Category: Tech news

We don’t cover Patch Tuesday much here at TechCrunch because the majority of you know how to leave Windows Update on and suck down the new software each month direct from the source. This month is a bit more special, however, as it heavily impacts the Surface line of tablets.

Among the updates are a set of Internet Explorer fixes that are worth checking into if you manage PCs. For a rundown of what is in the security side of this update cycle, the genial Larry Seltzer at ZDNet has a good rundown.

Now, to the Surface news. In short, if you own a Surface 2, Surface (the tablet formerly known as Prince Surface RT), or Surface Pro original, Microsoft has goodies for you. Surface Pro 2 owners, apparently your devices are working as intended, so you get nothing.

Surface 2 owners receive the most: Improved Type and Touch cover performance, camera upgrades, audio fixes including moving sound to speakers after yanking your headphones, better battery life and stability, and better Wi-Fi performance. A grab bag, but one that could make Surface 2 quality of life a measurable delta better. I haven’t had hands-on time yet with the update, but will report back later if the changes warrant their own post.

If you own a Surface Pro that is running Windows 8, you can now use Japanese-language, second-generation Touch and Type covers. So, for the eight of you that applies to, mazel tov. Those running 8.1 on their Pro will receive improved Wi-Fi performance.

Finally, if you have the original Surface, you too can now use second-generation Japanese Touch and Type covers. A small update, but one that could help Microsoft vend higher-margin peripherals in the country at a moderately improved clip in that country.

This is a workable set of updates and a welcome bunch. If you have problems picking up any of the above, drop a comment.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

This morning an internal memo inside of Microsoft detailed a new employee ranking system that will replace former policy. Microsoft’s former method for judging performance was widely considered backwards, poisonous, and generally a bad apple.

Tom Warren of The Verge published the memo this morning, and TechCrunch independently confirmed its veracity. A Microsoft spokesperson released the following statement to us: “These changes will encourage greater speed, creativity and teamwork to help us bring innovation to market faster and better serve our customers.”

The former system used a method of rating employees that encouraged strong employees to surround themselves with weaker workers to ensure that they would stay at the top of their cohort, with the requisite performance incentives and job security. That’s hardly a system that is conducive to strong teams and big new products.

Instead, performance reviews will now better match new product cycles so that employee results can be more accurately measured. Microsoft wants to ensure that workers slugging it out on long-term projects don’t forfeit bonuses, or other compensation boosts merely because they are in the trenches for a lengthy time.

The last caveat to this is that the company name-checks “leverag[ing] input and ideas from others, and what you contribute to others’ success.” This could foster better cross-department collaboration. Microsoft has long had infamously bitchy, bickering, and boxing business blocs. Its recent reorganization broke up former divisions in favor of more vertically distinct, and less overlapping, units. This forces teamwork. The Windows team needs to kick it with hardware, or the next Surface is going to be a weaker consumer experience, and so forth.

So the new groups need to get along, and what better way to encourage that by dropping some cash into the game?

On paper, Microsoft’s new ranking system has promise and could hardly be worse than what came before it. If it can dovetail neatly into the company’s new divisions, it could be a long-term boon for the firm. But for now it’s just a memo. Enjoy:

To Global Employees,

I am pleased to announce that we are changing our performance review program to better align with the goals of our One Microsoft strategy. The changes we are making are important and necessary as we work to deliver innovation and value to customers through more connected engagement across the company.

This is a fundamentally new approach to performance and development designed to promote new levels of teamwork and agility for breakthrough business impact. We have taken feedback from thousands of employees over the past few years, we have reviewed numerous external programs and practices, and have sought to determine the best way to make sure our feedback mechanisms support our company goals and objectives. This change is an important step in continuing to create the best possible environment for our world-class talent to take on the toughest challenges and do world-changing work.

Here are the key elements:

More emphasis on teamwork and collaboration. We’re getting more specific about how we think about successful performance and are focusing on three elements – not just the work you do on your own, but also how you leverage input and ideas from others, and what you contribute to others’ success – and how they add up to greater business impact.
More emphasis on employee growth and development. Through a process called “Connects” we are optimizing for more timely feedback and meaningful discussions to help employees learn in the moment, grow and drive great results. These will be timed based on the rhythm of each part of our business, introducing more flexibility in how and when we discuss performance and development rather than following one timeline for the whole company. Our business cycles have accelerated and our teams operate on different schedules, and the new approach will accommodate that.
No more curve.We will continue to invest in a generous rewards budget, but there will no longer be a pre-determined targeted distribution. Managers and leaders will have flexibility to allocate rewards in the manner that best reflects the performance of their teams and individuals, as long as they stay within their compensation budget.
No more ratings. This will let us focus on what matters – having a deeper understanding of the impact we’ve made and our opportunities to grow and improve.
We will continue to align our rewards to the fiscal year, so there will be no change in timing for your rewards conversation with your manager, or when rewards are paid. And we will continue to ensure that our employees who make the most impact to the business will receive truly great compensation.

Just like any other company with a defined budget for compensation, we will continue to need to make decisions about how to allocate annual rewards. Our new approach will make it easier for managers and leaders to allocate rewards in a manner that reflects the unique contributions of their employees and teams.

I look forward to sharing more detail with you at the Town Hall, and to bringing the new approach to life with leaders across the company. We will transition starting today, and you will hear from your leadership in the coming days about next steps for how the transition will look in your business. We are also briefing managers and will continue to provide them with resources to answer questions and support you as we transition to this approach.

I’m excited about this new approach that’s supported by the Senior Leadership Team and my HR Leadership Team, and I hope you are too. Coming together in this way will reaffirm Microsoft as one of the greatest places to work in the world.

There is nothing we cannot accomplish when we work together as One Microsoft.

Lisa

Top Image Credit: Dell

Airbnb is hoping to get more of its hosts and guests on mobile, as it has launched a “reimagination” of its iOS and Android apps. Today at an event in Airbnb’s new San Francisco office space, the company announced the new versions, which include an improved host dashboard, a more immersive design, and host groups, to help hosts connect with one another.

At the event, Airbnb underlined the company’s grand vision for connecting guests and hosts. “What if you could get paid to bring people to your living room?” Chesky said. “What if you could book someone’s home the way you could book a hotel anywhere around the world?”

With its new mobile apps, Airbnb is hoping to better empower its hosts to manage their listings. For Airbnb, today’s mobile launch represents the next iteration of its product roadmap, as the company seeks to provide better tools for connecting guests who need short-term lodging with hosts who have a room or apartment to spare. That’s something that the company has been increasingly striving toward, with a number of new product launches over the years.

On the host side, the mobile app underlines new hospitality standards that it’s trying to put forward, thanks to new head of hospitality Chip Conley. It’ll provide a stronger dashboard designed to help hosts respond to incoming messages, accept bookings, manage upcoming guests, update their calendar, and request photography directly from within the app.

That starts with Host Home, a new flow for adding your listing to the Airbnb platform directly through the mobile app. That includes the ability to request Airbnb’s free professional photography just from the smartphone. Hosts are also immediately directed to the host forum, quickly connecting the thousands of new hosts with others who already know what they’re doing.

There’s also a revised way to respond to inquiries, putting all communications, information about guests, and the ability to check one’s calendar all on a single screen. And, of course, hosts can accept the reservation immediately, without having to move around to different screens.

Host Home also makes recommendations for how to make a guest’s stay more special. It recommends amenities, recommends things that users can do to prepare for their guests, and recommends a special touch that hosts can provide for each of their new guests. It then sends a push notification for when guests are checking in. The app also provides users with the ability to learn about local host events, such as local meetups with other community members.

For guests, the app was revised to help users more easily discover listings that they’d like to stay at. That includes an improved “Discover” tab, which showcases more of Airbnb’s most compelling properties. It also streamlines the way that users can communicate with hosts and book listings. That includes changing the way that guests are listed, with reviews listed way up in their profiles and a streamlined way to book and pay for properties.

Airbnb is launching a new “Get Mobile” program to get even more of its hosts to use those apps. That could include helping hosts to pay for smartphones when they don’t already have them, as the cost will be subsidized against future revenues for those being booked.

“Airbnb is a company that was founded by hosts, for hosts,” Chesky said. With that in mind, the company is trying to get hosts rallied around the idea of openness in which you can “go anywhere and feel like you’re going home.”

This blending of the online and offline worlds helps Airbnb become not just a peer-to-peer platform, but also an integral part of the experience when travelers arrive. Making booking, communicating, and managing properties easier via mobile will make that a lot easier for Airbnb users.

Airbnb continued its pitch to regulators and hosts about the benefits of the new sharing economy, touting some new stats about the number of hosts and lodgings available on the company’s platform. Five years after launch, the company now has more than 500,000 homes and 350,000 hosts in 34,000 cities around the world.

“This is an economy where people have the power,” co-founder Brian Chesky at an event in Airbnb’s new San Francisco office space. “There are laws for people, and there are laws for businesses. But you are a new category – people as businesses.”

Chesky said that the company is having conversations with local governments. And at the event, he introduced the company’s new head of hospitality, Chip Conley, who talked about Airbnb’s Hospitality Innovation Lab in Dublin, in which the company determines best practices that its hosts have developed for the check-in of guests.

Conley said that if the hosts get nine “moments of truth” right, they’ll secure trust of their guests. That’s important, as there are 1,000 new hosts joining every day. And so, the company is suggesting new hospitality standards: welcome, support, reviews, accuracy, communication, availability, commitment, cleanliness, and amenities.

Hosts who answer a request within 12 hours, for instance, are more likely to get a guest to stay with them. The company is also hoping to provide more help from the community with the launch of its Superhost Program in 2014.

But that’s not all: Airbnb also announced new tools for hosts to share stories with one another, and to help each other share best practices. The launch of Airbnb Groups, announced today, is designed to help hosts communicate with each other and by strengthening the community’s standards and way they interact with guests.

“We are a community-driven hospitality company,” Chesky said. That will be improved by the company’s adoption of mobile tools, thanks to the launch of new mobile apps for hosts and guests to communicate with each other.

Airbnb has seen fantastic growth in the five or six years since launch. Airbnb CTO Nathan Blecharczyk said at Y Combinator Startup School a few weeks ago that the company had served 9 million guests since being founded, which was up from 4 million at the end of last year.

[Photo: Flickr/Phillip Capper]

Twitter will let you create custom timelines based on topics, hashtags and more from Tweetdeck, it announced today. Twitter is also providing an API to allow developers to build this functionality into their products.

This will allow people to create powerful streams of information out of Twitter’s public firehose, effectively allowing anyone to curate individual streams of data tailored to a topic. The topics could be literally anything that’s contained in a tweet, including hashtags, a phrase like ‘drinking coffee’ or event-specific keywords like ‘Superbowl’ or ‘TC Disrupt’.

The ability to create custom timelines in Tweetdeck is rolling out slowly, so not everyone will have it right away. This is apparently in an effort to educate people about the new capabilities of custom timelines and to see how people are using them. Not all of Twitter’s consumer products will get this feature right away. If it’s successful, however, it could definitely expand to other products.

Twitter’s Brian Ellin says that the custom timelines are ‘entirely new’. “You name it, and choose the Tweets you want to add to it, either by hand or programmatically using the API…This means that when the conversation around an event or topic takes off on Twitter, you have the opportunity to create a timeline that surfaces what you believe to be the most noteworthy, relevant Tweets.”

Every timeline will have its own permalink page that you can refer users to on Twitter.com. That makes it easy to share and shuffle them around and refer people to them. They’re also completely embeddable.

Over the past few months, the ‘tweet collection’ tool Storify has been expanding to other networks like Facebook in an effort to allow people to create stories around all kinds of social media. That seems wise at this point as many of the use cases of Storify appear to be covered by Twitter’s new custom timelines.

You’re able, for instance, to create a custom timeline in Tweetdeck and drag-and-drop individual tweets to it if you wish. Any custom timelines you create will show up in your profile card in Tweetdeck, and users can view them from there.

Each timeline is public and has its own page on twitter.com, making it easy to share so others can follow along in real time as you add more Tweets. And since custom timelines are part of our Twitter for Websites toolkit, you can embed these timelines on your website.

The tweets can also be added programmatically, using an API that was announced today as well. This allows users of the API to ‘program’ timelines based on logic operators or to add the custom timeline creation feature to their own products. Politico, for instance, is using the API to feed policy industry tweets into a Tweet Hub.

Twitter offers a host of examples of people already using the timeline, and those spell out exactly what Twitter hopes to see it used for including TV shows, live Q&A sessions, ‘Twitter playlists’ and sporting events.

The custom timelines look like a great way to expand the flexibility of Twitter’s ‘power’ product Tweetdeck. And it also offers a bunch of customization options for people that use Twitter for information gathering. Specifically, this looks like a great way to gather a focused stream of information around particular events, which has always been tough on Twitter. If you want to create a running timeline to follow a particular game or team that doesn’t clutter up your main timeline, for instance, these custom timelines will make it easy to do so.

But we can’t help but be drawn to the uses of the custom timelines as an information gathering tool. When breaking news happens these days at least some component of it happens on Twitter. Custom timelines will add a bunch of ways for people who use it for info-gathering in times of news to slice out feeds of solid meaty information from the random chatter around these topics.

The custom timelines product is still obviously very early on in its development, but it should be interesting to see where it goes from here.

Image Credit: Robert Benner/Flickr CC

3D-printer company Makerbot is leading a crowdfunding drive to buy 3D printers for every school in America. The push, called Makerbot Academy, will begin with CEO Bre Pettis personally pledging a Makerbot to every public high school in the company’s home town of Brooklyn.

“MakerBot Academy is a big thing. It is epic. There are around 100,000 schools in the USA and we want those students to be ready for the future,” Pettis wrote.

You can donate at the DonorsChoose.org page. “As a former teacher, I believe strongly in creating a new model for innovation. A MakerBot is a manufacturing education in a box,” wrote Pettis in a blog post. “We need to encourage our teachers and our youth to think differently about manufacturing and innovation.”

Makerbot is working with America Makes, part of the The National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute that is “kickstarting” the 3D printing industry in the U.S.

Teachers can request printers here and designers interested in building educational models can register their designs on Thingiverse.

Early benchmarks, like this one at Geekbench, noted by Primate Labs founder John Poole, are getting posted for Apple’s new Retina iPad mini and they’re looking pretty good. The A7 in the smaller tablet appears to perform nearly as well as its larger sibling, but is clocked in about 100MHz lower at 1.3GHz.

The larger iPad Air’s A7 processor runs at 1.4GHz and the iPhone 5s runs at around 1.30GHz. The lower clock speed in the mini (very slightly lower) will likely not affect performance much overall. The reduction may be due to thermal profiles which prevent the device from getting uncomfortably warm to the touch, a complaint with some previous models of iPad. Many iPad Air owners and reviewers have noted that the tablet does not have the same warming issues even with heavy use.

Any true test of iPad mini performance will likely not come as a result of the maximum clock speed but instead as a result of how Apple handles throttling the processor both under load and in idle states. This kind of careful power management is how Apple extends battery life and reduces heat. As long as that’s done carefully, and more along the curve of the iPad Air vs. the more battery conscious iPhone 5s, it’s unlikely that users will see much of a difference between the two tablets.

Apple’s iPad mini with Retina display went on sale last night, in a somewhat surprisingly casual launch for a new model.

Streaming set-top box maker Roku has just lined up some more live programming from a couple of cable networks. Today the company is announcing availability of apps from ESPN and Disney channels on its platform, with content that can be viewed by those who log in with their cable credentials.

The new channels include WatchESPN, WATCH Disney Channel, WATCH Disney Junior, and WATCH Disney XD, which will all provide access to live, linear programming through affiliated video providers. There will also be some on-demand content, showing recent news, clips, and highlights.

It’s all about making that content available on as many platforms as possible. For ESPN and Disney, Roku is added to a list of platforms and devices that include the iPhone, iOS, Android, and Microsoft Xbox platforms. But it requires those networks to have struck deals with cable, satellite, and fiber TV distributors.

WatchESPN’s live content is available to more than 55 million households, including from providers such as Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks, Verizon FiOS TV, Comcast Xfinity TV, Midcontinent Communications, Cablevision Optimum TV, Cox, AT&T U-verse® TV, and Google Fiber.

WATCH Disney, meanwhile, is available to 43 million pay TV subscribers, including Verizon FiOS TV, Comcast Xfinity TV, Midcontinent Communications, Cablevision Optimum TV, Cox, AT&T U-verse TV, and Google Fiber. In both cases, Charter and NRTC will have those apps soon.

Meet the new definition of an all-in-one coffee machine: the Bonaverde. It not only brews and grinds coffee beans, the tabletop machine roasts them as well. Put unroasted coffee beans in the machine, press a button or two and 12-14 minutes later it produces truly fresh coffee. But the creators need help bringing the device to market and just launched a Kickstarter campaign seeking $135k in preorders and donations.

The last ten years saw the emergence of all-in-one coffee machines that grind and brew a pot of coffee. These can now be bought for less than $100. Obviously the Bonaverde will cost a bit more, because, you know, it also roasts the coffee.

For early Kickstarter supporters the Bonaverde can be had for $250, but the company expects to eventually sell the device for north of $400.

The process is pretty straight forward: Put the unroasted coffee in the machine which then sends it through a roasting process. From there, a fan will cool the beans before a ceramic disk grinds them prior to brewing. The machine then brews the coffee using a rain-shower-type method that thoroughly saturates the beans with the heated water. The  whole process takes 12-14 minutes and produces 2-12 cups of coffee.

But where do you get unroasted coffee beans from? The farmers, of course. And apparently the company will facilitate that transaction, as well, providing buyers of its coffee machine with bean buying options from coffee farmers.

The product has been in development for over two years. The design itself was born from Jovoto where the company crowdsourced over 110 designs and the company expects to start shipping in the August of 2014.

Mesosphere, a startup that focuses on developing Mesos, a technology that makes running complex distributed applications easier, is launching Elastic Mesos today. This new product makes setting up a Mesos cluster on Amazon Web Services a basic three-step process that asks you for the size of the cluster you want to set up, your AWS credentials and an email where you want to get notifications about your cluster’s state.

Given the complexity of setting up a regular Mesos cluster, this new project will make it easier for developers to experiment with Mesos and the frameworks Mesosphere and others have created around it.

As Mesosphere’s founder Florian Leibert describes it, for many applications, the data center is now the computer. Most applications now run on distributed systems, but connecting all of the distributed parts is often still a manual process. Mesos’ job is to abstract away all of these complexities and to ensure that an application can treat the data center and all your nodes as a single computer. Instead of setting up various server clusters for different parts of your application, Mesos creates a shared pool of servers where resources can be allocated dynamically as needed.

Current Mesos users include the likes of Airbnb, Vimeo, Hubspot and Twitter.

Despite the fact that Mesos simplifies things in the long run, setting a Mesos cluster up is still complicated and involves installing ZooKeeper, the Hadoop Distributed File System (HFDS) and other software packages and then connecting all of these pieces. And that’s before you can install Frameworks like Chronos, Hadoop, Marathon, Jenkins and others.

With Elastic Mesos, Mesosphere gets all of this set up on AWS for you in under 15 minutes. In its current form, developers can choose between a six-instance cluster and an 18-instance cluster. Leibert tells me the small version, which should cost about $1.44 per hour to run at AWS’s current prices, should be perfect for testing Mesos, and the larger one (at $4.32 per hour) should be big enough to run serious applications on it. In the long run, Mesosphere will likely offer more flexible configuration options. While Mesos itself can generally scale by simply adding new nodes to the cluster, Elastic Mesos does not have this capability yet, but Mesosphere is working on allowing this.

Mesosphere itself is making the service available for free. The only fees developers need to pay are for their AWS instances.

Once everything is set up, developers can then run Hadoop or Spark on Mesos (or any other Mesos framework) within minutes.

Leibert hopes that making experimenting with Mesos easier will also help developers who want to write their own Mesos frameworks, too. After all, they don’t generally have a data center at their disposal just to experiment with a new technology like Mesos, but with Elastic Mesos, they can just spin up a cluster and start testing their framework for a few hours.

After Five years and more than $500 million in investment, FirstMark Capital (early backer of Shopify, Pinterest, and others) has today announced its third fund of $225 million that will go toward early stage investments.

The fund will be called FirstMark Capital III, and is the exact same amount as the last round at $225 million. FirstMark doesn’t disclose its investors.

FirstMark is partially responsible for some of the biggest names in tech, including Pinterest, Lumosity, Aereo, and Shopify, along with some incredible exits such as Boomi and Scalent’s acquisition by Dell, StubHub (which was acquired by eBay), and NetGear, which made millions in an IPO.

Here’s the official word from the FirstMark blog post:

In the five short years of building FirstMark, it’s been humbling to see the rapid growth and impact of many of our portfolio companies. It is a testament to the disruptive times we live in and the formidable determination of our entrepreneurs. And yet, these companies also share common beginnings. A few people banding together and taking a leap into the unknown. A heightened sense of excitement pushing “final” alpha code to the world, only to discover the world wants to do something else with it. A nerve-racking decision to pass on a major partnership to stay focused on the mission. A lucky bounce that unexpectedly changes the trajectory of a company. A replenished sense of vitality as clarity of direction slowly emerges. These are the moments we cherish being a part of and we are incredibly thankful to our entrepreneurs for allowing us to be a part of their journey.

FirstMark usually secures a new round every three years or so.

Although FirstMark is staying open ended about where it will invest this new fund, you can expect to see a focus on Internet of Things, wearables and big data as those spaces begin to truly heat up.

Regardless of the investment area, for now FirstMark will continue to focus early stage investments.

Poshmark, the mobile marketplace that lets women swap and sell items out of their own closets, is launching on Android today. Poshmark, which offers iOS and web apps, launched nearly two years ago and just crossed 1 million items sold this year alone.

As founder Manish Chandra explains, Android was the biggest request from the Poshmark community. Because 95 percent of Poshmark’s usage is on mobile, Chandra said that the startup’s engineers put considerable thought and time into ensuring that the Android experience allows both sellers and buyers to have a frictionless shopping experience.

Similar to the iOS app, users can start selling items by just taking a photo of the item they want to sell and uploading it to their closet. When they make a sale, Poshmark sends them a prepaid label for easy shipping. Once the buyer receives the item and approves it, Poshmark releases the buyer’s payment to the seller.

Buyers can browse and shop millions of items from closets via the app. And Poshmark’s Android app includes daily in-app shopping parties called “Posh Parties” where users can browse or market specific items from closets by themes such as Fall Trends and Bold Accessories, or around specific designers such as Marc Jacobs, Rebecca Minkoff or Chanel.

Chandra says that 70 percent of Poshmark buyers are also sellers, so Poshmark has allowed users to create a revolving closet through the app without spending any new money, using only the money made from Poshmark sales to purchase new items.

In fact, women are engaging with the Poshmark iOS app 7-8 times a day for 20-25 minutes, which is impressive for mobile app usage. We’re told that Poshmark as a company is on track to see 10X revenue growth year-over-year in 2013.

But Poshmark isn’t the only startup to be vying for fashionistas’ attentions in this space. Poshmark, which has raised $15.5 million from Rachel Zoe, Ashton Kutcher, Naval Ravikant, Shervin Pishevar, Menlo Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Inventus Capital, and SoftTech VC, faces competition from Tradesy, Threadflip and Vaunte, among others.

It’s clear when talking to Chandra that he thinks this is an eBay-sized opportunity or perhaps even more – and eBay is one of Poshmark’s competitors as well. eBay has also tried to add more to its fashion vertical. But what eBay hasn’t been able to do is create the community feel that Poshmark, and others in the space, have been able to accomplish. It wouldn’t be surprising if eBay is already sniffing around these companies for a potential acquisition.

You can download the Android app here.

Ever want to get a tattoo but didn’t know what to actually get? New startup Tattoodo has created a crowdsourced platform where users can browse and purchase tattoo designs – or even have custom designs made. It’s bolstered by a strategic investment and advice by some veterans of community-driven T-shirt design shop Threadless.

Tattoodo was founded by Johan (Joe) Plenge and Mik Thobo-Carlsen, two friends from Copenhagen, who recruited Miami Ink and NY Ink star tattoo artist Ami James to join them. The idea was to create a place where people who wanted to get tattoos could find interesting designs.

The original plan came about after Plenge decided he wanted a tattoo, but couldn’t find a design that he liked. It became obvious after a certain amount of time that there was no single reliable place where people could browse, search, and find designs that they like.

According to Thobo-Carlsen, there are some 147 million searches for tattoo designs on Google each month, and there’s very little competition for search engine marketing on Adwords. And, frankly, most of the designs you can find are pretty horrible. So the team set out to create the place where users could find attractive, high-quality designs.

On the one hand, Tattoodo has a peer-to-peer marketplace for interesting tattoo designs. Famous tattoo artists from around the world upload their designs, which can be purchased for anywhere between $29 and $59, and then tattooed on Tattoodo customers. It’s an easy way to find a design from a well-regarded artist without commissioning him yourself.

Tattoodo also provides a platform whereby users can create contests to have custom designs made just for them. To do so, they submit an idea of what they want and create a contest… Then artists submit their proposals, and collaborate with the user to come up with what they want. At the end of the contest, they then pick the design they like best.

Either way, Tattoodo is taking a crowdsourced approach in the way it connects those who want tattoos with designs they might like. And in that way, it’s not so different from strategic investor Threadless. That company, of course, was founded in 2000 to crowdsource funny and interesting designs from users, which it then printed on T-shirts and sold to customers.

With that expertise, Threadless co-founder Jake Nickell and former CEO and board member Tom Ryan have been advising Tattoodo on building its own crowdsourced marketplace of art. They’ve also invested in the tattoo startup, and are providing strategic help both in suggesting Threadless artists submit some of their pieces to Tattoodo and advising how to get greater distribution.

So far, so good: Tattoodo has more than 100,000 Facebook fans after just seven weeks, and has seen its traffic triple since launch. It’s hoping to soon become the #1 tattoo destination site, less than a year after it opened to the public.

On paper, the Pure Jongo S3 wireless speaker and A2 adapter sound like a great alternative to a Sonos system. But a poor user experience and clunky setup quickly dampened our enthusiasm.

A number of Instagram users are currently reporting difficulty accessing the popular photo-sharing service both on the web and mobile versions of the app. At 3:37 pm Pacific Time this afternoon, Instagram confirmed the outage in a Tweet citing “system issues”:

We're currently having system issues. We are aware of the problem and are working hard to resolve it. Thank you for your patience!—
Instagram (@instagram) November 09, 2013

As of 4:00pm PT, the system still appears to be having problems for many users. Indeed, trying to visit individual Instagram profiles on the web (such as TechCrunch’s) is currently turning up a 504 gateway timeout for me.

This has naturally resulted in some panicked messages on social media from people desperate to share sepia-hued snaps of their Saturday afternoons – and even more jokes about such first world problems.

We’ve reached out to Instagram and its parent company Facebook for additional comment on the outage, what’s caused it, and when it should be remedied. We haven’t heard back yet, but this post will be updated with any response we receive.

Let’s all hope it’s fixed before the Saturday evening club-hopping hours commence.