Category: Tech news

As it struggles to deal with rising royalty costs, streaming radio service Pandora is bringing back an old idea by capping free mobile usage at 40 hours per month.

The company previously limited free monthly desktop usage to 40 hours, but it lifted the cap in September 2011. CEO Joe Kennedy suggested that Pandora’s mobile business is in a similar position to its desktop business a few years ago — it needs to make more money. At the same time, Kennedy said his goal is still to offer free music to everyone.

“When you have a per-track royalty structure … there’s an inherent conflict between what radio has always been [namely, free] and what’s pragmatically reasonable,” Kennedy said. “We’re trying to balance the two. We’re certainly not backing down from the vision that we’re the future of radio. As mobile monetization improves over time, we’ll lift this.”

He also noted that there’s a big difference between mobile and desktop usage patterns — there are desktop users who basically listen to Pandora all day while they’re at work, so a larger percentage of them that exceeded the monthly limit. On mobile, however, the cap should only affect 4 percent of users.

That may not be much consolation if you’re in that 4 percent. Kennedy said the company is also trying to make the system as straightforward as possible. You’ll get an alert when you reach 85 percent of the limit, and when you hit the cap, there are a couple of pricing options: You can pay a one-time fee of 99 cents to get unlimited listening for the rest of the month, or you can sign up for a Pandora One subscription, which includes unlimited, advertising-free songs. Or you can decide that you don’t want to pay and just listen on your desktop/laptop computer for the rest of the month. And if you’re thinking about getting around the limit by just creating a second account, Pandora says that won’t work, because it’s applying the cap at both an account and a device level.

As stated earlier, Kennedy is placing much of the blame on the rising cost of music — he said that per-track royalty rates have increased 25 percent in the past three years, with an additional 16 percent increase expected over the next two years.

In the company’s most recent earnings release, Pandora reported growing revenue and a tiny profit, but its forecast was much lower than expected.

The cap will take effect starting in March. You can read more about the decision on the Pandora blog.

Toronto-based startup AppHero launched version 2.0 of its service today, with a brand new interface and big behind-the-scenes changes to how it offers up recommendations to users. AppHero is on a roll, fresh off funding and a spot on NBC this morning, but the app discovery space is a crowded one, and competitors like AppGratis have more international experience and are aggressively targeting the North American market.

But AppHero founder and CEO Jordan Satok thinks that his company is offering up one of the most comprehensive app recommendation engines available for iPhone and iPad owners inundated with a flood of new apps every day. In an email exchange, the young founder was kind enough to share a lot of behind-the-scenes information about how AppHero determines which titles to recommend with which users. As such, we’re able to share with you a very detailed synopsis of the recipe for AppHero 2.0′s secret sauce.

Surprisingly, much of the final process of determining which apps are and aren’t worthy of inclusion in AppHero’s recommendation still falls to human hands: Satok’s specifically. He says he “personally looks” at the crop of apps that remains after AppHero’s sophisticated, automated “app review” process tackles the 772,177 current (as of this writing) active apps in the App Store.

“We’ve built some algorithms that based on around 50 different factors (such as what people are saying about an app, how frequently it’s been updated, and what the other apps the developer has are like), is able to automatically filter out all the junk,” Satok says. “Think about this like a spam filter for apps.”

Once Satok has run a fine-tooth comb through the results spit out by its collection of filtering algorithms, the startup begins the task of making personalized recommendations. While Apple doesn’t allow third-party developers to see which apps are already on a user’s phone, AppHero (with a user’s consent, and in ways that sidestep Apple’s lack of direct access APIs without running afoul of their rules) is able to determine “with a high degree of accuracy” what apps they already have. That’s crucial to the process, since it prevents duplicate recommendations, and provides data that can be used to draw conclusions around general categories of interest (i.e., if a user has a recipe app and a kitchen timer, they’re probably fans of cooking).

AppHero has built tech around natural language processing techniques to help it automatically understand when apps offer similar functions. The engine can determine the general function of a particular app (i.e. Real Racing is a car racing game) and then group that with other similar titles (like Need for Speed Shift, for instance). Satok says grouping apps in this way proves much more accurate and useful in formulating useful recommendations than sticking to Apple’s own App Store category and sub-category divisions.

The core of the recommendation magic comes around its ability to analyze tweets, Likes and other aspects of a user’s social graph, which they volunteer when they sign in to their social network profiles on AppHero.

“I can’t go too deep into how we do this, because it’s very core to our business,” Satok explained, “But it’s unique tech because most other recommendation engines (Netflix, Amazon, etc.), are only able to do product based recommendations (i.e., you watched Lord of the Rings so you’ll like the Hobbit), but we’re able to do recommendations across different media types (i.e., you’ll like the TechCrunch app because you’ve liked an article from techcrunch.com on Facebook).”

Other key ingredients of the AppHero 2.0 recipe include improving the text descriptions that appear for each app, by taking not just the top-most content from App Store summaries, but instead finding the meatiest content in the hopes of better articulating to a user what an app actually does. The startup is also geo-tagging apps in its database where appropriate, so that titles relevant to a person’s location will bubble up, and they’re making sure to disambiguate between similarly named spots, so you won’t get recos for apps appropriate to London, England when you live in London, Ontario.

Satok says there are a lot of other projects in the works at AppHero to try and continuously improve the quality of its recommendations. There’s plenty of room for more than one solution in the app discovery space, but users will go back to the service that gives them the best recommendations out of the starting gate, and the underlying tech is the key to winning that race.

So the concept of big data sounds like a great idea — there are vast stores of information out there just waiting to be used, and we just need something to process it all. But unless you know exactly where to look, it’s difficult to actually find actionable information. More importantly, it’s damn near impossible to cross-reference information from multiple data sets without pulling it and analyzing it yourself.

New York City-based Enigma is trying to help users make sense of it all. And it’s raised $1.1 million in seed funding to get it started. The company, which is still in beta, looks at publicly available and proprietary data sets across multiple providers, including government, real estate and finance records.

So for instance you can do trend analysis across government databases to check out patterns in defense spending, and see who’s winning all the big contracts. Or you can check out how different real estate markets are performing relative to local job numbers, or you can even figure out something as banal as how many bagels are sold in New York versus other markets.

That’s because Enigma has started tracking more than 100,000 different data sets and begun to structure them in a way that makes searching them not only do-able, but useful. And all of it is available in the Enigma dashboard, decoupling the data from obscure sources that it comes from. The company’s relational database makes searching and comparing data sets a breeze.

Now that it’s collected all that data, the company is looking to grow its user base pretty significantly. Since it has such a broad amount of data, the number of applicable use cases is near infinite: It’s looking to pitch companies in media, finance, consulting, legal, and academic industries.

The funding from TriplePoint Capital, Crosslink Capital, early YouTuber Brent Hurley, Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, and Colbeck Capital partner Matthew Glass will help in that pursuit.

Groupon has just put out its Q4 and full-year results. It has reported quarterly revenue of $638.8 million with an operating loss of $12.9 million and a loss per per share of 12 cents, falling short of analyst expectations on the EPS front — they had predicted $638.41 million in revenue and EPS of $0.03.

Those numbers show 30 percent revenue growth and a slightly smaller ($12.9 million versus $15 million) operating loss compared to the same period last year. (Those Q4 results needed to be restated about a month after reporting because Groupon had higher-than-expected refunds, due to selling more expensive products and having customers make more returns of those goods.)

As of 4:31pm Eastern, Groupon shares had fallen 22.44 percent (to $4.64) in after-hours trading.

The earnings release emphasizes gross billings, which grew 24 percent year-over-year to $1.52 billion.

“Record billings growth this quarter is a clear signal that customers love Groupons,” CEO Andrew Mason said in the release. “We will continue to invest in growth through 2013 as we see new opportunities to give our customers what they want.”

For the year as a whole, Groupon is reporting revenue of $2.33 billion (up 35 percent) and operating income of $98.7 million (compared to a loss of $233.4 million in 2011).

There were some bright spots for the company this past quarter due to holiday season shopping, particularly in the area of mobile commerce, one of the services that it wants to expand as part of its plan to expand beyond daily deals to provide more services to local businesses. It noted that Black Friday mobile transactions were up 140 percent year on year, with four times as many mobile purchases as on a normal Friday morning; mobile drove over 40 percent of Groupon’s overall transactions during that period as well as over half of Groupon Goods’ transactions. The earnings release says that nearly 40 percent of transactions were completed on mobile in January, up 44 percent from the previous year.

Focusing on international, Groupon reported gross billings of $802 million (up 6.2 percent) and revenue of $263 million (down 15.9 percent). Groupon’s international business, which covers 47 countries outside of the U.S., with the U.K. being the biggest market, is still based around the company’s legacy business of daily deals. This is largely because Groupon’s growth has been inorganic and acquisition-based, and so each country has its own back-end system, which makes it a challenge to integrate into what the U.S. is doing. It’s about a year behind but apparently integration of some of the mobile commerce services is on the agenda, so we may see services like Breadcrumb point of sale solution coming to international waters soon.

The results are coming in ahead of a Groupon board meeting tomorrow.

The bSafe ‘panic alarm’ app and service on iOS and Android by the startup called Bipper launched into the U.S. mid last year.

It’s been successful in Europe and has been positioned for a big push in the U.S. But an unexpected turn of events has lead to an investment by a Hollywood star in the form of a new undisclosed investment by actress Jada Pinkett Smith.

She actually discovered the app after her daughter Willow began using it fall of 2012 and realised it might dovetail with her work as an advocate for the rights of human trafficking victims, given that bSafe is all about personal safety.

Bipper founder Silje Vallestad, who moved to the U.S. last year, received an out-of-the-blue call from Hollywood and the deal was sealed at the Smith family residence at a lunch event with First Lady, Michelle Obama. Every day stuff really…

Initially Smith was to promote the launch of Bipper’s safety products, bSafe and MobileKids, in the U.S., but ended up investing as well.

In a statement Pinkett Smith said: “”bSafe is a safety service that can easily be used by anyone… I chose it because I saw the potential to solve real problems for kids, parents, and anyone looking to increase their overall safety. I have great confidence in Silje and her team and look forward to working closely with them to increase the reach and impact of an already fantastic security tool.”

bSafe has competition in the form of PanicGuard, an app which sounds an alarm, will SMS a contact, start recording video and track your location. But it’s expensive ($6 a month), and hasn’t had the growth of bSafe.

The service (which costs $2 per month or $20 yearly) alerts your friends or family when you hit the panic button on the app, but also secures evidence and broadcasts a time-stamped video recording to them and sends them a map with your location. It additionally allows you friends to follow you home with live GPS tracking, broadcast just one location, and a ‘Fake Call’ feature makes the phone ring like a real phone call to help the user get out of an uncomfortable situation.

Founder Silje Vallestad has now moved to the U.S. to fund-raise a Series A round to take the service global.

Just as some people are put on this earth to create things, others are prone to destroy everything they touch. Those people should probably spend some time with the Caterpillar-branded CAT B15, an aluminum-and-rubber-clad Android smartphone that (inadvertently) encouraged people to work on their stress issues here at MWC.

Naturally, Caterpillar isn’t actually making the phones — it’s a very far cry from the engines and bulldozers that the company is better known for. The device itself is made by a licensee called Bullitt Mobile, a U.K.-based company whose sole reason for existing seems to be churning out these sorts of rugged handsets.

In fact, It’s actually rather hard to get a firm idea of how tough this thing actually is. Sure, it’s completely dust-proof (assuming all the ports are properly closed) and the 4-inch display is swathed in second generation Gorilla Glass, but it’s all sort of abstract until you hold the thing in your hand the feel the urge to heave it somewhere. In spite of its considerable chubbiness, the B15 is actually lighter than you’d expect, though it’s still going to elicit some stares should you shove the thing into your pocket.

In a classic case of brawn vs. brains, the B15 isn’t the snappiest thing you’ll ever see with its dual-core 1GHz Qualcomm processor and but it’s still got enough horsepower to handle most daily tasks. If anything, performance is aided by the fact that the particular build of Android loaded up on the B15 is totally stock — no garish, cumbersome UI to be found here.

And perhaps best of all, the 4-inch display recognizes touch input even when it’s wet — mostly. After a booth representative shot down my attempt to hurl the thing like baseball (not a huge loss, my fastball is pretty lousy), I settled for dunking the B15 in some water a few times. For the first few instances, things worked fine, but at some point you’ll eventually have to wipe the thing down for it to start behaving properly again. Hardly a big deal, but those of you looking for an Android-powered diving buddy will have to look elsewhere (especially because it’s only waterproof until you go deeper than 1 meter).

In the event that your current smartphone is just too puny to keep up with your lifestyle, the CAT B15 will be available in March for €395 — try not to hurt yourself until then.

Click to view slideshow.

For Vimeo, the David to YouTube’s Goliath, the focus moving forward will be on creating and delivering mobile video, according to CEO Kerry Trainor.

A big part of that future focus will come from Echograph, a GIF-making app that was recently acquired by Vimeo in a deal whose details weren’t disclosed.

“Like many video platforms, we’re focused on where things are going with mobile video,” said Trainor. “One area we see evolving very quickly is mobile video creation, and like Vimeo itself, Echograph took the position of creating a high-quality experience for both creating and viewing.”

Vimeo has also positioned itself as a more high-quality, professional experience than YouTube, which has more volume and traffic, but a vast number of crappy, amateur videos.

According to Trainor, the purchase of Echograph has nothing to do with Vine’s launch into existence. “No, truthfully, it’s really not a reaction in any way,” said Trainor.

Vine was launched out of Twitter at the end of January, and has received quite a bit of attention for being a potential Instagram for video.

But setting Vine aside, Vimeo’s focus on mobile video creation is only rivaled by its focus on monetization. The company already has subscription services, upgraded tools for the upload suite, there is a smaller advertising business working on the site, and Vimeo recently launched a Tip Jar service that lets viewers offer monetary Kudos to projects they like.

Soon, Vimeo will roll out a Paywall option to content creators giving them complete control over what portion of the film can be seen (if any) and how much it costs to get behind the paywall.

In terms of competition, Vimeo doesn’t seem so concerned with matching YouTube’s level of volume. “There’s no part of the model for us that relies on volume of what’s being created,” said Trainor. “It’s more about giving people the tools to empower them to create video.”

Julia Ferraioli runs developer relations for Google Compute Engine, the new cloud play the company has in limited beta. I caught up with Julia at the Strata Conference yesterday to talk about her job and the change she and her colleagues are seeing in the Google developer community as more people use the cloud to build apps.

In particular she says developers use social technologies to develop apps more than ever before. Google itself does Google Hangouts to show how to use services available to developers. She said Google is scaling its online resources as the developer community scales, as well.

Ferraioli says that Google Compute Engine has a project level structure so people can work on teams. More and more, development will be collaborative and Google is thinking about that as it builds services that cater to the developer community.

It takes a lot to stand out at a trade show the size of Mobile World Congress. But here’s one device that caught my eye today: an e-ink smartphone. Unlike Yota Phone, the Russian startup that’s using e-ink as a second screen to augment the back of a powerful high end smartphone in a bid to stand out in the uber crowded Android space, this prototype device has just the one screen. A single e-ink screen on the front of the device — so it’s a true e-ink phone.

It’s also a true smartphone. There were two prototypes on show at Eink‘s stand, both with a 1GHz chip inside and one (the white one) with a 3G chip in it. The other had Edge connectivity. The phones run Android but, as you’d expect, the OS has been simplified with a custom UI that strips back the functionality to focus on the applications that make sense for a fully e-ink smartphone — such as a reader app, a dialer and email. The UI also includes a web browser since certain types of webpages can be viewed on an e-ink screen. It won’t support video of course but text-based sites can still be read.

The black prototype device (pictured below) also includes a backlight for reading in the dark. Both screens are capacitive, but as you’d expect with e-ink the refresh rate can be a little slow. Ghosting on the screen from past renders can be removed by shaking the device. The technology can support both portrait and landscape orientation so the e-ink smartphone could be turned on its side to switch the orientation to more of an e-reader sized width. Both devices felt incredibly lightweight.

Why do you want an only e-ink phone? Price for one thing. Battery life for another. Not to mention visibility in bright sunlight. Put all those factors together and this could be the perfect device for some emerging markets where electricity is at a premium. The prototypes are proof of concept at this point but Giovanni Mancini, director of product management for E-ink — the company which makes the screen — said the Chinese OEM which has made the prototypes, Fndroid, is talking to telcos and could launch a device this year.

So how much would this e-ink smartphone cost? Mancini said the device maker would set the price but in his view it would be comparable with a feature phone price tag. A big theme of this year’s MWC has been smaller mobile players — from open source OSes like Firefox that are seeking to drive openness and accessibility and drive down the cost of devices, to mobile veterans like Nokia focusing afresh on building smarter feature phones to target cost-conscious users in emerging markets. So it’s interesting to see companies toying with the idea of an entirely e-ink smartphone to cut device costs while preserving key smartphone functions such as access to the internet and email.

Click to view slideshow.

Maluuba, a service many have lovingly dubbed the “Siri for Android,” is migrating to a brand new platform. No, the Disrupt finalist isn’t planning on a hostile takeover of Siri’s home turf, but Windows Phone fans may have something to celebrate.

The company has officially announced that the Maluuba app is now available on Windows Phone 8.

Here’s what Maluuba had to say about the launch:

Windows Phone 8 is a great opportunity for us and we’re excited for users to get it in their hands. We’ve gotten praise for our Android app from both the press and users and we think Windows Phone will be as positive. We’ve done some neat integration with live tiles and will continue to add more as Microsoft grows the platform. Unlike Google Now and Siri, we want Maluuba to be device independent. We’re in an age where users expect great services to not only work on multiple platforms but to leverage each platform’s strengths, we think we’ve done that for Android and Windows Phone and we’re already working on expanding to more platforms soon.

Maluuba first launched into the public at Disrupt SF in September of 2012. The app acts as a sort of Siri alternative for Android users (and now Windows Phone users), taking voice requests and turning them into useful information or actions.

For example, Maluuba for Windows Phone 8 can search restaurants, movies, events, and businesses (and handle shopping requests), set alarms, reminders and meeting scheduling, place calls, texts and emails, give directions and the weather, and it even integrates with Outlook calendar.

Maluuba is to Android (and now Windows Phone 8) what Siri is to iOS, except Maluuba (like Android) is open. The company officially launched a voice API in November, letting any app enjoy the power of voice transcription and computing. Past an API, the Maluuba team has also been looking into evolving past the phone.

Maluuba has teamed with Best Buy and Walmart to offer instant shopping queries to the Maluuba feature set. And if that weren’t enough, the team announced at CES that it’s working on integrating Maluuba into a number of different devices, such as fridges, cars, and TVs.

Maluuba debuted the Windows Phone version of their app at MWC today, and released a little demo video alongside it which can be seen below.

Maluuba also mentioned that they’ve “been in talks with a number of OEMs to integrate [their] technology with their systems,” which is an exciting thought.

Through new partnerships with top online and offline purchase data providers Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai, Facebook is now allowing advertisers to target hashed lists of existing and potential customers, and categories like role-playing gamers or soda drinkers. This expansion of Facebook’s Custom Audiences program could rake in revenue and attract businesses by matching ads to real spenders.

AdAge first reported the deal with Datalogix, Epsilon and Acxiom last week, though now these partnerships are confirmed along with one with BlueKai. It’s part of Facebook’s ongoing quest to show businesses that ads on the social network are not just scattershot brand marketing jazz, but can actually reach the exact customers that buy their products.

That’s been a bit of a struggle, as a combination of complicated products, targeting restrictions, and advertiser inexperience has led some businesses to fail to produce results. These businesses sometimes go out of their way to blast Facebook’s ad platform as ineffective, scaring away other big advertisers.

This is partly why Facebook launched the Custom Audiences program in September. It’s an important complement to Facebook Exchange, which allows for real-time, cookie-based retargeting of people who visit an advertiser’s website. Data providers can use cookies to add people to Custom Audiences, but can also use email sign-ups and other contact information.

The four new partners already work with many of the world’s biggest brands to target email marketing, direct mail, and other online ads. Now they’ll be able to use the same ones to pinpoint Facebook ads, as Facebook explains on its Studio Blog. Businesses can request their data partner upload a privacy-protected, hashed list of customer or potential customer information such as email addresses. The advertiser can then target these sets of people, but don’t ever know the identity of who they’re reaching.

Businesses who don’t already work with one of these data providers can still take advantage of the partnership. Facebook is setting up pre-defined categories like auto-intenders (people planning to buy cars), luxury fashion-buyers, and more that any business can target.

Anecdotal tests of the program provided by Facebook show promise, with Chicago car dealership Castle Auto Group seeing a 24X return on their ad spend through a combination of Facebook offers targeted to Custom Audiences of their existing customers. Hong Kong game developer Klingnet reduced their cost per install by 40 percent by using Custom Audiences of people likely to enjoy their titles.

Along with data protections and hashing to keep advertisers from determining the names or identities of people located by the third-party data providers, Facebook is offering users opt-outs from the program. Facebook went so far as to publish a Note on its Privacy Page detailing how people can click on Custom Audiences ads to see what specific advertiser was targeting them, hide future ads from that advertiser, and be exempt from that data provider’s targeting.

If the Custom Audiences program works, a Honda dealership could go from targeting “people who like Honda in Chicago” to “people in Chicago shown to have visited car-buying websites, signed up for dealership email, or bought a Honda between three and ten years ago.” As you can imagine, the latter is a lot more likely to lead to a sale. If businesses make money with Facebook ads, they’ll spend money on Facebook ads.

This is all part of a grander shift of online ads getting more accurate. With time, more offline and online purchases and behavior are going to be tied to demographic clusters and individuals. Out will go the vaguely targeted shotgun approach ads of TV and print. In will come laser-pinpointed ads that reach people genuinely ready to spend money on a product. This bodes very well for online ad platforms where people spend a lot of time including Twitter and media sites, but most of all Facebook. If you have a captive, always-there audience, you’re going to make a fortune once measurement and targeting tech evolve.

Google just announced that users who participate in its Gmail and Google.com search field trial will now also see results from their personal calendar on Google’s search results pages. You can see these results by using queries like [what is on my calendar today] and [when am i meeting rip].

The field trial itself isn’t actually new, by the way. Google has been running it for quite a while now and it’s open for anybody who is interested in trying out some of these personalized search features.

Recently, Google also added information about your upcoming flights, restaurant and hotel reservations and scheduled events to this trial. To display these results, Google scans your Gmail inbox for relevant emails from OpenTable, Ticketmaster, Eventbrite and others. Some of this information, of course, is also used to power Google Now.

As Google’s senior vice president for Google Search Amit Singhal noted when the company first introduced this field trial, “sometimes the best answer to your question isn’t available on the public web—it may be contained somewhere else, such as in your email.”

The reason Google will likely continue to offer these features as an opt-in “field trial” for the time being is that it obviously needs to connect your search results, Gmail inbox and calendar to display these results on Google.com. Not everybody will be comfortable with the idea of Google scanning and using information from their inboxes and calendars, after all.

As with all the previous additions to the field trial, it’s only available in English and for U.S.-based users with a gmail.com address. Sadly, this also means that calendar results from your Google Apps work account won’t appear on Google Search anytime soon.

In what appears to be a cyclical recurrence of post-success litigation, Snapchat is being sued by a man from South Carolina named Frank Reginald Brown IV, who claims that he originally came up with the idea for the ephemeral picture messaging app.

The idea for Snapchat is simple, yet has been widely misunderstood by older generations: you take a picture or video of yourself (or something else if you choose), set a time limit, and send the picture off to a friend. The app will only let the user view the picture for the pre-set period of time, no more than ten seconds.

Many assumed that it was built for sexting, which seems more and more ridiculous every day considering Snapchat’s booming growth. (It’s also worth noting that co-founder Evan Spiegel has said Snapchat has decided to push major updates during the hours of 11pm to 4am because it’s the slowest time for traffic.)

Brown and his lawyer, K. Luan Tran, claim that Brown conceived of the idea for Snapchat, and co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy called it “a million dollar idea.” The L.A. Times reports that, after working on the app together all summer under the name Picaboo, Spiegel and Murphy changed passwords to the servers and shut Brown out.

Brown even claims that he came up with the ghost logo that is still being used today. A picture posted by the L.A. Times appears to show Brown sitting with Snapchat co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy over a cake with the yellow Snapchat ghost logo frosted on.

This doesn’t prove or disprove anything except that the trio knew each other, but it’ll clearly take a court case to get to the bottom of all of this. However, it is interesting that the Snapchat logo (which never fully made sense to me) seems much more suited to a name like Picaboo.

Luan Tran, Brown’s lawyer, claims that Brown is looking for restored rights and any damages he may be owed.

Snapchat has responded with the following:

We are aware of the allegations, believe them to be utterly devoid of merit, and will vigorously defend ourselves against this frivolous suit. It would be inappropriate to comment further on this pending legal matter.

It’s also worth remembering that Snapchat just closed a solid Series A round — $13.5 million led by Benchmark Capital, to be exact.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a college project among classmates has turned into a multi-million dollar business. And we all know, where there is money, there will be blood.

We’ve reached out to Luan Tran for comment, but he has not immediately responded.

Here’s a copy of the lawsuit:

Frank Reginald Brown vs. Snapchat by

It’s been about nine months since Socialcam was acquired by Autodesk, and the company continues to innovate. It’s just released a new version of its iPhone app and has a new Android app coming soon. Even more impressive? The company is leaning on the expertise of its parent company to help improve things and boost the quality of videos that are produced.

In the latest release of Socialcam, GOING LIVE TOMORROW, the team took advantage of being part of Autodesk to improve the picture quality of videos that its users can shoot. According to co-founder Michael Seibel, Socialcam worked with people who worked on visual effects products at Autodesk to figure out better ways of processing video being captured within the iPhone app.

Together, they completely revamped video capture on of the app, making it a lot more efficient and capable of pushing higher-quality video.

The end result was an upgrade in quality for videos that users shoot with the app, now up to 720p. It’s also figured out a way to take advantage of the iPhone’s HDR functionality to improve tone mapping and color correction in realtime while creating videos. And a nice side effect of all this new high-quality video is that thumbnails displayed also look better, more appealing, almost like you want to click on them.

By improving video capture and adding HDR, “We can make the real world look a little bit better,” Seibel said, non-ironically. “If your phone can support HD video, we will shoot HD video.”

Making it 720p means that video sizes are slightly bigger than is usual for the mobile video app, according to Seibel. But the addition of HDR won’t change file size at all, since all compression is done after HDR is applied.

In addition to higher-quality video processing, Socialcam has completely redesigned its visual effects — all the filters and themes that users can layer on top of their videos to make them more appealing. A lot of that change has revolved around making the visual effects a lot more subtle, to make them more compelling to use with a wide range of video types and styles.

According to Seibel, the idea is to help move users into the right direction when it comes to using filters and themes. The end goal is to “make it a lot harder to make bad videos,” he said.

In addition to the new iPhone app, the company is also working on improving its Android experience. Seibel said the team rewrote the Android app from scratch, fixing a number of compatibility issues and completely updating the UI. While it won’t necessarily have all the bells and whistles of the iPhone app, it should be a much better app than what’s currently available. Expect that on Google Play next week.

I love hardware. That’s why I want you guys to bring some of the coolest hardware projects imaginable to Disrupt NY this year. That’s why I want you guys in our Hardware Alley.

Hardware Alley is a one-day celebration of hardware start ups both young and old. The goal has always been to show off amazing hardware that we have written about over the past few months, as well as a few surprises. Last Disrupt we featured the guys from Thermovape, Makerbot, and Lit Motors. This year we want to fill Disrupt NYC with more amazing companies.

For more details on Disrupt head over here. We’re looking for new or even unlaunched products, as well as potential Kickstarter projects. Prototypes are fine as long as they’re amazing.

You can see the previous Hardware Alley participants here. You can sign up here. Bootstrappers can contact me directly at [email protected] if you need a break on price. Hope to see you in the alley… the Hardware Alley.

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