Category: Tech news

It’s been nearly a year since I last wrote about Namo Media, the native ad startup founded by former Googler Gabor Cselle and backed by Google Ventures, so I caught up with Cselle today and he told me that the startup just launched an important new feature for publishers.

Basically, Namo now allows publishers to easily adjust the placement of ads in their streams of content. Cselle showed me a web interface where, with just a couple of clicks, he could adjust where the first ad appeared in the stream, and then how frequently new ads would follow. Within a few seconds, those changes took effect in the demo app.

This marks a big improvement over the experience that Namo first launched with in November, Cselle said. Previously, Namo’s ad placements were “hard-coded,” so any changes would require submitting a new version of the app. Publishers often test Namo’s effectiveness out by pushing its ads way down in the stream, so the old system made it tougher for them to display those ads more prominently once they saw it actually worked.

Now, with the new version of the Namo software development kit, publishers can adjust the placements as often as they want and the changes will go live immediately. There’s even an option for automated placements, where Namo tests out different variations and chooses the one that’s most lucrative.

Cselle’s vision is to deliver ads that fit naturally into the stream of content, overcoming the “banner blindness” that many of us have, while requiring very little work from the publisher.

One of the obvious models is Facebook — he said publishers are embracing the idea in part because they see Facebook’s mobile revenue — so it’s a good sign that Namo has enlisted Greg Badros, former vice president of engineering and products at Facebook (as well as a senior director of engineering at Google on ads and other products), for its board of advisors. (Other advisors include Russell Glass and Brian Balfour.)

I also asked about some of the recent discussions around native advertising, particularly columnist Bob Garfield’s claim that it amounts to “a racket.”

Cselle responded that most of the criticism seems directed at sponsored content, which Namo doesn’t currently support. While its ads may be designed to look like they’re part of the content stream, they’re labeled as ads, and they point, most commonly, to app download pages, so no one’s going to be tricked into thinking that it’s editorial content. But surely Cselle is planning to add sponsored content features down the line? Well, maybe, or maybe not — he declined to comment on his product roadmap.

Cselle also declined to specify how many publishers Namo is working with. He would say that he’s working with large and small publishers, and that he’s happy with the result. He attributed a lot of the current interest not just to Facebook, but also to the recent announcement from Twitter-owned MoPub that it will be supporting native ads.

The Syrian Electronic Army isn’t much a fan of Microsoft it seems. After compromising Microsoft social accounts, and one of its blogs, the group today defaced the company’s Office Blog, directly following a redesign of the property.

As The Verge notes, the Syrian Electronic Amy had previously promised continued embarrassing shenanigans. Neowin published an image of the defaced blog, as did The Verge. The site has since been at least partially retracted.

As part of prior harassment by the digital group, Microsoft admitted that some of its employees’ email accounts were compromised. Screenshots of mail were tweeted out, showing discourse between executives discussing the hacked social accounts.

It remains unclear as to how much, if any email from its staff was taken as part of the move. Microsoft at the time did note that no customer information was at risk.

Defacing the Office Blog isn’t much of an existential threat to Microsoft. But if the group’s claim today that “Dear @Microsoft, Changing the CMS will not help you if your employees are hacked and they don’t know about that. #SEA” bears true, the company could be in for more red-faced moments.

Neowin’s Brad Sams has the correct take on the situation:

The Internets are ablaze this morning after comments from HBO’s CEO about users sharing their HBO Go accounts. According to most reports out there today, the company couldn’t care less who you share your account with. Share your account with everyone! Free love forever! Hurray!

The catch: that’s… not quite what he’s saying.

Here’s the relevant clip from the BuzzFeed interview:

Now, he is saying that HBO doesn’t see account sharing as a problem for their business model. Share away! But if you listen to the entire video, it becomes quite clear that there’s a silent “…for now” at the end of each sentence.

The key bit (emphasis added):

Pleper: To us, it’s a terrific marketing vehicle for the next generation of viewers, and to us, it is actually not material at all to business growth.

BuzzFeed: So the strategy is you ignore it now, with the hopes that they’ll subscribe later…

Pleper: It’s not that we’re ignoring it, and we’re looking at different ways to affect password sharing. I’m simply telling you: it’s not a fundamental problem, and the externality of it is that it presents the brand to more and more people, and gives them an opportunity hopefully to become addicted to it. What we’re in the business of doing is building addicts, of building video addicts. The way we do that is by exposing our product, our brand, our shows, to more and more people.

Translation: it’s not a problem… until we decide it’s a problem. Then we flip the switch (“we’re looking at different ways to affect password sharing”) to make password sharing more challenging, and everyone we’ve gotten hooked (“what we’re in the business of doing is building addicts”) coughs up the cash for their own account.

Hey, kid — the first one’s free!

Is there anything wrong, or evil, with this strategy? Not really. In fact, it’s pretty damned smart. It’s like an indefinitely long free trial in disguise. With HBO currently set-up to be sold only as a premium add-on to a cable bill that’s generally already pretty massive, convincing someone to get their their own account is a pretty huge hurdle. If the alternative is people pirating HBO’s shows, HBO might as well get those people comfortable with the convenience of going through the official channels.

Just don’t expect it to last forever. They’re not “building addicts” for nothing.

Citing popular demand, HP is now pushing personal computers running Windows 7 over Windows 8 on its online store, a simple slight to Microsoft’s nascent Windows 8.x platform.

(Update: The ever excellent Ed Bott has some good notes on what HP is not doing — running scared back into Windows 7′s arms — but more that it is refocusing its marketing notes. It’s worth reading.)

It’s fair to say that Windows 8 had a rough start to market, and while a firm improvement, Windows 8.1 hasn’t been met with the enthusiasm that Microsoft likely hoped. Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 control a shared 10.5% of the global traditional computing market, as measured by NetMarketShare.

Still, with a revamped user interface, and a new focus on mobile computing, many consumers have found the new operating system confusing. Nothing I have said thus far is controversial I think, so let’s move on to the why of HP’s decision.

HP think has two goals in mind for selling, and pushing Windows 7 machines at this moment: Increase its unit volume by selling machines more comfortable to its customer base, and reducing the cost of support for newly sold systems. Friends of mine that work with OEMs have told me that margins are so low for some, that a single support call to the manufacturer erodes a unit’s entire margin.

So reducing support calls is a key metric for OEMs. Which operating system, on a per capita system basis do you think generates more call volume for OEMs, Windows 8.x or Windows 7? Even if you could make the argument — and many will, of course — that Windows 8 is intrinsically better than Windows 7 in a number of ways, if you are an OEM you simply don’t care: You want fewer support calls, not necessarily a slightly better long-term user experience with your machine. The margin pressure on the former event is more important than future potential margin on the latter.

The HP decision has another dimension worth mentioning, I think. By making this decision now, HP is almost refuting its own holiday lineup of Windows 8.x-based machines. So, it’s saying that whatever it had in place through December, it now wants to revamp. Given that Gartner tracks HP as dropping quite a lot of market share in the PC market during the fourth quarter, a shakeup isn’t too surprising.

Microsoft still sells an OS copy either way, so it doesn’t care, right? Wrong. Every Windows 7 PC that ships instead of a Windows 8.x PC removes a future Windows Store user. Microsoft needs every download inside that store that it can muster, to drive developer interest. And so continued Windows 7 usage harms the ability of Windows to move into the new computing era.

That’s a Microsoft problem. HP just wants to sell more machines at better margins.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Curved displays are officially a thing.

The LG G Flex, the Korean company’s latest attempt to battle back Samsung, is going to be available for pre-order at AT&T starting this Friday, January 24.

Sprint pulled the trigger last week, announcing that the phone would be available for pre-order on January 31, but AT&T has obviously beaten the yellow carrier to the punch by a week.

Still, AT&T never mentioned in its announcement when the phone would actually be delivered to customers or available in-store, but all signs point to the phone’s imminent arrival.

T-Mobile will also carry the curved screen phone eventually, but has made no moves toward announcing availability just yet.

As for AT&T, the LG G Flex will be available at the flagship price of $299.99 with a two-year contract or through the new Next financing plans.

The LG G Flex marks the first curved display phone to be available in the U.S., but you can bet it won’t be the last. Curved displays, both in smartphones and other gadgets like TVs, have been a major focus for electronics manufacturers in the past year, so you should expect to see plenty more.

The ultra curious can check out specs here.

Let’s go back in time. In 2005, Yahoo purchased 40 percent of the Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba for $1 billion. The move would later all but save the American company.

While Yahoo, under the leadership of its yet-new CEO Marissa Mayer has shown fresh dynamism, and has rebuilt its reputation in the technology market as its mobile push has matured, the company’s core financial performance metrics have dragged. Revenue has sagged, as have earnings. For all its vaunted mobile growth, Yahoo has not managed to turn around its advertising business, even as its search incomes have been lackluster.

Why then the dramatic rise in its share price over the past few years? It goes back to that Alibaba purchase made nearly a decade ago.

Yahoo sold 40% of its 40% Alibaba stake in 2012 for a massive $7.6 billion. The company now owns a more modest 24% of Alibaba. (Media reports tend to indicate that Yahoo owns 24% of Alibaba, while the below linked company report indicates 23%.)

It doesn’t want to shed a share of that remaining equity so long as it can. That’s due to the simple fact that at Alibaba’s current growth rates, the longer Yahoo holds on its shares in the company, the more money it makes.

How do we know that Yahoo wants to hang onto its Alibaba equity? A recent agreement that lowered the percentage of its extant holdings that it must sell at the time of Alibaba’s IPO. Here’s Yahoo at the end of its prior deal to sell some of its shares back to Alibaba:

Today’s announcement is the first step in a staged and comprehensive value realization plan for Yahoo!’s stake in Alibaba. Under the terms of the agreement, the second phase allows for Yahoo! to monetize approximately half of its remaining stake at the time of an initial public offering (IPO) of Alibaba at the IPO price. Lastly, after an IPO, Yahoo! has the right to sell its remaining shares following a customary lock-up period.

However, in late 2013, Yahoo got a partial reprieve. As I reported at the time:

Today in conjunction with its third quarter earnings release, Yahoo announced that it has come to a new agreement with Alibaba that will force the company to sell less of its shares in the Chinese ecommerce firm when it goes public. The number of shares that Yahoo will be required to sell now totals 208 million.

That figure represents a 20.4 percent decrease on the former 261.5 million share requirement. Yahoo owns 523.6 million ordinary shares of Alibaba.

So Yahoo gets to hang onto more of its stock in the company, longer.

The final piece to the above is that Alibaba worked to reform a credit facility that it had previously opened to grant it a longer ramp to IPO. Current speculation tips the firm as public not this year, but the next.

This means that, provided it can continue to grow, Alibaba will go public at a higher valuation than previously expected. This raises the value of Yahoo now, in expectation of that future reaping.

When it does IPO, what will Alibaba be worth? I’ve seen numbers as high as $200 billion, and as modest as $130 billion. What I think is now somewhat reasonable is to presume that by the time it does go public, the former tally of $120 billion for Alibaba’s valuation at IPO is light. So this means that Yahoo is joining Microsoft among the ranks of the successful corporate venture capitalists.

As you can quickly calculate in your head, 24% of $200 billion is $48 billion. Half of that evaporates into taxes, but Yahoo will be left with a cash position that is far more than half its market capitalization.

The longer Alibaba waits, provided it retains corporate vigor, the better off Yahoo is. It’s something to keep in mind when media reports indicate that the company’s stock rise is due it in-house performance, and not a mere ride on Jack Ma’s coattails.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Some people still buy CDs, and there are still some hipsters left who swear by vinyl, but for most of us, music now comes in the form of DRM-free MP3s or whatever streaming format Spotify uses. This has meant the end of reading liner notes, printed lyrics as part of the CD booklet and all of the artwork that was often part of the whole album package. Even the concept of the album now often feels like an anachronism. 3plet wants to bring all of this back by combining the advantages of the old CD experience with the best of what digital can offer.

The service provides musicians with an app for all the major mobile platforms that recreates much of the album experience. Users get to see artwork selected by the musicians, access to background notes about the band and music, lyrics and links to additional content online. The apps are also integrated with an artist’s YouTube channel and social networks.

The apps will be available for free. Users will only be allowed to listen to one to three songs without paying extra. This turns a 3plet app into something akin to a mobile presentation kit for bands. The rest of the album sits behind an in-app paywall and bands charge an additional fee (somewhere around $10 in most cases) for the full album experience.

The company believes that its service can offer bands a new income stream and creative outlet at the same time. For the most part, the 3plet team believes, a band’s most dedicated fans – the ones who would also go out and buy a boxed set – will be the ideal target audience for this digital experience, but 3plet also sees it as an alternative to selling CDs at shows.

The Estonia-based startup, which was co-founded by Vlad Davydov and Valery Mifodovsky, charges musicians a set fee for building these apps and takes an additional cut from in-app purchases.

In its early days, 3plet mostly focused on the Russian-speaking market to test its idea. Now, however, it’s starting to more actively market its services in the U.S. and Western Europe. While Davydov says the company is talking to a number of big-name musicians, its catalog mostly features very few mainstream artists. 3plet is currently a finalist in MIDEM’s upcoming Midemlab competition for groundbreaking music startups, though, and the company hopes this will give it a bit more visibility to bring its service to a wider audience.

As Bitcoin trading and use spreads through medium-sized countries, local exchanges, wallets and processors are popping up left and right.

South Korea’s Korbit is one of the latest and it’s picking up $400,000 in funding from angels including Tim Draper, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, SV Angel’s David Lee and SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert, who created a Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. Also participating are Pietro Dova of XG Ventures, Michael Yang, co-founder of mySimon, and Jay Eum, co-founder of Translink Capital.

Interestingly enough, Korea’s government Ministry of Science helped broker contact between the startup and its angels. They had organized a pitch event in Silicon Valley where Draper was the judge.

The company, which is already profitable, does about $300,000 in trading volume per day with a 0.6 percent fee on buys and sells. They have about 20,000 registered users, and recently launched real-time processing for deposits and withdrawals. Although they are currently an exchange, they plan to launch wallets eventually.

Right now, like many other countries, the South Korean government doesn’t recognize Bitcoin as a currency. But CEO Tony Lyu says the government seems to be taking a “wait-and-see” approach otherwise. It’s not clear yet if gaming platforms, search portals and other big consumer destinations on the web and mobile in South Korea will be able to charge in Bitcoin.

Why bother with a gift registry or wish list, when you can just pin favorite products to a Pinterest board? With newly launched iPhone app LoveList, you can do just that, even when you’re out shopping in the real world. The app lets you quickly expand your Pinterest collections with products you find on store shelves, simply by scanning an item’s UPC barcode.

The app itself is a side project created by Cincinnati-based Brad Mahler, currently a creative director at global digital ad agency Possible, and Mark Tholking, an independent iOS developer located in San Diego, who previously co-founded BigSho. The two have known each other for nearly a decade, after meeting through the same agency where Mahler still works.

The idea for LoveList, explains Mahler, was prompted by his own shopping trip out in the real world.

“My fiancée and I were shopping and we found an item we wanted to add to our Amazon registry,” he says. “We keep a Pinterest board for that purpose, so as my fiancée was pinning it she asked, ‘why can’t I just scan this to Pin it?’” Mahler knew this would be possible, but no one had built a tool that made that easy to do yet. (Pinterest’s own app lets you pin places, photos or links, but not actual products via barcode scans.)

Mahler adds that he believes Pinterest works best when pinned products are actually available for purchase. As it turns out, this has been a problem with Pinterest for some time. According to mobile commerce vendor Branding Brand, almost 60 percent of Pinterest traffic to retailers’ sites during the 2013 holidays came from those in search of a product that doesn’t exist anymore. And this figure has been over 50 percent since the service launched. Of course, pinning real-world items to Pinterest doesn’t necessarily solve that problem. Eventually, those items could also disappear while Pinterest continues to recycle their links.

About The App

Mahler says they built the LoveList app quickly. It went from an idea to proof-of-concept prototype in a day, and not too much later, it went live in the App Store.

Not surprisingly then, the app is exceedingly simple. Similar to how you can use Amazon’s app to scan items and add them to a wish list, LoveList also lets you scan barcodes while out and about. That’s all it does, too, which means it takes fewer taps to do so than with Amazon’s own flagship application. You just scan, tap the board you want to pin the item to, and you’re done.

Currently, the app is only connected to Amazon’s own product database, which, while large of course, is still limited. But Mahler says they want to quickly put LoveList in the hands of users, and hopes to add support for large and small individual retailers in the future, including those with online stores.

For now, the app is a paid download at $0.99, but they’re considering an affiliate model and retailer partnerships further down the road.

LoveList is certainly a useful tool to have on hand while shopping, but until it expands beyond Amazon.com products, it may not be worth moving away from Amazon’s own wish listing feature just yet. (Unless you’re heavily into Pinterest, or never use Amazon wish lists, perhaps). Plus, Pinterest could also just as easily add a barcode-scanning function to their own app if such a behavior proves to be popular, which could be a problem for LoveList if it doesn’t grow its feature set to offer more than product scanning.

LoveList is available here on iTunes ($0.99). Below, a quick demo video. (And thank you for not choosing that cloying Apple-esque music everyone is using now.)

Shopping online can be a tedious affair, characterised by bottomless trawling of search engine results and price comparison websites to try to locate whatever finicky thing you really need this time.

Shopping requirements can also get pretty specific — a pair of blackout curtains with a 70+ inch drop, say, or a toaster that has a removable basket so you can lift your toasted bagels out without getting your fingers burnt.

Requests that are often far too specific for a simple search engine query to turn up purely relevant results. Further human digging is all-too-often required to wade through the machine generated results and pull the wheat from the chaff.

So enter buyhandpicked.com: a startup, launching today in the U.K., that’s taking a Mechanical Turk approach to cracking personal shopping online by building a platform where online shoppers can submit detailed shopping requests, and — at the other end of the pipe — get humans to go a-hunting on their behalf.

Buyhandpicked is starting off with a small team of personal shoppers signed up to its platform — when I started corresponding with co-founder Ben Cole earlier this morning the site had 23 shoppers. A few hours later (now they’ve opened up the personal shopper sign up process) it stands at 37. He says the aim is to have more than 100 within 48 hours of launch.

How does it work? Would be purchasers submit shopping requests via the platform and one of the personal shoppers should pick up the request within a few minutes and start looking. The Buyhandpicked interface includes a chat window so the personal shopper can ask you questions and you can feed them more info as the search progresses. When/if they find something that matches your requirements they send you a description with a link to click through to buy the item. Or apologise for being unable to deliver.

If they do recommend something, and you’re not happy with it, you can say so and send them back to the digital coal-face again.

The service is entirely free to use from the shoppers’ point of view. The personal shoppers only get paid if a search results in a validated purchase (or purchases), and even then they’re only getting slice of the commission that Buyhandpicked gets for purchases via a small pool of websites it has affiliate sales deals with (which currently boils down to around 20 U.K. retailers including Amazon, John Lewis and Currys).

So really these virtual personal shoppers are likely going to be getting virtually nothing for total time spent, assuming a large number of the searches they make result in no sale.

Here’s the breakdown of what Buyhandpicked’s personal shoppers (apparently) get paid when a  user does end up clicking through and buying the recommended item from one of the sites it has commissions deals with, as Cole tells it:

How sustainable Buyhandpicked’s business model will be will depend on having enough personal shoppers willing to spend time search for only the chance of a fee, and doing a decent job of tailoring recommendations to requests. So time will tell on that one. (Sign up euphoria might soon convert into petty cash disappointment.)

It’s also currently only accepting personal shoppers based in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia — so isn’t (yet) looking to take advantage of lower rates of pay in emerging nations. (Worth noting that the founders hail from London but relocated to Chiang Mai in Thailand to bootstrap the development work to keep costs down — so are clearly not averse to cutting business costs by taking advantage of differing global pay rates. Whether their personal shoppers remain based in Western nations, or end up outsourced to markets where small commissions can stretch further, is one to watch.)

Cole describes the main competitors for Buyhandpicked as price comparison websites — which still require users to do a lot of leg-work figuring out which item to buy, instead of getting a single tailored recommendation.

“They don’t really compare as they rely on algorithms to find products and prices which simply can’t provide the personal service BuyHandPicked will provide,” he says via email, adding: “We use collective knowledge (crowdsourcing) of hundreds of Internet savvy shoppers to provide truly personal and perfect results.”

The latter claim doesn’t stand up quite yet — being as Buyhandpicked hasn’t yet recruited hundreds of personal shoppers. And, as mentioned above, it remains to be seen whether the personal shoppers it does sign up remain happy campers, or decide to seek more lucrative employment elsewhere.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen this sort of Mechanical Turk platform for personal shopping. At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, back in September, a bro-friendly startup called BRANDiD presented a website for taking the strain out of clothes buying in our battlefield competition, for example. BRANDiD’s San Francisco offering targets specifically guys, and even more specifically guys with a fair amount of ‘tude — and a burning desire to reduce the time they spend on sartorial acquisition to as close to zero as possible. 

But BRANDiD charges a 10% surcharge for any items purchased in the process of using its recommendation service. Which again plays into its targeting of a very specific sub-section of dudes who care more about not being bored than paying a premium for their threads.

Buyhandpicked is not so tightly focused. For starters, as mentioned above, its service is free to use for shoppers — so you can get a personal shopper to look for something on your behalf for absolutely zip. Gratis. Nada. Which does feel a bit decadent (so do resist the temptation to send your virtual helpers off on a fruitless search for a ‘long stand’ or a ‘big weight’).

It’s also not focusing on a specific category of shopping — which is probably a bit of a risk, being as its crack team of human Internet trawlers are going to have to grapple with all sorts of random and specialist requests (some of which presumably can never result in any kind of shopper commission if they can’t be bought from a retailer the website has an agreement with).

Ultimately, the proof of the pudding will depend very much on the quality of recommendations Buyhandpicked can generate. If its shoppers are good, they might be able to fire up a sales conversion machine. If they’re bad, well, no one gets paid — and that doesn’t sound like a business with very long legs.

To test the service I asked for something I’ve previously trawled the Internet for: a cat litter tray with an entrance on top of the box, i.e. rather than the more usual side-placement. I made this search even harder by requiring the item not to cost a small fortune to a U.K. buyer — as apparently this ‘Holy Grail’ of cat litters trays does (for some reason).

My own prior searching for this elusive litter tray did eventually turn up one U.K. option — still pretty pricey for what is essentially a plastic box with a circular hole cut out on top. But it took me considerable Internet trawling to find even that scant picking. How would Buyhandpicked fare?

Katie, the Buyhandpicked personal shopper who picked up my request, had the same troubles as me initially — especially as I’d set the budget to a non-lavish sub-£50. But after a few minutes, maybe 10 or so, she delivered — finding the exact same item that my own web trawls had previously turned up.

That’s either highly reassuring, or rather depressing if you’re the kind of shopper who hopes that there’s something even better out there, if only you spend enough time looking for it.

Another Buyhandpicked shopper, called Ken, failed to find anything for a second request I made — for a no-drilling picture hanging system for a 6kg+ picture.

“Due to the weight of the painting I can’t find any suitable products,” he said regretfully, not least because he’d spent time searching for something that probably doesn’t exist — and not getting paid to do so.

I have an iPhone, and like most adult humans I imagine, I use that as my alarm clock in place of one of those quaint old-fashioned pieces of dedicated hardware we used to use. But it’s not always ideal: you can’t just smash a button to get it to stop trying to wake you up, for instance. The wobL, a new Kickstarter project launching today, hopes to fix that.

As its name implies, the wobL wobbles, and therein lies the key to its functionality. It’s designed to be used with a companion alarm clock app for iPhone, which allows a user to activate a snooze mode simply through motion. The idea is that you reach over and simply tap the phone or the stand, resulting in a rocking motion which triggers snooze and gives you a free extra few minutes to catch some Z’s.

Of course, this presents some problems: it’s so easy to trigger wobL’s snooze mode that you may manage to rock yourself into never waking up at all. You’d admittedly have to be really dedicated to staying under those covers, but if you’re in Toronto this week, say, and it’s -30 degrees out, you have some pretty good motivation.

Wobble does make it easier to hit snooze instead of accidentally turning off an alarm altogether, so it’s got that going for it. It’s also mechanically simple, and yet allows for you to keep your phone plugged in and charging at night. The app is iOS-only for now, but the stand itself is designed to work not only with all iPhone models, all iPod touches and cases, but also with Android smartphones.

The wobL team is looking to ship its device by October of next year, and early backers can get one for just $25. This is the first project from Third Prime studios, but the team behind it has ample experience building consumer products for other companies, and its relatively simple hardware design means it should stand a good chance of seeing the light of day should it reach its $29,000 funding goal.

Hopper CEO Frederic Lalonde is bemused by the coverage of his travel startup’s “launch,” which supposedly took place this past week, according to various news stories. The company, reportedly in stealth for six years, had just now opened its doors, it was proclaimed. Not quite, says Lalonde. “The site, Hopper.com, has been live since early last spring,” he tells us, noting it has since seen millions of visitors. But around two weeks (not days) ago, the company opened up access directly from the Hopper.com homepage.

As it turned out, that was enough to draw people’s interest. The company, which was founded back in 2007 and has been operating in stealth for some time, had been working on a “big data” solution to the challenges surrounding travel discovery. Still, it’s been more of a gradual launch, rather than a sudden opening of its doors.

If you look in Google, for example, there are 1.5 million Hopper.com search results in the Google index, and the service has gotten around 2 million impressions from Google, plus over 1 million from Facebook, we’re told. “Users have been flowing through the Hopper since most of last year,” says Lalonde, discussing the site’s traffic and growth.

Today, the consumer-facing travel startup founded by former Expedia engineers and backed by $22 million in venture funding now offers site visitors who create an account access to its trip-planning engine, which the company claims is powered by the “world’s largest structured database of travel information.”

We first covered Hopper when the company had raised its $12 million Series B from OMERS Ventures, Brightspark Ventures, and Atlas Venture, but the company had declined to then go into much detail about the product it had in store. The founding team at the time included former Expedia engineers, with CEO Frederic Lalonde, co-founder and CTO Joost Ouwerkerk, André Coudé, and Mathieu Patenaud on board. (CMO Dena Yahya Enos, previously of TripAdvisor, has since left the company to become VP of Marketing at Carbonite, according to LinkedIn.)

Why So Slow? 

Has Hopper really been working on its database of structured travel content since 2007? Apparently so, slowly and surely.

“What’s really been taking time is the data collection,” Lalonde explains. “We aggregated 2 billion webpages…we ended up realizing there was this huge amount of amazing content that was being produced on blogs.”

The problem is that this data was basically unstructured. It’s just sitting there, not even well-ranked on Google, since many of the bloggers aren’t “authorities” on travel or professional writers, but rather regular people posting photos and sharing stories about their trips, often on non-travel related blogs, too.

So what Hopper built is proprietary technology that not only goes out and crawls the web to find those sites, it can also help to identify that a post is interesting, written by a real human, and is not spam or “content farm” content. It can also break up a longer post about multiple destinations or attractions into smaller pieces, and each of these bite-sized travel experiences can be then associated with the correct geo-location.

Oh, and that’s the other thing Hopper had to create; in order to add all those interesting travel stories and photos to specific items in a place database, they needed one of those, too. “You need to know pretty much everything on Earth about travel. You need to know where everything is,” says Lalonde. “It’s akin to building maybe 10 to 20% of what Google has in Google Maps, and we had four engineers working on this problem.”

But thanks to the Series B and earlier rounds, most of which is still in the bank, Hopper’s backend is up and running, crawling the web, finding the travel posts, pulling out what’s interesting, having those reviewed by human editors, then adding those pieces of content to its site. Of the 2 billion total pages crawled to date, less than 1 percent are good enough to make it to Hopper.com.

In January of this year, new pieces of content were being added at a rate of 200 per day. Now, the current rate of production is 2,000 per day, and they’re hoping to grow that to 5,000 per day soon, as the team scales from 20 editors to 50 by March. This would put Hopper on a rate of growth of something like TripAdvisor, says Lalonde.

For consumers, Hopper.com, which anyone can now access, is a well-built, travel-planning utility which allows you to search for places and activities from around the world. Every page on the site is annotated with information about the attraction or locale, including maps, directions, URLs, details on flights and prices, photos, related destinations, and more.

What’s interesting about the service is its focus on discovery. You can search for any place or even any activity (e.g. hiking, skiing, surfing, etc.) to find inspiration about where to travel and what to do. It’s not trying to compete with the services whose main goal is to sell you a flight, hotel or car rental, the CEO explains. For now, it’s about building a great user experience around travel discovery, with the ability to then search for flights as the secondary step.

However, to make this happen, Hopper also had to close deals with flight data providers (the three main companies that compete with Google/ITA) to get access to their data for free – deals that took two years to close, also slowing things down. But now, because of Hopper’s visibility into flight search activity, it can see about a billion flight prices searched by real people in real-time. This can help Hopper offer current flight search results on its site, but it also allows the company to track trends in consumer shopping behavior, or show how an event (like the Polar Vortex, or the Olympics) is impacting travel. This data is provided through Hopper’s Research arm, which takes journalists’ requests.

Going forward, the real business for Hopper may not be in its consumer-facing service, or even its forthcoming mobile apps, but in offering developers programmatic access to the Hopper data store. “Travel APIs have stayed static for almost over two decades, and the data we have has never been collected,” says Lalonde. He thinks the developer API will certainly appeal to startups, but also potentially bigger businesses who come up with use cases they haven’t even thought of before.

Now a team of 30 people, Hopper only started to speed things up since its move to Boston a couple of years ago. “People forget, the world exploded in 2008. There was a very long period where we didn’t want to burn any of the initial seed capital that we raised,” explains Lalonde. “We didn’t want to grow, because we knew it was a very risky thing we were doing.”

Hopper.com will release a new version of its site by the end of winter, and promises mobile apps “soon.”

For AirPlay speakers, there’s a lot of choice out there. Often that can result in the feeling that there are essentially a lot of people sticking to an easy formula and churning out virtually interchangeable devices, but Libratone is a speaker-maker that makes AirPlay sound ware that stands out, and the new Loop is no exception.

Basics

• Wi-Fi enabled for AirPlay and DLNA streaming
• 3.5mm and USB audio inputs
• PlayDirect for AirPlay without network
• Interchangeable felt speaker covers
• MSRP: $499.95
• Product info page

Pros

• Room-filling sound
• Easy wall mounting with included hardware

Cons

• Expensive
• Portable design but no battery

Design

Libratone’s strength is design: They make speakers that don’t necessarily look like you’d expect from something fitting that description, using heathered felt and odd shapes to surprise and also better mesh with modern interior design. A signature Libratone move is to offer interchangeable felt covers for its speakers so that owners can color coordinate with their existing setup, and the Loop offers this (spare covers will cost you extra, however).

The disc design is a bold one, and might not mesh with everyone’s tastes, but it makes the speaker an object of art itself, rather than something you’re trying to hide away. Resting atop a TV bench or even just propped on its included stand by itself in the corner of a room, it looks at home and like a design decision rather than an afterthought.

There’s another great aspect to the Libratone Loop’s design: its mounting hole and peg make it very easy to hang on the wall (where its disc-shaped design is especially attractive), and yet also keeps it portable should you want to take it with you to another room.

Performance

The Loop not only looks good, it also renews my faith in Libratone’s ability to put out speakers that sound great. The Zipp impressed me with its sound quality, but the Loop carries that further, with a richer sound that’s better for a full-on living room home audio setup replacement.

It’s a speaker that can get very loud without offering up any kind of distortion, and while it might be a little heavy on the bass side for many users, it’s probably right in the sweet spot for most people looking for an AirPlay speaker that’s pricey without being ridiculous. It’s also easy to set up, and you don’t need anything beyond an iPhone or iPad to do it. PlayDirect, the AirPlay that doesn’t require a shared network (the Loop can provide its own) is also a huge selling point that isn’t necessarily shared by Libratone competitors.

The Competition

Speaking of the competition, Libratone has a healthy crop. At this price range, there’s the new and very capable line of Cambridge Audio speakers, including the Minx Air 200 that I’d consider its closest rival. For an extra $100, the Minx Air 200 offers preset Internet radio stations that don’t require a computer or other audio source to listen to, and there’s Bluetooth built in. The Loop is cheaper, however, and better looking, plus it has deeper bass (though executes with less clarity in the mid-range) if that’s your bag.

Bottom Line

The Loop is a great AirPlay speaker, and with DLNA support, it’s relatively platform agnostic. I’m a sucker for the design aesthetic Libratone has chosen, too, so that’s a big selling point as well, but it’s the sound that brings it home. Libratone is essentially a boutique shop specializing in AirPlay sound, and it shows, so you can’t go wrong with their lineup, and the Loop fits nicely price wise in a gap between its Zipp and Live range of devices.

Kim Dotcom of Megaupload fame (or, rather, infamy) and file-sharing service Mega has today offered a sneak peek of his latest project, music service Baboom, which was previously known as Megabox. The site is scheduled to open its doors in late 2014, but this “soft launch” serves as a way for users to check out the service in advance, while also sampling Dotcom’s own album, Good Times.

The album, which is already on Google Play and iTunes, is available both for streaming and download on Baboom in MP3, FLAC, and WAV formats. In addition, the accompanying artist profile page features things like photos, videos, interviews, social updates and more. Users can follow an artist’s Twitter account with a click of a button, too. Meanwhile, Baboom’s navigation is available in a simple sidebar on the right, which will soon let you access Search functions, your music library, plus Activity and Jukebox pages, when the service becomes publicly available later this year.

What’s interesting about Baboom, or at least Dotcom’s Europop album featured on the site, is that it’s being offered both as a free download and paid. For paid downloads, the site points users to official music marketplaces, including iTunes, Amazon and Bandcamp.

As Dotcom explains in the video posted next to his own album, “my idea is that artists should make their music available for free, and fans should only pay for it if they really like it.”

“So I’m going to lead by example today,” he adds, encouraging users to make his album number one to prove that this model can work.

It’s not an entirely crazy idea to release free downloads – after all, the appeal of today’s radio-like streaming services is not necessarily their fancy personalization algorithms but the ability to listen to music you like for free. Services like SoundCloud have also prospered because they’ve allowed a place for lesser-known or upcoming artists to feature their work and grow a fan base. But many of today’s on-demand services, like leading Baboom competitor Spotify, have to some extent struggled with aspects surrounding music discovery, too, heavily focusing on the social graph instead of an individual’s own musical tastes. (After all, your Facebook friends don’t necessarily like what you like, nor do you necessarily care what they play.)

That being said, Baboom may be hard-pressed to compete head-on with the established services and platforms in the space, but by making an appeal to forward-thinking artists who have a better understanding of the shifting landscape in the music industry, there’s a chance that Baboom could end up looking more like a modern-day Myspace.

Myspace, for those of you who only recall it vaguely as some pre-cursor to Facebook, originally took off because of its focus on music discovery, and being known as a platform where artists could connect directly with their fans. They could host profile pages, let Myspace users listen to tracks for free, and fans could in turn optionally post their favorite songs to their own profiles.

Baboom feels familiar, almost like the way Myspace would look had it grown with the changing times instead of exiting to News Corp and later becoming something of a joke. Baboom may not grow into a social network of its own, but it’s easy to see how, if artists choose to embrace the platform, it could serve those same urges to freely sample music while learning what you like, then buying the albums belonging to your favorites.

You can check out Baboom for yourself, and sign up to be alerted when it launches.

WhatsApp, an early mover in the messaging app space, has racked up 430 million active users to date. But despite the influx of new competition from the likes of Line, WeChat, KakaoTalk and Snapchat, WhatsApp says it will be sticking to its guns: avoiding advertising; staying away from “gimmicks” like disappearing photos and games; and continuing to request its users to keep paying to use the service as its basic business model.

The app, which used to be paid, is now free to download and costs $0.99/year to use after the first year.

The comments were made by co-founder and CEO Jan Koum, who was speaking at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany. “The important thing is focus,” he said, not disappearing photos — a reference to the ephemeral messaging service Snapchat.

Of WhatsApp’s 430 million users, some 30 million started using the app in the last couple of months (it only announced 400 million in December). WhatsApp now sees some 50 billion messages sent and received daily — rivalling SMS volumes.

“No ads, no games, no gimmicks,” Koum said today. It’s a credo that is written on a Post-It note from co-founder Brian Acton (who first worked with Koum at Yahoo). Koum keeps that note, which he got Acton to sign, on his desk as a reminder of where WhatsApp would like to remain anchored.

“We just want to focus on messaging. If people want to play games there are plenty of other sites and also a lot of great companies building services around advertising,” he added. It’s a “free market” with apps, so the beauty is that people can get those features elsewhere, Koum said.

Koum declined to talk about whether the company is profitable or any other financial metrics. “We make money, but the important thing [now] is not monetization,” he said simply. Someday the company will focus on it, but today the main aim is to to make sure WhatsApp has a service that works.”

We have heard reports of companies like Snapchat rebuffing acquisition overtures from the likes of Facebook and Google for $4 billion, and similarly Koum and WhatsApp remain bullish on staying independent to grow, as they have before when acquisition rumors surfaced.

“When we started the company we wanted to build something for the long term and sustainable,” he told interviewer David Rowan of Wired. “It’s not hard to sell a company, but if you look at [leading online] companies today like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Twitter, they didn’t sell. They stuck around and built a great offering for users.” Koum acknowledged that these are all built on advertising, while WhatsApp is not, but the main idea remains: “For us it’s about [building] a company that is here to stay.”

Although WhatsApp is now pushing half a billion users, the company has remained very light and has tried to keep its startup mentality. The company currently employs 50 people, 25 of which are engineers, and another 20 that focus on multilingual customer support. “We’re extremely small,” Koum said. And its business model is pretty atypical. “We’ve always thought that advertising would be the wrong thing to do,” he said. By people giving us money, “we’ve always had a direct relationship” with users.

Koum’s upbringing in Soviet Ukraine, he says, has played a large part in how WhatsApp’s business model has developed. That extends from the no-ads policy and the ability to offer reliable and inexpensive communications, through to how the startup handles privacy.

On the subject of pricing, Koum recalled how, when he first moved to the U.S., it was expensive and difficult to phone family long distance, with the need to sign up to long distance phoning plans — a challenge for immigrants with limited resources. “With WhatsApp you don’t have to pay [exorbitant] fees,” he said.

The lack of advertising, meanwhile, is a throwback to his life before the U.S. Advertising, he said, is emblematic of the kind of information clutter that he did not know. ”I grew up in a country where advertising didn’t exist and I had a remarkable childhood,” he said. “Looking back it was an idealistic environment. Even though there were thousands of problems, the joy of growing up in an uncluttered lifestyle [meant] you could focus on other things.”

On the other hand, WhatsApp’s approach to privacy is a response in the opposite direction. “I remember my parents having no conversations on the phone. The walls had ears and you couldn’t speak freely,” Koum recalled. “It is extremely important [for us] to provide a level of security and privacy…. We don’t collect people’s personal information. We just know your phone number and those of the people you want to message with.” He said WhatsApp makes a point of knowing “as little as possible” about users.

Covering a wide range of topics, Koum also was upfront about his preference for Android as a platform over iOS. “Android is a lot more open. We are able to build new features and prototype faster on Android, not to mention that we have a lot more users on Android,” he said.

Longer term, it doesn’t look like WhatsApp plans to turn away from smartphones for its core experience any time soon. “Our goal is to be on every smartphone.” Quoting a projection of 5 billion total smartphones down the line, he said their goal is to be “on every single one of them.”