Category: Tech news

Commenting platform Livefyre is announcing today that it has acquired a company called Realtidbits. Apparently Realtidbits makes a number of social applications (we covered its real-time forum product, for example), but Livefyre founder and CEO Jordan Kretchmer told me he’s particularly interested in the company’s analytics experience and technology.

The acquisition of self-funded Realtidbits comes just a couple of months after Livefyre purchased social curation startup Storify. That was Livefyre’s first acquisition, making this deal its second – it probably helps that the company raised a $15 million round earlier this year.

“We’re in a pretty acquisitive place right now,” Kretchmer said. “We want to expand our product reach, and we’re actively exploring anyting delivering on our premise of social everywhere.”

Although Livefyre is best-known for its commenting system (a system that’s used by TechCrunch), it offers other social products and features like the ability to integrate content from social media and run ads. (It has also said it plans to continue operating Storify as a standalone brand and product.) However, it hasn’t done much in analytics – Kretchmer said the entire five-person Realtidbits team will become the core of Livefyre’s analytics team, and of a new San Diego office.

Kretchmer noted that there are a number of other analytics companies out there, and he said he was impressed by co-founder and CEO Kelly Abbott’s background in journalism and his connections with publishers. (Judging from his LinkedIn profile, Abbott wasn’t a journalist himself, but worked on product development at several media organizations.) Livefyre says Realtidbits racks real-time engagement on Realtidbits products, third-party plugins, Backplane-enabled products, and JavaScript-enabled web pages, and that it integrates with Adobe Omniture, Google Analytics and Mixpanel.

When Kretchmer discussed the product, he seemed particularly interested in tracking video engagement and second-screen engagement driven by TV shows.

The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. The company says users of Realtidbits Comments, Forums, Gallery and Pinboard will be transitioned to the corresponding Livefyre products.

App.net is fairly well-known for reinventing itself. The whole point of the business, according to founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell, is to take its core API and show what can be done with that with product layered on top. That’s where the Twitter-style microblogging platform came from, and that’s what informs today’s launch of App.net Broadcasts, a tool that brings the concept of direct, occasional messages to an interested group to a mobile-native environment.

Broadcasts works by essentially offering the one thing most publisher, blog and artist mobile apps do well: push notifications direct to fans. Many apps that fall into this category seem hastily put together and poorly maintained, and Caldwell thinks that’s because they really only need to serve one purpose, which is to offer up direct info to users about content related to the person putting out the app.

“If really the reason you have an app is just to do push, I think that this really gives you the benefits of that, for free,” Caldwell explained in an interview. “Also, I think from a consumer perspective, having a ton of apps, say one for every tech publication or one for every band that you like is kind of goofy, and everyone already knows that. Perhaps having a lower friction way for people to subscribe to different kinds of broadcast channels will actually increase the number of people that are interested in these push notifications.”

Click to view slideshow.

Broadcasts work by allowing publishers to create and customize their channel, and then embedding a subscribe button in their website via a simple line of code. From the App.net mobile app, on both Android and iOS (Broadcasts is launching simultaneously on both platforms), you choose your channel, hit Compose Broadcast and then create a rich push notification. Said notification doesn’t have to be just a link, either; Caldwell notes that it could feature images or even an animated GIF, so that subscribers don’t just feel marketed to, but like they’re actually receiving a rich stream of content via push.

It’s remarkably like SMS marketing, which is still a preferred channel in many developing markets. As with SMS, however, the danger is that you can elicit annoyance in your target audience. But Caldwell likens it more to the email newsletter, which is increasingly popping up on blogs in a sort of renaissance. The reason, according to Caldwell, is likely that publishers and bloggers want a way to cut through the noise of something like Twitter and provide a direct line.

As with previous ventures, Broadcasts for App.net will work on a freemium revenue model, with all the functionality described above provided without cost, and paid features such as analytics being added in later. Caldwell says this is already the model used by most email marketing companies, so it should be familiar to his potential customers.

In the end, this is also a way to help prove that it’s worth paying for an App.net account, Caldwell admits, in addition to being yet another demonstration of the kind of simple and elegant things you can do with the App.net API. It’s somewhat reminiscent of things like Boxcar, which aggregates push notifications from a number of services under one roof, but with more focus on the publisher and less on the end user. As a podcaster and blogger myself, I can definitely see the value of the service, but we’ll have to wait and see whether that reflects a larger consensus.

Microsoft is bringing message encryption to Office 365. The system will allow email to be automatically encrypted, even when sent to non-Office 365 users. So, you can use the protection with anyone, on any other email service.

In the age of pervasive data abduction by government agency, keeping your private stuff private is an increasingly important issue. The addition of message encryption to Office 365 is therefore on point, and potentially very useful.

The system is neat: Once administrators turn it on, emails that are sent are encrypted before they are fired out, meaning that they only leave the house after they put a jacket on. The recipient receives an email that has an encrypted attachment. That’s the message.

The attachment opens in a browser window, and the recipient authenticates themselves with either their Microsoft or Office 365 account. They can then view the email in the browser, with an interface akin to the Outlook.com layout:

The kicker: All replies are encrypted as well, so the system retains its security.

The other kicker: The NSA is working to end encryption as we know it, so that’s not very good. Still, Microsoft has put together a system by which average folks can enjoy encrypted protection of their messages. It’s clunky, but that is the result of it needing to work with every other email system.

The final kicker: It won’t be out until the first quarter of 2014.

So, what does it cost and who gets it? If you are an E3 or E4 subscriber of Office 365, it will come for free. Also, if you are a standalone customer of Windows Azure Rights Management you get it for free. I don’t know what those words mean, so I have asked Microsoft to translate that bit of their verbiage into English. When I get more, I’ll include it here.

Encryption for all is a good thing. Microsoft, make this available to all Office 365 users, please.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Wireless connectivity gives the NeatConnect a huge edge over other scanners and the traditional two-step process of scanning to your PC, then uploading to a cloud service.

Lenovo has seen the future, and the future is hinges. Or so it thinks.

Many game consoles aspire to be more than just a game console, but Xbox One really means it.

The original GlowLight was a great device when it launched. Instead of continuing that momentum, the latest version feels like an e-reader that lost its way.

Facebook is tweaking the way it counts up the small and medium businesses that have a presence on the social network.

Why the change? Well, it increases the count. Dan Levy, who leads Facebook’s small and medium business team, told me there are now 25 million Facebook Pages for SMBs, and 1 million of those businesses are active advertisers.

This may seem like an arcane tweak, and, well, it kind of is, but it’s worth noting as we track this side of Facebook advertising, since it could potentially become a big part of the company’s bottom line. In addition, Facebook likes to frame a lot of its ad-related changes in terms of how they might help small businesses (and not just giant advertisers), so it’s good to be reminded that those businesses really do exist and really are active on the site.

Back in April, Facebook said there were 15 million SMBs with Pages, but that was under the old definition. According to Levy, the company only counted businesses that had a physical location, whereas now it’s including e-commerce companies that may not have a brick-and-mortar store but aren’t big brand advertisers either.

Facebook is counting SMBs based on three criteria, he added – they must have a Page that’s been active in the past 28 days, it must be a business Page (rather than personal one), and they can’t be one of Facebook’s “managed clients” (those clients are the company’s big advertisers).

Facebook has been working to simplify its ad products this year, for example by launching “objective-based” ad-buying, and Levy said that’s already beginning to pay off with more SMB advertisers, but he added that the company has just “started that journey.”

“We continue to hear feedback from small businesses and incorproate it, and we still have a lot of potential left,” he said.

As for the mobile ads that account for 49 percent of Facebook’s revenue, Levy argued that Facebook is a great way for SMBs to establish a presence on smartphones – by creating a Facebook page and advertising on Facebook, they automatically have “a mobile marketing presence” and “a mobile advertising strategy” without doing any extra work.

Levy will also be discussing Facebook’s small business strategy at a session this afternoon at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

According to BloombergBusinessWeek, cloud file storage firm Dropbox is looking to raise an additional $250 million at a valuation of around $8 billion.

The news comes on the heels of Pinterest’s massive $225 million round that valued it at $3.8 billion, and endless hype that Snapchat is raising some god-tier amount of money at a valuation of lots of billions.

So, if your first reaction to the Dropbox news was to spit out the bile that welled up from your stomach, I get you. But hold on, this time round the nine-figure bush, there is some substance in play.

According to the BusinessWeek piece, Dropbox’s revenue has grown rapidly, and is now in the “hundreds of millions of dollars” area, meaning that Dropbox could quite easily have top line close to what Twitter currently generates. For the first three quarters of 2013, Twitter had revenue of $422.2 million, if you had forgotten.

However, Om Malik, a venture capitalist, journalist, and generally good human recently reported that Dropbox is “is on its way to a billion dollars in revenue.” He tweeted today that the company is on a $1 billion run rate, meaning that the firm is generating revenue at a rate that totals a billion when extrapolated forward 12 months. 

Depending on how you forecast Twitter’s revenue, Dropbox could be outperforming it handily. And that is precisely why the $8 billion figure feels oddly inexpensive.

From an earlier report on Twitter’s valuation, here’s the revenue multiples that arose from its public offering:

Twitter, in the trailing 12 months (TTM) leading to its final private quarter (ending September 30), had revenue of $534.5 million. […] Twitter filed to go public at $26 per share. Using a fully diluted share count of 705,098,594, Twitter valued itself at $18.3 billion. The company opened instead at $45.10, valuing the firm (again: using a diluted share count) at $31.8 billion.

Comparing those figures to Twitter’s top line, the company valued itself at 34.2 times its trailing 12 month’s revenue. Its forward revenue figure would be substantially less, of course. The market valued Twitter at $31.8 billion, instead, or 59.5 times its trailing revenue.

Now, we’re comparing trailing revenue for Twitter, and forward revenue for Dropbox (measuring past, and future revenue, respectively), so the ratios are not to be taken directly. Still, valuing Dropbox at something around 8 times forward twelve month revenue, and Twitter at up to nearly 60 times trailing revenue feels disjointed.

And the above comparison doesn’t take into account profits because Twitter loses buckets of money, so if Dropbox is also in the red tough snakes, it doesn’t really matter for this comparison. Dropbox could be managing its valuation, hoping to avoid getting its figures too high, and thus spiking its chance of later private money if it wants to delay its path to an IPO. That’s utter speculation, however.

If Dropbox is on a $1 billion run rate, and is raising at an $8 billion valuation, I’m in. Where do I send the check?

Top Image Credit: Flickr

In just the past couple years, I’ve noticed something: My colleague John Murillo, who shoots and edits video for TechCrunch TV, has increasingly become one of the most popular people in any room he enters. Anywhere we go on the days we shoot video, whether it’s a startup office or just a pub to grab some lunch, everyone wants to strike up a conversation with him to ask about his camera equipment. The lenses, the shutter speed, the megapixels. It’s become clear that it’s no longer just the professionals or the early adopters who are into talking about gadgets – nowadays, it’s the mainstream.

The people over at Engadget, the gadget-oriented blog (that disclosure: is owned by AOL, which owns TechCrunch too), say they’ve noticed the same thing. So over the past few days they’ve launched a top-to-bottom site redesign, with a host of new interactive features, aimed at appealing to a larger-scale audience – an Engadget that’s not just for the early adopters, but for “the early adopter in all of us.”

Many elements of the new look, such as personal profiles, product profiles, pricing comparison engines, and the like, are being folded in from Gdgt, the consumer electronics review site founded by Engadget co-founder Peter Rojas and former Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block that was acquired by AOL earlier this year. In a phone call this past week, Ryan Block and current Engadget executive editor Marc Perton said that this integration was not initially planned when AOL acquired Gdgt back in February – but it soon became apparent that it was the most logical next step.

“There was so much more synergy than we expected between Engadget and Gdgt. These two properties had so much more in common,” Block, who currently heads up the product team that has now shifted from Gdgt to Engadget, said. “All of the best things about Gdgt are now in Engadget.”

The changes also set Engadget up to be an online destination for the mainstream electronics buyer looking for help with a purchasing decision, in addition to the hardcore gadget geeks that have read Engadget since its inception. This puts Engadget more squarely into competition with the likes of Consumer Reports and CNET, in addition to its existing competitors in the gadget blog world. It’s a big step, but it’s one that Block and Perton say is coming at a perfect time.

“We’re evolving. We’re going to continue to tap into the traditional tech enthusiast market – we’re not going to dumb anything down,” Perton said. “But at the same time, we’ve got a much broader market than ever before. People who had never thought about electronics have now become the early adopters.”

Today Microsoft announced that there are more than 1,000 games in its Windows Store and Windows Phone Store based on the Unity engine. On July 22nd this year, Unity took the beta tag off of its support for the platforms.

Therefore, in the ensuing 17 weeks, developers have released Unity-based games at a pace of around 58.8 per week, or 8.4 per day. That’s a decent clip, as the titles that are being ported over to the Windows platforms (mobile, and mostly not, respectively, or Windows Phone and Windows 8.x) are of generally of a decent quality.

Microsoft remains grimly determined to grow the number and quality of applications on its twin platforms. It’s doing so by integrating them, lowering the price of entry, and working with folks like Unity to open as many doors as possible are open, and stay that way.

I’ll have more on development figures for the Windows world later this week, but keep in mind that while download counts for the platforms are growing, they remain small compared to iOS. Windows 8.x sees around 1.7 million daily downloads. iOS is around 74 million. Still, the march of 1,000 miles starts with one step, and apparently a lot of pushing.

Salesforce.com and HP are forming an alliance to create what they call a “Superpod,” that will provide customers with HP’s converged hardware to run on the SaaS provider’s infrastructure. HP CEO Meg Whitman will announce the news on stage tomorrow at Dreamforce with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

The superpod converged infrastructure, designed by HP, is what IT calls a converged infrastructure. It runs compute, storage and networking all in one box as opposed to running across a distributed infrastructure such as with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The new offering is meant for very large companies that have extensive IT infrastructure which require enterprise integrations and a level of compliance that can be guaranteed by having the SaaS environment all in one box.

For HP, the company can now package its expensive hardware with the Salesforce SaaS technology. And Salesforce gets a way to move deeper inside large, corporations with the promise of a single, dedicated solution.

In a prepared statement, Whitman described a “new style of IT,” that combines HP’s hardware technology with Salesforce cloud services.

HP is banking on selling its converged infrastructure as a way to get deeper into the enterprise with what they have called a private cloud service.  In this case. HP is bringing the IT to Salesforce, a move that demonstrates how Salesforce is changing to accommodate larger companies by partnering with legacy enterprise providers. Earlier this year, Salesforce inked a deal with Oracle to purchase the software giant’s converged database technology to run its SaaS offerings.

At the crux of this, is Salesforce new stage of development, which leverages its platform and third-part ecosystem with technology that would normally be found in a corporate data center.  For HP, the deal makes it more appealing as companies can access the services Salesforce offers through data center style, big box machines.

Google has agreed to pay $17 million to 37 states for circumventing privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser in 2011. Safari blocked tracking cookies by default, but Google overrode the settings. Stanford researchers discovered the problem, leading to a nationwide investigation.

New York’s Attorney General wrote an overjoyed press release, announcing “nearly $900K from Google to prevent future violations of consumer privacy”. Google has also paid $22.5M to the FTC over the same issue.

Interestingly enough, a federal judge dismissed a class-action lawsuit from users, finding that plaintiffs could not prove any harm had occurred.

“While plaintiffs have offered some evidence that the online personal information at issue has some modicum of identifiable value to an individual plaintiff,” explained Judge Sue Robinson [PDF], “plaintiffs have not sufficiently alleged that the ability to monetize their PII has been diminished or lost by virtue of Google’s previous collection of it.”

While it’s obvious that Google misled users (intentionally or not), it’s not clear why that should result in a multi-million dollar fine. I’d like to remind readers that consumers are affected when states rush to the collect money from the Google lawsuit piñata. AllThingsD reports that the much-loved Google Reader was shuttered because the company could not justify the privacy costs necessary to keep the program running.

These lawsuits are not a simple David vs. Goliath story. It’s as likely that overzealous prosecutors can affect consumers as much as a data-hungry search giant.

[Image Credit: Flickr User imtfl]

Payments platform Spreedly, which offers customers a credit card vault in the cloud that works with 54 different payment gateways, has just raised an additional $500,000 in seed funding from Emerge.be, bringing its total raise to date to just under a million. The funding comes not even a year after Spreedly’s pivot from a digital subscriptions service it sold off this July.

Spreedly has been around for some time. The company was founded in 2007, but had been focused on subscription-based payments until demand from customers found the team examining a new area involving payments: a cloud-based credit card vault and API platform for sending payments to multiple payment gateways.

In fact, a company called Pin Payments, basically the Stripe of Australia, funded Spreedly’s initial efforts in making this pivot, offering $120,000 in a seed investment last December. By March, Spreedly had its new service off the ground, and ended up selling its subscription business to Pin Payments, too.

A credit card vault, in simple terms, allows businesses to store a customer’s credit card information for repeated use. The ways this works is that a business will typically pass a credit card charge to a payment gateway like Stripe or Braintree, and that company then returns a token which the business stores. And when the business needs to run a charge again for that same customer, they send the token back the gateway for processing. The use of tokens is more secure, and allows for things like PCI compliance.

Developers use Spreedly by plugging into an API for storing cards in the cloud – that is, Spreedly returns the tokens, just as you would see with most payment gateways today.

But the difference is that Spreedly itself is not a payment gateway – instead, it allows developers using its API to specify which payment gateway they want to use for each transaction.

“On the front-end, we look like a modern payment gateway API, and developers really like that,” explains Spreedly CEO Justin Benson. “And then they just have to do one additional step,” he says, referring to the addition of the payment gateway. “We don’t touch the money flow – Stripe, Authorize.net – those guys do.”

There are a number of businesses that need to work with multiple payment gateways, Benson tells us. These include billing platforms, those in e-commerce space/subscriptions space, those selling into specialized vertical markets (Spreedly has found traction with companies selling to gyms/health clubs, in the vacation rental market; etc.), and companies which need to process transactions in different countries. In the latter case, the companies generally want to take advantage of the better rates and lower declines that come with using a local payment gateway.

Today, some of Spreedly’s customers include Cabify (an Uber-like service in Europe), PayByGroup, BusBud (an app that lets you buy a bus ticket across bus companies), Walla.by, and Giftcardzen. The company has 130 customers, and will do 125,000 transactions this month, totaling roughly $8.5 million.

Benson admits that most of Spreedly customers today are smaller startups, who pay for the service on a SaaS model starting at $50 per month and going up to around a couple thousand per month. But longer term, the goal is to grow Spreedly to the point where it could support much larger businesses. Some discussions on that front are underway today, he says.

The company connected with Emerge.be, a group of four angel investors in Belgium, on AngelList. The angels had been an earlier investor in Ogone, which was acquired this year by Ingenico for €360 million, so they are familiar with the space. They’re also investors in some potential Spreedly customers, like Cabify, which could help Spreedly’s business grow.

Durham, N.C.-based Spreedly is using the additional funding for product development and hiring, with plans to grow its four-person team to seven with the hire of its first sales person and two engineers.

The company also offers a useful Payments Gateway Index (pictured above) in partnership with Shopify, which lets you track metrics associated the various gateways on its platform, including success rate, volume, average ticket size, and more.

In the never-ending court battle between Aereo and major network broadcasters seeking to have Aereo shut down, the NFL and MLB are chiming in on the matter.

According to ATD, the MLB and NFL are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule against Aereo, threatening to move their programming from free broadcast channels to paid cable networks like ESPN.

This isn’t the first time that Aereo opponents have made threats. NewsCorp said in April that it would be forced to pull its programming from broadcast and offer it as paid content should Aereo remain in business.

The networks, including Fox, ABC, NBC, and others, believe Aereo is stealing and rebroadcasting their content without permission. Aereo’s technology lets users rent out remote antenna/DVR systems to provide access to free over-the-air signals, similar to the way rabbit ears work.

Based on precedents set by a Cablevision case with regards to recording and replaying individual copies of content remotely, Aereo operates within the law thus far, winning earlier rulings in New York and Boston courts. In fact, it’s entirely probable that Aereo was developed with the Cablevision precedent in mind.

Still, the media industry is digging in and ferociously clutching the current system, with outdated UIs and overpriced content bundles. Though the leagues are openly threatening to back away from broadcast, it seems they have a nine-year agreement in the works that stretches through the 2022 season, including ABC, Fox, and CBS.

Of course, Aereo’s legality is ultimately up to the courts, as are the leagues’ abilities to back out of previous agreements with broadcasters.