Category: Tech news

[Editor’s Note: This is a weekly series. If your company is doing something amazing to help a charitable cause or doing some good in your community, please reach out.]

What if just by buying a t-shirt that spreads a message for a charitable cause, you could help fund that cause? What if there were a website that highlighted a specific cause and t-shirt every week? And what if that website donated $7 from each sale to that cause? You’d have Sevenly.org, a pretty amazing startup with the sole purpose of helping to raise both money and awareness, all with fashion, e-commerce and you, of course.

By highlighting one cause a week, Sevenly puts all of its focus on promoting that cause, which benefits from it, and giving you a simple call to action…buy a t-shirt.

I spoke to Ryan Wood from Sevenly and here’s how he describes his startup’s mission:

The way that our model works is that for every single product purchased from our website, Sevenly donates $7 to that week’s cause on behalf of the supporter. For example, if our supporters purchase 1,000 products during the seven-day campaign, Sevenly will write a check for $7,000 and donate it directly to the cause (charity partner) for that week.

Through this model we’re also able to do some pretty exciting things. Often times we’re able to quantify our purchases to say, for example, for every item purchased an orphaned child in Thailand will be provided with daily meals for an entire month. Or, for every item purchased a child struggling with cancer will be given a jar full of toys that will bring joy and happiness to their lives. In addition to being able to quantify these purchases, we are able to introduce match donors occassionaly for our campaigns, raising the donation amount from $7 to $14 per item purchased, and in some cases, a full $21 donated per item purchased.

This week’s shirt benefits Child Help, which is dedicated to helping victims of child abuse and neglect.

The company has already raised $1,554,040 for various causes since its launch, with its items being shared on various social networks 4,018,721 times. That’s quite a network effect, and pretty good for a company that started less than two years ago.

While I’m not a fan of infographics, Sevenly has put one together that shows you why its model works and was necessary. As you’ll see, there’s a surplus of charitable causes out there, but there’s no clear way for them to reach the right audience of supporters who will both donate and spread their message:

Does the company make some money? Yes, of course. It has a staff to pay and it takes time, effort and money to design and print t-shirts. This is what Sevenly does, and all you have to do is buy a t-shirt to participate. If you’re a non-profit and want Sevenly to highlight your cause, simply fill out this application.

A couple of weeks ago CNET was put into an absurd situation – they could not favorably cover a technology product because the company behind that product was in litigation with CNET’s parent company, CBS.

I wasn’t all that interested in the story at the time. Reporters and bloggers are constantly pressured to write or not write about things by parent companies and even business executives in their own companies. CBS telling CNET what it could and could not write about wasn’t anything I haven’t seen before.

I understand why CBS was trying to control messaging about a company that they were suing, although they certainly weren’t very smart about how they handled it. The Streisand Effect kicked in and not only did the product end up getting tons of extra positive press, but both CBS and CNET looked like idiots.

Still, big companies do stupid things all the time. It’s a big part of why small startups are often so successful at disrupting them.

What I don’t get is why CNET staffers have stuck around. They’re the ones who are supposed to be journalists and all that entails. They’re the ones I blame right now.

I blame them because they’re the only reason CBS is able to get away with this. Every single journalist at CNET should have resigned by now.

More than once at TechCrunch we made AOL extremely uncomfortable with things that we wrote. But they never ordered us to write or not write about something because they understood that not only would we not comply, we’d write a post about the whole thing.

Our independence from AOL was so important to me that I negotiated an extremely odd provision in our purchase agreement that allowed me to disclose confidential information about AOL. It was their job never to give me that information. It was not my job to protect it in any way.

If AOL had ever ordered me to remove a piece of content from the site for any reason I would have immediately written about it and disclosed the situation to our readers. And if I had ever ordered a writer to remove content I would have expected that writer to have done the same to me.

In fact, one of the things I am most proud about at TechCrunch is the culture of independence in its writers. Many times I have been criticized publicly by my own team. We’ve even had absurd arguments break out, on the site, about the pros and cons of one gadget over another. It can drive readers crazy to see all the conflict, but there was never any question about whether or not people’s unfettered opinions were being expressed.

When Greg Sandoval left CNET (to my knowledge the only person who’s resigned over this mess) I thought he’d be the first of many. His words – “We are supposed to be truth tellers” – rang true.

Why haven’t others followed him? Why are they still grumbling about it but not actually doing anything about it?

CNET reporters need to either be resigning or be reporting this story, or both. On CNET. If someone higher up removes their content then they should republish it on their personal blogs. If they are then fired for that they should sue the company. And either way, other tech sites, including this one, would be more than happy to make them job offers.

I left (or was fired) TechCrunch in 2011 over editorial independence. The Huffington Post tried (and was successful for a time) to take control of TechCrunch. And not only did I leave, a whole string of writers and editors left shortly afterwards. It wasn’t until AOL removed TechCrunch from the control of the Huffington Post that things stabilized. And today TechCrunch is stronger than it ever was, by far.

And, importantly, even when all of this was going on at TechCrunch, AOL and Huffington Post never successfully tried to censor TechCrunch writers from saying exactly what they thought. Things got messy, but they were never hidden.

Earlier today I read John Gruber’s short post about what’s happening at CNET. He wrote that the situation was untenable, and “CBS either needs to give CNet editorial independence or sell them to someone who will. As it stands, they’re grinding CNet’s reputation and brand into worthless powder.”

Those are almost the exact words I yelled shortly before I left TechCrunch – either sell the site back to the original shareholders or give us true editorial independence.

As with AOL and TechCrunch, it’s unlikely that CBS will do either. But at the very least, it might make CBS think twice if CNET’s editorial and reporter teams were to simply say exactly what they think, and then walk out.

In short I expect big companies to be some combination of stupid and evil. But when the people affected do absolutely nothing, they’re just part of the problem, too.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”

Update: See Truth, Money, Right, Wrong

San Francisco-based Coaster launched a few months ago with a mobile drink ordering app, allowing consumers to place orders and pay for their drinks at select bars without having to wait in line. Since launch, the startup has been slowly adding local venues to the app. But it couldn’t reach them all, so it just released a self-serve iPad app that bars can install on their own.

While getting users to download and try out the app is difficult, the bigger problem that Coaster faced was getting the system in more bars. The local small business market is a tough nut to crack, after all, and it’s nearly impossible to go through the process of going door-to-door to sign on new partners in the bar scene of just one city — San Francisco — let alone wherever bars happen to be, which is pretty much anywhere.

The new iPad app enables bars to roll out the system themselves. They can quickly create their own menus, specifying various drink prices and drink specials. Since Coaster already has a number of different drinks and beers already in the app, most bars will merely need to choose which they’d like to add to the menu, and at what price point. Or, they can fill out their menus with specialty drinks that they price themselves. Once they’re finished, they just save out and their venue will appear on the app.

I’ve written about Coaster before, but mainly I was writing about the value prop for users. That’s mostly the ability to skip waiting in line for drinks and to make payments via in-app purchases, rather than having to open up and close out a tab. Even better, they can pay using credit cards through the app at bars that usually only accept cash.

But for bars, there are numerous advantages as well. Bartenders don’t need to worry about keeping track of tabs and credit cards that users leave behind. Since Coaster users are paying (and tipping) in app, there’s no exchange of money back and forth, even in those bars which are cash-only.

Coaster founder Inderpal Singh says one other advantage is that bars will be able to sell more drinks. First, by decreasing the wait time between orders, and also by making payment quick and easy. But the big reason bars might want to adopt the Coaster iPad app for their orders is that Coaster charges no payment processing fees — the system is completely free to implement.

The Coaster team hopes that by making the app free, it will be able to get bars to at least test it out. And once it’s done that, it’ll be able to show that it can move the needle by increasing sales and decreasing credit card costs. We’ll see how that plan works out, and how many bars actually try it out, and report back soon.

Yandex begged Facebook not to shut down its social search app Wonder that launched this morning. But the explanation Yandex’s lawyers sent us for why it’s compliant with Facebook’s policies didn’t stop Facebook from blocking all API calls from Wonder, Yandex confirms. Facebook tells me it’s now discussing policy with Yandex. The move follows a trend of Facebook aggressively protecting its data.

Wonder has, or should I say had, big potential. When I broke the news that Yandex was readying Wonder earlier this month, I detailed how the voice-activated social search app for iOS let people see what local businesses friends had visited or taken photos at, what music they’d been listening to, and what news they had been reading. It essentially reorganized Facebook’s data into a much more mobile, discoverable format.

Unfortunately, Facebook’s Platform Policy says “You must not include data obtained from us in any search engine or directory without our written permission.” Facebook would not confirm that it has blocked Wonder, though Yandex tells me it received an email from Facebook that its data access had been revoked. Wonder is still able to access Twitter, Foursquare, and interestingly, Instagram data. However, any Wonder user who tries to log in through Facebook is getting this error:

ThoFacebook did confirm its policy against competing search engines still stands. The two companies are currently discussing the future of Wonder. For now, though, the Google of Russia’s larger integrations with Facebook will still have access to the social network’s data.

The policy enforcement confirms rumored fears from Yandex that Facebook would shut down Wonder. Yandex tried to preempt this and disuade Facebook by sending us this statement which we printed alongside the launch this morning:

We note that Yandex is not in violation of Facebook Platform Policies providing for restriction to use data obtained from Facebook in a search engine or directory for the reason that Wonder is not a search engine or a directory. Our application is a personal assistant that helps browse and organize information that is exclusively available to and associated with relevant account of the relevant user in various social networks and services.

On the contrary, [a] search engine is conventionally understood as an information location tool which automatically indexes tens of thousands of publicly available websites, fetches information with unrestricted access and is freely accessible to any Internet user. In addition, we would like to note that Wonder requests [a] user for specific permission to access each portion of information available to the user through a social network or services and never accesses information or data which is beyond the consent, availability for or extent of permission expressly granted by the application user. It is further to be noted, that the application does not perform any automated operations, unless these are specifically permitted by the user.

But last week, Facebook blocked voice messaging app Voxer’s access to its Find Friends feature that lets people recreate their Facebook social graph on other apps. Facebook told me this was because it didn’t want competing messaging apps taking advantage of its data if they weren’t contributing much back to Facebook. Voxer only offered a very buried “share to Facebook” option, and since the app was designed for private messaging, few people probably used that option.

It seems that Facebook has matured to the point that it’s willing to trade its status as an “open platform” in exchange for preventing competing apps from stealing its value and users. If Facebook doesn’t handle these situations delicately, it could cause a chilling effect that disuades other developers from building on top of it.

America’s “Happy Warrior”, Vice-President Joe Biden, was as entertaining as ever in his Google+ hangout on gun reform today. “If you want to keep people away during an earthquake, buy some shotgun shells,” he said, in response to a question about assault weapons bans. We’ve compiled the best of Biden’s Hangout, with special attention to his video game comments.

On The Assault Weapons Ban

“A shot gun will keep you a lot safer–a double-barrell shotgun–than an assault rifle in somebody’s hands who doesn’t know how to use it…It’s harder to use an assault weapon to hit someone than it is a shotgun,” said the Veep in response to a question about why its important to have assault weapons in the hypothetical case of a natural disaster that plunges America into a chaotic dystopia.

“If you want to keep people away during an earthquake, buy some shotgun shells.”

On His “Interpretation” Of the Second Amendment

“My interpretation of the Second Amendment,” he explained, “it is an individual right, not a corporate right, no related to a militia, you have an individual right to own a weapon both for recreation–for hunting– and also for your self-protection.”

Continuing, “But, just as you don’t have an individual right to by an F-15, if you’re a billionaire, with ordinance on it, just like you don’t have the right to buy an M1 tank, just like you don’t have the right to buy an automatic weapon, those judgements have been made that there are no reasonable societal justifications or constitutional justifications for owning them”

“There is no sporting need that I’m aware of to have a magazine that holds 50 rounds, none that I’m aware, and I’m a sportsman”.

On Internet Celebrities

Before YouTube celebrity Phil DeFranco asked a question, he joked that the VP was probably not aware of him or his show. “Actually i have seen it, I wish I had your hair”.

On Video Games

“There’s no hard data on whether these excessively violent video games, in fact, cause people to engage in behavior that is antisocial, including using guns,” he said, referencing a noted American Academy of Pediatrics review of research that violent video games are strongly associated with aggressive behavior. ”They didn’t make the next connection saying that leads to violent behavior, but there’s no studies done,” Biden concludes.

I do agree with the fact that the preponderance of evidence does show a convincing link between actual physical aggression and violent video games.

It’s also true that there’s no good causal evidence showing a link between violence and video games (just physical aggression, like yelling and kicking), but that’s mainly because the relatively smaller population of gun offenders makes it difficult to do experimental and large-scale research. Also, even if a link were found, there’s no clear way that legislation could stop games getting into the hands of kids anyways.

Still, I agree with Biden that it couldn’t hurt to do more research.

On Interest Group Extremism

“Part of the Interest group population out there is afraid of facts”, he said, “let the research be done.”

“You’ll hear the NRA say, well, that might not be so bad, but its a slippery slope…if you allow that to happen then next thing you know, you’ll call for firearms registration, gun registration, and you’re going to be able to confiscate my weapon, etc.”

On His Family’s History With Guns

“There is a legitimate, respected, and I think as old as the country, culture of gun ownership in America. My dad was a hunter. My dad had a gun case full of some fairly valuable weapons. He had some hard times, he had to sell them when I was a kid. I own two shotguns, my son owns shotguns.”

Then, in rare form, he regaled the audience with a story of an old woman who showed him her guns, ” ‘Come on, let me show you mine’. And, she’s out there, and she’s firing a shotgun at a barn. And she’s 78-years-[old]. She said, ‘My daddy gave me this gun’. It’s a legitimate and respected tradition.”

Honorable Mentions

While not very quote worthy, the Vice President did make some compelling arguments on school safety and magazine limits. Rather than give teachers guns, we should have professional guards that develop a relationship with students and the community. Additionally, teachers will be trained to spot disturbed individuals, through “Project Aware”.

Additionally, he says that limits on the amount of ammunition a gun can hold could save lives. Speaking about the shooting that left Representative Gabby Giffords with permanent brain damage, the shooter was tackled when he was forced to reload the gun clip. Other mass shootings have had similar incidences. Biden argued that if magazine limits could save one life, it would be enough to justify a new law.

Joe Biden is on a digital hotstreak. Earlier this month, one of his tweets went viral when he referenced The Onion’s TransAm driving parody (below) of him. Once again, Joe Biden won the Internet.

Q for @reddit AMA with my @TheOnion pal: A Trans-Am? Ever look under the hood of a Corvette? #imavetteguy –VP http://t.co/xPGMBBYl

—
Office of VP Biden (@VP) January 18, 2013

Microsoft announced today its financial results for the second fiscal quarter of 2013, and it was an overall strong showing for the company.

The Redmond, Washington-based software giant posted revenue of $21.46 billion and net income of $6.38 billion, with earnings per share of 77 cents. That’s largely in line with what Wall Street had been expecting, though a bit lower on the revenue side and higher on the earnings side — ahead of today’s financial report, the analyst consensus was that Microsoft would post earnings of 75 cents a share on $21.53 billion in revenue.

Today’s results show a nice gain from Microsoft’s results for the first quarter of fiscal 2013, in which the company posted revenues of $16.01 billion and earnings per share of $0.53.

Here are the results in handy graph form, thanks to TechCrunch graphic designer and illustrator Bryce Durbin:

In a statement accompanying the release, Microsoft said that the past holiday season turned out to be the strongest in the company’s history. Additionally, CEO Steve Ballmer was characteristically bullish about the company’s recent performance and future prospects, especially in regards to Windows Phone 8 and the Surface tablet:

“Our big, bold ambition to reimagine Windows as well as launch Surface and Windows Phone 8 has sparked growing enthusiasm with our customers and unprecedented opportunity and creativity with our partners and developers. With new Windows devices, including Surface Pro, and the new Office on the horizon, we’ll continue to drive excitement for the Windows ecosystem and deliver our software through devices and services people love and businesses need.”

Microsoft’s stock price has been climbing over the past two days, apparently in anticipation of strong Q2 results. However, the stock has started to lag a bit in the aftermath of the earnings report: Microsoft’s share price was down 1.5 percent in after-hours trading within the first minutes of the report.

Breaking out the results in terms of company divisions, the Windows Division posted revenue of $5.88 billion, a 24 percent increase year-over-year; the Server & Tools business reported $5.19 billion of revenue, up nine percent year-over-year; the Microsoft Business Division posted $5.69 billion of revenue, a ten percent decrease year-over-year; the Online Services Division reported revenue of $869 million, up eleven percent year-over-year; and the Entertainment and Devices Division posted revenue of $3.77 billion, down eleven percent year-over-year.

AT&T shared its Q4 2012 earnings results today, reporting overall quarterly revenues of $32.6 billion (an increase of 0.2% year over year), and earnings per share of $0.44, The highlight of AT&T’s quarter is likely its record smartphone sales, however, as the carrier sold 10.2 million smartphone devices, of which 8.6 million, or 84%, were Apple iPhones.

AT&T’s performance was mixed when it came to consensus estimates from Wall Street, which had predicted earnings per share of $0.46, with revenue of $32.2 billion in revenue for the quarter. The telecom’s postpaid subscriber base now covers 107 million customers, a net increase of 1.1 million subscribers from the previous quarter. EPS was up slightly from $0.40 in the year ago quarter, and revenue also grew (if only a little) from the $32.5 billion reported in Q4 2011.

The real standout metric here is AT&T’s smartphone sales, which were the highest the company has ever recorded for a quarter. It pre-announced that it had crossed the 10 million threshold for device sales this quarter, in fact, so we knew that it was a big quarter in this regard, but now we get a clearer picture of exactly how big. Those smartphone sales included record highs for both iPhone and Android-powered smartphones, AT&T said.

Still, AT&T cautioned investors in advance that Superstorm Sandy, and higher than expected smartphone costs, likely related to its initial outlay for the iPhone 5, would put a damper on results, It also gave a heads up about the $10 billion charge it noted pertaining to its pension plan.

As I’ve noted, AT&T activated 8.6 million iPhones, compared to Verizon’s 6.2 million, meaning that combined the two U.S. carriers accounted for 14.8 million units, or around just a hair under 31% of all iPhones sold globally by Apple during the quarter. AT&T is still Apple’s number one driver of device sales, despite the fact that its monopoly on the iPhone ended years ago.

Turning briefly to AT&T’s wireless business, the Dallas-based telecommunications giant didn’t fare quite as well. Overall wireline revenues were $14.9 billion, down very slightly year-over-year, though operating income did lift a bit to $1.8 billion. AT&T also had a strong quarter when it came to roping in new home services customers — 192,000 subscribers signed up for AT&T’s U-verse TV service, while the company’s U-verse High Speed Internet picked up 609,000 new subscribers, making for a total of 7.7 million. Most importantly though is that revenue from these residential customers was up 3% from the year-ago quarter, a level of growth that AT&T notes is the strongest they’ve seen in four years.

Additional reporting by Chris Velazco

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In The Studio” continues this week by welcoming a former Oxford PhD student who, upon completing his long education, ended up in San Francisco, toyed with a few web ideas, and eventually was so inspired by an idea, based in part on his experience in a PhD program, that he found his passion and founded his first real startup.

Richard Price had an interesting path to be on this show. After launching his startup, Academia.edu, in 2008, and raising over $5 million in venture capital from savvy investors, it was Price who reached out to me to be on the show. I was very skeptical, I must admit. I didn’t understand how the site had been around for so long but I couldn’t get a feel of the activity on the site. To his credit, Price answered a long battery of emails quite nobly, and while we are all looking to use the web to test ideas far and wide, we too are enamored by growth and evidence of usage or impact, the validation that many seek. While Academia.edu certainly isn’t there yet, it’s clear from interacting with Price — and as you can see on this video — he is a founder who has identified a key problem and is obsessed with trying to solve it.

In this video, Price and I discuss the genesis of the site, what they’ve been doing to help architect their system, and the overall state of how academic papers are kept within the realm of academic journals, which he believes slows down the pace of discovery and innovation in science and technology. Additionally, while this conversation was originally taped on December 13, 2012, it is quite relevant today given the news around the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. A few days ago, I invited Price to comment on his views about Swartz’s attempt to free academic papers from JSTOR using MIT’s network. Price responded:

Aaron was totally right that there is an injustice about taxpayer-funded research being behind paywalls. There is a tragedy of the commons in science. Individual researchers hand over the copyright of their intellectual property to journals for free, in their desire to collect reputation metrics (i.e. the journal title on their resume). This dynamic enables the journal industry to acquire the intellectual property for the entire world’s scientific output for free, and charge the scientific community and the general public $8 billion a year to get access to it. To get out of this mess, we need to build new reputation metrics, ones that don’t incentivize scientists to put their work behind paywalls. Ironically scientists would vastly prefer to have their work open access. It is just that the system of reputation metrics that has emerged in science doesn’t allow them to do it. Building a new system of reputation metrics is one of the most important things that Academia.edu is doing.

Video editing app Videolicious was designed to allow users to create interesting videos on the fly by stitching together multiple photos and short video files. Thanks to an easy editing tool, the app been adopted by enterprise customers who are using it for internal and external communication, sales, and marketing. With that in mind, Videolicious has just released a new version of the app to provide businesses with more tools to provide branded videos and to better manage them in their publishing workflow.

Unlike other mobile video editing apps, Videolicious has taken steps to try to corner the enterprise market, rather than just go after consumers. The reason? Well, that’s where the money is. And it’s actually done pretty well — the startup has more than 1,500 business customers signed up to the platform after launching its business offering last summer.

One vertical where Videolicious has gotten a lot of attention is in the real estate market, where brokers and real estate agents can use the app to quickly create video previews of properties that they’re looking to sell or rent. One of the biggest Videolicious clients is Coldwell Banker, one of the biggest residential real estate companies in North America.

With version 2.5, Videolicious is adding more business-friendly features to appeal to business users and enterprises. One key feature allows enterprises to add unified branding at the beginning or end of all videos created by their employees. Coldwell Banker agents, for instance, will have the same end screen with company logo and branding in the videos they create.

The new version also includes APIs so that enterprises can automatically pull videos created within the app into their content management systems. That means they don’t have to go through the trouble of manually extracting videos and then uploading them separately. The app also now has tools to allow managers or editors to review videos before they’re pushed live.

Videolicious has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from investors such as Howard Lindzon, Joanne Wilson, Amazon.com, Venture51, Ludlow Ventures, Trestle Ventures, Scott Ingraham, and Quotidian Ventures.

140 Proof is expanding its social ad technology today with the launch of a new format called Native Ads for Social Sites, which allows 140 Proof advertisers to run campaigns on blogging platforms like WordPress and Tumblr.

The company started out by using social data to determine user interests and then use those interests to target ads in social networking apps. The new native ad units also use 140 Proof’s targeting technology, but by expanding to blogs, it’s taking another step towards serving, in the company’s words, “any publisher or media brand that wants to monetize social content, online or on mobile.”

Co-founder and CTO John Manoogian III said the team is particularly excited about Tumblr because many companies — including 140 Proof itself — already have their own Tumblrs and realize that it’s an important way to reach consumers. At the same time, advertising hasn’t really become a big part of the platform — Tumblr only launched its first ad products last year.

Manoogian noted that by delivering the ads in a “native” format, they can be reblogged and shared like any other blog post. He added that there’s already a long list of brands on the waiting list for 140 Proof’s Tumblr ad units, giving the company “a very strong, positive signal Tumblr is ready for this.”

140 Proof will be adding more advertising channels as part of a broader “blended strategy” later this quarter, he said.

Distil.it, a cloud-based platform that aims to help businesses quash web scraping and other nefarious web-born fraud, announced today that it has landed $1.8 million in seed financing. Investors in the round included ff Venture Capital, Idea Fund Partners, CIT, Piedmont RIA, Cloud Power Fund and TechStars.

What has investors intrigued? Distil.it co-founder and CEO Rami Essaid believes that Distil.it is the first Content Protection Network (CPN) that helps businesses identify and block content scraping and data theft. Its technology allows it to scan your website’s traffic and make realtime decisions, distinguishing between your customers and bots, while accelerating your content through 15 global nodes to reduce server loads and improve site speed.

A part of the inaugural class of TechStars Cloud in early 2012, Distil.it’s CEO tells us that the company has been experiencing 35 percent month-over-month revenue growth over the last four months, part of what has made it so appealing to investors. There’s also the fact that this has become a growing problem for businesses. When someone scrapes and duplicates content, they steal visitors, SEO rank and revenue. Not cool, bro. Not cool.

So, Distil’s Content Protection Network helps companies stop this, identifying and elbow-dropping on malicious content scraping and theft.

As to what makes Distil.it different: Essaid tells us that, unlike other solutions, the startup doesn’t rely on rate limiting to identify and stop bots, instead using “sophisticated code injections” to verify a connection’s identity and find automated agents. It then applies a layer of machine learning that enables it to discern the difference between bot traffic and human on a site-to-site basis.

The biggest differentiator from sites like Siteblackbox and Sentor, he says, is that when the site catches a malicious bot in action, it builds a signature to ensure that it’s never allowed to return. Distil.it then aggregates those signatures across all of its customers, crowdsourcing bot DNA so that every business gets to benefit from each bot captured. A digital community service.

With the new capital in tow, going forward, the startup plans to expand its cloud network footprint, spinning up four new data centers over the next quarter. It also is working to add more robust analytics to its user portals — tools that will help customers better identify who is trying to attack them, while giving them ways to monetize based on that traffic.

For more, find Distil.it at home here.

There might soon be a super simple way to download copyrighted movies, music, and software: the Caribbean island of Antigua is reportedly set to host servers that allow users to download content as revenge for a U.S. trade blockade.

As reported by TorrentFreak, “The Government of Antigua is planning to launch a website selling movies, music and software, without paying U.S. copyright holders. The Caribbean island is taking the unprecedented step because the United States refuses to lift a trade ‘blockade’ preventing the island from offering Internet gambling services, despite several WTO decisions in Antigua’s favor.”

Antigua lawyer, Mark Mandel, says “There is nobody in the world that can stop us from doing this, as we already have approval from the international governing body WTO.”

Apparently, the government of Antigua is permitted to suspend up to $21 million in copyright annually, because the U.S. defied a World Trade Organization ruling that permitted it to host online gambling. “A few years ago 5% of all Antiguans worked at gambling related companies. However, when the U.S. prevented the island from accessing their market the industry collapsed,” explains TorrentFreak.

In revenge for snubbing the WTO, Antigua plans to “capitalize” on the right to offer copyrighted materials, which means there might be some fee associated with the service.

For now, there are no details on the plans. TorrentFreak’s Ernesto tells TechCrunch that since the downloads are not peer-to-peer (like Napster), it should be much easier for users to disguise their activity from government surveillance. For instance, he says, a virtual private network (VPN) which routes traffic through other countries. In other words, the government may not be able to scare users away from Antigua through prosecution.

Concludes Torrentfreak, “If the Antiguan media portal indeed launches, it will make headlines all across the world, which may result in the site becoming one of the larger authorized suppliers of U.S. media on the Internet.”

Having launched two years ago into an extremely crowded travel vertical, Hipmunk has carved out its own niche. The site was built out of the need for ease of travelling by its founders, and the company has done a lot of things right since then. Hipmunk has raised $20.2 million to date, and has recently launched a new Deals product, which allows people to find the best places to go based on the best price available.

For people who just want to go somewhere, and nowhere specifically, Hipmunk can help you find a cheap ticket to a random place. For example, if you’re looking to “get away” this weekend, Hipmunk could find you a super cheap plane ticket from San Francisco to Vegas in a snap.

Hipmunk’s CEO and founder Adam Goldstein stopped by our studios to discuss the new product and to update us on what’s still ahead for the company.

The company started out small, but it currently has 32 people now and is looking for more engineers. You probably get to travel a lot…you know, to “test things out.”

WordPress.com parent company Automattic has acquired Simperium, the startup that runs a data syncing platform and is also well-known for Simplenote, the personal note-keeping app that’s been described as “a lightweight version of Evernote.”

Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed. Simperium first launched in August 2010 out of Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator. The three-person company closed a $450,000 seed round in 2011 from Y Combinator, Google Ventures, Kal Vepuri, David Tisch, Geoff Ralston, David and Alaina Sloo, Alex Payne, and ENIAC Ventures. I’m told that Simplenote has some 750,000 registered users.

As part of Automattic, both Simperium’s data-syncing app platform and Simplenote will live on, founders Mike Johnston and Fred Cheng said in blog posts announcing the deal, noting: “You know how sometimes, the services you love just disappear when they’re bought by someone else? Or they wither and die a slow and painful death? Not the case here. We made sure of that.” Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg himself is a long-time Simplenote fan who actually pitched in to buy the Simplenote.com domain name from a domain squatter, they added.

Here’s an excerpt from one Simperium blog post about the the future plans:

“In joining Automattic, we’re working with more resources and a growing, complementary team. Our plan is to supercharge Simplenote with a lot more attention in the months and years to come: native apps for more platforms, ongoing improvements, and more work on Simperium, our service for keeping your data in sync. Of course, Simplenote will stay simple. We know how important that is to you. It’s what kept it in the top apps of 2012, and it’s important to the team here as well.

Simplenote is in good hands. Our new family, now over 140 people strong and distributed around the world, lives and breathes all things internet. They get this stuff. We get this stuff. We build and use a wide variety of online tools every day to stay in sync with each other as a company.”

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise, but the mobile app economy continues to grow like gangbusters — like it stole something. Research2Guidance found that revenue from the top five app stores hit $8 billion in 2012 (up 27 percent from the year prior), while about 26,000 applications are submitted to iOS’ App Store each week. As a result, AdEven expects Apple to add at least 435K apps to its catalog in 2013 — on top of the million-plus already live.

And yet, in spite of this, app developers have it rough. Just 25 of the top developers took home 50 percent of app revenue in 2012, and it appears that supply has now exceeded demand to the point that the average revenue for paid apps decreased by 27 percent from $26,720 in 2011 to $19,560 in 2012.

So, how can we fix this problem? Well, there are a number of ways: fixing discovery (rankings and categories, among other things), search, overall quality, and so on. But a handful of students and entrepreneurs from Boston think they have a better idea: a pre-App Store app store. Huh?

Do we really need another app store, you ask? No, not really. GetJar filled that role nicely, and even that was a bit of a stretch. But PreApps, a new Boston-based startup, is today launching a platform that intends to act as a marketplace, connecting end users to app developers who can share their apps (and recruit beta testers) — all before they ever bring their app to the iOS App Store, Google Play or the Windows App Store.

Again, why? Hey, says PreApps CEO Sean Casto, there are plenty of sites and platforms where people who love entertainment can preview the next big movie, song and video game. So, now that apps have become a thriving economy, why not give users a place where they can check out the best upcoming apps? Fair enough.

However, if this is such a great idea, why doesn’t the “Preview App Store” already exist? Casto says that he thinks it’s partly due to the fact that the real inflection point in mobile growth has — in the big picture — happened relatively recently. Plus, the growth of the iOS and Android platforms in tandem with their app stores make them pretty daunting to go up against.

Not to mention the most important part: If you’re going to build another app store, you have to provide a big value-add for both end-users and developers. No easy task, but the PreApps team thinks that by offering developers a place where they can build a following and a brand, gain followers, fans and beta testers — before they even launch on the App Store — makes them far more likely to make money once they get there. Basically the mantra is “start earlier.”

Like Google and Apple’s stores, PreApps lets developers post their apps, which are split into categories, Top Apps, and so on. Each app gets its own page with a description, pricing, expiration (or release) date, screenshots, social sharing, videos, comments and suggestions. Developers can even post polls to ask their users if they like certain tweaks or updates.

In turn, end users get to check out these apps pre-release (so they can feel exclusive), get notifications when there are changes or the app is released and they can become a beta tester. There’s a handy “Become A Beta Tester” button right under each app’s icon, which allows you to send basic info directly to developers, at which point they can send you their beta download, and the rest is history.

Yes, in a way, this is just a different way of packaging a beta-testing service for app developers, something that’s not entirely new. (See BetaBait for example.) So PreApps wants to go beyond that and become a big ol’ developer resource. It’s primarily targeting younger people, like those in college or those developing apps for the first time — although it’s trying not to limit its scope.

But, if developers need help with engineering, with finding the right ad networking, designing in-app purchasing tools, creating an icon or producing a demo video, PreApps wants to help. For a fee, of course, which will likely be the startup’s core revenue stream — as all beta testing is free. (The prices listed on app pages just shows how much they’ll cost when they go live.)

The co-founders hope that by working on SEO, enabling developers to get early users sharing their apps on social networks and, really, in helping them produce a better product before their app goes live, they’ll be able to win over at least some of the masses. The value proposition for app developers is more clear than it is for end-users, however. I’d love to be able to check out some cool apps before they hit app stores and be involved in the beta-testing process, but that only goes so far.

To really build traction, PreApps is going to have to secure partnerships with one or two of the biggest app stores (not necessarily an easy sell, though the co-founders tell me they are currently in talks with one) and some of the most well-known app developers. The question is whether they can create enough value and a big enough distribution channel that the Rovios of the world can’t help but pre-launch on PreApps.

“Our vision for PreApps is to forever enhance the relationship between mobile app developers and mobile app users, which will in turn create better apps,” says Casto. “By implementing user feedback in the development process, apps have a greater chance of success and for users a more enjoyable experience.” That is true, and it’s a noble (and important) mission, and I hope it’s successful in that mission. But it’s got a long road ahead, that’s for sure.