Category: Tech news

When rumors come true! Two weeks ago we reported on a tip that social TV startup Dijit, maker of the NextGuide iPad app, was in the process of acquiring quasi-competitor Miso. The deal took a little bit longer than we expected to actually get done, but the companies are announcing this morning that the tie-up is complete.

Through the deal, Dijit will get a bunch of technology and patents that Miso has built over the last three years as one of the first second-screen or social TV apps. But while the companies have definitively struck an agreement for Miso to be acquired, there’s still a lot that’s up in the air. For instance, it’s not clear how many of Miso’s nine employees will be joining Dijit. Or how Dijit plans to incorporate Miso’s technology and community into its own applications.

One thing that is certain: Miso founder Somrat Niyogi will be stepping away from the day-to-day, although he will remain as an advisor to the combined company. Also, according to CEO Jeremy Toeman, Dijit will shut down Miso’s recently launched Quips app, which was designed to allow users to share specific moments from their favorite TV shows.

Miso’s other products — its legacy TV check-in app and its Sideshows companion app — could live on, but Toeman said he wants to have a unified identity system to integrate them. The company will be looking for ways to move Miso users into its own NextGuide system.

While Miso had been working on ways for users to share what they’re watching, and for providing more information and content around shows, Dijit’s NextGuide is more focused on discovery. Toeman said that the tie-up could provide better ways for Dijit to connect users with new shows and connect shows to a new audience, as we all enter a “second era of social TV.”

“We’re definitely somewhere different than where we were three years ago,” Toeman said.

Terms weren’t disclosed and Toeman wouldn’t comment on the deal structure, but we had previously heard that it was more likely to be an equity swap than a cash deal. That makes sense, as Dijit hasn’t raised a ton of money. Toeman confirmed that the company had previously raised a small seed round last year, but wouldn’t comment on how much. Miso, meanwhile, had raised about $6 million over the last few years, with investors including Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures, and Hearst Interactive Media.

“Social infrastructure” provider Gigya released some data this morning that highlights its growth over the past year. The biggest number? The 1.5 billion unique users reached by Gigya’s tools each month, up from 1 billion a year ago.

To have that kind of reach, Gigya presumably needs big clients, and the company says new customers added last year include Wal-Mart, DirectTV, RedBox, Beats Electronics, Pacific Sunwear, American Heart Association, Jelly Belly, Barneys New York, Bad Boy Marketing Group, Adidas, Food Network, AlItalia, and Lush Cosmetics. The company says it now has 650 clients total, including 50 percent of the comScore’s top 100 US web properties.

As for revenue, Gigya said it’s now bringing in tens of millions in annual sales. Sales growth tripled from 2011, with the fourth quarter coming in as the company’s biggest quarter ever.

“Our growth has been so phenomenal that we truly feel we can control the entire social-consumer technology market in the next three years,” CEO Patrick Salyer told me via email. (I guess we’ll have to check back in three years …)

The company raised a $15.3 million round last year and now has more than 150 employees. Its products fall into three broad categories — user management (including social login), social plugins, and gamification.

I ran into senior marketing manager Victor White at the Crunchies awards ceremony last night, where I asked about the company’s plans for 2013. He said the big focus will be on social data, namely helping Gigya customers get more use out of all the customer information they’re collecting. At the same time, White said Gigya will continue developing and promoting privacy standards through its SocialPrivacy certification.

Apple has managed to nab three of the top 5 spots for the top-selling mobile phones in the U.S. during Q4 2012 according to the NPD Group, with the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 ranking first, third and fourth, respectively. Apple also retained the crown for best-selling overall smartphone maker, accounting for 39 percent of smartphone sales in Q4 2012, compared to Samsung’s 30 percent.

iPhone 4 sales rose 79 percent compared to Q3 2012, and iPhone 4S sales grew 43 percent sequentially, while the iPhone 5 accounted for 43 percent of all iPhone sales in Q4 2012, which is roughly in line with the numbers we’re seeing out of carrier data as well. It also made up nearly two-thirds of all smartphone sales on post-paid plans with a value over $200, NPD says. Samsung made considerable gains on the year, going up to 30 percent of all U.S. smartphone sales in Q4 2012 from 21 percent in the year ago quarter, but the gains were mostly at the expense of other Android OEMs, including HTC, while Apple’s overall share remained constant.

Net Applications also released its monthly report on mobile OS share, which found that Apple’s iOS increased slightly in terms of traffic, accounting for 60.56 percent of all mobile operating systems, while Android actually took a bit of a dip to 24.51 percent, continuing a decline that has occurred over the past two months from a peak high in November of 28.02 percent. It looks like Apple’s release of the iPhone 5 might have essentially begun to erase earlier gains made by the longer availability of the Samsung Galaxy S III, but Apple still has some ground to make up if it wants to climb back to its 2012 high of nearly 66 percent web traffic share among mobile devices.

Apple’s holiday quarter, which included 47.8 million iPhone sales and 22.9 million iPads, looks to have helped it in terms of remaining the leader in both smartphone and mobile device sales in the U.S., and in keeping the hold it has on mobile browsing. The strong quarter also accounts for Apple’s regaining the role of largest mobile phone maker by volume in the U.S., an honor it reclaimed according to the latest data from Strategy Analytics released earlier today.

Google Maps just won Best Mobile App at the Crunchies 2012 and Daniel Graf, Google’s director of Google Maps for mobile talked to our own Colleen Taylor after accepting the award. In the interview, Graf noted that it was a unique opportunity for him and his team to start from scratch. Looking ahead, Graf stressed that the next frontier for maps will be about personalization.

Talking to Taylor, Graf noted that the company has a lot in store for Google Maps for the next year. “There is a lot more you can do with a map. If you look at a map and if I look at a map, should it always be the same for you and me? I’m not sure about that, because I go to different places than you do.”

Google obviously personalized virtually all of its search results already these days, so starting to personalize maps (beyond highlighting restaurants and other local businesses you reviewed on Google+ Local) seems like a logical next step.

While Graf didn’t give away too much about Google’s plans for the coming year, he did tease that his team has a lot in store for the next few months. Interestingly, he also noted that he thinks Google now has all of the basic use cases down, so now is the time to do more “interesting” things with maps.

You can see the full interview below:

InfoArmy — a startup built on the “Data 2.0″ concept of crowdsourced competitive intelligence — has today sent out a letter, printed in full below, to its researchers informing them that it is pulling the plug on its current business model after failing to find enough sales for the research reports, and being unable to sustain the quality of the work that was being produced. As a result, it will be offering reports on its site free of charge and will no longer be paying researchers for their contributions, as it works on a pivot of the company.

“The key thing is that crowdsourcing is still a part and parcel of what we’re doing, but the way we’re doing it with this model has not worked,” CEO and founder Jim Fowler told TechCrunch. “We got a bunch of researchers to work on this and it was a 50-50 share, but it ended up not working. The critical thing is that we’re looking at a much more crowdsourcing-like model. I remain a 100% believer in it.”

Still, the news represents a setback both for enterprise-focused crowdsourcing, and also for Fowler, who sold his previous crowdsourced enterprise startup, Jigsaw, to Salesforce for $175 million. To date, InfoArmy had raised $19.3 million from Norwest Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures and Fowler himself. It has been in operation for only about eight months.

TechCrunch learned of the news from some of the researchers. One of them noted that he “really enjoyed” the experience at first. “Things were smooth, a lot of committed folks were involved,” he says. But he noticed early signs of problems with sales — not a surprise, perhaps, since there was only one salesperson hired at the company, but he noted that InfoArmy’s response was to cut the pay of researchers and claim report quality was the reason for the problem.

“I take that as a fair criticism, but given they design the system within the researchers operated, they surely could have made some tweeks to improve quality,” he said. After this came more problems with the payment system, an outsourcing move to India for some of the report editing and publishing, and lots of researcher complaints on a forum — now, apparently, deleted.

“They regularly teased a ‘big February 1st announcement’ that would address all of our concerns and hopefully right the ship. Then came today’s announcement,” he noted.

The announcement goes into a lot of detail into what went wrong. “I’m a believer in being direct and honest,” explained Fowler. “Only then can you create a good company.” He also pointed out some of what InfoArmy plans to retain in its service when it pivots: “We like the mobile-first philosophy, and we’ve got gorgeous reports for tablets,” he said. “We’ve learned a lot about producing for mobile and done some great work on it.”

The letter is below.

“InfoArmy launched last June. Since that time we have worked together trying to create an innovative new business model that would allow many researchers to eventually earn income on the InfoArmy platform. Unfortunately, the current business model has several large and unfixable problems:

? Sales are not happening. So far InfoArmy has sold just 44 individual report subscriptions ($4,356). All of this revenue was distributed to researchers (InfoArmy did not take 50% as planned under the Revenue Share model).
? Almost two months ago we hired a full time sales person. He has been unsuccessful so far. Data quality is the main issue preventing sales. Common complaints include incorrect revenue estimates and competitors.
? Publication bonuses have created the wrong incentives. Some researchers have published the lowest quality reports they can get away with.

“Quarterly updates are very unpopular – even with our best researchers. The report abandonment rate for quarterly updates is high. Updates are critical to the success of the current model. We have been unable to create a sense of report ownership across a large enough group of researchers.

“So far InfoArmy has paid $146K to researchers (averaging $23/report), and some researchers have made over $5,000 individually. We are very happy that many hard working researchers have made money. However, without a clear path to revenue this model is unsustainable.

“InfoArmy takes full responsibility for the above issues. This business model was our idea. Unfortunately it isn’t working as planned and we have to make some major changes.

“We haven’t figured it all out yet, but we believe the new model will look something like this:

? No more 50/50 Revenue Share. Members will exchange information they have for information they need.

? No more report ownership. Many different people will contribute to reports and make estimates. Reports will be updated in real time instead of quarterly.

? All reports will be free (in their current form). The object will be to create added value that can eventually be put behind a pay wall.

“For purposes of clarity, we will no longer be paying InfoArmy members for their information gathering. If you choose to continue to provide services to us under the new model, you will not be paid under the Revenue Share model or by any other means. The Terms Of Service that govern the services you provided will terminate with the final payment you receive. InfoArmy is creating an entirely new business model that will have new terms. As of today we have made all existing reports free. If you wish to remove the reports you created from the InfoArmy website please contact us at [email protected].

“We made one final General Fund Payment on January 31st, 2013. Along with the General Fund payment we included an Appreciation Bonus to thank you again for your support. Each initial report creation was awarded $5 and each update $2. These bonuses applied regardless of whether or not you still owned the report and were split 80-20 between the PR and SR. This final payment will make the total amount paid to researchers approximately $200K (or approximately $29 per report).

“We anticipate that you may have questions and concerns. Please email us at [email protected] and we will respond as quickly as possible. We will also have two webinars to answer your questions. They will occur on Friday, Feb 1 at 3pm PST and Monday, Feb 4 at 7am PST.

“To the majority of researchers who believed in the InfoArmy vision of creating a revenue share platform we offer our sincere apologies that the current model did not work. We recognize that many of you poured your hearts into creating reports, and we are very sorry to have let you down. We truly thank you for your support and have enjoyed getting to know you all. We are hopeful to see you again when we launch the new model.

With best regards,

Jim Fowler and the InfoArmy Team”

Question: when does your mobile app also need a web experience? Answer: when the app is essentially an e-commerce shop. Sesame, the recently launched mobile gifting app from Sincerely, a company known for its mobile photo postcard and greeting card applications, is now web-friendly with the debut of the Sesame online store. Like its app-based counterpart, the web store will allow users to browse through the various gift boxes for sale, including the trio of new additions for Valentine’s Day, then purchase and send them without the need to install an app on their phone.

This is a slight change in direction for Sincerely, which has been a mobile-first company in the past. Although the Sincerely website does offer users access to their past orders, account info and address book, the process of designing cards, greetings or ordering other gifts was done on mobile, previously.

Sesame, for those unfamiliar, launched just before the holidays, allowing users to browse and send themed gift boxes from their iPhone. These boxes include unique, hand-picked items packaged nicely, and centered around a theme like “Cocktail Hour,” “Game Night,” “Puppy Picks,” and more.

According to Sincerely CEO Matt Brezina, the new web store was added based on users’ feedback – they would read about what Sesame had to offer, but were frustrated that they had to download an app to even see the available gift sets, he says. Now they have access to a fully featured shopping experience right on web.

Not only is running an online store like this a change for the company, Sesame itself represents a step up from the apps Sincerely launched in the past – postcards and greetings you send from your iPhone. But so far, that transition has gone well, says Brezina. Though he declined to provide user numbers because of the app’s newness, he did note that Sesame’s holiday sales quickly passed those of its Postagram app (mobile postcards) in terms of daily revenue, thanks to the average order size being so high, as well as increased interest from the corporate gifting market.

“This has been our strategy all along,” says Brezina of the shift to Sesame’s more expensive gifting options. “We start users on the world’s simplest gift, a printed postcard, and then cross-sell other, more premium priced cards and gifts.” Once someone uses the Sesame app for a gift, their rate of repeat purchase is high, Brezina adds.

Because Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, the company has introduced three new gift sets ranging from a spicy “5 Shades of Grey” set complete with massage oil and lotions, chocolates, silk ties and more. The other two sets are tamer, featuring the traditional V-Day selection of chocolates, a card, and a plush toy (a “love monkey,” aww).

Since its launch, the company has added just one other set to the dozen or so it already had, and still plans to add around two per month going forward, including holiday gifts.

Although Facebook has also been making moves into social gifting in recent days – including with yesterday’s launch of reusable gift cards – Sesame’s gifts, in my personal experience, have been of higher quality than the early, more self-promotional efforts Facebook has delivered. Gifts was a low mark on Facebook’s otherwise solid Q4 2012 earnings this week, as Gifts product and promoted user posts functionality accounted for less than $5 million of Facebook’s overall revenue.

A little more than three years after the company was first announced, personalization startup Gravity is doing a big launch today, opening up its suite of APIs so that they’re available to any publisher who wants to use them.

Founded by a trio of former Myspace executives, Gravity has created an “interest graph” mapping different topics, which it then uses to recommend different content to users based on their activity on a given site. As the technology becomes better-acquainted with each visitor, the recommendations should improve.

Kapur lays out a pretty ambitious vision about how personalization is “the future of content,” but publishers can implement Gravity in more limited ways — for example, by using the technology to create a “Recommended for You” widget that’s personalized for each reader.

Until now, the company has been working with a specific group of partner publishers. Those partners include CNN Money, which Gravity’s technology to deliver recommendations in its iPad app, and TechCrunch, which has a Gravity-powered “What You Missed” widget (it’s down and right from this post). Gravity says it already delivers 25 million content recommendations to 200 million users per day. That’s more a reflection of the reach of its publishers than usage from actual readers, but the company also some partners have seen clickthrough levels increase two or three times, with a 300 percent increase in return visits and 40 percent growth in session time.

Co-founder and CEO Amit Kapur (previously COO at Myspace) said it was always part of the plan to open up the platform to any publisher. So why has it taken several years to get to this point?

“I think when you’re trying to do this big and disruptive, you have to be methodical,” Kapur said, later adding, “You want things to happen sooner and faster, but you have to kind of build at the pace that helps you build that amazing product.”

Kapur also suggested that now is the time when “the market is ready to embrace personalization” — as one example, he pointed to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s recent interview about personalization as the future of search.

The tools will be available to publishers for free. The company will include sponsored stories in the recommendations and split the revenue with publishers (an approach that’s similar to other content recommendation services like Outbrain). Kapur said one of his big goals in the coming months is to grow the sponsored stories program and hire more salespeople. He also sees mobile as a big opportunity — the small screen size means that publishers want to give their readers a more personal experience, and it also means that they can’t rely on standard ad units to make money.

Gravity has raised a total of $20.6 million in funding, including a $10.6 million Series B last fall. Recent hires include former MediaPass sales executive Robert Leon as its vice president of sales and Josef Pfeiffer, previously a senior product manager at the Wall Street Journal, as its director of product.

U.K. startup onefinestay — which has attracted backing to the tune of $15.9 million from Index Ventures, PROfounders Capital, Canaan Partners and David Magliano – has been using some of that cash to develop a keyless entry system to make it easier for homeowners to manage comings and goings.

onefinestay is best described as an upscale Airbnb — its business relies on convincing high-end homeowners in London and New York to rent out their city abodes when they’re away. But convincing well-heeled types to let strangers sleep in the four-poster sounds like an uphill task. The startup had signed up 1,000 homeowners as of December, doubling the number of homes on its books in July 2012 — a growth rate that’s best described as steady but slow.

It’s clearly hoping to remove a few more barriers to potential home hosts — not to mention offering them a bit of a carrot — in the form of some cutting edge digital convenience. That and reducing the number of physical keys it has to manage (noting on its website that “onefinestay manages what is known in polite society as ‘one heck of a lot of keys’”).

So enter stage left onefinestay’s keyless lock system Sherlock, which it is currently offering to install in hosts’ houses for free during a trial period. onefinestay CEO and co-founder Greg Marsh told TechCrunch the startup has been developing the patent pending technology for more than two years. “We’ve conducted extensive field tests across a range of homes of onefinestay members in London — including the CEO’s.”

“Some hosts are naturally concerned about making copies of their keys,” he added. “Clearly, one of the major advantages of Sherlock is that it significantly improves the security for homeowners when they work with onefinestay.”

The promo video for Sherlock (see below) talks up the benefits in terms of no more wasting precious time sitting in waiting for the plumber or the delivery man — by allowing users to lock and unlock their door via an app or by sending a text message. Of course the super rich aren’t going to be doing any of that hanging around anyway — they’ll have staff for such drudgery and/or live in a managed apartment with a concierge — but there’s doubtless a swathe of high end homeowners that onefinestay wants to woo who still have to push and pull their own door hinges.

onefinestay’s keyless entry system also allows users to distribute single or multiple use virtual keys to friends or trusted individuals — so they can gain entry without needing to be given a physical key.

But why is onefinestay getting into the entry system making business itself? There are already smart keyless entry systems on the market and in development — Lockitron‘s Kickstarter springs to mind — but Marsh said that after evaluating what was out there the company decided it needed to build its own offering that does not require users to change all their locks (hardly convenient) and which also addresses the problem of unlocking multiple doors, so that homeowners who live in so-called ‘walk-ups’ aren’t excluded from using it.

“We extensively researched other solutions before committing to develop our own, and remain open to working with other vendors to offer a complete solution. However nothing out there today solves the whole problem. Most existing systems — including unsurprisingly the ones being sold by major lock companies — require people to change their locks (and sometimes keys),” said Marsh.

“While that’s not a problem if you live in a townhouse, the large majority of city inhabitants live in apartment buildings and walk-ups, and don’t have a doorman. That means that they have two front doors — a building door and an apartment door. Have you ever tried persuading all your neighbours and/or your building management company to let you change your building door locks, or install a device into the common areas of your building? That’s a tough sell!”

onefinestay’s keyless entry system does not require new locks to be installed (or new keys used), or a device to be attached over existing locks — it uses a wall-mounted box installed inside the user’s home close to the door to connect to the apartment’s door entry system, and to onefinestay’s servers to authenticate the unlock/lock request. If there’s no door entry system in the building, Marsh says the system can still be installed — by swapping out the standard strike for a “conventional electric strike component”.

There are still a minority of doors that aren’t compatible though — but 95 per cent are, according to onefinestay’s calculations. ”We’ve been testing Sherlock in a range of buildings with positive results, and are now starting to roll it out to onefinestay hosts in London,” Marsh added.

As part of its customer service offering the startup currently meets every onefinestay guest on arrival, but Marsh said he can envisage Sherlock helping it to be freed up from some of these face-to-face interactions in future — “possibly having trusted or repeat onefinestay guests use Sherlock to enter a home so that there is never a need to give guests physical keys”.

Beyond reducing key-based complexity, potentially cutting some customer face-time and paving the way to grow the number of home hosts on its book, the startup said it might end up selling Sherlock as a standalone product in future — hence the patent pending — “if all goes well”.

It’s a full-blown computer jammed into a teeny, tiny frame. How does Acer do this? Through sacrifices.

Our lives are booked up with office holiday parties, flash mobs, and virtual hangouts. Luckily, keeping track of events has never been easier.

This portable, 12-watt Bluetooth unit gets surprisingly loud. Unfortunately, while volume was never an issue, bass response was.

Google’s cloud-driven laptops may have found the key to wide adoption: a $250 price tag.

Acer’s Iconia W700 is one of the best Windows 8 slates on the market. But we’re still not convinced it’s a great buy.

As the first Windows 8–certified speaker, the Aris relies on Microsoft’s DLNA-derived Play To system.

The A5 may be the smaller of Bowers & Wilkins’ two new AirPlay speakers, but this impeccably designed 80-watt rig has no trouble delivering the natural, refined sound the company is known for.