Category: Tech news

Zapier, a platform for connecting apps to automate tasks, has been constrained to some extent by the limitations for integrating third-party services. That has changed with Zapier’s update to its developer platform that the company announced this week.

The change is noteworthy for, if nothing else, how it opens systems so apps can talk to each other and data can be exchanged to enable people to get their work done more easily. Connecting apps also helps decompose entrenched, on-premise technologies. The data can be pulled out and used in ways that were not possible before.

Zapier is one of those services that turns a trigger into an action. For example, you can use Zapier to get a notification when a web page gets updated. A photo sent to a social network can also be delivered to a Dropbox account using the service.

Now any service with an API can be added to Zapier. Furthermore, Zapier can also now do multiple API calls for each trigger or action. That opens the possibilities for businesses to use the service to connect information from multiple departments such as sales and finance.

Zapier currently has 262 services that can be connected. Gmail, MailChimp, Dropbox and Salesforce are some of the services it offers. Last August, Zapier launched its developer platform. Since then, 141 services have been added. Over the past six months, the Zapier team rebuilt the developer platform with Backbone.js to make it faster for people to use.

The new platform has two major new features, said Zapier Co-Founder Wade Foster in a phone interview this week. Until now, only services with specific authentication capabilities could be added to Zapier. These were sophisticated apps such as Google Docs and Twilio that had fine-grained authentication features.

Zapier has now engineered the new platform to allow the most common API authentication methods out of the box. That opens a huge landscape of apps that have APIs but do not necessarily have the authentication requirements needed for integration into the Zapier platform. It means a developer or even non-coder can add any services that have an API. These can be made publicly available or used internally for connecting different on-premise environments such as CRM and ERP systems.

In this example, Etsy is added to the Zapier platform:

A scripting engine that sits in front of the API for connecting services is also available, Foster said. This allows a developer to pull data from multiple sources. That’s opposed to traditional APIs that just connect two points. With the new capability, a service can call multiple apps and return information that draws from the different services or data sources.

For example, invoice data and customer sales contact information may be in two separate silos. With the new features, a developer from Zapier can access both through one API.

For too long, IT has been a maze of data silos. With Zapier, IT now has a new capability, said Chris Dancy, who works in the CTO’s office at BMC Software. It means someone can connect SAP and Oracle data, opening all kinds of possibilities. A lot has been made of “Shadow IT,” which has helped with the rise of SaaS and the ability for anyone to get their work done with ready-to-use services.

Executives at Apple in India are preparing to celebrate passing $1 billion in annual revenue in the country for the first time this financial year.

But Apple today remains a small player in India, accounting for less than 2% of all mobile sales in 2013 according to one estimate. In a market where more than 90% of the 224 million phones sold in 2014 will be bought by first-time users, Samsung, Nokia and Micromax phones are expected to take the lion’s share, leaving Apple a bit-player.

According to several estimates, including some sources at Apple India, the company shipped 1 million iPhones in 2013. As a point of comparison, newly minted iPhone carrier China Mobile has clocked up 1 million in pre-orders alone.

There have been reports that Apple is now considering a drastic strategy: according to the Economic Times, Apple plans to push a legacy model, the 8GB iPhone 4, at a price of about $250 to get more aggressive in India. We have heard from reliable sources that nothing like this is in the cards because there is “no way Apple would sell phones that cheap.”

But it is correct that it wants to use an older model to target new, aspirational consumers who are ready to pay an extra $100-$150 to own an iPhone.

Our source tells us that Apple is planning to sell 8GB iPhone 4 models in India for around RS 22,000 (about $358). That’s about $70 less than the previous retail price of around RS 26,500 (about $431) when it was launched, if not quite $250.

The pricing dilemma

India will account for nearly a quarter of the 1.03 billion smartphones that will be sold in 2014 globally according to Mediacells. But iPhones will only be a small proportion of that. Even the most aggressive estimates do not expect iPhone sales to cross 1.5 million units this year.

So far, Apple has attempted to make up for its premium pricing by throwing in extra offers such as buyback offers and option to pay in monthly installments.

Part of the problem has been that India’s average phone pricing runs almost at complete odds with Apple’s bigger pricing strategy. In the last launch of new models, the “cheaper” 5C variant works out as more expensive ($525) to many top end smartphone models from Samsung (around $400) and Nokia (about $300), and that contrast is even greater in India.

Now, Apple wants to target the sub-$350 smartphone category to woo aspirational users who are ready to pay an extra $100-$150 for owning an iPhone.

According to a source who knows Apple’s India plans, this deal could be sweetened further by offering buybacks and monthly installment options to lower the upfront cost for buyers.

Billion-Dollar baby

Breaking $1 billion in revenues — a milestone for any company in India — could be an indication that Apple is turning over a new leaf in India. In 2006, and then couple of years later, Apple shelved plans to open a technical support centre in Bangalore and even fired dozens of engineers within few months of hiring them. India was also among the last countries to get any Apple products until 2010.

Things started changing for Apple in India after November 2011 when it began shipping the iPhone 4S in the country. In 2013, Apple more than doubled its iPhone shipments to India to around 1 million iPhones, according to several estimates.

Apple’s share of the Indian smartphone market has grown from around 0.8% in 2012 to just under 2% in 2013, according to Mediacells, which tracks the mobile market. This growth was fuelled by some schemes that Apple allowed its team to offer in the Indian market.

“The buyback scheme for the iPhone 4 in India was very effective in contributing to the 2% milestone,” said Brad Rees, CEO of research company Mediacells.

Apart from offering buybacks, Apple India also sweetened the deal by tying up with banks who allowed consumers to pay in monthly installments.

“From a purely macro-economic standpoint, Apple cannot and will not keep their eyes off the prize in India, China and Brazil but – guess what – neither will Samsung and Google, Nokia and Microsoft – it’s brutal out there,” Rees added.

While China and India will together account for more than half of all smartphones sold in 2014, the two countries cannot be compared.

“I don’t think one should compare India and China in the same breath; for one thing, they are both at radically different stages of smartphone development,” said Rees. Mediacells predicts that by the end of 2014, 30% of Indians will be smartphone-enabled, compared to 63% of Chinese smartphone owners in same time period.

Despite Apple’s new-found love for India, it’s unlikely that it will get the attention China is getting anytime soon. But with over 800 million active phone users currently and another 224 million smartphones set to be added in 2014 alone, and growing competition in other emerging markets like China, Apple may have found its India moment.

A Pittsburgh-based tech company approached us on the CES 2014 show floor last week and asked for a bit of time to talk about their product, a small ball that can take panoramic video and is rugged enough to be strapped to a helmet or surf board. The product, called the 360fly, is still in beta but the company wanted to show it to us – complete with male surfer model – so we could get an idea of how the device worked.

The company’s previous products, the GoPano line, sold very well. The products connected to your iPhone and allowed you to take panoramic video anywhere using the iPhone’s own camera. This idea isn’t particularly new but I think the 360fly is a fascinating refinement of the product.

We’ll update you when these guys, Voxx, have more to show. Until then, enjoy seeing a poor man in board shorts and a t-shirt smile uncomfortably as I talk to the founder.

Ustream has recently made moves to de-emphasize its free, live broadcasting service. But those changes are just part of a larger focus on enterprise clients.

Last week, Ustream sent an email to members who had free accounts, telling them that it was making changes to the way videos were stored or archived. The email said that videos recorded by its free, ad-supported Ustream Basic accounts would only be stored for 30 days, and then automatically deleted.

The company offered up a new unlimited storage plan for users who wish to pay for them. For $19.99 a month, Ustream is allowing its users to archive videos that they’ve already shot beyond 30 days. But for those who didn’t want to upgrade to a pro version of Ustream, the company offered the ability to download copies of their videos to store them offline.

For Ustream, culling archived videos from free users is just one step in its continued focus on enterprise accounts. Over the past year, the company has been working to add features and win over more media and business clients to its service.

Co-founder and CEO Brad Hunstable told me in a phone conversation that most of the company’s growth has come from working with major media companies. Also, he said that a small portion of the views the company gets comes from archived videos — which is one of the reasons it’s fine with having them disappear.

“Our core competency is live broadcasting and that hasn’t changed,” Hunstable said. “There are plenty of places to store videos, but 80 percent of our viewership is live.”

In addition to media companies, Ustream has seen its live streaming services used by other enterprise clients. Some of that comes from brands turning to live streaming as a way to increase visibility, but video is also being used as a way to reach customers, partners, and employees in the enterprise.

“Over the last few years, we’ve seen companies like LinkedIn, Sony, and others using our products more like a media companies,” Hunstable said. “We’re seeing public companies doing their earnings announcements through video, and also internal broadcasting.”

Founded in 2007, Ustream isn’t the only live streaming video startup to move its focus away from consumers. Competitor Livestream historically has been focused on major events as its largest source of revenue, and Justin.tv pivoted to eSports and rebranded as Twitch more than two years ago.

Sure it’s not made of metal, nor did it convince Google to give its creators billions of dollars, but dammit if this isn’t a cool hack. The folks at Spark.io, creators of the Spark Core, a unique Wi-Fi development board that allows you to add Wi-Fi controls to Arduino projects, have used their tech to create a Nest-alike with some of the same features as Tony Fadell’s popular wall wart.

The team essentially created a web-connected thermostat by cutting out a nice hunk of wood and some plastic and adding a Spark Core and some control logic. The device can change temperature by scrolling the large wheel on the front and displays the temperature using an LED display. Most of the other logic – including temperature logging and remote control – happens on a remote server. To sense the temperature and humidity they added a Honeywell HumidIcon chip and a motion sensor tells the system when you’re away. They tested the whole project out on a breadboard first and then stuck the whole thing into the small casing they made.

Is this high quality stuff? By no means, but it’s cool that they tried. As the team wrote:

I love projects like these. They prove that almost anything can be reverse-engineered – even improved upon – and it shows just how easy it’s become to be a hardware hacker even without years of experience. Doing this, in short, would have taken a team months to develop and build and now it takes a couple of cool kids a few hours. Yowza indeed.

A message spotted on Chromium.org, home to the open source browser project Google Chrome is based on, states that a “Chromoting” application is in development for iOS devices. This would allow users to control their computers from their iPhone or iPad, for example. An Android version of this same technology has been in development since last year, it’s been previously reported.

These mobile clients would be an extension of Google’s earlier efforts with its Chrome Remote Desktop screen sharing and remote access service, which exited from beta in fall 2012. With that still somewhat under-hyped Chrome application, users can securely share their computer over the web with others for things like remote tech support, or simply access their own computers, applications and files from another desktop or laptop.

The benefit to using the Chrome application over competing solutions designed for professionals, like LogMeIn or TeamViewer, for example, is that it’s turnkey for existing Chrome users, and also, it’s free. (At least for now).

From the brief post on the Chromium.org site, we’ve learned that the iOS version of the so-called “Chromoting” mobile client is still very unpolished at this point, and not surprisingly, further behind in development than its Android counterpart.

But at the very least, it’s a confirmation that the project is still in the works. (Today, there’s a version of the Android client available, but you have to compile the app from source because there’s not an official version being distributed at this time.)

Details regarding the overall feature set, or a general timeframe to launch are still under wraps for these official “Chromoting” clients, but we’ve reached out to Google to see if the company would be willing to clarify the status of the project. We’ll update this post if or when we hear back.

UPDATE, 1/17/14, 4:45 PM ET: Google declined to provide any clarification on this matter, saying only: “We’re always experimenting with new features in Chrome, especially in the Dev channel, but have nothing to announce at this time.”

Hat tip: 9to5Mac

Inventus Capital Partners, an early-stage investment firm based in Menlo Park, Calif. and Bangalore, is announcing that it has raised a second fund totaling $106 million.

In fact, Inventus says that it has already started investing from the fund, for example with its recent backing of data infrastructure company Espresso Logic.

In the funding release, co-founder and managing director John Dougery (pictured) said the firm was founded in 2007 “to continue our two decades of success partnering with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and helping them access India’s natural advantages adding value to digital services businesses.”

The release also says the firm is focused on digital services companies, arguing that the industry is “in the midst of a transformation from product to service-led businesses,” and pointing to the success of past investments redBus (which was acquired by Naspers), ViVu (acquired by Polycom), and Sierra Atlantic (acquired by Hitachi Consulting) as evidence.

Inventus says it aims to lead a startup’s first institutional round and can invest up to $10 million over the life of a company. It backed 18 companies with its first fund and is planning to invest in 20 to 25 with the second.

The new fund was also revealed in a regulatory filing.

As we predicted last year, President Obama has announced a partial end to the National Security Agency’s surveillance dragnet. We’re still parsing official documents and expert reaction, but  here are the bullet points:

• Obama is promising major reforms to the bulk collection of Internet and phone data. Until plans are finalized, the NSA may only query its data stores with judicial approval or in an emergency.
• James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with Attorney General Eric Holder, will annually review future opinions on surveillance courts for purposes of protecting privacy and declassification.
• Immediately, the NSA will only be able to look at suspects “two hops,” instead of three, away from a target suspect. Before, the NSA and other agencies could look at associations that were a “friend of a friend of a friend.” Most people are three connections away from millions (or hundreds of millions) of others. With one less hop — friends of friends – the NSA could still investigate a large percentage of the US, since each individual has about 200,000-400,000 of these associations.

• Obama claims for the first time, the US will be extending increased privacy protections to our friends overseas, including many of the same liberties afforded to US citizens. Details to come.
• Obama will ask Congress to create an independent review group to press for civil liberties at intelligence agencies and during secret court hearings.

Readers can review the official White House proposals below. We’ll have more analysis soon.

Wayra U.K. is still a relative newbie to the London startup accelerator scene, opening its doors back in May 2012 for its first intake. Last year’s cohort included journaling app Narrato and lesbian dating service Dattch, to name two of the 17.

Today Wayra U.K. is naming its third intake that will be hothoused through the circa nine-month mentoring programme centrally based, near London’s Goodge Street.

The 13 startups that made the cut for the 2014 intake are:

• Geneix — healthcare startup combining big data and genetics to work towards personalised medicine.
• Team-Match — web analytics for teams to enhance performance by assessing personalities and strengths & weaknesses.
• Virtually Free — develops games and gamification designed to improve mental health problems.
• Aprefis — helps companies increase margins and profitability through big-data pricing algorithms, with a focus on making this type of analytics accessible to smaller companies.
• Skim.it – social news application to create personalised news feeds and present the data in a summarised format (which sounds rather like Summly).
• Living Indie — wants to be the ‘Netflix of live concerts’, doing live streaming of gigs in HD.
• GeniusMatcher — hardware free indoor navigation using computer vision and 3D — initially focusing on digitally recreating shopping malls.
• Paperfold — a new inbox concept, initially for iPad.
• Tonguesten Rebeats — a music/film/text platform for learning languages and literacy skills, powered by original artificial intelligence and metadata.
• MedArkive — digital delivery and hosting for copyright protected content licensed and
  distributed to the medical community.
• Represent — an online portfolio platform for school leavers that lets them create a showcase for their skills that’s more visual than a CV (aka a ‘visual LinkedIn’).
• Runnit — a mobile app that rewards users with discounts and free products for going running.
• Lobster — a user content marketplace to buy/license photos from Instagram, Flickr, audio, videos, text.

The startups were whittled down from a shortlist of 27 — one of which  (Lobster) was sourced from a reserve list and stepped in to pitch in place of a finalist that dropped out. The shortlisted startups pitched the judges earlier this week and today during Wayra Week. (The startups that did not make the cut are listed at the end of this article).

Judging criteria for selecting which startups bagged a space in Wayra’s London academy — and the up to 50,000 Euros in funding that comes with it — focused on five factors: opportunity size, maturity, strategic fit, risk and innovation.

The strategic fit portion of the criteria refers to Wayra’s parent company, the global carrier Telefonica. What’s a hoary old mobile operator doing accelerating startups? Well, despite having massive customer bases to sell stuff to, carriers have typically been terrible at coming up with innovative new ideas that engage consumers. Telefonica’s workaround for plugging this ideas gap is thus to outsource “talent detection” to a global network of Wayra academies — which now extends to 14 academies in 12 countries.

(The full Wayra academy footprint is as follows: Bogotá, Caracas, Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Barcelona, London, São Paulo, Santiago, Dublin, Prague and Munich.)

Unfortunately Wayra U.K. would not disclose how many applications its London academy received this year, saying only that across its entire network of academies it’s had a cumulative total of 23,000 applications to date. Which is, as my TC colleague Steve O’Hear judiciously observed, “lame” in terms of putting its performance in context with other London accelerators.

Seedcamp, for instance, which has been running its bootcamp programme since 2007, released a swathe of data on its performance last September — at which point it said it had received 2,000 applications in 2013 alone.

Meanwhile, the newly-relocated-to-London Oxygen accelerator (unsurprisingly) had far fewer applications — just 310 – to its programme last year. And although also a newcomer to London, TechStars, which held its debut Demo Day in the U.K. capital last September, drew in 1,302 applications from 72 different countries — demonstrating the global pull of the TechStars brand.

It remains unclear how much traction Wayra U.K. is getting in attracting startups willing to hand over a portion of their business — and share their best ideas — in exchange for a little business acumen, a little investment and the chance to pitch a roomful of VCs and investors when the time comes to seek more money. But it’s worth noting that the size of the 2014 intake is smaller than the 17 startups that Wayra U.K. incubated last year.

The new Wayra U.K. cohort will take up their desks in the London academy on February 17.

The shortlisted startups that did not make the cut this time were:

• Zave App — Allows users to save and send money to an account by rounding up their bills.
• Aeroline — Provides a web-based solution that reduces the cost and risk of aerospace companies when conducting the approval of their suppliers.
• Aire Score — A better credit scoring system for individuals, built ground up using newer data and algorithms.
• Temptster — Über of the hospitality world.
• StockFlare — The most user-friendly App that helps you make better investment decisions.
• BitPoster — Ad exchange for the digital billboard market.
• Student Tutors — A tutoring platform for university students to tutor in subjects related to their degree.
• The LMS App — elearning at your fingertips
• ThumbTags — Making online images shoppable, engaging and interactive, generating revenue for publishers.
• Avuxi — ‘Klout’ for place – visualised on a map and with augmented reality.
• 6 Degrees of Sound — A new way of listening to music: interact with musical instruments in an auditory virtual environment.
• DadzClub — An online social platform for dads in the UK.
• Awesome.bi – Not a business intelligence tool, but a cloud based retail ‘action tool’.
• Mobiloud — Native mobile app publishing platform for small content publishers.

Selective social network Path has finally opened the floodgates on Windows Phone with a public beta launch – though somehow I doubt this will result in a mass uptick in the respective user numbers of either. Path recently raised some funding, but it also had layoffs last year and even founder Dave Morin isn’t denying a general engagement drop-off noticed by many members.

Windows Phone is faring better, growing its share slightly in recent studies measuring smartphone platform performance. It’s looking more and more like Windows Phone will easily grab a definitive third in the world market, and perhaps even eventually take over the number two spot.

As of right now, however, it’s not likely that its position will afford Path much additional reach or many new users. But for those already on the social network who have since switched to a Windows Phone device (all 12 of you), it’s a welcome development, and the design actually manages to feel at home on Windows Phone without ditching Path’s unique style.

Path had previously released their Windows Phone client in closed beta back in December, but you still had to have an approved email account from their beta list to use it. Now anyone with a Path account created on either Android or iOS can join in and new users can register directly from the app as well.

The LSR305 monitors are great-sounding, cheap, and versatile studio speakers.

Jawbone’s famous Bluetooth telephone earpiece has been redesigned. This time, it’s less geeky simply because it’s smaller.

On the heels of today’s ruling overturning net neutrality, Senator Al Franken aggressively condemned the decision, arguing that it would lead to an unleveling of the economic playing field, tilting the marketplace against small businesses that he represents.

Advocates for an open Internet have expressed open discontent with the ruling. TechCrunch’s own Greg Ferenstein wrote critically of both the decision, and Verizon’s pursuance of an end to the regulatory structure.

Some view the end of net neutrality as a sort of financial shakeup that could lead to great economic benefit. The American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis phrased that argument in the following way: “But at its core ‘net neutrality’ really is nothing more than an attempt at rent seeking by content providers who want the ISPs to pay the tab for future network upgrades.”

Senator Franken disagrees, making a different economic argument. His statement follows [bolding TechCrunch]:

Anyone who goes online to shop, promote their business, or simply to connect with the world should be worried about today’s opinion. I have been fighting to make sure the Internet is a level playing field for everyone—the website of a Minnesota small business should load as quickly as the website of a large corporation.

Getting rid of net neutrality is bad for consumers and the economy, plain and simple. And it’s a real risk to the Internet as we know it. Net neutrality is the common-sense idea that big corporations like Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner shouldn’t control who gets to innovate, communicate, or start a business on the Internet. The FCC needs to respond immediately in a way that keeps the internet open to all of us, not just big corporate interests.

There isn’t excessive middle ground between the two perspectives.

If you are unsure which side of the debate you’re on, ask yourself which of the following two statements is more accurate:

1. Net neutrality erodes ISPs’ ability to generate revenue from their networks, retarding infrastructure investment, and shifting costs ultimately to consumers and away from content creators that depend on fiber that they didn’t lay.
2. Net neutrality ensures that every voice, regardless of its wealth, scale, message or progenitor, has equal weight, keeping the Internet the open driver of innovation and discussion that it has always been.

As Ferenstein argues, there is significant nuance required in crafting the legal parameters for net neutrality, and we shouldn’t presume that any sort of regulatory outline we can draw is the correct idea. That difficulty, naturally, doesn’t mean that the project isn’t worth the time required to get it right.

But I would argue that granting companies that both deliver and create content the right to decide what is worthy of viewing, and what is not worthy of viewing for their customers, is far more troubling than option No. 1 above.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

If you know me you know I like two things: sausage and 3D printers. While I primarily use FDM printers like Makerbot at home, I do love the quality and coherence of SLA – stereolithographic – machines. This new one, the Pegasus Touch Laser, is similar to the Form One in that it uses an inexpensive UV-cured resin to build surprisingly detailed models using laser light and a little elbow grease.

This model improves upon the average 3D printer in a few ways. First, it has a nice 7x7x9 inch build envelope and supports multiple colors of resin. It also has a built-in minicomputer and LCD that you can use to control the print as it comes out. Writes the Las Vegas-based team:

You can see the Pegasus in action over here and pledge $2,000 to get your own printer. It’s a slightly faster print as well thanks to the group’s efforts to build a 3000mm/sec laser path. And, unlike the Form One, the Pegasus uses more logical and less obtrusive supports as it rises out of the resin bath. It will sell for $3,499 after the initial Kickstarter run.

The company calls this a sub-$2,000 SLA printer which isn’t quite true. However, given that the closest competitor goes for $3,299.00 the price is just about right for a powerful SLA machine. While I still think FDM is great for beginners and hobbyists, a nice resin-based laser printer makes me all warm and resiny inside.

ff Venture Capital announced in a blog post this morning that it has closed its third fund — or rather, two funds, ff Rose and its “sister fund” ff Rose Innovate.

The firm had been open about the fact that it was raising a fund, thanks to new SEC rules. Together, the funds total $52 million, a little bit more than the $50 million that ffvc said it was planning. Investors in the funds include New York State’s Empire State Development, Goldman Sachs, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, and limited partners who had backed the firm previously.

Why two funds? Founding partner John Frankel told me via email that ff Rose Innovate will invest with ff Rose, but only in companies based in New York State. That’s because of funding from Empire State Development, which Frankel said is aiming “to stimulate job growth and economic development in New York.”

“We are one of a handful of funds to receive Innovate NY money, and we consider it good use of public funds and hope to prove so over the life of the fund,” he said.

ffvc (the ff supposedly stands for “founder friendly”) is headquartered in New York, and it raised its second, $27 million fund in 2012. Rounds that it has led in the past year include funding for Tackk, Plated, and Bottlenose.

Frankel also said the firm won’t be changing its strategy, which he described as “finding entrepreneurs and teams we believe are building companies that are changing human behavior, and supporting them with financial and intellectual capital.” He emphasized the support staff that the firm offers (it has a team or more than 20 people), and he said, “We recognized that our predecessor fund was actually too small for our strategy and the capital was deployed faster than planned, in part due to the high growth our portfolio companies have generated and their continuing need for capital.”