:
First, we’ve built a dedicated team of Flight Geniuses who know air travel inside and out and make sure we have the most reliable data by flight possible;
second, we’ve built a complex system of databases and algorithms called Flightpad (which stands for Flight Product Attribute Database) that allows us to store, score and match specific details on billions of flights (down to the class of service and sub version of the aircraft scheduled);
finally, because the data does not exist from any single source, we hand pick data from hundreds of disparate sources, thoroughly fact check it and only allow it on the site after it’s passed a comprehensive, peer-reviewed process for quality.

Facebook has just acquired Parse, marking its entry into a whole new business category: paid tools and services for developing mobile apps.

The company is buying the mobile-backend-as-a-service startup (yes, the industry acronym is mBaaS) in a deal that we’ve heard is worth $85 million. [Update: And we’re hearing that excludes retention.] Neither company is commenting on the size of the deal, except that Facebook said it’s not “material.”

Parse was founded about two years ago by a small group of seasoned Googlers and Y Combinator alums who got together to build a useful set of back-end tools for mobile developers. They originally called their back-end service, the “Heroku” of mobile in a homage to what was one of YC’s biggest exits to date — the $212 million sale of Heroku to Salesforce.com. They offer services that help mobile developers store data in the cloud, manage identity log-ins, handle push notifications and run custom code in the cloud.

Facebook won the deal amid what we’ve heard was a competitive process with many of other Valley’s other biggest potential buyers. Parse CEO and co-founder Ilya Sukhar said that he chose Facebook over other suitors — without naming names — because the company was a better cultural fit.

“I don’t think any of the other conversations created anywhere near the excitement level that we had for Facebook,” he said in an interview.

Why Parse? Facebook is in a big push to become more relevant than ever to mobile developers. It doesn’t own its own mobile OS like Apple or Google. It doesn’t make its own devices.

Instead, it’s a horizontal social and identity layer that runs through thousands of apps of iOS and Android, in deep custom integrations in devices made by hardware makers like HTC, and in its latest project, Facebook Home.

In that sense, Facebook has to prove value to mobile developers in other ways. Facebook integrations can make apps stickier when users add friends, and the company’s mobile app install ads help developers acquire new users.

Now through the Parse deal, the company will be able to offer back-end services for data storage, notifications and user management. This is a brand new kind of revenue stream for Facebook, as the company is keeping Parse’s freemium revenue model. Parse currently has over 60,000 apps and roughly the same number of developers. They focus on monetizing the top 10 percent of their clientele.

“This fills out one of the pillars of Facebook platform that we’ve been thinking about for awhile,” said Facebook’s Director of Product Management Doug Purdy. “Since 2007, the Facebook platform has been about being an identity mechanism with sharing. But over the course of the last six months, we’ve been thinking about how we can help applications get discovered and how they can be monetized.”

He added, “In order to provide the best experience possible, developers also need to build a whole host of infrastructure. Parse is a natural fit. They’ve really just abstracted away a lot of the work necessary to get an app up and running.”

The deal is a big exit for Parse, which had raised just $7 million to date from investors including Ignition Partners, Start Fund, Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, Data Collective, Yuri Milner, Aaron Iba, Garry Tan, Justin Kan, Chris Fanini, Sean Knapp, Don Dodge and David Rusenko.

As for Parse users, the company says apps won’t be affected in any way, that developers won’t have to integrate Facebook and that existing contracts will be honored. Parse has a freemium model with a basic free version for up to 1 million requests or pushes per month and a limit of 20 bursts per second. A lowest paid version is $199 a month with 15 million requests a month, 5 million pushes per month and a burst limit of 40 per second. Then there’s an enterprise version where the rates are negotiable.

In the long-run, by getting closer to the development process Facebook could increase the likelihood that third-party apps integrate with them and buy their ads. When added to the direct fees Facebook will collect from Parse subscribers, the acquisition could become a critical part of how Facebook earns money from the burgeoning app economy.

Here’s the post from Sukhar:

Parse has come a long way. In just under two years, we’ve gone from a rough prototype to powering tens of thousands of apps for a very broad spectrum of customers.

Some of the world’s best brands trust us with their entire mobile presence, and a growing number of the world’s brightest independent developers trust us with their next big thing. We couldn’t be happier.

As stewards of a good thing, we’re always thinking about the next step in growing Parse to become a leading platform in this age of mobile apps.

These steps come in all sizes. Most are small and incremental. Some are larger. Today we’re excited to announce a pretty big one.

Parse has agreed to be acquired by Facebook. We expect the transaction to close shortly. Rest assured, Parse is not going away. It’s going to get better.

We’ve worked with Facebook for some time, and together we will continue offering our products and services. Check out Facebook’s blog post for more on this.

Combining forces with a partner like Facebook makes a lot of sense. In a short amount of time, we’ve built up a core technology and a great community of developers. Bringing that to Facebook allows us to work with their incredible talent and resources to build the ideal platform for developers.

We think this is the right way to accomplish what we set out to do. We’re excited about the future of Parse!

Ilya, Kevin, and James

And here’s Facebook’s statement from Director of Product Management Doug Purdy:

Last week, we hosted our first Mobile Developer Conference, where we launched several new products to help mobile developers integrate Facebook: Open Graph for mobile, better Facebook Login, and new developer tools. Today, we’re making it even easier to build mobile apps with Facebook Platform by announcing that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides scalable cross-platform services and tools for developers.

By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices. Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management, and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences.

We’ve worked closely with the Parse team and have seen first-hand how important their solutions and platform are to developers. We don’t intend to change this. We will continue offering their products and services, and we’re excited to expand what Facebook and Parse can provide together.

Google really cares about the web being faster. In 2010 it led a group of contributors in releasing a module for Apache web servers called PageSpeed. Today, the same group has released a version for Nginx, an alternative to Apache, which is also open source and used by massively trafficked sites like Netflix, Hulu, Pinterest, Airbnb, WordPress.com, Zynga, Zappos and GitHub.

In alpha testing, content-delivery network provider, MaxCDN, reported a 1.57 second decrease in average page load times, with bounce rates dropping by 1 percent. While those seconds might not seem like a big deal, they are, especially when you have multiple visitors on your site performing multiple tasks. Think about how it feels when you use Hulu at a Starbucks; that almost 2 seconds could ease some of your frustrations in waiting for a page and video to load.

The module is available for webmasters on GitHub, with open source participation coming from Google, Taobao, We-Amp and individual developers.

In a post by Jeff Kaufman, who is an engineer on Google’s Make the Web Faster Team, (have to love Google’s team names), he explains how PageSpeed works:

Running as a module inside Nginx, ngx_pagespeed rewrites your webpages to make them faster for your users. This includes compressing images, minifying CSS and JavaScript, extending cache lifetimes, and many other web performance best practices. All of mod_pagespeed’s optimization filters are now available to Nginx users.

With Google pushing to bring faster Internet to everyone in the world, starting with a few cities in the United States, it makes sense that the company would participate in projects like this to help the rest of the web keep up. Naturally, Google is able to leverage the work of projects like this for its own sites, since speed is a huge concern of CEO Larry Page for its existing and future products.

As a man who spends most of his time in his attic, it’s nice to hit the open roads, feel a little wind in your hair, and run over crack vials as you motor through downtown Manhattan. That’s exactly what I did yesterday as when I tried to ride an Hero Eco A2B Metro electric bike from Bay Ridge to our offices on Broadway, thereby cementing my love for electric bikes and this electric bike in particular.

The Metro, made by German manufacturer Hero Eco (formerly Ultra Motor), is a brutalist electric bike with a built-in battery and maximum speed of 20 MPH. It has pedals and a 7-gear shifter so it is technically considered a moped and does not require a motorcycle license and a built-in limiter ensures you don’t go roaring down the streets on this 80 pound machine.

The company has had these bikes in the US for a few years now but they are working on a complete rebranding – although the bikes will remain the same. You can see the brand new bikes on this absolutely awful webpage they’ve made. This particular model costs about $3,000 online but the build quality is excellent and the equipment – from the fat Kenda tires to the Shimano shifter – is acceptable enough. I noticed some bad reviews on Amazon complaining of damaged motors or tires and, although I didn’t experience these issues over the past week, I cannot speak for extensive use. In my 15 mile ride I saw solid performance and no skidding or fishtailing while accelerating. I did, however, experience a low battery and riding this thing home, even for a mile, on pedal power wasn’t great.

The bike is bit big but it’s still thin enough to ensure you don’t get entangled with other riders in tight paths. I found it worked great in tight quarters and, because it is in actuality just a bicycle with a hub motor, the other cyclists didn’t give me that much of a stink eye.

I’ve avoided looking at electric bikes of late because most of them look like motors strapped to 10-speeds. This is far different and, if I were to describe it in any way, it is the exact opposite of those foldable city bikes folks are riding. My kids, in fact, have taken to calling it Super Bike.

Hero Eco is finding its footing right now and also has sub-$2,000 models available, including their own version of the folding electric called the Kuo which retails for $1,599. The company is also now calling itself HeroEco and was formerly called Ultra Motor, so you may see a bit of confusing until their full rebranding.

What are you paying for? Well, you’re paying for a solid, welded frame, solid components, and excellent acceleration. The range isn’t too shabby and for a bit more you can add on a second battery for 20 miles of range. I could also imagine a user removing the governor – though I’m sure Ultra Motors doesn’t condone this. This isn’t a sport bike. I could really see it more as a bike for folks with a 10-15 mile commute who want to hit the open air a little and don’t want (that much) of a carbon footprint.

Actian is on a buying spree. The big data management company announced today the acquisition of ParAccel, the data analytics company that has $64 million in funding from Amazon and other investors. Earlier this month, Actian acquired Pervasive Software, a data integration company based in Austin.

Actian provides data integration and a a data analytics database called Vectorwise with a particular emphasis on Hadoop. Its Hadoop connectors hook into Hadoop, pull out relevant data in real time and integrate it accordingly. ParAccel also has a data analytics database.

ParAccel has made a mark with its analytics database. It is used by Amazon Redshift, the service that acts as a data warehouse in the cloud. ParAccel, as of December, has more than 60 customers.

Actian CTO Mike Hoskins said the company is profitable, giving it an opportunity to build a big data portfolio. “When you look at our combined capabilities, including Versant, Pervasive and now ParAccel, we have global reach in many fast-growing markets and annualized revenues north of $150 million,” said Hoskins in an email interview. Hoskins had before served as CTO at Pervasive.

The “Internet of Things,” with its volumes of data, both traditional and machine-generated, are growing exponentially, Hoskins said. Companies that can gain insights with data, across multiple sources, have a significant advantage. With the combined companies, Actian can scale a company’s data across commodity hardware, capturing data from different directions and running analytics on that data.

Actian’s acquisitions show how data integration and analytics represent a potent combination. The question is can Actian actually integrate the technologies to become a top data analytics vendor.

Given the fairly nutballs hype surrounding the launch of Mailbox for iPhone (and its crazy queues), you could probably assume that they’d bring the app to other devices and platforms — and you’d be right if you did.

The company recently started letting users know of their upcoming projects: an iPad app is in the works, with Android and desktop clients “on the agenda.”

[Disclosure: TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington is an investor in Mailbox by way of CrunchFund. While neither Mike nor anyone else at CrunchFund has ever even mentioned Mailbox to me, I prefer to make these things nice and transparent.]

While Mailbox had mentioned to us that they were tinkering with an iPad app in previous briefings, they’ve only recently begun to mention it in public — and even then, seemingly only through relatively quiet Twitter responses. This is also the first we’re hearing of potential Android/Desktop clients.

@AdamYaffe no ETA yet but the iPad version is coming soon! iCloud and other accounts may be added as we grow !—
Mailbox (@mailbox) April 15, 2013

Though there’s seemingly no ETA for any of the above, it would seem that the iPad app is further along in its development than the other aforementioned platforms. While their mentions of the iPad app are frequently detailed as “in the works” or “coming soon,” mentions of the Android/Desktop app are always labeled with the considerably less committal “on the roadmap.”

@bsetter iPad is in the works and desktop is on our roadmap!—
Mailbox (@mailbox) April 25, 2013

@1LottoStud No certain timeline yet, but other platforms are coming down the road—including Android!—
Mailbox (@mailbox) April 25, 2013

We’ve reached out to the company for clarification on where each project currently sits, and we’ll update if we hear back.

It makes sense that an iPad app would come first. Mailbox is already written for iOS/Cocoa Touch —most of the work would be in adjusting the interface for the bigger screen, unless they add iPad-exclusive features. Porting it to Android, meanwhile, would involve quite a bit more new code. Even porting it to OS X would require a pretty drastic rethinking of the super touch-centric UI, at the very least.

On a side note: I actually stopped using Mailbox a few weeks after installing it. As it strongly focuses on fast actions on individual emails (as opposed to en-masse actions on groups of emails), I found myself paying more attention to preening my inbox than before. I still really dig the time-based reminder future, though.

[Double disclosure, for good measure: see the above disclosure about CrunchFund.]

Last quarter, Amazon, which has been a freight train and Wall Street darling over the last year, surprised analysts by reporting lower-than-expected earnings. Expectations were high considering the holiday shopping season, but Amazon saw net income drop 45 percent to $97 million in Q4, compared to $177 million in 2011, although on the bright side, net sales continued to increase (by 22 percent) to $21.2 billion.

Today, Amazon continued the trend, still finding itself in a bit of a hangover after missing expectations in Q4. The eCommerce giant reported earnings from Q1 after the market closed this afternoon, in which it saw cash flow increase 39 percent to $4.25 billion, compared to $3 billion for the prior year, while net sales increased 22 percent to $16.07 billion in Q1, compared to $13.18 billion in first quarter 2012.

And by mixed results, we mean that Amazon blew away earnings-per-share expectations at $0.18 in Q1 on revenue of $16 billion. Leading up to today’s announcement, Wall Street expectations were much lower for EPS, with analysts expecting $0.08 EPS for the quarter. In turn, the Street expected Amazon to report sales of $16.2 billion, which the company just missed with $16.07 billion in sales.

In spite of the mixed results, as the market has been wont to do over the last year, Amazon’s stock was trending up, closing at $274.70 per share, on rumors that the company could be launching its own TV set-top box this fall, bringing more of the company’s hardware into your living room.

Tellingly, in today’s announcement, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t touch on the numbers or falling profits, instead plugging the company’s efforts to take on Netflix with some original programming of its own for Instant Video customers. Last week, the company launched 14 new comedy and kids pilots on Instant Video, which quickly became the “most watched TV shows on Instant Video,” the company said Monday.

“Amazon Studios is working on a new way to greenlight TV shows. The pilots are out in the open where everyone can have a say,” Bezos said in today’s earnings release. “I have my personal picks and so do members of the Amazon Studios team, but the exciting thing about our approach is that our opinions don’t matter. Our customers will determine what goes into full-season production. We hope Amazon Originals can become yet another way for us to create value for Prime members.”

Other points of interest: Amazon’s free cash flow fell 85 percent to $177 million year-over-year, compared to $1.15 billion in the year prior, due in part to dishing out $1.4 billion to purchase new office space in Seattle. Operating income decreased 6 percent to $181 million in Q1, compared to $192 million in the same quarter last year, while net income fell 37 percent to $82 million from $132 million in Q1 2012.

The upside for Amazon continues to rise, thanks to its move into original programming and the expansion of its selection for Prime Instant Video, which is in part due to new licensing agreements with A+E, CBS, FX, PBS And Scripps. This means that shows like Downton Abbey, Justified and Under The Dome, as well as content from Food Network, the Cooking Channel, the Travel Channel and HGTV will all be headed to Amazon. The company said that Prime Instant Video now has 38,000 movies and TV episodes in its collecton.

In addition, Amazon touted the launch of its new MP3 store for Safari, which allow iPhone and iPod touch users to discover and purchase digital music from the company’s catalog. This comes on the heels of reports today that the influence of the company’s Appstore is growing and shows high revenue potential. Amazon also announced its Cloud Player for iPad and iPad Mini this quarter, extended AutoRip to vinyl records and announced the launch of Kindle Fire HD 8.9″.

Good news also came for authors and readers, as Amazon announced that it will start paying its authors their royalties monthly, ahead of the twice-a-year industry standard, along with the acquisition of popular book recommendation hub, Goodreads.

All in all, it was a busy quarter for Amazon, especially for AWS, which launched a slew of new products over the last few months and again lowered its prices. The company said in its announcement today that AWS “has lowered prices 31 times since it launched in 2006, including 7 price reductions so far in 2013.”

Looking forward, Amazon is lowering expectations, however, as it said today that it expects sales to come in between $14.5 billion and $16.2 billion next quarter — equivalent to a 13 to 26 percent increase from Q2 2012. In turn, it expects operating income to be between -$340 million and +$10 million. In other words, a potential loss.

For more, find Amazon’s Q1 earnings announcement here.

Leap Motion has just announced that its 3D gesture controller hardware ship date will be delayed, from May 13 for pre-orders and May 19 for general retail availability to July 27. The delay was caused by a need for more testing from the Leap Motion beta testing community, and an expansion of that group with additional members, according to Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald, who held a press conference today to discuss the missed dates.

This is not good new for a company that has spent a lot of time promoting its product and securing high-level partnerships (with Asus, HP and Best Buy) up until now. The hype that Leap Motion has been able to build only means that users will be more disappointed by any delays in its launch window, and the effect on public perception is certainly one the hardware startup would like to have avoided. Still, some 12,000 developers have received units and already used them to do impressive things, so Leap Motion is hardly in danger of being branded ‘vaporware’ as of yet.

Leap Motion says it wants to make sure that the product they deliver is the best they can offer, and says that there is “nothing catastrophically wrong” with the hardware as of yet. The company believes that it could have shipped by the original date if it had really pushed things, but wanted to make sure that things were ready for prime time. The new July 22 ship date is firmly set, according to Buckwald, and this is “the first and only delay there will be.”

When asked if there was a specific cause, Buckwald said it’s more about beta testing everything in general, but that there will definitely be a focus on getting more input on how customers interact with the product. In general, it sounds like there’s some concern about making sure that user experience is pleasant among not only Leap Motion’s more technical users, but also the general public, too. Buckwald says it has addressed most of the technical issues around gesture tracking, and now the emphasis is squarely on usability testing, and those who are already seeded with early hardware will essentially act more as consumer testers.

“If you’d asked me a year ago what was the biggest challenge, I’d have said it would be the hardware side,” Buckwald said, but went on to explain that the software aspect is now what’s holding things up, and the part that needs more refinement. 600,000 units are in inventory in warehouses ready to ship, he said, but those won’t be going out until the software issues are ironed out. When asked about how that affects their funding situation, he explained that the $45 million it has raised so far was designed to help it field unexpected hiccups in the process, and it continues to help with that.

A small number of additional users will be invited to the beta test pool beginning in June, Buckwald explained, but Leap Motion will be reaching out to users specifically to choose those, based on their desire for a more varied beta pool. In other words, you probably can’t petition for early access. The full letter Leap Motion is sending out to pre-order customers follows:

Release Date Update

I wanted to reach out to update you on the status of our ship date. After a lot of consideration, we’ve decided to push back the date and will now be shipping units to pre-order customers on July 22nd.

This is not a decision we take lightly. There are hundreds of thousands of people in over 150 countries who have pre-ordered Leap devices, some as long as a year ago. These people are part of our community and there is nothing more important to us than getting them devices as quickly as possible.

We’ve made a lot of progress. When we first started taking orders back in May we were twelve (very tired) people in a basement. Now we are eighty (although still tired and possibly still in a basement). We’ve manufactured over six hundred thousand devices and delivered twelve thousand Leaps to amazing developers who are building applications that let people do things that just wouldn’t have been possible before. These developers have given us great feedback that we’ve used to make huge improvements to the stability and polish of the product. We’re really proud of Leap as both a company and a product.

The reality is we very likely could have hit the original ship date. But it wouldn’t have left time for comprehensive testing. This will come in the form of a beta test that will start in June. We will give the 12k developers who currently have Leap devices access to the feature complete product including OS interaction (today developers only have access to the SDK). We will also invite some people who are not developers to join the beta test.

Ultimately, the only way we felt 100% confident we could deliver a truly magical product that would do justice to this new form of interaction, was to push the date so we would have more time for a larger, more diverse beta test.

I really appreciate your patience. I know it’s been a long wait. Everyone that works at Leap is working tirelessly to make sure that wait is worth it. Thanks so much for your help and support.

David and I will be participating in an open video Q&A using Google Hangout tomorrow. We’ll send along more specific information on that shortly. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact our support team at[email protected] or my personal email ([email protected]). As always, we will not charge pre-order customer’s credit cards until the devices have actually shipped.

Thanks again. Michael Buckwald

It’s been more than a year since Toronto-based Extreme Startups raised funding and launched its Accelerator program. Now it’s ready to introduce the third group of five companies to have gone through the program.

Extreme Startups morphed out of Extreme University, with funding from Extreme Venture Partners, OMERS Ventures, RHO Canada Ventures, BlackBerry Partners Fund, and Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC). The accelerator has two cohorts of five companies each, which go through the typical 12-week incubator program.

For participants, the accelerator provides funding, mentorship, and access to administrative and legal support. It gives teams $50,000 at the start of the 12-week program in exchange for 10 percent of equity, as well as an additional $150,000 convertible note upon exiting the program. In addition, participating startups get coworking space, will attend weekly classes, and will have access to more than 50 mentors that have signed up to help.

The first two cohorts included companies like e-commerce startup Shoplocket, couples app SimplyUs, and online ticketing startup Picatic.

With that in mind, the next five companies are a mix, from online craft marketplace BRIKA to business intelligence tool Polychart… With some vitamins and science research thrown in for good measure. The companies are:

• BRIKA is a curated online shopping destination for discovering well-crafted lifestyle products from talented and inspiring makers.
• Instaradio is a simple and powerful way to broadcast a live audio stream that can be listened to on any computer, phone, or tablet.
• Køge is a vertically integrated vitamin retailer that provides a premium experience built around each customer’s unique background. Through personalized nutrition recommendations, Køge offers highly-tailored vitamin packages conveniently delivered each month.
• Polychart is a lightweight Business Intelligence tool for SMBs, that allows any professional to explore, analyze, understand and visualize data without any technical skills. Polychart connects directly to your existing database to drive insights and is offered as both a SAAS and on-premise solution.
• Sciencescape accelerates the discovery, organization, and sharing of scientific research. We use big data to curate research in real-time, allowing users to rapidly navigate thousands of papers and find out what’s happening in the world of research.

We’ll be keeping an eye on these companies as they go forward, and the Canadian startup scene in general. With incubators and accelerators popping up all over the country, we’re seeing a lot more interesting startups from up north.

Chartbeat is launching what CEO Tony Haile told me has been the big “missing piece” from its real-time analytics product for publishers — a video dashboard.

“And not just missing for us, but largely a missing piece for publishers, too,” he said.

By that, Haile means video data is usually stuck in a separate application, and therefore analyzed completely separately, by a separate team, from the rest of the site. Plus, because the analytics can be so expensive, publishers often cut the data that they receive.

Chartbeat takes a different approach by integrating video data into its general analytics tool. So when you look at the traffic and engagement data for your site, videos will be included, and when you look at the data for an individual page, you’ll see how a specific video (if there is one) contributes to the engagement time on that page. Haile said this can help publishers understand how videos fit in to their broader editorial strategy, and whether there are areas where they should be including more videos or promoting videos more prominently.

And there’s unique data that tells publishers about the performance of each video — not just how many people watched a video and for how long, but also how many people dropped off when the ads started, and how each of those metrics compare to videos with similar characteristics (primarily length).

It sounds like some of those features came out of Chartbeat’s early tests with publishers, including the Wall Street Journal and MSNBC. Haile said one tone of the big things he took away from those tests was the need to answer the question “Are we putting our resources to work in the right way with video?” That’s not something you can answer by just throwing a bunch of numbers at a publisher, he said, which is why Chartbeat tries to place the data in context, and even summarizes the engagement data with a single engagement score.

Head of Brand Lauryn Bennett noted that the company is hoping the video numbers, just like all Chartbeat data, are used by the broader company, not just the analytics team or the video team.

“This last part is pretty important,” she said. “It’s bringing together teams. Video content is now everyone’s job.”

Haile added that Chartbeat is offering a “generic SDK” that should work with “most videos.” It has also built a Brightcove plug-in and is working on similar plug-ins for Ooyala and HTML5.

After a long decade of media destruction, no one in the industry was surprised to see “Reporter (Newspaper)” ranked as the worst job of 2013. But life is starting to look better for some online publications — like at Vox Media. Its SB Nation network of local sports sites has become a foundation for a national edition, tech-oriented news site The Verge, and most recently video gaming site Polygon.

On the business side, it has begun cracking the display advertising market.

The CEO who is behind its ongoing growth is Jim Bankoff, who you may also know as the guy who previously led Aol’s content businesses for many years. He’s going to have a couple of newsy things to say about Vox and the business of high-quality media today when I interview him Monday at Disrupt NY. If you’re interested in media, advertising, and startups trying to get into these industries, you’ll want to see this.

Tickets are available here.

He joins our list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Nasty Gal’s Deborah Benton, investor Chamath Palihapitiya, and hardware creator Limor Fried, with more still to be announced.

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

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Jim Bankoff
Chairman & CEO, Vox Media

Jim runs all aspects of Vox Media, one of the fastest growing online publishers, focused on the sports, personal technology and gaming categories. Vox is solving the problem of developing high-value digital journalism, storytelling and brand advertising at scale. Its audiences are among the most engaged and affluent on the web.

SB Nation, its sports brand, boasts over 30 million users per month across 300 individually branded, fan-centric sports communities, each covering a specific professional or college team, league or sport. In November 2011, Vox Media launched The Verge, which has quickly established itself as a category leader and the fastest growing site that covers technology. In October, Vox launched Polygon, a site dedicated to news and community for fans of gaming, anchored by an all-star roster of writers. All Vox Media sites are built upon, Chorus, its world-class proprietary publishing platform.

The company enjoys support from leading investors including Accel Partners, Comcast Interactive Capital, Khosla Ventures and Allen & Company.

A veteran of the online industry, Jim developed and led dozens of the most popular websites on the Internet including Aol, Mapquest, Moviefone, AOL Music and Engadget as an Executive Vice President at Aol. He co-founded TMZ.com and also oversaw Aol’s industry-leading instant messaging services, AIM and ICQ, and social networking and community applications including Blogsmith and Netscape.

His accomplishments have earned him wide recognition, most notably the first Emmy ever awarded to a webcast, for his role as Executive Producer of the Live 8 concerts online. Jim also serves as a Senior Advisor at Providence Equity Partners, the largest private equity firm focused on media and communications.

Social network scheduling startup Buffer continues to grow, and is now on track to make over $1 million in annual revenue with over $100,000 coming in from clients per month. The company now has over 600,000 users, and over 10,000 paying users as of this month, signalling significant growth from December of 2012, when it had 400,000 total users, and a third of its current social shares per month.

The bottom line is that providing a service that makes it easy for brands to schedule and deliver their messages via social networks like Twitter and Facebook is fast becoming big business, especially as social media becomes a more widely accepted and important arm of any company’s public communications. I spoke to Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich, now back in San Francisco after a temporary visa issue sent him and his team back to Austria temporarily last year, about how the market has evolved.

Widrich says that they’re definitely seeing a big increase in the number and range of companies who want to have an active social media presence, and scheduled sharing is a key component of those efforts. The company also recently introduced a brand new integration with Feedly, which makes Buffer the default sharing method for content collected through your feeds. It’s a big integration win for Buffer, especially as Feedly moves into position as one of the top potential replacements for Google Reader, which could result in a very sizable new user pool.

Scheduled social media updates recently received a bit of scrutiny as brands dealt with the repercussions of having banal and sometime inappropriate content go out over Twitter and Facebook during the Boston Marathon incident. During any crisis, scheduled updates can appear incredibly insensitive, and that’s something Buffer is cognizant of and is working to help with.

“We’ve started to implement a universal pause switch,” Widrich says. “Before that, we would just tweet to people and explain how to turn it off, and people are always really appreciative of that, but we’ve heard a lot of feedback and we want to make that easier.”

Development on a one-click pause solution is underway, but Widrich says that regardless of whether you stop your scheduled updates or not, the key to helping make sure you’re being sensitive to anything going on is by acknowledging any mistakes on your part and doing your best to apologize for things that have gone out that maybe shouldn’t have. Generally speaking, he says users are understanding, so long as someone at the company takes some kind of responsibility for anything with potential to offend.

While Buffer is working away at that pause feature and other product developments, the company is happy with the relatively modest $400,000 seed round it raised in 2011, and Widrich says most of that is still in the bank. The startup’s revenue-generating powers are doing enough to help the company stay away from more outside funding, and that’s an ideal situation for Buffer for now.

Sony’s pocket-size shooter features a full-frame sensor and an awesome f/2 fixed lens. This is pro-level stuff, as evidenced by the $2,800 price tag.

The Galaxy S4 is better than its predecessor in almost every way, with fast hardware and a big, sharp screen. The software that ships on the device, however, is gimmicky.