Author: Blancer

Of all the things written about the heavily funded Color, there is no denying that it’s confusing to a lot of people, at least at first. Updates have helped this a bit, but the app relies so much on technology in the background, that it almost seems as if you’re doing something wrong when you’re using it. Tracks, a new app launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, offers similar photo clusters done on the fly. But it’s much, much easier to understand.

The examples the team gives for uses range from a pub crawl with friends to a family vacation. You and the people with you (who have to be explicitly invited into a group, rather than Color’s automatic method) create picture albums on the fly. These are called Tracks. And these tracks are then viewable both in the app and on the web in a beautiful, optimized experience.

To me, the latter is something that has always interested me about Color. The idea that you can share the pictures you and your friends take clustered together onto the web. But Color does not have a good mechanism for finding those pictures unless you explicitly share them and then remember that link. Tracks makes this concept much more digestible.

Also cool is the map view, which shows the path of your Track. (Not to be confused with your Path, the other photo-sharing app.)

And Tracks smartly angle themselves towards another trend in mobile photos: physical photo books. Companies like Postagram and Keepsy have been working on this, but they leverage other sites’ photos. Tracks is an all-in-one solution.

Here’s their presentation

Judge Q&A with Jeff Clavier, Shana Fisher, Roger Ehrenberg, Saul Hansel

JC: Do you have to use your app or Instagram?

A: Great question. We pull from photo libraries, so many of your Instagram photos are there.

JC: Other services?

A: Yeah, photos are just the beginning.

RE: What gives you the confidence that using Facebook won’t kill this?

A: Tracks is like a living ongoing experience. That’s part 1. The other part is the other members – not everyone wants this on Facebook. Right now this is just a private experience.

SH: Why no text? No captions?

A: That will come. We wanted to get something super simple out there.

SF: Do you have a login?

A: Yes

SF: I think you should test the Facebook login.

A: We tested it, but people didn’t want it.

SF: SMS?

A: Also on the roadmap.

RE: Revenue model?

A: We have a few ideas. We think brands could be big. But the initial focus is on engagement.

JC: Initial engagement will be tricky. You should learn what the others have done.

A: I completely agree. But Facebook and Twitter are lower than a personal invitation.

Groups are all the rage right now. Facebook is focusing on them. Google is thought to be focusing on them. GroupMe, Beluga, etc. The fact that so many companies are focusing on them shows a common belief that they’re extremely important. Kohort, a new service launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, believes this as well. They just believe that everyone else has failed at them so far.

One reason is that Kohort believes the grouping features for most of these services are tacked-on. With Kohort, it’s the central feature. And it goes deep.

Kohort allows for hierarchical groups, so groups can have as many subgroups as a user would like. And there are Channels — groups of groups that can be created to better organize things. Users can subscribe to these Channels based on their interests.

The best way to think about Kohort is probably Google Groups meets the more modern grouping features. In that regard, it’s a bit like the recently launched Convore, but Kohort aims to be about more than just conversations as well. With that in mind, Ning or Meetup may be closer — or, wait for it, the now defunct Google Wave.

The revenue play is to have sponsored groups and well as premium groups. But the vast majority of Kohort groups will always be free and supported by ads.

In April, Kohort raised  a large $3 million seed round from IA Ventures, RRE, and others.

Here’s their presentation

Judge Q&A with Jeff Clavier, Shana Fisher, Roger Ehrenberg, Saul Hansel

SF: What’s the model?

A: It’s free and prosumer.

SH: From free to $99 a month is a big step.

A: If you have a group that has less than a large amount of users, it’s free.

SH: How do you compare this to Ning?

A: There are a lot of players in the space. But we have more features.

SF: Yeah a lot of competitors.

A: Again, we have a lot of features. And we made it social.

SF: How do you make it social?

A: Groups in the real world interact. But that’s tough online. Usually it’s a phone call, we give you more tools.

SH: Even though you’re freemium, is your heart with the big groups?

A: We think this serves everybody. From big groups to to small organizations.

CatchFree is making its formal debut at Disrupt today with the unveiling of a social platform that allows people to discover and sharing the best free(mium) software and services online. The startup just raised $5.5 million in funding from top notch investors such as Index Ventures, First Round Capital, True Ventures, Polaris and 500 Startups.

Combining the power of social networking with freemium, the CatchFree platform wants to make it easier for people to find and share great freemium services by linking them together, enabling each service to draw off the growth experienced by other freemium products.

The idea is that, by centralizing freemium offerings, companies who rely on that business model no longer need to call upon traditional advertising methods, which tend to favor only businesses that could afford to do so thanks to their higher average revenue per user.

For end users, the benefit is obvious: they can easily discover free web or software applications in a range of categories, free of charge, with the added value of a community that can engage in conversations about freemium services and surface the best of them.

The revenue model for CatchFree will be – wait for it – freemium.

CatchFree will refer users to a range of freemium apps and services at no cost, and for those services approved by CatchFree community members that participate in its referral network, the startup will collect CPA fees on net referrals.

Here’s their presentation

Judge Q&A with Jeff Clavier, Shana Fisher, Roger Ehrenberg, Saul Hansel

JC: I don’t understand – do you have a button to start the loop?

A: There will be a badge to show top picks. These would be carried on the site participating.

RE: It feels like SiteAdvisor. Nice outcome, but not huge company.

A: Free is the future of all things digital. It’s game theory — free is where it’s headed.

JC: So the traffic goes where? You guys just use SEO?

A: I think with download.com, you see it’s going toward paid customers. I’ve worked with free businesses. It’s hard.

SH: Do you charge for the review?

A: No we don’t. Anybody can be on the site, users vote. In any category only the top two vote getters show up. The price we’re setting is really fair.

SF: What about in-app downloads?

A: No, we won’t do that.

SF: But don’t people make money that way?

A: Others do that well, but the referrals aren’t that converted. I actually expect to hit a million uniques today.

Meporter is a location-based news app that enables you to write, photograph, and record video of your local news as it breaks, and then to share those stories with anyone who owns a mobile phone or has an Internet connection. Using the Meporter app on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you can take a picture, make, a video, or write your own story, and post it for the world to see — all in a matter of minutes.

You can post about items for sale, new styles and trends, local politics, area businesses, yard sales in progress, traffic conditions – anything that’s happening in your neck of the woods. Readers will see a user’s location, can comment on stories, and check in as eyewitnesses.

Interestingly, Meporter only allows reporters to post local news – and readers to post comments – if they are on location. The app allows you to create a Meporter profile that others can view. While anyone online can follow your stories, only people in your area can comment on your breaking news.

Meporter also allows users to stay better informed by adding their friends’ news stories to a Meporter news feed, adding Facebook friends and Twitter contacts. When and if content is inappropriate, readers can simply flag the story. Flagged posts are subject to review and cancellation by Meporter staff.

When a user posts local news on Meporter, you earn “press passes” (read: badges) for posting their first story, posting to specific categories, and more. (Like BleacherReport and HuffPo.) These press passes can be redeemed for actual prizes in the Meporter Store from sponsors.

The apps are based on the rising trend in citizen journalism, which I love to see, but this also seems like it has some potential for stalking…

Judge Q&A with Jeff Clavier, Shana Fisher, Roger Ehrenberg, Saul Hansel

JC: You break news through Twitter and get news through Twitter.

A: Yeah you can push to Twitter.

SH: Is there anywhere in the system — editor or curator? The community is self organizing.

A: It’s citizen journalism.

SH: Let’s say there’s a big story — Empire State Building burns down. And then small news?

A: Next release we have a way to filter better.

SH: You’re going to need more layers. Rosen’s law 99% of citizen journalism is unreadable.

A: There are obviously going to be power users. But you can also filter through your friends.

RE: Much of the really good content will get lost due to chronological. Or the Digg system which can be gamed.

A: We know there are a lot of things to think about.

The pitch behind Madbrook Publishing’s first product is pretty amazing. It seems like it should for sure be a joke. But it’s not. It’s Everything Butt Art.

No, that’s not a typo. The product is not “Everything But Art”, it’s “Everything Butt Art” — two “t’s”. Butt. As in, the thing you sit on. That’s the basis for the product. And it’s launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York.

So how on Earth is this a product, let alone a real product, and a tech product? Because the founders seem to understand how kids think. And that’s the key because this is all about kids thinking.

Everything Butt Art is a children’s educational book and app that teaches step-by-step drawing. That’s where the crazy name comes in: every drawing begins with the kid drawing the shape of a butt.

While it may not be so apparent at first, many, many things can be drawn when you start with the butt shape. And this unique approach is both humorous and simple enough to immediately engage children.

And at least a few big names already agree. Independent Publishers Group (IPG) has agreed to print the initial Madbrook Publishings and Barnes & Noble are stocking the books on their shelves. That was phase one of the roll-out, phase two is the iPad app launching today.

The app will have several main parts: a full book, a butt hunt (yep), step-by-step drawing lessons, a reward system, and saving/syncing drawings with the web, and a Facebook-style news feed.

The plan is also to create different themed versions of the app that will be available as add-on purchases.

The Madbrook Publishing approach is part of a move toward more data-driven feedback in kids games to help parents see what they’re learning. This is similar to the recently announced Stickery.

Judge Q&A with Jeff Clavier, Shana Fisher, Roger Ehrenberg, Saul Hansel

JC: I think it’s great. Discovery?

A: So the book is out now. The discovery issue is a key one. Steve Jobs thinks education for kids should be a key thing for the App Store.

JC: Free app? Paid?

A: Free app with three characters included. Then there will be add-on packs.

JC: It has potential to please Apple. But will the butt hurt?

A: Well they just released a Playboy app. I think we can say “butt”. We’re being asked to go into school. “Educators are not fearful of butts.” If you can get something in front of kids and engage them that’s a win.

RE: I like butts as much as the next guy. I think what’s you’ve built is very interesting. But how does this go viral?

A: I couldn’t agree more, we have to work with schools. Do events at bookstores. We live in New York, the publishing capital of the world.

RE: Schools don’t have money. So they won’t pay, but they might help distribute. You have to make money somehow.

A: Part of the reason we did print is that. It’s about the brand experience even if they don’t have the device.

SH: Age group?

A: 4-11 I think.

SH: The UI looked too complicated.

A: I’ll challenge that. Sit down with a group of 6 or 4 year olds. They can do it.

SF: I have two kids in that age range. We have some apps that are a lot like it. I think you went too all-in with the butt thing. It’s too much on the gimmick. I don’t think you need that.

A: So what sets those other drawing apps apart?

SF: It’s feature sets. Stamps. Stickers. I don’t like kids learning to draw by touch.

InvoiceASAP, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt today, is a cloud-based invoice app that allows you to easily create and send professional invoices, estimates, sales orders and receipts. The app provides easy-to-use menus on your mobile phone, and swiftly guides the user through the setup and invoicing process, making your device a powerful tool for business management.

InvoiceASAP is all about taking its service mobile, but offering the full suite of services a Web app would provide as well. So, the startup provides invoicing that integrates with accounting software, so that a user’s invoices, estimates, sales orders and receipts can all sync with accounting. You or your sales team can add new accounts from the field that are simultaneously created in accounting as well.

So what’s the market for InvoiceASAP? CEO Paul Hoeper said that he hopes that since there has been eager adoption of mobile payment systems that mobile invoice software will be greeted the same way. Hoeper said that the target demographic for InvoiceASAP is anyone on Angie’s List — electricians and gardeners to plumbers and contractors.

The mobile app allows you to document your invoices, estimates, and receipts right from the field. If you’ve just paid for something in realtime in the field, you don’t have to go back to your laptop to enter it into a spreadsheet, you can just invoice on the spot. The most unique thing about their mobile app is that it offers photo-based invoicing. You can use pictures, audio recordings, and geo-tags with your invoices, attaching them to any document. Pics can be used before or after, or as proof of work completed for those disbelieving bosses out there.

The audio recording feature to send a greeting, and the ge-tage feature creates a record of where your invoices were created, so that you have documentation of the time and place of your purchases. That’s pretty handy. And you can even take a picture of your friend who you take with you to buy expensive things, so that you have a material witness.

Here’s their presentation.

Carnegie Mellon student and a future Google intern Sohail Prasad built a working torrent streamer at this weekend’s TC Hackaton and demoed it to us today after tweaking a few things. The product will be available soon at Nowstre.am and Sohail is trying to figure out a more, shall we say “legal,” use case for the product.

Read more…

If you’re looking to give Windows a facelift with some interesting UI tweaks, you may be interested in Lumier, a new startup that just presented at TechCrunch Disrupt. The company quietly raised a seed round from some top-tier angels like SV Angel and Founders Fund without sharing much about its future plans — now we have a better idea of what they do.

Founder Cullen Dudas, who has been very involved in the Windows community, says that the project is designed to tailor your Windows experience toward what you want, versus what billions of other users want.

Dudas says that Lumier will offer “Collapsed user models, and a more beautiful interface” to users. It will be available this summer. Honestly, it’s unclear how this is much better than other Windows skins out there, but it sounds like they have some more ambitious plans.

Q&A
There’s obviously some confusion around this one. The demo of the product was limited.

It’s consumer focused, and will look toward cloud storage for monetization.

Dudas says that it seems reasonable that people would think this looks like a Mac OS X skin for Windows, but there is apparently (hopefully) more to come for launch.

Tracking the success and productivity for sales reps can be a challenge for any organization. Foretuit, which launches today at TechCrunch Disrupt, maps sales employees’ business behavior and determines patterns in order to provide predictive outcomes for sales operations.

Foretuit says that the sales process is inefficient because of compliance (sales reps don’t actually put data in CRM applications) and reps don’t leep data current. Fortuit’s application for the Salesforce CRM helps solve this problem.

Foretuit combines predictive analytics with employee data to help improve productivity of the front office or sales teams. The startup does this by collecting unstructured data from a sales employee’s digital presence to identify patterns based on their roles, frequency of communication and work output. Foretuit then allows an enterprise to look forward and improve business outcomes.

The startup will track emails, communications, and other data to determine how much a sales rep has made, how many deals need to close, and which deals are at risk. Fortuit will also help businesses improve their sales pipeline.

Q&A

Q: A good sales manager already has this?

A: Sales managers have a tough time figuring out how to make sense of all the information they are getting from sales people.

Q: What’s the pricing model?

A: It’s free for the rep…but enterprise level will charge the entire enterprise.

Q: For this to work, you need all the data.

A: We’re building a pattern engine that scores sequences.

A little “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours” seems to be going down between handset makers Samsung and Apple during their ongoing patent battle, only Apple has become that kid that never ends up showing theirs. In mid-April, Apple filed a lawsuit claiming that Samsung infringed on copyright patents with regards to the design of its products.

Read more…

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington recently wrote a post praising the fighting spirit of a little startup called Octopart. The New York City-based startup is a search engine for electronic parts that enables users to find esoteric doodads and doohickeys through categorical or keyword searches. Once you’ve found your item, Octopart shows you which distributors sell the part and provides you with a link to buy it. Octopart was financed by Y Combinator back in 2007, and today the Octopart team is launching a new platform live at Disrupt called ThriftDB.

ThriftDB, also backed by Paul Graham, and several other angels, is being referred to as “the Amazon Web Services of search”. In the process of building Octopart search, the team says, they were forced to solve various scaling and performance issues related to implementing their search; they were unhappy with existing solutions, so they built their own.

Technically speaking, ThriftDB is a flexible key-value datastore with search built in that has the flexibility, scalability, and performance of a NoSQL datastore with the capabilities of full-text search. Essentially, what this means is that, by combining the datastore and the search engine, ThriftDB is offering a service that makes it easy for developers to build fast, horizontally-scalable applications with integrated search.

The ThriftDB team says that most websites have crappy internal search, because search itself is difficult to implement on the backend. Typically, sites and users just use Google search, instead of relying on a quality internal search. The team believes that a quality search feature will also be of great appeal to the database market, because in spite of the popularity of NoSQL, most developers are still using relational databases. The ThriftDB team believes that functional internal search is the missing ingredient.

As for a business strategy, ThriftDB plans to open-source its core technology to encourage adoption, while charging for a hosted solution with premium features like search analytics and machine-optimized ranking algorithms. And the company is bringing in $10 million a year in commerce flow.

Q&A

Q: How did you implement this (for TechCrunch)?

A: It took us 20 minutes to set up the search engine.

Q: It seems complicated, who are your target customers?

A: Developers at smaller startups. Even larger companies, this can make your development time quicker.

Q: Who wants to buy you?

A: We’re not focused on that. But everyone now, including Salesforce, is focused on the cloud and data. We have plans to opensource the product, which should encourage adoption.

Q: What’s are the benefits of defining search with database? How much does it cost?

A: We’re going to keep it free indefinitely.

Launching in public beta today at Disrupt is ccLoop, a previously stealth startup founded by serial entrepreneur Michael Wolfe that aims to tackle one of the biggest problems with modern communication: the disaster that is email.

We heard the company had raised $3.5 million from Benchmark Capital, SV Angel and other investors earlier this year, but not how they were planning to solve that particular problem.

On stage, Wolfe attempted to explain just that. He argues the problem with email isn’t so much the information overload that almost automatically comes out of using it, but rather the fact that emails are too hard to track down, provided they’ve been received at all.

ccLoop thinks lists are the answer, more specifically their vision of the ‘Smart Mailing List’.

Essentially, ccLoop wants to make it easier for users to create, manage, share, discover, join, and follow lists. Dubbed Loops, users can decide for themselves which emails they want to receive in what way, using a cloud-based service.

Users can opt to receive certain emails in their inbox, others as mere summary digests, and others simply as messages that can be searched for whenever certain information is needed.

And since it’s SaaS, there’s no need to download anything or change your email ways.

ccLoop users can also share lists with each other, or publicly for anyone to discover, and all documents are version-tracked. The startup expects Loops to be used in professional environments, but also in personal and community life.

The service will be freemium: end users will be able to create and join lists for free, but a paid version for enterprises would come with additional features such as advanced administration and security capabilities as well as the ability to manage loops that are open to members of a specific domain (i.e. techcrunch.ccloop.com).

In short: ccLoop thinks email on itself is fine, and users don’t necessarily need to get forced to use something else for collaboration or plain communication, so rather than replace it, they want to make email better. If they can pull that off, they will be lauded worldwide.

Utopian or realistic? Here’s what the judges had to say about ccLoop:

Q&A

Q: How are you making money?

A: it’s based on a freemium model.

Q: How do you control security with email and internal communications?

A: You have to explicitly indicate whether a communication is meant for a certain section of the company?

Q: I don’t think that many loops will be created.

A: It’s through customer acquisition. We have a Stanford alum class who wants to use ccLoop to keep in touch.

Q: What is the problem you are trying to solve?

A: Inbox wreck, discoverability.

Round three from day one focused on “Disrupting Commerce.” These are companies that hope to displace giants like Amazon, eBay, and so on. Not exactly easy prey, but these guys think they’ve got a unique take on shopping and money management. The companies in this batch are SneakPeeq, StyleSeat, Spenz, and BillGuard. Plus, a wild startup alley company appears! Happy Toy Machine is our wildcard for Monday.

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SneakPeeq is shopping with social and game component that rewards you for checking out popular items by continually lowering the price. But once someone buys, the price goes back up. It’s like playing Chicken… with bargains.

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StyleSeat lets hairstylists, many of whom are independent contractors, manage and track their business, providing backend functions like scheduling, reminders to clients, and more.

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Spenz is all about tracking your own spending habits. There are mobile and web applications for reporting, tagging, and exploring how and where you’re spending your money, and every action you take counts towards rewards and deals.

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BillGuard describes itself as antivirus for your bank account, but a more precise description might be crowdsourced fraud detection. It monitors your credit card statements and compares with thousands of others, then identifies transactions it thinks may be unnecessary or fraudulent.

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Design and customize your own plush toys, with tons of color and material choices. Like Build-a-Bear on steroids, and not limited to bears or the Ursidae family in any way.

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More details, along with Q&A by the judges, can be found at the individual posts. The rest of our Disrupt coverage can be found, of course, at our Disrupt microsite.

BlablabLab and 3D Systems (along with some help from Sonos) set up an amazing exhibit at Techcrunch Disrupt. Essentially, it’s a 3D scanner/printer that grabs a 3D copy of your body and then prints it out into a 3-inch high figurine. It is, in short, magical.

Read more…

Launching today at the Disrupt conference, Thinkfuse is all about TPS status reports, more specifically making it easier to share and manage weekly status reports in order to assist organizations in achieving their goals.

Thinkfuse is armed with $500,000 in seed funding from Founders Coop, Ali & Hadi Partovi, Scott Banister, SV Angel, Todd Warren, Emil Michael, Travis Bogard and other angel investors.

Today, the company posits, status reports are emailed from one person to another only to wind up somewhere in an inbox, lost in all the other noise and collecting dust. Status reports deserve better than that, they contend, as they often contain vital business information tied directly to goals, and as such they should be accessible to the entire company and organized in a way that helps move the needle forward.

Thinkfuse thinks it can solve this problem with a subscription-based “freemium” application designed to collect, follow, and search status updates across an entire organization.

Managers can use it to set up a reporting schedule and template for their direct reports, who then receive automated reminders.

Passive readers, meanwhile, continue to receive and comment on updates the way they’re accustomed to in email. The system also creates a searchable archive that’s accessible to the rest of the company, tagged with goals, and available for any stakeholder to follow.

Thus, people in different business units, project teams or other groups can see what others are working on to track dependencies, or lend support. This also helps them gain insight on how his or her work fits into the whole.

Thinkfuse was co-founded by Brandom Bloom and Steve Krenzel, both former Microsoft employees who actually met after their time at Redmond, when both worked on the Google Translate service. Chief executive of the company is Aydin Ghajar, who was previously responsible for revenue and user acquisition at iLike.

Q&A

Q: In big companies, they still use email, this is a workflow step. how do you see people who are already overloaded work this into their systems?

A: People can actually use their email to update their status reports on Thinkfuse.

Q: This seems like the sort of thing that Yahoo would love to use. Who will you charge?

A: We are planning to use a freemium model.

Q: if you had presented this three years ago, this would be interesting. What’s different with what you are doing?

A: there is a wave of social media apps for the enterprise, but you can’t reliably use this as a communications tool for important projects. We are specifically addressing status reports.

q: do you have any filters, how do you send reports to specific members of a team?

A: We have three settings, private, for people invite or set to a domain.

Q: How big does a company need to be for this to work?

A: it applies to both big and small startups, from two-person startups to larger companies.

Q: Do you have any special algorithms?

A: We are searching for rich text but over time we’ll be examining more structured data.