Category: Tech news

You don’t have to leave the house to experience high-end mixology. Just add your favorite high-grade hooch and a couple of these gadgets, all designed to bring your drinking into the current age of mixologistic indulgence.

Y Combinator has been a mainstay of Silicon Valley, with an office not far from the Mountain View Caltrain station.* Over the years, however, the seed-stage incubator has seen more of its companies and partners take up residence in the city. As a result, it has opened a small satellite office to support founders and partners who need temporary space to work out of.

There’s a growing trend of startups being founded in San Francisco, as younger tech workers are looking for more excitement after hours than might be found, in say, downtown Mountain View. Whereas a decade ago it was expected that companies like Twitter and Square want to be near Stanford and Sand Hill Road, newer startups are becoming comfortable with the idea of settling down in the city. And investors are coming to them.

Y Combinator already has a number of big success stories based in San Francisco — both Dropbox and Airbnb, for instance, have spacious new offices in the SOMA neighborhood. But the incubator is looking to support more San Francisco-based companies, as the appetite among tech workers for city living continues to increase and as jobs here become more plentiful.

At the same time, it’s brought on more part-time partners over the last few years, many of which are based in San Francisco. That includes folks like Socialcam’s Michael Seibel, Hipmunk’s Steve Huffman, App.net’s Dalton Caldwell, and Groupon’s Andrew Mason (who recently moved to San Francisco from Chicago).

Y Combinator hasn’t always just been in Silicon Valley — it used to have classes in both Silicon Valley and Cambridge before founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston decided to stay on the West Coast year-round. But the new office, which opened its doors early last month, follows a larger trend of VC firms and investors looking beyond their stodgy Sand Hill Road digs to meet with and support a growing number of startups making San Francisco their home.

Firms like Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins set up offices here. Early next year, 500 Startups is also opening a San Francisco office, which will be run by new venture partner Parker Thompson and is expected to house one track of its accelerator program.

Unlike 500 Startups, Y Combinator’s San Francisco space isn’t meant to house or support a whole incubator class. Like Mountain View, the San Francisco space is available on a part-time basis, but YC startups are expected to find their own offices.

The new YC space, which is near the city’s Union Square neighborhood, has room for about eight workstations, as well as a room where founders and partners can take meetings and do office hours.

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* My colleague Anthony Ha maintains that the YC Mountain View office is “not that close to Caltrain” and “actually a really long walk.”

Google’s Malaysian site has been hacked and replaced with a splash screen giving credit to a group called “Team Madleets.” The normal site has been offline for several hours as of late Thursday afternoon and the page lists a series of handles that are ostensibly part of the team responsible. Updated with brief statement from the hackers below.

The attack appears to have been of the DNS poisoning variety, in which a hacker gained access to the Malaysia Network Information Center and changed the DNS records of Google’s site to Madleets-controlled servers. So no information appears to have been changed on Google’s servers at this time, as this is a redirect attack of sorts.

The stamp at the top says ‘[!] Struck by 1337′, which is apparently a reference to an individual hacker within the group called 1337, who has recently (allegedly) performed hacks on domain registrars of several countries. A message on 1337′s Facebook page says “Google Malaysia Stamped By 1337″ and references the google.com.my and google.my domains. The only other indicator about who the group could be is a reference to them being Pakistani in origin.

The Madleets address leads to a Facebook page for the team that has the following message posted:

We feel we need to alert anyone, that we don’t hack any country tlds for example google.com.my as a result of any kind of hate, We don’t hate anyone, We love all humanity, there is no obvious reason for stamping the tlds.
Least the reason is not any kind of hate.
Whatever the reason is we can’t explain except we love all of you.
Regard’s
H4x0rL1f3

The page info states that “MadLeets is a Ethical and 1337 White Hat Hackers Community. We are Anti Hackers , we teach how to protect yourself from getting hacked.”

If the reasoning on the team’s Facebook page is accurate, then this is simply a matter of doing it because they can and not to make a political statement. A link placed in the source code of the page leads to a music video for the artist Instrumental Core.  The music is auto-played on the site while visitors are there.

Google Malaysia was hacked back in July, along with several other Malaysian sites, by a group protesting the treatment of Bangladeshi workers in that country. One possible motivation for the group taking action now, if it is indeed not simply “exposing vulnerabilities” would be the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Kuala Lumpur, which will be attended by Secretary of State John Kerry in lieu of President Barack Obama.

We’ve reached out to both the email address given for the team on the site and to Google. We will update this story if we receive a response from either side.

Update: The hackers responded with a brief statement to TechCrunch:

There’s not much reason behind it, only to prove that security is just an illusion. It does not exist.

We have no political intentions whatsoever, as you have already stated.

Regards, LeeT

Catherine Shu contributed additional reporting to this story.

Members of Congress are not very content with the flow of information that reaches their ears concerning the pervasive surveillance activities of the United States intelligence apparatus.

Following remarks from Senator Bob Corker that Congress often learns more from newspapers than their briefings on the National Security Agency and its cohorts, Rep. Amash blasted Congressional intelligence committees as complicit in hiding information, essentially “working with the executive branch against the interests of Congress.”

As quoted in The Hill, Rep. Amash called Intelligence committees not “friends of Congress but [instead] the opponents of Congress.”

Explaining what it was like to work with intelligence officials who are reticent to disclose information, even to the branch that is tasked with their oversight: “You don’t have any idea what kind of things are going on. So you have to start just spitting off random questions. Does the government have a moon base? Does the government have a talking bear?”

What this means is that the more information that members of Congress have going into those meetings, the better they can press for answers. Rep. Amash continued to say as much. The implication therefore is that the information that Edward Snowden leaked is providing Congress with the tools they need to execute their oversight.

As far as I can tell, oversight of the United States intelligence agencies is a farce. Those in favor of its activities obfuscate and lie, while those who wish to vet its activities are occasionally physically harassed or detained.

A final detail for flavor: Rep. Amash previously accused Rep. Rogers of withholding documents relating to the NSA’s activities from being distributed with Congress. This kept an entire new class of Representatives in the dark. Oversight!

Top Image Credit: Mark Taylor

Yesterday HP enjoyed a sharp rally following encouraging words from its CEO, the release of its fiscal 2014 guidelines, and promise that more cash would be returned to investors. The company, its CEO Meg Whitman said, is in the midst of real turnaround.

Yes, revenue will decline in fiscal 2014 from fiscal 2013 levels, margins remain an issue, and HP will generate non-GAAP EPS only in the range investors expected, but the company’s statement that it would devote half its fiscal 2014 free cash flow to share buybacks and dividends was welcome.

Previously, HP focused on cutting its debt load. Now, with its liabilities back in order, the company feels free to devote more of its generated cash to rewarding its owners. HP forecasts that it will generate between $6 billion and $6.5 billion in free cash. Half of that will be returned. That works out to between $3 billion and $3.25 billion.

A line from its release, recounting HP’s accomplishments in its fiscal 2013:

Recommitted to smarter innovation, with research and development (R&D) spending expected to be in excess of $3 billion in fiscal 2013.

HP has a gambit in place: New revenue sources will eventually grow and surpass the incomes generated from its shrinking personal computer business and printer business. The Post-PC age isn’t here yet, but HP doesn’t want to wait until those doors close in order to open new, replacement revenue drivers. So, as HP’s software and services top line grows, the goal is to have those dollars replace, and more, the slowing of PC and printer sales.

This means that HP is building new products, and competing with exceptionally cash-rich companies. And it is being outspent. HP yesterday stated that Microsoft was no longer just a partner, but is instead a full competitor. That’s true. Both sell software, services, and devices, often in the same product categories.

Microsoft’s recent fiscal quarter’s research and development tab was $2.8 billion, or roughly what HP spent in a full year.

This at a time when HP is turning its cash from debt retirement to paying investors. You have to ask if that money could be better directed towards aggressive hiring in the divisions that are building the 10 and 20 year internal businesses that will sustain HP in the future.

A caveat to the above: “HP will invest in its product portfolio to accelerate high-growth areas in the New Style of IT. HP plans to reinvest approximately $0.12 per share of savings from its restructuring program into the business in fiscal 2014, including products and solutions such as 3PAR, networking, Vertica and cloud solutions.” That’s smart.

But in a war between HP and rival companies that have more cash, and more mature products, you have to ask if the cash could be better spent.

$280 million. That’s the cost of HP’s quarterly dividend, according to its most recent earnings release. So extrapolated out for a full year, HP spends about $1 billion yearly through dividends. That implies that in fiscal 2014, it will spend more than $2 billion buying back its shares.

That will be a change. In its fiscal third quarter of 2013, HP repurchased a total of $3 million of its own stock. It’s planning to spend twice that much, per day, every day of fiscal 2014. That’s aggressive.

Why would investors cheer the decision? HP is worth $43 billion. Two billion dollars in buybacks per year – assuming HP continues the effort after fiscal 2014 – removes around 4.65 percent of HP’s extant stock from the market. This concentrates earnings and so forth.

But as a  decision it doesn’t solve the company’s core problems: Slipping revenue and small margins.

If Meg Whitman believes in her long-term strategy, as I think she does, spending money to reward investors in the short term feels dissonant. Unless Whitman is worried enough about short-term investor pressure that she feels the company has no choice but to buy off investor discontent with its free cash flow to allow it time to make the structural reforms it needs, the cash could be better used. I doubt that.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Amazon has announced plans to snap up online education company TenMarks. The company offers an online math curriculum currently, and Amazon VP of Kindle Dave Limp says that together, “Amazon and TenMarks intend to develop rich educational content and applications, across multiple platforms, that we think teachers, parents and students will love.”

TenMarks was founded in 2008 and has raised debt funding several times over the last few years. Its most recent raise came in September of 2011, when it snagged $3M from Catamount Ventures and Birchmere.

TenMarks is a service that lets teachers specify math skill levels or concepts to cover and then develop personalized curriculums it calls ‘playlists’. TenMarks Math is a free product  for teachers that it says has been used across ‘tens of thousands’ of schools.

“Amazon and TenMarks share a commitment to developing easy-to-implement solutions for schools and families,”  Rohit Agarwal, TenMarks co-founder said in a statement today. “We currently offer teachers, students and parents access to effective resources to foster the vision of the Common Core curriculum in math, including scalable professional development and tools for connecting with parents. We back this belief with our business model, where teachers can register and access our product for free, while being able to opt in for premium features, if needed. Going forward, we believe Amazon and TenMarks will create significant innovations in the K-12 arena.”

Whatever TenMarks’ business model was, it doesn’t matter much any more as it floats its way into the welcoming folds of Amazon. The acquisition is set to close in the 4th quarter of 2013, and terms were not disclosed.

The move is interesting on a couple of levels, as Amazon flat out says that it will be building its own education-oriented apps for ‘multiple platforms’. I don’t doubt that those platforms will begin with the Kindle Fire and perhaps even Kindle. Amazon has shown little reluctance to ship apps on other platforms in the past, and currently offers Kindle on iOS and ‘stock Android’.

Also, if there’s a competitor to Apple in the tablet space that could make a real play for the educational textbook market, you would be hard pressed not to finger Amazon. Apple has made a significant play for the education market with the iPad — both on the textbook and 1-for-1 school deployment fronts — and Amazon could be looking for a good slice of that with the Kindle and some ‘in-house’ material. Current programs like Amazon’s Kindle Textbook Rental could partner up with bespoke apps to create an attractive package.

Amazon has struggled to get anywhere near the volume of apps into its store that Google or Apple enjoy, but that doesn’t necessarily matter for the education market. What it needs is a core curriculum that it can sell to schools and partnerships with ed-tech vendors that can help it appear more attractive to school purchasing departments.

“Who can look up your Timeline by name?” Anyone you haven’t blocked. Facebook is removing this privacy setting, notifying those who had hidden themselves that they’ll be searchable. It deleted the option from those who hadn’t used it in December, and is starting to push everyone to use privacy controls on each type of content they share. But there’s no one-click opt out of Facebook search.

To be fair, the “Who can look up your Timeline by name?” feature was likely misunderstood by lots of people. At first glance, you might assume it means that strangers can’t find your profile. But that’s incorrect. There have been lots of ways to navigate to your profile, like clicking your name on a photo you’re tagged in, finding your name in a friend’s friend list, or combing through Likes on a mutual friend’s News Feed post.

With the roll out of Graph Search, the avenues for sniffing out someone’s profile grew exponentially. Basically every piece of personal information (and soon the content you post about) could bring you up in a search. If you publicly list that you live in San Francisco, a Graph Search for “People who live in San Francisco” could lead someone to your profile.

It also led people to think search was broken in some cases. If I met someone through a Facebook Group and wanted to friend them, I might search for them and not be able to find them if they had used this privacy setting. But what’s more important are the safety implications.

Keeping this privacy option around gave people a false sense of security. For that reason, it’s wise for Facebook to remove it. But it should have provided an ever stronger universal privacy control for opting out of search, not a slew of weaker ones.

Over the new few months, users who’ve employed the privacy setting to avoid being searched by name will see a big announcement at the top of their Facebook homepage explaining what’s happening. They’ll have to confirm they understand the change before they’re put back into name search and the privacy setting disappears from their options.

After that, the way people can stay hidden is to manually restrict the visibility of each piece of their profile. And that is a bit of a chore. You’d have to go through every piece of personal information in your About section and set its visibility to ‘Friends’ or ‘Only me’. At least Facebook provides a quick way to restrict the visibility of all your old News Feed posts.

Serious privacy aficionados should remember that your current profile picture and cover image are always public, so you’d have to leave those blank if you didn’t want anyone to any idea of who you are beyond your name.

For people with stalkers, though, Facebook may have just gotten a bit more dangerous. Facebook tells me the way to keep a specific person from finding your profile or viewing any of your content is to block them. But what if your stalker just signs up for a fake profile with a new name? Then they could search and find you.

This is where the friction of Facebook’s mission to connect the world, responsibility to make money for its investors, and its duty to keep people’s privacy safe come into conflict.

Facebook could surely offer an option to lock down all your personal information the same way it does for your old posts, but it doesn’t. It could offer a way to opt out of appearing in any type of search results, not just searches for your name, but it doesn’t. It wants your friends to be able to find you. It wants Graph Search to be a comprehensive utility. It wants the engagement and ad views your friendship and News Feed posts generate. But its protecting its access to these things by sacrificing your right to choose just how much your identity is indexed.

Philip Kaplan, AKA “Pud”, AKA The Guy Who Made Being Online In The Late 1990s Bearable has just announced the official launch of DistroKid, a service for musicians to release unlimited tracks to various online music stores for a flat yearly fee. Folks wanting to try it out can upload any song for free without submitting a credit card.

Artists get 100% of the royalties for their music.

“I’m the only employee. I’ve been working on it for a little over a year,” said Kaplan. “The final major piece just went live a couple of days ago (Amazon distribution went live). Which is why I’m opening the service up to a wider audience today.”

An offshoot of Kaplan’s Fandalism the service was eventually spun out into its own project. We first talked about DistroKid in May but it has finally come out of beta.

Kaplan has bootstrapped the company and has seen 16,338 songs uploaded to the service. Kaplan expects to double that this month.

The site’s major competitors are TuneCore and CD Baby, but at $29 per year and $59 per album respectively, DistroKid’s offering is far cheaper.

“The founders of both services have publicly endorsed DistroKid over their own services (which is crazy yo!),” said Kaplan.

For example, CD Baby founder, Derek Sivers, wrote on Hacker News: “This is exactly what I would have created if I didn’t sign a non-compete agreement when I sold CD Baby. I just created an unlimited account on DistroKid and I’m uploading all of my own music in the background as I type. I’ll be sending everyone I know to DistroKid now.”

It’s unique that founders have rallied around Kaplan and his project, especially considering they compete (or competed) directly in his space.

“Conversely, DistroKid makes uploading music to stores more like uploading a video to YouTube or copying a file to your Dropbox — super easy and low friction. You don’t have to think about it — you just upload everything you have, whenever you want,” said Kaplan. “I’m a musician. Sometimes I record band rehearsals, sometimes my live shows, sometimes I make music at night using Garage Band. I have a ton of music. I just wanted a simple service that let me upload every song into stores after I’m done recording it. Current options make that nearly impossible/too expensive/too difficult.”

In this episode of my Foundation video series, I sit down over some craft beers with entrepreneur and Circa founder Matt Galligan. Matt and I discuss the concept of breaking news and Circa’s second version of its news app for iOS and Android.

Matt’s advice for fellow entrepreneurs building companies:

“A good formula is looking at what problem you are solving, and then doing constant repetition of that problem. Any time we had a new feature or idea, we asked whether it solved that initial problem, and made sure we were doing things that fit the equation.”

Kevin Rose is a general partner at Google Ventures. You can watch Kevin’s prior Foundation episode, an interview with famed illusionist David Copperfield, here.

Two years after billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel announced an experiment to pay bright high schoolers to drop out of college for $100,000, the Thiel Fellowship program hasn’t won over education leaders.

“I think the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel’s special program to bribe people to drop out of college,” said former Harvard President Larry Summers at the Nantucket Project conference during his first public appearance since removing himself for consideration for federal chairman.

Never one to shy away from an opinion, Summers said his friend’s ongoing education nonprofit is “meretricious in its impact and the signals that it sends to a broader society.”

Summers isn’t the only one leveling criticism.

“Peter Thiel promised flying cars; we got caffeine spray,” wrote Berkeley researcher and Wall Street Journal columnist, Vivek Wadhwa. For context, remember that Thiel Fellow Ben Yu made headlines for developing a topical caffeine spray (all the fun of coffee without the hassle of ingestion). Wadhwa argues that this isn’t the world-changing startup that many had expected from top-tier entrepreneurs with the connections of Thiel.

In reality, it’s hard to condemn or praise the fellows program yet. In the context of tech investing, Thiel’s fellows are still greenhorns. Even the most successful startups can take years to stabilize. There’s been one successful exit, and the fellows are hard at work tackling 3D printing, biomedical imaging and solar energy.

Of course, It’s unclear whether Thiel ever expected that his fellows would create world-changing products with their $100K. Instead, the project was funded to show that, on average, the cost of tuition could be better spent on building things. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he told TechCrunch when the program first began.

Summers wasn’t convinced.

“I think it’s hard to look back and say it’s a sad thing that Bill Gates dropped out of college — world’s OK, he’s OK. I think it’s a hard thing to say that it’s sad that Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college. But they are extraordinary exceptions, and if any significant number of intellectually able people, of the kind that would have the opportunity to attend top schools are dropping out, I think it’s tragic.”

The criticism, in the end, may be premature.

[Image Credit]

In what is a poignant statement about the state of Android tablet apps, Twitter has announced the first tablet-optimized version for the platform. It’s been 3 years since the iPad hit and Android tablets have blown up in the meantime, but this is the first time they’re being served with a real app.

Twitter says that the app is rolling out on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 first but will roll out to other Android tablets by the end of the year. Twitter says that it’s included some Samsung-specific features like multi-screen view for the in-app browser, a Twitter widget for the home screen that allows basic twitter actions and shows breaking news customized to countries.

There’s also a ‘tweet illustration’ feature that lets you doodle on pictures with Samsung’s ‘S-Pen’.

One of the strengths of the Android platform is that most of its phone apps will run just fine on tablets, due to flexible layouts and encouragement early on from Google to build them that way. But since the early days of Android, the tablet market has exploded and Google has changed its tune. It has begun encouraging developers to produce tablet-specific layouts for their apps, providing for better experiences on larger screens.

Much of the impetus for this is the fact that there are an incredibly small number of apps on Android that are designed with a tablet in mind. On Apple’s iPad, there are thousands.

Tim Cook’s Challenge

Apple CEO Tim Cook has specifically called out the Twitter app for Android before — and on a Samsung tablet no less. At the iPad event last year, Cook showed a slide of the Twitter app on Android and said “It kind of looks like a blown-up smartphone app, because that’s exactly what it is. Compare that to Twitter on iPad.”

Ironically, at the time, Twitter’s iPad app was a unique flower with a cool card-based interface. These days it looks a lot more like its iPhone app and website.

During a Businessweek interview earlier this year, Cook had this to say about the state of Android tablet apps:

I think if I bought [an Android tablet] and used it, and I thought that was a tablet experience, I’m not sure I would ever buy another tablet. The responsiveness isn’t there. The basic touch is really off. The app experience is a stretched-out smartphone kind of experience. It’s not an optimized experience. However, that said, I have always said that the tablet market was going to surpass the PC market. I was saying that well before it was viewed to be sane to say that. It’s clear that we’re 24 months away from that.

The feeling that Android tablet app experiences have lagged far behind those on the iPad may not be a popular one, but it’s accurate. A head-to-head comparison between Android tablet apps and iPad apps from last year makes the problem incredibly visible.

Android-powered devices continue to slice out an increasingly large percentage of the tablet market, but continue to trail hardcore in usage figures. Google needs to encourage more companies to customize their apps specifically for tablets like the Note 10.1 if those usage numbers are going to turn around. Remember, Google makes nothing from Android proper, it makes money if people use those tablets for stuff, like browsing the web and using apps. If Apple continues to maintain what it claims to be an 82% share of web traffic, Android tablets are going to contribute nothing to Google’s bottom line. Honestly, with those kinds of usage numbers, who could blame Twitter for dragging its toes?

Still, Samsung appears to be selling a decent chunk of them, with an estimated 18% of the total market, so it’s a good place to start. Now where are the rest of the Android tablet-optimized apps?

We already know that BlackBerry is considering a sale, with a $4.9 billion dollar bid already having been made. Looks like two other guys might be interested, though: its co-founders, Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin.

Though Lazaridis is a bit more well known and oft credited as the sole founder of BlackBerry, he and Fregin co-founded the company as Research In Motion back in 1984. Fregin acted as the company’s VP of Operations until he retired in 2007; Lazaridis, meanwhile, left his role as Vice Chair of BlackBerry’s board in May, about a year and a half after stepping down as CEO.

The pair have filed a 13D with the SEC, disclosing their interest in taking over the company they started. Here’s the nut of it:

In light of the Issuer’s recent announcement that its board of directors has formed a Special Committee to explore strategic alternatives to enhance value and increase scale, the Reporting Persons are considering all available options with respect to their holdings of the Shares, including, without limitation, a potential acquisition of all the outstanding Shares of the Issuer that they do not currently own, either by themselves or with other interested investors (an “Acquisition”).

Combining their own personal shares, those managed by their corporations, and those held in myriad family trusts, Lazaridis and Fregin already own at least 8% of the company.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean they have a concrete intent to acquire the company — just that they’re considering it. According to the filing, they’ve brought in Goldman Sachs and Centerview Partners LLC to help them weigh their options.

[Photo Credit: textlad on flickr]

New York-based Hubbl, a maker of app discovery and personalization technologies, has been snapped up by mobile ad platform Airpush for $15 million, the companies are announcing today. The two businesses will combine their respective efforts – Hubbl with its personalized native ads technology and Airpush with its ecosystem of some 120,000 mobile apps – to create a new, native advertising platform for mobile.

Hubbl originally grew out of the efforts of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012 finalist Hmmm, which was originally working a startup in the social networking space before pivoting to app discovery. The company found app discovery to be a tough business as well, however, and had been transitioning toward its B2B offerings more so than its consumer-facing mobile app in recent months. Hubbl was also challenged in raising a round, from what we’ve heard, with investors spooked by the app discovery market as a whole, despite Hubbl hitting the usual milestones that would have otherwise led to at least a seed stage deal.

But given that the full team will now be able to continue their efforts within the folds of a larger organization (Airpush is over 160 people) after going from bootstrap to acquisition, it’s not exactly a terrible outcome for everyone involved.

Hubbl’s co-founders Archana Patchirajan and Kushal M. Choksi will remain in New York, while the majority of its 25-person staff will stay in India. They will operate somewhat independently from Airpush itself – that is, they’re still continuing their product efforts as they would have otherwise, for the most part. This wasn’t just a talent acquisition in other words.

Nifti, a Google Ventures-backed shopping startup which first debuted its price tracking and alerts service this summer, is today making the move to mobile. The company is launching its iOS application by the same name, while also offering a slightly different take from what Nifti does online. On the web, the company’s idea is one of a smarter wishlist where you can track historical price changes over time, and be notified when the price drops below a price point you designate yourself.

Meanwhile, though Nifti’s mobile app also includes price history and tracking, it’s also about offering you an easy-to-access portal where you can shop and compare items across different stores without having to continually switch between different shopping apps or mobile websites.

Explains co-founder Nathan Sharp, the new product still serves Nifti’s larger purpose. “At it’s core, the Nifti app is still about making it as easy for a shopper to act on price changes as it is for merchants to change prices,” he says, noting that the release has been timed to hit ahead of the holiday shopping season, where prices can often fluctuate wildly.

After installation, app users will be able to access a “Stores” tab where they’ll see in real-time what other Nifti users are tracking at the over 700 retailers the company supports –  a number which is up from the 400 it was watching earlier this summer. This makes the app something of a user-generated catalog of popular items, which is not an entirely different concept from a number of trendy shopping apps on the App Store today, like Wanelo, for a representative example.

But where Wanelo and others tend to be focused on fashion and home goods (and heavily used by younger women), Nifti is not limited to a particular demographic in theory, given its broad support for anything you can bookmark from the web using the browser bookmarklet, as well as its massive list of supported retailers.

Nifti is also a bit more practical in nature than the current crop of mobile shopping apps are, which are sometimes more about aspirational favoriting than real-world conversions. Services like Pinterest are slowly moving into this area too, having recently launched price alerts and now promotional pins which the company hopes will push its users from just “collecting” and sharing to actually making purchases.

But Nifti’s app, on the other hand, is giving you the data and other information you need to push you through and take that final step. Not only does it track the history of an item’s pricing over time, you can now use the app to sort items by date, price, or total discount to see where all the best deals are right now. And while you’re browsing through a store, you can also click a plus sign to begin to track any item found on that retailer’s website within Nifti’s app.

Elsewhere in the app, you can view your wishlist – or watchlist, rather – of saved items, where you can quickly tell whether prices are trending up or down thanks to brightly colored red and green buttons with percentage changes and new prices next to old, also color-coded for easy reference.

The company currently generates revenue through affiliate deals with the retailers, but over time it wants to broaden those relationships to help retailers better understand their potential customers’ behavior. “We want digital marketing to be less about grabbing your attention, and more about understanding your intention–and that starts with knowing exactly what you want and how much you want to pay,” Sharp explains.

The app was quietly released on iTunes earlier this month for testing purposes, and is currently climbing the “Lifestyle” charts on iTunes where it’s closing in on a top 50 position today. (It’s #62 at the time of writing, per App Annie’s data).

Nifti’s mobile release comes at a time when one of its top competitors, Decide.com, has exited the market. Ebay acquired the company, which had raised $16.5 million, in September. Decide had been doing much of the same thing in terms of watching historical price drops over time in order to alert users as to when is the right time to buy. But the company fumbled by starting to charge users for the service too soon – before it had generated significant consumer adoption. It was having trouble scaling its user numbers as a paid service, and was not generating the revenues it would have needed to continue to scale.

While investors at the time told us that everyone made money on the deal, and it was a “positive outcome,” there was little talk of specific deal terms because it wasn’t a sizable kind of exit investors want to tout. So Nifti’s decision to remain free for consumers is a good one – especially as it moves to mobile where paid apps are generally on their way out.

Unfortunately for Nifti and apps like it, not all retailers have been quick to adapt their sites for the influx of mobile users. That can leave users who are trying to checkout frustrated with the experience to the point of giving up and abandoning their shopping cart. But assuming Nifti takes off, the company could begin to work with retailers to better streamline and optimize mobile checkout for consumers further down the road. However, Sharp says that for now, checkout will have to take place on retailer websites, but they’re working on making the experience more seamless for end users so they could checkout in the app itself. Ultimately, Nifti plans to offer users the choice of either app or web.

Refusing to pipe down today, Aereo has just confirmed that a federal judge has ruled in favor of Aereo in its legal battle with Hearst Stations in Boston, one of three ongoing lawsuits between the streaming TV startup and major network broadcasters, the other in New York and most recently Utah.

Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton issued a ruling that denies the plaintiff a motion for preliminary injunction, which would force Aereo to cease business in Boston while the case is being evaluated. This would be a terrible outcome for Aereo, which the company has already avoided in New York.

Hearst, then, could not prove likelihood of success based on merits or that irreparable harm would be done to the company without this “drastic remedy,” in legal speak. But this in no way means that the fight in Boston is over.

In fact, Aereo was denied the motion it filed to have the case against Hearst brought back to New York under Judge Nathan, who had ruled favorably for Aereo in the past.

Here’s what Aereo founder and CEO Chet Kanojia had to say about the win:

Today’s decision, coupled with the decisions in favor of Aereo in the Southern District of New York (July 11, 2013) and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (April 1, 2013 and July 16, 2013), shows that when you comply not only with the letter, but the spirit of the law, justice will prevail. Today’s victory belongs to the consumer and today’s decision, makes clear that that there is no reason that consumers should be limited to 1950s technology to access over-the-air broadcast television. Using Aereo, a consumer can simply and easily use an individual remote antenna and cloud DVR via the Internet to record and watch-over-the air programs.

This comes on the heels of an earlier report, which claims that major broadcasters plan to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review lower court rulings that have been in favor of Aereo, allowing the startup to continue offering access to those network’s free over the air signals.

So far, these same broadcasters have lost in the Second Circuit Appeals Court, where officials refused to reconsider a case after upholding a ruling by district Judge Allison Nathan, who previously denied a preliminary injunction in New York.

The petition may go through considering that an Aereo-like service, Film On X, is losing against broadcasters in Los Angeles. The Supreme Court may decide to step in if multiple district courts are issuing different opinions.

Here’s the ruling:

Aereo v Hearst

[IMG courtesy of TVGuide]