Category: Tech news

Elephanti, a startup that’s supposed to make it easier for physical stores to connect with shoppers online, is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding from LMJ Holdings.

The basic selling point for consumers, according to founder and CEO Lalin Michael Jinasena, is avoiding situations where you end up wandering from store to store, asking, “Do you sell Item X?” Instead, you can just visit the website or open the app, then search for a specific item, bringing up a list of stores that carry it. Or you can look up a retailer and browse a catalog of in-store items.

The concept isn’t too different from Milo, the local shopping startup that was acquired by eBay back in 2010, but Elephanti has a number of additional features that make it more than just a product search engine.

For one thing, after shoppers identify their interests, Elephanti can show them recommendations and offers from nearby stores. Users can also build shopping lists with multiple items, and the app will point to stores where they can buy all the items on the list. Plus, shoppers can check-in at stores and, in a promised update, share photos of what they’ve purchased, so their friends will know that something is really in-stock and available at a certain price.

Since the company is working directly with merchants, Jinasena said it’s focused on a specific geography (namely, San Francisco) for now, although it works in other cities. In fact, I tested it out today in Los Angeles, and it would have saved my mother some time — a few days ago, she was hopping from store to store in search of baklava. When I opened the app, it instantly identified the restaurant where she eventually found what she was looking for. (By the way, the site’s product catalogs include menus, too.)

The product search isn’t perfect. I also tried to find a mop (don’t ask), but the app would only recommend places where I could buy Mophies and albums by the band Moped.

As far as I can tell, Elephanti doesn’t incorporate real-time inventory data, and instead asks stores to manually build and update their catalogs, but I’m confirming that with a company spokesperson.

Update: A spokesperson said stores can choose to connect their inventory systems to Elephanti.

Perhaps best known for his definitive book about Facebook, David Kirkpatrick is one of tech’s smartest and best informed writers. He now runs a media startup called Techonomy, which — through a series of annual conferences in Detroit and Tucson — focuses on the impact of technological innovation on the broader economy.

So when I interviewed Kirkpatrick at one of my FutureCast salons at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, I asked him if Silicon Valley is less critical to the innovation economy than it used to be.

The good news for Silicon Valley, according to Kirkpatrick, is that what he calls the local “solar systems” of Google, Facebook and Apple remain extremely important. The less good news, at least for Silicon Valley, is that “it’s becoming really easy to do cool stuff.” So, Kirkpatrick says, innovation is widely distributed right now. And, echoing Chris Schroeder, he identifies Lebanese capital Beirut as a place that is doing particularly cool stuff.

But for all his talk of innovation as a “global phenomenon,” the New York City-based Kirkpatrick hasn’t written off Silicon Valley. Indeed, next November he’ll be holding his main Techonomy event in Half Moon Bay where, no doubt, this conversation about Silicon Valley’s place in the innovation economy will be continued.

Plain Vanilla Games, the company behind ultra-hot trivia app QuizUp, has raised a $22 million Series B Round of financing. The financing was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from all existing investors, including Tencent, Greycroft Partners, IDG Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, CrunchFund (owned by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington), and MESA+.

QuizUp is an iPhone app that pits users against one another in either real-time or asynchronous trivia matchups. Users choose from up to 300 different topics and can challenge friends or strangers to answer a fast, six-question round of trivia questions.

It’s incredibly fun, and has become extremely popular over the last several weeks, with more than 5 million downloads since launch.

This round of financing is the third that Plain Vanilla has raised since the beginning of the year, but it’s by far the biggest, and brings the total amount raised to $27 million. Along with the new cash, the company is adding Sequoia’s Roelof Botha to its board of directors.

The game studio’s last round of financing — the addition of $2 million from Sequoia and e.Ventures — was timed basically right around the time of QuizUp’s launch, which means the company took money before it knew that it had a hit on its hands.

At the time, Plain Vanilla was looking for a little insurance and some money to fund marketing around the launch of the game. What it found instead was that QuizUp spread like wildfire, thanks to impressive word-of-mouth and growth through social channels.

“We didn’t really need the money just before launch, but we thought of it as an insurance thing,” CEO Thor Fridriksson told me in a phone interview. “In retrospect we probably shouldn’t have raised then. The dilution is higher when taking money on a pre-launch valuation versus now.”

Growth Since Launch

The latest investment in Plain Vanilla was made after QuizUp spent several weeks at or near the top of the Apple App Store charts. Released in late November, QuizUp has averaged about a million downloads per week, racking up more than 5 million downloads since launch.

“It’s the dream of any entrepreneur — you work on something for such a long time and then when you release it, it’s a hit,” Fridriksson said. While pure download numbers have been impressive, the company has been even more encouraged by continued interest in the game, even several weeks after launch.

“The funny thing is that we had a really good launch, but we’re used to seeing games that follow a growth curve where they have a big spike in the beginning and then growth slows down after a week or so,” Fridriksson said. Until recently, he noted, QuizUp had been in the top five or top 10 in the app store since launch.

(The app has been bumped down a bit in the rankings over recent days, likely due to new or first-time iPhone owners adding must-have apps like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat.)

But what’s more impressive than its download numbers is the amount of engagement that Plain Vanilla is seeing within the app. Users typically spend an average of 30 minutes a day playing matches, messaging friends, and participating in discussion boards.

Those discussion boards might be one of the app’s best-kept secrets. Each of QuizUp’s nearly 300 topics has one, and altogether, users are posting more than 100,000 comments a day in those discussion forums, according to Fridriksson.

Picking Sequoia

Thanks to QuizUp’s impressive launch, the company has had its pick of investment partners to choose from. But it decided to go back to Sequoia and add partner Roelof Botha to its board.

Botha brings with him a wealth of expertise in social and mobile startups. The former CFO of PayPal has invested in a series of startups with huge, high-profile exits, including YouTube, Tumblr, and Instagram. He also sits on the boards of EventBrite, Square, TokBox, Jawbone and, most recently, secret-sharing app Whisper.

But the investment follows a much longer courtship between Plain Vanilla and Sequoia. Botha told me by phone that he met Fridriksson about 18 months ago, and has been following Plain Vanilla’s development of the game mechanics and technology behind QuizUp ever since.

Botha said he wanted to invest even back then, but that it was challenging to make the case for putting money into a company based in Iceland that was pre-launch. It’s worth noting that he did connect Fridriksson with angel and seed investors, and Sequoia put a small amount into Plain Vanilla’s Series A.

But once QuizUp was out it the wild, it seems like making a larger investment was an easy decision. “After launch, [QuizUp] just started taking off like a rocket ship. How many apps have this type of engagement?” he asked.

But he believes there’s an opportunity to make QuizUp much bigger.

What’s Next

As quickly as QuizUp has grown, it’s important to note that the app is still only available on the iPhone, and still targeted just to English-language speakers. As a result, there’s a huge opportunity to expand to new platforms and new geographies.

The next step will likely be a launch on Android, which opens QuizUp to a gigantic new user base. After all, about 70 percent of smartphone users are on Android, according to research from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. But Plain Vanilla is also looking to release an iPad app soon that will bring its trivia experience to tablet users.

In addition, there’s an even bigger opportunity for QuizUp to reach more of an international audience. That includes localizing the app to support different languages, but also means adopting more trivia that is of interest to international users.

“Our most popular topics in each country are the ones that are connected to pop culture of that country,” Fridriksson said. “We’re focusing then on sourcing local content for the things that those people are passionate about.”

QuizUp does that by turning to its community of users for questions. While it sourced many of that original 200,000 questions on the app itself before launch, now that it has a huge (and growing) number of passionate users, it’s begun accepting user-submitted content for its trivia questions.

With the help of its new funding, Plain Vanilla is in good shape to get its app in as many hands as possible. “It’s incredibly important for us to scale up and get to other markets and other platforms,” Fridriksson said.

Now it’s just a matter of executing on that plan.

Taipei-based startup Gogolook confirmed that it has been acquired by Naver, the Korean Internet giant that is best known outside of Asia for being the owner of Line. Gogolook has not disclosed the acquisition price, but a report yesterday from the Investment Commission of Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said the amount was NT$529 million (or about $17.6 million USD) (h/t Tech In Asia). In an email, Gogolook CEO Jeff Kuo told me:

“After joining the Naver group, Gogolook will be able to accelerate and extend our strategic business deployment in a global scope. With the affiliation of LINE and abundant resources from the parent company worldwide, we cannot wait to show the world the strong innovative capabilities of Taiwan app startups.”

Gogolook’s flagship product is Whoscall, a caller ID app that has 1.2 million monthly active users and over 600 million numbers in its database, according to the company. We profiled Gogolook in June when the company launched the iOS version of Whoscall. Gogolook was officially launched in April 2012, but started three years earlier as a side project by three friends, including founders Kuo and COO Edgar Chiu, who is taking on an additional position as general manager of Camp Mobile (a Naver-owned mobile-specific company) in Taiwan.

Whocall’s database of numbers was originally gathered from public sources like the Yellow Pages and the Google Place API, but as the app’s user base grew, it began to rely on crowd-sourcing. The company’s database of numbers — including spam callers — might prove handy to Naver as it seeks to build Line’s global footprint and compete against other popular messaging apps like WeChat and WhatsApp.

Gogolook raised about $500,000 in angel funding and its investors included Trinity VC.

Remember Plurk, the social network once considered a rival to Twitter, along with other microblogging sites like Heello, FriendFeed and the late Rejaw? Plurk is still trucking along with 10 million users (and recent funding from W.I. Harper) and now its founder, Alvin Woon, is working on Re.mu, his new fashion-based startup.

Re.mu is a mobile- and web-based social network that is targeted at the kind of style lover who would rather browse thrift stores and Etsy than covet high-end designer items. Woon says he wanted to create a site that would attract users who are already showing off their daily outfits on platforms like Instagram. Re.mu’s seed investors include Taipei-based TMI Holdings and KAMIA.

For its users, Re.mu combines the functions of clothing organizing apps such as Closet, NetRobe and Stylitics with a social platform that lets people share their daily outfits, get validation from other users with similar tastes, and go shopping in-app. Re.mu’s community is still small — since launching two months ago, it has racked up 35,000 users — but Woon says the community is highly engaged and uploads about 25,000 posts per day, including photos of outfits and items that they own.

In addition to Asia, Re.mu is also targeting growth in Spanish-speaking countries and the U.S. Re.mu can offer analytics about trends emerging in those places for fashion companies. For example, one trend that Re.mu has picked up on over the last two months is the popularity of floral-print leggings in Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan and Thailand. Seventy percent of users in those countries, however, prefer to dress in black, white or grey, and Woon is excited about the potential of Re.mu’s data for social scientists that see fashion trends as an economic indicator.

But Re.mu has plenty of competition. Lookbook.nu is already well-established among fashion brands as a source for trend forecasting. Other fashion communities include Chictopia, StyleMob, Pose and Tagbrand, as well as the many style blogs on Tumblr and wardrobe_remix, a long-running group on Flickr.

Woon says Re.mu sets itself apart with features like a machine-learning algorithm that will tell you how to style pieces you already own, based on factors like your favorite color combinations, body type and what’s trendy in your area. The site also offers “very granular filtering” in order to give companies and designers insight into not only what items are popular each season, but how fashion consumers are styling them.

Re.mu also wants to differentiate with an approach to fashion that encourages people to wear the stuff they already own instead of chasing the latest products. To build traction, Re.mu has been targeting consumers who share that philosophy.

In the U.S. and Spanish-speaking countries, the startup has approached bloggers who are into searching thrift shops for secondhand items or buying handmade items on Etsy. That tactic doesn’t work as well in Asia, where many style-conscious consumers still covet luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Chanel, but Re.mu has stuck to its idealism. In Taiwan, for example, the startup has hosted secondhand clothing markets.

Of course, Re.mu will have to balance its “spend less and wear what you have” manifesto with the demands of fashion brands as it develops its business strategy, which Woon admits will be a delicate balancing act. He faced the same challenge at Plurk.

“I think after a while, I began to realize that I’m good at building communities, but maybe not that good at trying to make money out of them,” he says. “But I’m pretty good at building stuff and getting people to come and play with it.”

Re.mu’s path to monetization is more clear-cut than Plurk’s because it already has a strong vertical. Right now the app has affiliate links to e-commerce sites like Saks.com. Woon says he wants Re.mu to eventually offer whole catalogs inside the app from a select roster of brands, with a focus on independent designers. To encourage users to make purchases in-app, Re.mu will offer incentives like discounts or the ability to upload more photos with each post.

Plurk never achieved the high profile of Twitter and the microblogging networks of Sina and Tencent, both of which are massively popular in China, but Woon says that its traffic has continued to grow steadily since its launch in 2007. Woon isn’t involved with its day-to-day operations anymore, but he’s still its chairman.

Though it’s hard to recall in the wake of Twitter’s successful IPO, the site once had masses of users threatening to leave because of its server problems. The irritatingly frequent appearance of Twitter’s Fail Whale error message helped cast Plurk and other microblogging sites as strong rivals.

When I asked Woon if it’s weird to see Plurk described as a Twitter also-ran, he was frank.

“Plurk is a six-year-old company and I think we can agree that at times we lost track of what we were trying to do because people were trying to go for bigger targets, like how many millions or billions of users we could have,” he says.

Now Plurk focuses on attracting users who want to connect with small social circles over niche topics they are passionate about (Woon has described Plurk’s average user as “16-28. Female. Cos-player. Knitter. Second Lifer. Likes cheesecake.”)

Woon hopes Re.mu will retain that same sense of intimacy even as its user base grows.

“It’s a matter of trying to create a medium where newcomers don’t feel left out when they first get a taste of the network. Then after a while, you need something to keep them hooked,” he says. “As their friends join, are they going to get the feeling, like, if you like an indie band and then it gets popular and then you start not to like them anymore because now even your mom knows about them? We want to preserve a tight-knit social network as we grow.”

Less than a year ago, brothers Hadi Partovi and Ali Partovi launched Code.org to help advocate for computer science in the U.S. and increase participation in STEM education by making these subjects more available in schools and classrooms around the country. Today, it seems that what started as a whisper has grown into a roar.

On December 9, Code.org kicked off a new, nationwide campaign called the “Hour of Code,” which asked teachers across the U.S. to help introduce their students to the basics of computer science through the organization’s coding programs and tutorials. Timed in conjunction with Computer Science Education Week, the campaign has sought to change the perception of Computer Science in the American education system — chief of which is the fact that, today, 9 out of 10 schools in the U.S. do not offer computer science classes.

After months of campaigning and lobbying for change at the state level, in which the Partovis and Code.org have asked states to begin offering programming classes for credit, it seems that their work has begun to pay off — both at the policy level and through the “Hour of Code.” Alabama, Maryland and Wisconsin have announced (or are planning to announce) policy changes at the state level, while both the Chicago Public Schools and the New York City Department of Education have unveiled plans to bring computer science to their classrooms.

What’s more, at the culmination of Computer Science Education Week, the Partovis told us that more than 15 million students had participated in the “Hour of Code,” collectively writing more than 500 million lines of code during the campaign. While Computer Science Education Week came to a close on December 16, the campaign has continued, and the number of students participating has since crossed 20 million, with over 675 million lines of code now in the books.

All told, Hadi Partovi told TechCrunch, more than 20 million students have participated across 170 countries. However, factoring out non-U.S. students and adults, Code.org claims that just about 1 in 4 students in K-12 schools in the U.S. participated in the “Hour of Code.” What’s more, Partovi tells us that “more girls participated in computer science in participating schools in the last two weeks than all students in the history of U.S. public schools combined.”

To break down the “Hour of Code” stats even further, Code.org tells us that, of the 20 million-plus participating, 83 percent were from the U.S., 74 percent were in grades K-12, 51 percent were girls, 8 percent were African-American and 14 percent were Hispanic. While we’d all no doubt like to see these percentages continue to rise and it remains to be seen just how much of a long-term effect one hour of programming can have on students, the “Hour of Code” is off to an impressive start.

As to how the campaign has managed to accomplish this?

The “Hour of Code” has been bolstered by support from a litany of recognizable names. For starters, as we wrote at the outset, both Microsoft and Apple showed their support by hosting an “Hour of Code” at every one of their retail outlets over the course of the week, with Apple advertising its tutorial on its homepage. Google, in turn, kicked off of Computer Science Education Week with a Google Doodle that remembered “Grace Hopper, an American computer scientist and creator of the Cobol programming language” and also linked to “Hour of Code” beneath the doodle.

On top of that, the campaign featured on the home pages of YouTube, MSN, Bing, Yahoo, Disney (and many more), with recognizable names from across politics, music and sports pitching in their support. Among them were “actors and musicians like Shakira, Ashton Kutcher, Angela Bassett and athletes like Chris Bosh, Warren Sapp and Dwight Howard, along with tech leaders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Susan Wojcicki.”

Politicians from both sides of the aisle also lent their support, including President Obama and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, as well as “Senator Cory Booker, Newt Gingrich and Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan.”

To help teachers get their students started in the world of programming, Code.org has curated online tutorials and programs from a bevy of partners, including companies, non-profits and universities. The traffic to some of its partners was so heavy, particularly Khan Academy, that their website was forced offline — as ATD reported at the time.

So far, it’s been a strong showing, but the 20 million is just a start. To find more on how to participate, find the “Hour of Code” at home here. You can also find the videos from President Obama and more in our previous coverage here and more info in the infographic below.

Dogecoin, the virtual currency that was named after a silly meme but has been described as a potential successor to Bitcoin, was successfully hacked for the first time today, with Dogewallet users losing an estimated 21 million Dogecoins. The incident was confirmed by Dogewallet in a Reddit post after users reported disappearing Dogecoins on Doges.com’s forum. In an email, Dogewallet told us:

The hacking incident was extremely unfortunate for the Dogecoin community and all members of the Dogecoin community. We’re trying out best to make sure users can retrieve their lost Dogecoins.

Dogewallet is currently in the middle of refunding users, and several million Dogecoins have already been refunded today. Refunding users is our priority because we too want to see Dogecoin grow, not only because it’s backed by the best community of any digital currency, but because it also has the greatest potential to completely overtake and topple Bitcoin. This is exemplified by the community reaching out to help create a system for refunding affected users of Dogewallet just moments after the incident.

Lastly, we’d like to remind everyone to please use offline wallets as a means of storing any significant amount of Dogecoin. Online wallets are more convenient for new users and offer people the ability to learn about and use the currency immediately, but offline wallets offer the greatest security.

Dogewallet promised to fully refund all lost coins and has temporarily shut down its site. Angry users, however, are questioning why Dogewallet created a new Reddit account to respond to complaints and shutdown its Facebook page (link via Google Cache).

Each Dogecoin is currently worth about US$0.00057. Together, the stolen Dogecoins are the equivalent of about $12,000, which is not a massive amount, but still a loss for users who spent a lot of time accumulating the virtual currency.

In its Reddit post, Dogewallet said that they are “currently looking at logs and have found thousands of attempts to hack our systems.” The hacker gained access to Dogewallet’s filesystem and modified its send/receive page to send coins to a static address.

Along with several hacking attempts on Bitcoin wallets, the Dogecoin incident is a reminder that all online wallets are vulnerable to hacking.

“We’re incredibly sorry to all users who lost funds from the attack. Please use offline wallets as online wallets are meant for new users who aren’t using them as storage of coins. Offline wallets are more safe and secure than any online wallet due to possible attacks that can originate from anyone, anywhere,” Dogewallet posted on Reddit.

Here’s my wish list. I realize it’s too late for this year, but I’m hoping the companies are already planning for next year, and this way they have all of 2014 to deliver. Many of these are pretty big asks, I admit, but the companies in question have pretty deep pockets and access to world-class resources. So how about let’s all deliver.

1. Microsoft

Skype torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. Skype is terrible on every platform, and yet I’m cursed to use it every day. It delivers in VoIP pretty reliably, but not as reliably as you might imagine given its origins. Also, it’s terrible at text-based chat communication, and key features like group chat are locked behind a paywall, even though I already pay the company a bunch annually for Skype Out, Voicemail and Skype In numbers.

2. Nintendo

Put Mario (and others) on iOS and Android. I’m really hoping that the Wii U was a secret plot to tank the stock and force management to reconsider licensing properties for other mobile platforms, because if so, stroke of genius. Let’s have Mario, Pokemon, Donkey Kong, etc., on iOS and Android, and we’ll give you lots of money in exchange.

3. Google

Kill Glass and focus on making Android better on phones and tablets. Google Glass doesn’t make any sense to me, and continues to make less the more I learn about it. I’m sure this will be greeted with ample fanboy froth and fury, but honestly, any resources Google has devoted to this project would be better used to help make Android on smartphones and tablets less something you check interminably and more a seamless part of your everyday life. Glass’ goals are fine, in other words, but focus on the platform people will actually use.

4. Amazon

Nail that grocery formula on a global scale. I love the idea of Amazon Fresh, I just hate the painstakingly gradual rollout. I also understand there are a lot of moving pieces and it’s going to take time to get things right, but selfishly, I want the same company I count on for most of the rest of my shopping to solve the remaining inconvenience of grocery shopping, too.

5. Facebook

Stop trying to be Yahoo mixed with Twitter. It’s crazy to even consider, but I actually miss the endless stream of baby pictures and pointless posts lamenting some minor mundane inconvenience a friend from high school had during the day. Facebook wants to be a source for news and real-time info, but that’s not what I want it to be. I’m at the age where I’d actually appreciate the quaint sentimentality of an old friend posting their kid’s first crayon drawing, and ironically FB’s trying to mature past that.

6. Twitter

Keep evolving Direct Messages. DMs want to be more than they are, and Twitter has finally started recognizing that and is building on it. I want more of that, and I think this is one gift on my list that I’ll actually get in 2014. Here’s hoping I don’t regret asking in the first place.

7. Apple

A MacBook Air with Retina Display. Apple, you’ve been working towards this for so long, but you keep the Retina Air just out of reach, just on the horizon. The MacBook Air now has tremendous battery life, and is near perfect in a 13-inch version, but the screen on the 13- and 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro just blows it out of the water. The Retina MacBook Air is the Holy Grail of personal computing, so let’s make that happen.

Those are my wishes: Some are selfish, some are realistic, some are definitely not going to happen; all are what I’d genuinely like to see coming from the major players in the tech space in 2014. Oh and maybe some socks, most of mine are looking pretty threadbare.

Feature image courtesy gagilas on Flickr.

Singtrix is the personal Karaoke machine of the future.

Instead of being limited by Karaoke-friendly, vocal-free tunes, Singtrix lets you erase the vocal track from any song in your phone or tablet, effectively expanding your library from a few songs to anything you can download.

And that’s not the best part.

Singtrix uses special audio technology to filter your voice with a number of different special effects. You can sound like your singing in a choir, or drop your voice down to match Barry White’s.

When you hit the “hit” button, Singtrix automatically harmonizes your voice with four copies of your voice, making you sound a lot like a rock god.

We had a total blast playing around with this thing, which is a really great option for the kid who doesn’t want an Xbox or is too young for an iPhone.

Two flies.

There are a few extra special Christmas gifts that can’t be wrapped and don’t quite fit under the tree — love, family, happiness… and new episodes of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV show that takes you inside the doors of the tech industry’s hottest companies to see what day-to-day life is like for the people who work there!

In this special holiday-themed Cribs episode, we headed to TellApart, the customer data technology startup headquartered just 16 miles south of San Francisco in Burlingame, California.

TellApart is doing some gangbusters business — the company is profitable and just announced that its annual revenue runrate crossed $100 million — so it’s no surprise that its offices are pretty sweet. And who better to give a tour than Josh McFarland, TellApart’s founder and CEO who also led the entire project of designing its office, transforming an old auto shop into a gleaming modern startup HQ.

Check out the video embedded above, and I’d encourage you to watch until the end: TellApart has a pretty amazing ritual it observes for every big business milestone it has, and fortunately a filming of Cribs made the cut. I won’t spoil the surprise, but it involves a saber and a bottle of champagne, and it is a pretty festive thing to behold.

We didn’t plan it, but it seems that this week is “Mystery Gift Box” week on TechCrunch. First we had the Timeless Box, a tightly secured titanium box that can only be opened after a certain amount of time. Now, we have its spiritual brother: the GPS AdventureBox, a box that locks itself down until the recipient makes it to a specific place.

Built to power many a fuzzy-wuzzy lovey-dovey scavenger hunt, the idea is simple, but friggin’ adorable: take a wooden box. Strap an LCD display to the lid, along with a single button. Tuck a GPS-enabled Arduino board inside to act as the brain, and wire it up to a locking mechanism to keep the whole thing locked tight.

Once your recipient receives the box, the display on the lid will give them their first clue (something like “Go to where we first kissed”). When they go to that spot and push the button, they’ll get their second clue. Go to clue spot #2, get another clue — and so on. Once they eventually solve the final clue, the lock automatically flips open and the contents are revealed.

The route and its clues are programmed in by the gift giver themselves, by way of a super simple Google Maps-powered route planner. For each step in the hunt, you can set a location, the clue that’ll lead the way there, and a distance tolerance anywhere from 5 feet to 1000 miles.

You could have a scavenger hunt that leads your friend all across the city, eventually leading them to a concert hall — and inside the box? Bam! Tickets to the show! Giving your kid a car on their 16th birthday? Lead’em all around until they eventually end up back at their own home, their new ride parked in the driveway. Box pops open — BAM, it’s the keys.

The bad news: it’s a Kickstarter project, so it’s not actually available just yet. With that said, the campaign is just about to click past its goal at the time this post was written, so it’s looking pretty feasible. Given that it’s a relatively small run with fairly complicated components, this thing doesn’t come super cheap: an $80 pledge gets you a DIY box that you’ll need to solder yourself, while a $135 pledge gets you a pre-built box with delivery targeted for some time in February of 2014. Yeah, you’ll want to get that box back when the hunt is over.

Lets just hope that your scavenger hunt doesn’t lead you anywhere that might require a flight — this one could be pretty tough to explain to the TSA.

Those lovable rascals from Andreessen Horowitz-backed Rap Genius are stirring up trouble again. But this time it’s not for controversial statements they’ve made — instead, the company came under fire for spammy SEO tactics.

Yesterday, following a call to action on Rap Genius’ Facebook page looking for blogs interested in participating in the company’s affiliate program, Y Combinator alum John Marbach recounted an interaction he had with Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam in which he was asked to post a series of links to Justin Bieber song lyrics in exchange for “MASSIVE traffic.”

That tactic, which Marbach euphemistically referred to as a growth hack, reminded many people of old-school Google bomb SEO practices. And it led Google webspam head Matt Cutts to say the search engine was investigating what Rap Genius was doing.

Rap Genius has since issued a mea culpa, and is pleading for leniency from Google webspam team. The startup says that the affiliate program is a small part of its SEO strategy — so small, in fact, that Rap Genius believes it should easily be able to get rid of any unnatural links that have appeared as a result of its so-called affiliate program. Stuff like, for instance, THIS.

“[We’ll] discourage things like this in the future. We are also getting in touch with the relevant site owners individually to request that they remove any such links. Just to be clear, this is an not a widespread practice, and it should not be too difficult to stamp out.

But Rap Genius also used the occasion to call out its so-called competitors in the music lyric game — sites like AZLyrics.com, Metrolyrics.com, Lyricsfreak.com, Lyricsmode.com, Lyrics007.com, and Songlyrics.com. In each case, Rap Genius shows how those sites seem to be involved either in massive link exchanges or potentially paying for links from other sites in an effort to boost SEO from Google.

But in the witch hunt that was spurred by what seems like a pretty minor and insubstantial portion of Rap Genius’ overall SEO juice, all parties involved seem to be ignoring what really makes the site’s search engine ranking work.

Rap Genius says its main objective is to “create an amazing experience for users and hope they prefer us to all other lyrics sites and link to us.” All of which might be true. But as pointed out over here [h/t Valleywag], a large portion of Rap Genius’ overall traffic likely comes from users searching for individual song lyrics.

“What sets Rap Genius apart from the thousand other lyric spam sites rife with pop up ads is that they’ve figured out how to exploit this tendency. The annotation format gives them a good excuse to create a standalone page for each individual line, which maximizes their presence on search engines.”

Of course, those annotations wouldn’t be possible without the community. We reached out to the Rap Genius folks and they said they’ll be working 100 percent on the community/annotation focus from now on. Co-founder Ilan Zechory writes:

We messed up here, which is why starting today we are 100% focused on the SEO strategy that has gotten us the best results: building an amazing product and community. It’s also the strategy we execute most effectively – we believe Rap Genius provides the highest quality lyric search results, and it’s not even close. For example, check out Rap Genius’ annotated edition of Justin Bieber’s “Confident” – as of today 67 different fans have contributed annotations!

Our goal is to bring about a world where everyone searching for lyrics gets a rich, interactive, knowledge filled experience, rather than a flat spammy one.

Taking on Amazon when it comes to e-commerce can be a futile effort. There are only a handful of e-commerce companies that have successfully been able to build a billion-dollar-plus business in e-commerce (without having physical stores) in a post-Amazon world. Zulily is one of those companies. Another one, which has stayed relatively under the radar, is Boston-based Wayfair.

Wayfair, founded by college friends Niraj Shah and Steve Conine in 2002, was born from CSN Stores, and rebranded as Wayfair in 2011. Shah and Conine are serial entrepreneurs, having sold their first company, Spinners, to iXL in 1998.

What’s impressive about Shah and Conine’s company is that it has quietly been able to create a solid, $1 billion business around selling home goods and furniture online and will likely IPO in the next year or so. Instead of appealing solely to a high-end market, Wayfair focuses on the mid-market, competing with the Macy’s, Overstocks, Target, Bed Bath and Beyonds of the world. In addition to the Wayfair.com destination, the company also operates a One Kings Lane-competitor, Joss & Main (which focuses on high-end furniture), as well as a modern furniture site (think CB2 or Design Within Reach) called AllModern.

As Shah explains to me, the company hasn’t focused on pursuing massive press attention to flaunt big-name backers, even though Wayfair counts early Twitter backer Spark Capital, Battery Ventures, HarbourVest Partners and Great Hill Partners as investors. In fact, for the first nine years of operation, the company was bootstrapped. In 2011, Wayfair did decide to raise funding to expand aggressively, and took $200 million from the investors named above.

The site now has 7 million home products available for purchase from a fulfillment network of 8,000 suppliers across 12,000 brands. And Wayfair is seeing $1 billion in order volume, which translates into $900 million in sales for 2013. That’s up from $600 million in sales from 2012.

One drawback to ordering on Wayfair is because of its fulfillment network, and because it is shipping furniture, it can take days or even weeks to receive an item. But unlike Target or Macy’s’ online sites, Shah says, Wayfair actually pays attention to merchandising and has been utilizing technologies such as Pinterest-like inspiration clipboards and more, to help engage consumers. In fact, the company employs over 300 data scientists and engineers to help use these data points towards increasing personalization and engagement. To be fair, the Targets and Walmarts of the world are starting to realize that design, personalization and technology can only help them increase sales, but these companies tend to move slowly.

Home and furnishing spend is a $200 billion market in the U.S. alone, and only 5 percent of this spending is online. As e-commerce continues to grow, Wayfair’s share of this will, too. Right now, Shah estimates that Wayfair has around 1 percent of all home furnishing spending online. Amazon has expanded into new territories like fashion, wine and grocery, but he isn’t afraid of the e-commerce giant growing into the home furnishings territory (via Amazon’s Quidsi acquisition, it operates a home furnishings and supplies site Casa.com).

In fact, Shah believes that home furnishings, jewelry and fashion are the only areas in e-commerce where there is room for a number of large companies. That’s because, he explains, the consumer is looking for uniqueness in these categories vs. electronics, books, household supplies, grocery and more.

With the company’s growing sales, it’s of no surprise that Wayfair was one of the companies invited to present at Goldman Sachs’ Private Internet Company Conference in Las Vegas in November. Many of the companies invited to present are the ones bankers want to keep their eye on — and potentially represent in a public offering in the future. For Wayfair, an IPO may not be too far off.

Shah has been open about his intentions to go public. The company also recently brought on former Warner Music Group Vice Chairman Michael Fleisher as CFO.

It’s clear that 2014 will be a pivotal year for the company. Investors will be looking for continued growth, and other large retailers will be trying to up their technology game to increase their share of online dollars spent on home furnishings. But for a company that was relatively unknown two years ago, Wayfair’s growth and ascent is impressive. Stay tuned.

Up until a few months ago, President Obama probably didn’t worry much about the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance program. After all, Congress had approved it, courts oversaw it, and a majority of Americans continued to support it — even after the leaks were reported.

But, now that every major branch of government is calling for reform, including the President’s own special advisory group, I predict far more transparency and a partial end to mass spying is coming.

To be sure, the future of the NSA is mostly in the president’s hands: it’s controlled by the executive branch and Obama wields veto power over any pending legislation. But looking at the president’s history with government programs and his own unique political philosophy, we can bet that the big overarching change is that moneyball is coming to the NSA.

In other words they’ll need to prove that all their programs are worth the risks, which implies more transparency, oversight, and limited access to data.

Much More Transparency On Programs And Targets: Obama is, despite everything, a government transparency pioneer. His first major initiative, the $787 billion economic stimulus package, designed an entirely new way to track federal spending online. Before that, one of his first major executive orders was the creation of the Chief Technology Officer, who opens government data warehouses to citizens.

In a cringe-worthy folksy analogy, Obama said that the American people deserve to verify the NSA programs, similar to the way he used to invite his wife into the kitchen to verify that, he, in fact, washed the dishes (really). To that end, he’ll likely release the gag order on tech companies who wish to post the number of users being spied on through their platforms.

For programs that cannot be made public, members of Congress will quit getting stonewalled by the NSA, which has made it quite inconvenient for them to attend briefings.

Limited Access To Bulk Data: The mass collection of telephone and Internet data is really what sets off America’s hair-trigger anti-authoritarian rage. Obama’s task force recommended that telephone companies be the gatekeepers of data, which the government can request with judicial oversight.

The NSA maintains that sophisticated data mining helps it unearth terrorists who exploit every new app, messaging channel, and website as a cavern to cloak dangerous collaboration. But it has yet to convince critics with access to classified reports that the NSA’s fancy data-mining tools actually work.

From now on, the NSA will likely have a quarantined sandbox of data from telephone and tech companies to explore. The more bad guys they catch, the more data they get. But, no more wanton authority to hoard every 0 and 1 they want.

Obama has been a fierce defender of evidence-based policy-making; a principle that will likely replace the intuition of war hawks as the basis for intelligence strategy.

Stop Screwing With Standards: Engineers the world over were furious that the NSA coerced security standard organizations to loosen procedures that could prevent government spying. Unfortunately, everything from nuclear plants to pacemakers need protection from malicious hackers. Obama’s a fan of believing in an interdependent, interconnected world; one weak link threatens us all.

Human Resource Changes: Access to private data will be significantly limited. Congress has already proposed revoking data access from thousands of future Edward Snowdens, who had disturbingly high-level access to spy on Americans. While some decried this move as a cosmetic change, it’s the rogue workers that were the most likely cause of real harm, like love-sick agents spying on ex-lovers.

Critics are wrong to paint Obama as anti-privacy — he’s privacy negligent. Like many innovators in Silicon Valley, pioneers of transparency and new media typically focus on the good that comes from more information, and tend to ignore the unintended consequences.

In fairness, the NSA probably hasn’t done much concrete harm, but it’s building up the capacity for disturbing levels of power. Democracy and tyranny have always balanced on a knife’s edge; as Obama ends his presidency and looks to a possible future Republican administration, he’ll agree to rein in the NSA’s power.

Nokia is now basically the defacto Windows Phone handset manufacturer, and the Lumia 1520 is its latest effort. The big, big full HD 6-inch display sets it apart from any previous Windows Phone device, and puts it into a rare class of device even among Android phones, whose screens can also get pretty darn huge.

The screen is great, but the phone is a crime against nature. Or at least, that’s my side of the story. Chris predictably sees it differently, because he’s blind. Of course, there are some arguments in favor of the gargantuan device, but they melt away when you try to wrangle one in a human-sized hand.

You can probably predict how the chips fall given that description, but watch for the Christmas sweaters, and stay for the verdict.