Category: Tech news

Nest CEO Tony Fadell was at DLD in Munich today, giving his first on-stage interview since his company was acquired by Google in a massive $3.2 billion deal last week. Fadell and Nest had already made clear that the acquisition wouldn’t change how Nest treats user data, but he went a step further today, assuring users (via TNW) if there were to be any changes in the privacy policy under Google, they’d be opt-in and made fully transparent to users.

Fadell is clearly seeking to reassure users who think that as part of the Nest deal, Google will be able to harvest data gathered by the thermostats to help power its efforts to compile a more complete profile of its users for the purposes of advertising and monetization. Fadell already spelled out that there would be no change in the current privacy policy for Nest, which mandates that info only be used to improve Nest products and services and not shared with anyone else.

Later, however, Fadell admitted that the policy was subject to change. Google has frequently altered its privacy policy and user agreements to give it greater access to and use of user information. A good recent example is when Google announced it would be using Google+ user profile pictures in ads unless people opted out of that program, hence Fadell’s emphasis on the opt-in nature of any data sharing arrangement between Google and its new subsidiary Nest.

The comments from Fadell today might reassure some users, but they’re also a pretty clear indication that Nest will eventually be changing its user policy, and that part of that change will be some kind of dialog that will ask if Google can user your data, in the same way that you’re prompted to do so when you sign in to Maps and other products. Transparency around the changes means only that they’ll spell out what’s happening, which is actually only what they’d be required to do in order not to cause a massive user furor.

Google and Nest have the potential to do great things together for users and consumers, but don’t expect that to happen without users giving up some more of their precious data to the search giant. All that remains to be seen is how that will happen, and what people get in exchange for that access.

CommonFloor, an Indian real estate search engine and listings site based in Bangalore, has raised $10.4 million from existing investors, Accel India and Tiger Global in Series D funding.

The new capital will be used to expand beyond property listings and offer information on related products, including home decor etc., the startup said in a statement. The latest funding brings the total money raised by CommonFloor to around $17.9 million. In July last year, the startup had raised $7.5 million from the same investors.

There are over 150 million Internet users in India, most of whom are looking to buy, rent apartments, and even sell things online. Real estate listing startups such as CommonFloor, Housing.com and MagicBricks are targeting the country’s rising middle-class population planning to buy and rent houses across major Indian cities. Many of them are already depending on these sites to not just conduct initial research, but also buy houses. Last year, during the Great Online Shopping Festival (India’s version of Black Friday/Cyber Monday) Tata Housing sold some 50 apartments online.

Internet users in the country making transactions online are expected to touch 38 million by 2015, according to this research by Ernst & Young.

“We have seen phenomenal growth in the past 2 years on every possible parameter – be it financials, visitors, advertisers or engagement. In fact, our topline has continued to grow by over 100% quarter on quarter since last year,” said Sumit Jain, co-founder of CommonFloor.

Launched in 2007 by Jain, Lalit Mangal and Vikas Malpani, CommonFloor now has over 75,000 projects listed on its website, it said in the statement.

The real challenge for CommonFloor and several other real estate listing sites will be to offer more personalized solutions, instead of just being a search engine. This will require investments in data analytics and developing newer offerings.

A good example to illustrate this would be to look at what startups such as Zillow and Urban Compass are doing in the U.S. — not to blindly copy what others are doing (because these markets are quite different), but more in terms of enhancing the services.

New York-based Urban Compass for instance, combines its home rentals platform with a hyperlocal social network to help users not only find their next apartment but also discover everything else they need in order to turn their apartment into a home.

Mobile enterprise security startup Bluebox has raised $18 million in Series B funding from Tenaya Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sun Microsystems Co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim, and SV Angel. Brian Melton from Tenaya Capital will join the company’s board of directors. This brings the company’s total amount raised to $27.5 million. Bluebox previously closed a $9.5 million Series A round in July 2012.

Although the company debuted two years ago to the public, Bluebox is still in stealth but the public launch is coming soon, we’re told. What we know about Bluebox’s offering is that it has developed a mobile security solution for businesses that allows enterprises to secure devices like iPhones and iPads properly. Reports have indicated that at least 85% of employees use phone/tablet applications and web-based services for both personal and work-related activities, which puts corporate information security under threat. Bluebox’s offering balances the needs of both businesses and employees, who are accessing corporate data via their personal devices.

What we do know for sure is that the team behind Bluebox has an impressive background in enterprise security. CEO Caleb Sima, who joined HP with the SPI Dynamics acquisition, was previously CTO for HP’s Application Security Center, and was responsible for the company’s web application security solutions. Prior to SPI, he worked for Internet Security Systems (ISS)’s X-Force R&D team and as a Security Engineer for S1 Corporation. Bluebox’s other co-founder Adam Ely was previously Chief Information Security Officer of the Heroku business unit at Salesforce.com, and before that, he led security and compliance at TiVo and led security within The Walt Disney Company, where he was responsible for Disney.com, ESPN.com and ABC.com. Sima says that the team “founded Bluebox with a unique approach to mobile security that focuses on what really matters—data.”

In an interview at launch in 2012, Sima told us that one of the key differentiators for Bluebox was its security DNA. “We know exactly what needs to be solved and how to solve it,” he said at the time. “That has not been addressed by anybody in the market…we’re planning to hit his market head-on and disrupt it.”

As the enterprise workforce is increasingly using their own mobile devices to access business data, the need for high-powered security options have become mandatory for businesses to adopt. Bluebox isn’t the only company to tackle this market. Competitors include Lookout and others. And the space has become increasingly acquisitive as incumbents snap up startups in this arena, with Oracle and IBM both making purchases in the past few months.

Online gaming continues to be attacked on two fronts: the over saturation of casual titles and “me-too” offerings coupled with an increasingly savvy but fickle user base, and the rapid transition to mobile. The has led to major challenges right across the industry, from the likes of Zynga’s Wall Street woes, and Zattikka’s financial problems, to a refocus on quality and “differentiation” by Europe’s Bigpoint. It seems that no online games company has been left unscathed.

It is in this climate that late last year rumours were swirling around that Stockholm-headquartered Stardoll, the fashion-oriented virtual world for “tween” and teenage girls backed by Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital, had shuttered its London and L.A. ad sales offices. As part of the reorganisation, we’d heard that ad sales in the UK were being transferred to Venatus, the boutique ad sales house that targets the gaming industry — something that Stardoll has now confirmed to TechCrunch.

In parallel, Stardoll tells us that U.S. ad sales are now being handled by Roblox, the massively multi-player 3D world that lets users build things, which is particularly popular with teenage boys. This is actually a bit of a role reversal. Two years ago, Stardoll began selling ads on behalf of Roblox in the UK and U.S., so in many ways this is a continuation of that arrangement, albeit structured in reverse.

Thus, UK and U.S. ad sales have now been effectively outsourced, where they were previously brought in-house, leaving Stardoll to focus on its core business of building various virtual world and gaming experiences based on the Stardoll IP.

Under both arrangements, Stardoll’s ad sales teams — based in London in the UK, and L.A. and New York in the U.S. — have been transferred to Venatus, and Roblox respectively. However, my understanding is the company’s London-based 8 person ad team were quite taken aback by the change in ad-sales strategy and four employees have chosen not to take up that offer, while two of the team were offered to relocate to Stardoll’s Stockholm HQ, which, according to a source, they may have declined.

Contrary to rumours, Stardoll says that only one member of its ad team hasn’t been offered a job elsewhere.

So, why the change in ad sales strategy? A change in strategy that effectively sees ad sales come full circle.

In a phone call with TechCrunch, Stardoll CEO Mattias Miksche explained that back in 2007, when the company decided to supplement revenue based on selling virtual in-game currency with advertising, very few advertisers “got” the concept of a virtual world. Using generic ad networks produced very low CPMs, leaving Stardoll no choice but to bring ad sales in-house and recruit its own specialist sales team.

However, fast-forward a few years, says Miksche, and the market has evolved significantly with the advent of free-to-play online and (now) mobile games. “Does it really make sense to have our own sales team in a changing market?,” he asks somewhat rhetorically. Clearly, in the case of Stardoll, Miksche believes the answer is a resounding “no”.

This, it could be argued, frees up the company to plough more resources into tackling its biggest challenge to date: the transition from Web to Mobile. “Everything is about managing this shift,” says Miksche. “Mobile is by far the most important for us as a company”.

The shift from Web to Mobile shouldn’t be underestimated (and is industry-wide). Various third-party measurement services point to a downwards trend for Stardoll.com, while the company’s own official metrics claim 1.8 million unique users in the U.S. for December 2013 versus 2.2 million in December 2012. Globally, however, Stardoll says it’s seeing 15 million uniques/month overall.

To-date Stardoll has launched 8 mobile apps/games.

Fon, a free “crowdsourced” WiFi network that is created out of people sharing a portion of their private WiFi connections, is today announcing another $14 million in funding led by Qualcomm Ventures as it gears up to tackle new areas like the U.S. and business users. It will also be teaming up with Facebook around a new “social” router called Fonera, which will let people share their WiFi hotspots with Facebook friends and no further authentication — a product that Facebook and Fon plan also to offer to physical stores, which will give users free WiFi when they “like” or check-in to a location.

Qualcomm’s investment is strategic: Fon is building a new, “social-music” router based on a chipset from Qualcomm subsidiary Atheros. Martin Varsavsky, CEO and founder of Fon, tells me that this router will not be ready until May or June of this year. The brand name has not been made public, nor have any other details like music partners.

Qualcomm will also be integrating Fon into other Atheros chipsets, making it available as part of the SDK so that third parties using the chipsets will also be able to integrate Fon network access as well.

“The amount of this round and the caliber of investors will propel us into our next stage of growth,” said Martin Varsavsky, CEO, Fon, in a statement. “We are excited about our new relationship with Qualcomm, which is an amazing company and a leader in mobile data communication. By integrating Fon into Qualcomm Atheros’ chipsets, more devices and systems will be automatically equipped to be part of Fon’s global WiFi network.”

Speaking to TechCrunch from Munich, where he appeared on stage at the DLD conference, Varsavsky also said the Fonera product that was launched today acts as a range extender, “so if you have WiFi in your kitchen it will extend out to the rest of home.”

Others in this latest round of funding include existing investors Index Partners, Google, Coral, Atomico and T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom (DT). Fon has raised nearly $72 million since being founded in 2006. To date, Fon covers just over 12 million hotspots worldwide, and the aim is to expand that to 35 million by 2016.

The Facebook integration will work to help Facebook and Fon tackle both the enterprise and consumer segments of the market. Among consumers, friends of Fon users will be able to use their friends’ Fon connections when they are in the same physical space as their friends, and using a Fonera router. The advantage of doing this is that you don’t have to give out your password to your own WiFi network, making it easier for people to connect when they are visiting you at home or in your office, and more secure for you in the longer run.

On the enterprise front, the social network will be leveraging the Fon deal to expand its reach in local commerce, by linking up Fon access with Facebook check-ins.

“The stores where you can check in and have WiFi is something that would work well for users, and for Facebook, too,” said Cory Ondrejka, director of mobile engineering at Facebook, speaking today at DLD about the relationship. This, in turn, ties Facebook in more closely with a business’ bigger presence online, leading potentially to more advertising and other commerce business from those same retailers.

Varsavsky tells me that this will work similar to the Fonera home product, but will be a separate piece of hardware.

“We’re working on a product for shops, a new type of Fonera for shops that will authenticate in a different way,” he says. “Once you check in or ‘like’ a brand, you connect to WiFi. People come to your shop and promote you in a sense, so we give you WiFi.” He says that this is part of a larger push at Fon to target small and medium enterprises.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed but Varsavsky says that Facebook is not taking an investment in Fon in the process. “We have a business relationship with Facebook and we work with them,” he says.

The U.S. partnerships will not end with Facebook, either. Fon is talking to carriers in the U.S. to roll out as a supplement to their own broadband services. To date, this has been a very fruitful way for Fon to grow. In the UK, it partners with BT, giving BT’s broadband subscribers the ability to access WiFi outside their homes, and to keep using WiFi even when their own connections at home are failing them. I’m a BT subscriber and have had to use the Fon network more than once when my router or my broadband collapses.

Fon says that it has grown by 50% this year, and claims 10% penetration in markets like Belgium and the UK.

Perhaps it is that track record, plus the success and market acceptance of other collaborative consumption startups like Airbnb, that have made Fon and its investors more bullish on the prospects of the company repeating that success in the U.S.

“Fon’s unique approach to crowd-sourcing Wi-Fi is going to play an increasingly instrumental role in the future of mobile data,” said Miles Kirby, senior director for Qualcomm Ventures, in a statement.  “Fon fits perfectly into our vision to solving the increasing demand for data.”

What’s a little biomimetics between friends? Today’s edition of TIDWRTWHUFOO we present a few exciting projects from MIT’s Biomimetics Lab where they’re copying animal motion in order to create more efficient robotic hunter/killers.

First up we have a charming cheetah that runs 2.3 meters per second and looks like a skeletonized cat that is looking to scrounge up a little skin for itself. Perhaps your skin?

Below we see a hopping, squirming lizard leg that can swim through water and, presumably, take to land for a bit of fun with you and the kids. These robots use high torque-density motors as well as a bio-like bone structures to copy what real animals do on their days off.

Finally there’s there’s this rollerskating robot. If I were still in a Roller Derby team (Go Rebel Scumz!) I’d maybe be afraid of this guy but really? Who’s afraid of a skating robot? Nobody, that’s who. Stay warm, humans, because the robots will be able to withstand cold that will freeze our bones!

Ready for your semi-regular reminder that technology is freakin’ amazing?

FaceSubstitute is a tech demo that lets you use your webcam to try on someone else’s face (god, that was a weird sentence to type), and it’s just as creepy/awesome as it sounds. Want to be Walter White? Sure! Want to be a terrfying psuedo-Kardashian? Okay! Want to be Bieber for a day? No problem, weirdo!

The app currently has 17 different faces for you to “wear”, from celebs like Nicolas Cage and Brian Cranston to stranger, cartoony masks like “Picasso”, or “Abstract” that intentionally distort your face in the freakiest of ways.

The whole thing is liiiittle bit “It puts the lotion in the basket”, but as a tech demo it’s just too damned neat. Doubly impressive is that it’s all browser based, through the magic of WebGL and ClmTracker, a Javascript library built specifically for facial feature tracking. The app was built by Norwegian developer Audun Mathias Øygard to show his library in action.

Is it perfect? Nah. It glitches out fairly frequently and it tried to render a face on my wall for some reason (Ghosts!). But when it all lines up, it’ll drop your jaw. Or Walter White’s jaw, or Bieber’s jaw, or whoever’s jaw it is you might be wearing.

Here’s the link.

How to make it work:

• Open up Chrome (it works best there) and go to the app
• Give the web app permission to use your webcam through the dropdown dialog box
• Hit the start button, wait a few seconds for it to map out your face, then pick a new look.
• Laugh at yourself for the next half hour.

A few pro tips:

• Make sure you’re in an evenly and well lit room. The first room I tried it in was too dark, so it didn’t work at all.
• The tracking isn’t perfect, so move slowly and try to keep your face relatively straight to the camera.
• If it things start getting way off (it’ll do that after a while) just move your face out of frame and then bring it back in to reset the map.

The next obvious step for the devs, if they’re listening: make it so that people can easily record themselves wearing these freaky flesh masks, then charge’m a buck a pop to send the video to their friends.

[Shout out to Wilson over at Fast Co. for spotting this]

You think I just turn on my webcam and some dude is there creepin’ me out? No, Skylar. I AM the one who creeps.

News is out today that BlackBerry has no intention of bringing a BlackBerry Messaging (BBM) application to Windows Phone. Comments published in TrustedReviews from the company indicate that it deems Windows Phone too small to warrant the investment. TechCrunch confirmed the statements.

According to TrustedReviews, BlackBerry’s David Proulx called the nonexistence of a BBM application for Windows Phone “entirely market driven,” and stated that the decision is not a “religious thing,” but is instead merely a choice made on the back (lack?) of consumer demand.

So, sorry Windows Phone fans, if you were pining for BBM, you must wait.

Might BlackBerry bring BBM to Windows Phone in the future? Yes, but only once Windows Phone reaches larger scale. In the words of Proulx, “as other platforms emerge, whichever they may be, we will execute on those platforms as well.” The question then becomes whether BlackBerry will still be around by the time that Windows Phone “emerges.”

This is playing as you would expect in the Windows Phone world. WMPowerUser was irked by the shade-tossing, for example:

Blackberry, who clearly has a knack for making friends, has confirmed it has no current interest or plans to bring their BBM app to Windows Phone, citing the size of the Windows Phone market.

Perhaps BlackBerry is saddened by the loss of its rank as the “third” mobile platform.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Dropbox has raised a massive $250 million funding round, valuing the company at $10 billion according to the Wall Street Journal. The new funding round is led by a BlackRock fund, according to the WSJ, which cites “two people familiar with the deal” as the source of the report.

This is actually the second time that Dropbox has raised $250 million: It did so in 2011 in a round that included Goldman Sachs, Sequoia, Index Ventures and Accel Partners. Back in November, a rumor about an additional $250 million raise put the valuation of the company at a supposed $8 billion, which, based on various revenue estimates, could have been viewed as anywhere from expensive to cheap.

When news of the raise was first circulating last year, revenue for the cloud storage company was rumored to be in the “hundreds of millions of dollars” range according to BusinessWeek, which helps justify the company’s huge valuation. Other companies in the same ball park in terms of worth pre-IPO include Twitter, which was valued at $10 billion back in May, 2013; Google, which went public with a $2.7 billion valuation; and Box, which is a direct Dropbox competitor and had a valuation of $2 billion when it raised $100 million late last year.

The fact that Dropbox raised at a $10 billion valuation instead of $8 billion could indicate that the round was competitive, with third parties bidding for a chance to scoop up Dropbox shares. And, naturally, at a valuation that rich, Dropbox is placing itself far up the IPO queue.

Prior to this raise, Dropbox has collected $257 million in funding. Provided that the WSJ has the new capital story correct, Dropbox will have raised a total of over half a billion dollars.

Dropbox’s new capital dwarfs the $100 million that its traditional rival Box recently absorbed, perhaps granting it a competitive edge as both companies look to expand their core business and diversify their product lines.

Also included in this round are existing investment partners, the WSJ says, but it’s unclear who exactly was involved at this stage. We’ve reached out to Dropbox to find out more about the reported funding and the backers in the round, and will update if we find out more.

More to come…

Andreessen Horowitz is raising a massive new fund, according to Fortune’s LP whisperer Dan Primack. The expected total for the new fund is $1.5 billion, giving the venture group sufficient capital to pursue deals at every funding point at scale.

According to CrunchBase, Andreessen Horowitz previously raised a total of $2.65 billion, meaning that this new fund would be equal to more than half of its prior total. The $1.5 billion new fund is the same size as the group’s’ Fund III that was put together in 2012.

It’s no accident that the funds are the same size, says Primack, who reports that the new fund will be “similar in structure” to the past fund. Given that, we can expect the new fund to contain monies for both early stage investment and large deals alike.

At the moment Andreessen Horowitz is regarded as some of the smartest money in circulation.

The group rose to prominence on the back of its massively lucrative investment in Skype, which was later sold to Microsoft for more than 8 billion dollars. In late 2013, Andreessen Horowitz announced a reticence to invest in companies at the Series A level, implying that its new fund will find a home in companies that are generally of larger scale.

Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Nothing is truly NSA-proof or hacker-proof, but WireOver wants to offer you more security than Dropbox, Google Drive, or Skydrive. The Y Combinator startup just emerged from stealth with a desktop app that lets you send files of any size for free. And for $10 a month, your transfers get end-to-end encryption so only the recipient can open them. WireOver can’t even look at what you’re sending.

If you just want to send huge video files or photo collections to friends and aren’t worried about encryption, WireOver is totally free for unlimited file-size sharing. But its premium level of privacy could be a big draw for anyone with sensitive files to send.

WireOver founder Trent Ashburn tells me there are security holes in the way big file storage and sharing providers transfer your stuff. “In the industry it’s called encryption in transit and encryption at rest. But the files arrive on the servers decrypted. Their servers will re-encrypt them and store them, but the encryption keys used are controlled by and accessed by the provider.”

Ashburn tells me there’s a risk of the same company having both a copy of your encrypted files and the key to open them. But with WireOver’s end-to-end encryption, files are never stored on its servers, and it doesn’t have the decryption key. “The approach we’re going for is ‘Trust No One’”.

Ashburn spent several years building computational models for quantitative hedge funds before becoming a semi-pro cyclist. He wanted to start a company he could relate to, and he found he was having some trouble with file transfers.

“With Dropbox, Google Drive, and Skydrive, sending small and medium-size files is pretty much solved but it’s a pain to send big files securely. There’a bunch of things that Dropbox works great for [like syncing]. And they do their best within their goals to have security, but they’re not trying to be the most secure tool. They’re trying to be your files everywhere.”

So Ashburn entered WireOver into Y Combinator. They built a bunch of failed prototypes before settling on a Python-based desktop client. Along with the YC funding it got from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, and Yuri Milner, the four-person startup has raised an additional seed round from Bessemer Venture Partners, Boston’s .406 Ventures, and angels like BrandCast’s Hayes Metzger.

How To Use WireOver

Once you’ve installed WireOver, you just dump files into its little window, and type in the email address of the recipient[s]. Once they have WireOver installed and running, the file is transferred completely peer-to-peer, or routed by WireOver’s servers but isn’t stored there.

If you select “Secure” transfer and both you and receiver have paid the $10 a month fee, your file gets end-to-end encryption. For even more security again man-in-the-middle attacks, you can request to verify the recipient’s machine’s crytopgraphic fingerprint.

The big downside to WireOver using a transfer system rather than cloud storage is that both the sender and recipient have to be online at the same time. You can just upload a file, email someone a link, and shut off your computer.

But since WireOver doesn’t store files, it doesn’t have to charge for unencrypted transfers. That means you could send 200 gigabyte or even terrabyte-sized files for free, which could cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on Dropbox, Drive, or SkyDrive. If you’re looking for security and privacy, WireOver might be worth the $10 a month.

Ashburn says some clients have switched to WireOver from sending physical hard drives and USB drives through the mail or with FedEx. While there are other encrypted file sharing services, we haven’t found any popular ones that offer unlimited file sizes for free, or encryption of those files for as cheap.

Companies large and small are seeing their data fall into the hands of hackers, and we’re realizing our governments are engaging in widespread surveillance. Meanwhile, as our cameras get better and our screens get bigger, file sizes just keep going up. So whether you’re paranoid or just want to send all your photos to mom, WireOver understands.

Twitter’s Vice President of Product Michael Sippey just announced that he’s stepping into an advisory role at the company, then moving on to, well, something else.

In a company email that Sippey also posted on his blog, he said he realized that “it was time to move on” after discussions with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and COO Ali Rowghani. Sippey doesn’t go into too much detail, but he hints that he wants to be at a smaller company again: “I’ve spent most of my career working at startups, helping them scale and having a direct hand on the product.”

It sounds like team members at Twitter have been frustrated with the product leadership, at least according to AllThingsD’s Mike Isaac and our own Matthew Panzarino. Isaac described the problem as a lack of a clear path for moving product changes “up the ladder at an efficient pace,” while Panzarino suggested that there was an over reliance on user testing.

Sippey’s post says that as an advisor, he will be “helping with product strategy, providing input on the great work the team has lined up for 2014, and helping [COO] Ali [Rowghani] find a new head of product.” It sounds like that’s mostly a transitional role, because afterward, he’s “excited to go figure out what’s next.”

Sippey has been at Twitter since 2012. He was previously at blog platform Six Apart and then at Say Media, the media company formed from the merger of Six Apart and VideoEgg.

[Image: Flickr/Joi Ito]

Grokr, a company that had previously been working on a sort of “Google Now”-like application for iOS users, is launching its latest creation called Fantastic into public beta today. The new app, a smart music player for iOS devices, lets you not only play your own music, but discover new artists and tracks you may be interested in, as well as new videos, upcoming concerts and more.

What Happened To Grokr, The “Google Now for iOS?”

Fantastic takes advantage of the same technology Grokr had built for its flagship application released in late 2012, before quietly shutting down sometime last summer. At the time, we had heard reports that the company being acquired by Apple, but, as it turns out, that was not the case. We understand now, according to sources, that while Grokr had indeed engaged in discussions with Apple and other large internet companies, the team decided to instead shift away from its original product to focus on a series of single-purpose apps instead.

Asked why, co-founder and CEO at Grokr Labs Srivats Sampath says they realized that people were having trouble understanding the use case for Grokr because it was so broad.

“They had no idea what the app did or for what reason they needed to go into the app. It was very eye-opening for us,” he explains. “And when we spoke with the Google Now guys, they gave us similar feedback: it’s one thing to build a platform, but it’s another to try to sell that platform as an app,” Sampath adds.

So the Sunnyvale-based team went back to the drawing board, instead of opting for the exit. Sampath, who was previously founder and CEO of McAfee.com, Discussion Corporations, and Mercora in years past, says that he has learned not to give up too soon. “This is my fifth company. Out of five companies, two went public and two went under,” he says. “Plus, ninety percent of success is just surviving.” Putting his money where his mouth is, so to speak, Sampath personally invested another half a million into Grokr last June.

Grokr had been going in the right direction in terms of the larger trend of predictive search, but now the company is going to take advantage of the underlying technology to build a series of new applications. After Fantastic, they’ll release other “smart” apps, like, perhaps, a smart news reader, video player and smart browser.

Fantastic, A Smart Music Player And Discovery Service

Fantastic, however, is the first out of the gate, as it was already something lead developer (and music lover) John Brunsfeld had already created as a side project. He had built an app that used the Grokr platform to allow him to find out about new music and concerts. Today, the more polished Fantastic app, now in public beta, does the same.

After installation, you tell Fantastic whether to reference your iTunes library or your Spotify Premium account. Then, using this data, as well as social data, location data and more, Fantastic will offer a real-time music feed detailing new and upcoming releases, nearby concerts, YouTube videos, trending Facebook posts, tweets, and articles about your music, as well as what your friends on the service are saying about a track or an artist.

“Essentially, what the platform does is it learns everything about you,” explains Sampath, “and then it takes that and applies that to a knowledge graph – in this case, we have a massive knowledge graph of music-related, event-related, and artist-related information.”

The end result is an app that, in theory, will tell you want you need to know about the music you like and related events.

For obvious reasons, the app works better if your Spotify account reflects your own tastes, and not those of, say, your partner or kids who may also be using your same account. But over time, the service can learn more about you as you play tracks, which should improve the relevance of its suggestions.

Fantastic has been in private beta since September, and now earns around $0.65 in album sales per user per month – basically, half a single. But the company’s goal is to increase that to $1.50. It could also push users toward ticket sales to generate additional revenue.

Going forward, Grokr’s team is also shooting for one new app per quarter, including things like the iPad release and Android release of Fantastic, which will arrive before any other smart applications. (Unless, of course, one starts really blowing up during a private beta test).

Fantastic is free download here in iTunes.

It’s been a big week for smart things.

Coming off the heels of CES, this week we learned that Lockitron hasn’t been shipping the majority of their smart lock pre-orders, Nintendo hasn’t been selling many Wii Us, that Google has been building smart contact lenses and buying smart thermostat companies, and that our dear Chris Velazco is leaving us.

It may not be the happiest Gadgets Podcast you’ve ever heard, but at least it’s honest.

We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, and Darrell Etherington.

Enjoy!

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

For about the last year and a half, Google has let you mute display ads they don’t like. Just click the little [x] button and it’s gone and will never be shown to you again. That’s a pretty useful solution for noisy ads you really, really hate, despite the fact that they promise to show you that one weird trick to finally lose all your belly fat.

Google’s users have already muted “millions of ads,” the company says, and it’s using this information as a signal to “make ads more relevant and useful.”

To get even more data about how users interact with its ads, you will now also be able to give Google a bit more info about why you didn’t like an ad. Over the next few weeks, Google will roll out an in-ad survey that will pop up when you hit the mute button. These surveys, Google says, will help it learn more about user preferences and why they mute ads.

Based on Google’s screenshots, it will only give users three choices per survey, but it looks like the process could be spread out over multiple steps. As far as I can see, users don’t have to actually finish these surveys to mute an ad. Most people will think they have to, however, so this will probably give Google quite a bit of new data to fine-tune its ad targeting.