Category: Tech news

Less than a month after browser-toolbar and mobile startup Conduit‘s Conduit Connect division merged with Perion to take its place on Nasdaq, the company is making another change to its business. Today Conduit announced that it will be discontinuing Wibiya, the social browser toolbar service that it acquired in 2011 for $45 million, as it shifts further away from its toolbar business.

In a letter mailed to customers that is living at this link — but which is not yet publicly accessible through the company’s actual site — Wibiya’s founders, Daniel Tal, Avi Smila and Dror Ceder — write that the company will be discontinuing its service by the end of the year.

“Most of” Wibiya’s team and innovations are getting integrated into other Conduit operations, they note. No explanation for the streamlining in that letter. “Joining a larger company is never easy,” they write. “and we learned a number of invaluable lessons along the way.” Conduit is offering Wibiya customers three months of Conduit Mobile, which costs $39/month.

Meanwhile, in an internal email that we have obtained, Ronen Shilo, the co-founder of Conduit who helped engineer the company’s reverse takeover of Perion in September, puts the decision down to changes that Conduit is making in the wake of its big corporate move to split the business back in July.

That move divided the company in two, with one part focusing on its mobile and engagement business and run by Shilo; and the other, Client Connect, merging with Perion. It was into Client Connect that Wibiya had gone, along with Conduit’s other toolbar business; together they were merging with Perion brands like Incredimail (unified messaging app), Smilebox (photo sharing) and the SweetIM (an IM app). (Client Connect is currently run by Josh Wine.)

In short, Conduit is moving out of the toolbar business, or at least making it a less strong focus:

“As you know, the decision to separate the company reflects a newly focused objective for Conduit – including a shift in product strategy – which has implications beyond Client Connect. One of those is that maintaining Wibiya as a free-standing business no longer fits where we are headed,” he notes. “We acquired Wibiya as a complementary solution for our toolbar business; they delivered publisher solutions within a site, while our toolbars did that outside the site. Now that the toolbar business is no longer a focus, it’s clear that Wibiya, as a business unit, lacks a strategic role for us.”

The Wibiya business let publishers integrate toolbars that let users do things like share links on social networks; or translate pages into different languages; or offer free apps, games and video galleries — all in the name of getting users to spend more time on the site.

Wibiya — an Israeli company founded in 2008 — was conspicuously absent from both $1.4 billion Conduit’s communications when it was splitting into two July, and its reverse takeover of Perion in September. At the time of the Wibiya acquisition in 2011, we reported that its toolbars were on around 120,000 sites, reaching some 200 million unique users. Those numbers have grown but not by much: it’s now used by some 150,000 publishers reaching some 285 million uniques.

It’s not exactly clear, but it may have been that this business simply was not generating meaningful enough revenue for the company. Also, it wouldn’t be the first toolbar to shut down after getting acquired. The same thing happened to website toolbar creator Meebo about a year after Google bought it.

Both Wibiya letters, to customers and to employees, are below.

Dear employees,

As you know, the decision to separate the company reflects a newly focused objective for Conduit – including a shift in product strategy – which has implications beyond Client Connect. One of those is that maintaining Wibiya as a free-standing business no longer fits where we are headed.

We acquired Wibiya as a complementary solution for our toolbar business; they delivered publisher solutions within a site, while our toolbars did that outside the site. Now that the toolbar business is no longer a focus, it’s clear that Wibiya, as a business unit, lacks a strategic role for us.

However, there is great technology, human experience and capabilities within Wibiya, and we’re in the process of integrating many of these into the existing Conduit businesses. This will enable us to use much of Wibiya’s technology and skills in our existing and planned products. Wibiya is comprised of a strong team of talented individuals from various disciplines and we look forward to finding them exciting positions within Conduit.

We will carefully and thoughtfully wind the brand down between now and the end of this year, as part of our overall preparation for life after the separation.

This decision has not been easy for Wibiya’s founders or myself but as always Dror, Daniel and Avi are true leaders and product visionaries and understand the current situation and where we’re headed. They will remain with us to ensure the process is successful and I personally intend to remain close to them, in active dialogue, as they figure out their plans.

I want to personally thank the Wibiya founders and employees for their contribution to Conduit and look forward to seeing their future efforts come to fruition, whether within Conduit or elsewhere.

Ronen

With mobile publishers moving away from paid apps and toward in-app purchases in order to monetize on mobile, there’s an increased need to generate more revenue out of existing install bases. That’s an area which mobile app engagement platform Appoxee has been focused on since its founding in early 2011, and today it’s announcing an additional $1.8 million in seed funding to help it continue its growth.

The round was led by U.S.-based hedge fund Lazarus Israel Opportunities Fund and Mosche Lichtman, who previously served as President of Microsoft’s R&D center in Israel, and is now joining Appoxee’s board. Existing investors including Cyhawk Ventures and Oryzn Capital also participated in the round, bringing Appoxee’s total funding to $2.4 million to date.

The additional investment is aimed at helping the startup, which has so far seen traction in its home base of Israel and elsewhere in Europe, take on the U.S. market. To that end, Appoxee plans on opening a San Francisco office by year-end. In the U.S., the company will have compete with a variety of companies like Urban Airship, Facebook acquisition Parse, and dozens of others.

Explains CEO Itay Levy, his product is differentiated from many operating in the space by the methods it uses to help app publishers create their campaigns. Appoxee primarily targets product managers and marketing managers – that is, the business side of app publishers. After signing up for the platform, instead of having to figure out how to use the system to meet their needs, Appoxee instead asks the customer about their goals. Then, working backwards from those goals, it helps the publisher build automated campaigns whose focus is on increasing retention and in-app purchases.

Says Levy, in some cases it will increase in-app purchases by 20%, but they’ve even seen others where they increased by 100%. The company now touts thousands of developers and apps using the platform, including names like Playtika, Social Point, Sygic, and Win.com, to name a few. In 2011, Appoxee was installed on 3 million end user devices, and by 2012 that number grew to 60 million, he tells us. Today, it’s at 275 million installs, and is sending over half a billion push notification messages per month.

While Levy declined to speak about revenue specifics, he would say that revenue is up by 800% since the beginning of the year and is still growing. The company today offers a free tier with unlimited push messaging up to 250,000 users, then launches into premium services beginning at $500/month.

The funding, in part, will go toward product enhancements, mainly those that will provide more automation in terms of the campaigns being run, as well as other optimizations. “We want to allow engagement and more automated. As a publisher, it will be very easy to create an effective campaign. Some of the things that we’re doing today can be automated,” Levy says.

Also in the works, Appoxee plans to grow its Tel Aviv-based team with hires on the engineering and product side, while looking for more sales and marketing hires in San Francisco. By next year, they hope to have doubled their 15-person team.

Getting a book published used to require something called “an agent” who talked to a “publishing house” who, in turn, hired a “printer” to make a “hardback” or “paperback” version of your words. Tablo.io is just another in the long line of startups aimed at relegating those things to the deep, dark past.

Tablo is an Australian company founded by Ash Davies and Andrew McIntosh, two design hackers who wanted to grab a piece of the epub pie. Their product has been funded to the tune of $20,000 by Australian accelerator Angelcube.

There are two publishing methods: you can cut and paste your chapters one at a time into the WYSIWYG interface or simply upload iBooks-compatible epub files. The system then makes them available in your web browser or, for an extra fee, in the Amazon and iBooks bookstores. The company saw $12,000 in revenue in its first month after launch and they have 150 authors from 30 countries signed up for the service.

“Creating a book with Tablo is like creating a blog post with WordPress. You can create your book in the cloud with full control over your design, media and content,” said Davies. “You can preview your books in the browser, collaborate with editors or friends and publish to bookstores with a single click.”

The service also lets you embed books onto websites and you can read them on any mobile browser.

“Publishing my own eBook sucked – it took me months to wrestle with book conversions, file formats and publishing contracts,” said Davies. “As a blogger I was so used to being able to type something and click publish, but nothing like this existed in the eBook world.”

The company is ramping up its U.S. presence and is looking for local funding. Because both of the creators are designers, the whole thing has a simple, WordPress-esque feel to it, similar to sites like pressbooks.com, allowing bloggers and other online media ninjas to build books without all the old-fashioned clutter of “book stores” and “editors.”

The latest Neftlix update for iOS 7 finally added full AirPlay support to the app, something that many probably assumed it already had. But it also appears to have broken the feature, which allowed it to connect directly to TVs with Apple’s HDMI AV adapter.

Some users have been crying foul about the error, claiming that Apple and Netflix were trying to force people to buy Apple TVs in order to use AirPlay. We reached out to Netflix about the error and they ensured us that this is just a bug that is affecting a ‘small percentage’ of customers, and that they’re working on fixing it.

A search of Twitter shows that there are quite a few users running up against the issue over the past couple of days. Here’s the error that one user, Kari Knudson, had been seeing:

So, if you’re seeing a similar error, just know that it’s not a grand conspiracy of some sort, just an unfortunate bug. Hopefully Netflix will get the update rolled out soon.

In the meantime, an Apple support thread on the matter suggests that turning AirPlay off completely will force video to output to the HDMI adapter, letting you watch video the way you want while Netflix rolls out a fix.

Just in time for frenzied family trips to the mall — i.e. the holiday season — wearable tech maker Filip Technologies is preparing to take its first product to market, a GPS and mobile-enabled watch that keeps children and their parents in communication. After three years in product development, AT&T has partnered with Filip Technologies as the device’s network provider, distributor, and billing service.

Exact pricing and service plans will be announced in the coming weeks, Filip Technologies CEO Jonathan Peachey said. Although the final retail price on the FiLIP watch has not been set, it will not exceed $200. The monthly voice and data plan will be less than that, Peachey added, the aim being to not burden the average family’s monthly mobile budget.

The colorful two-button watch, worn by the child and hooked up to an app on a parent’s phone, can make and receive calls to the parent. It also uses a combination of GPS, cell tower location, and WiFi triangulation to act as a locator, and there’s an emergency button that begins ambient sound recording and connects the child with emergency services. And although smartwatches are so hot right now, it’s wearable primarily because kids are prone to losing things not attached to their bodies.

The FiLIP watch is aimed at children 11 and younger, given that many parents don’t want to buy their kids a cell phone until they’re a bit older. Although there are GPS devices and phones with limited calling capabilities targeted at children on the market, it’s a diversity of features that Filip Technologies is hoping will set its product apart.

“You need a combination of location and voice,” Peachey said. “I can’t point to a product that does the features we do in a wearable product.”

This summer has marked a few milestones in the development of the product. FiLIP passed its FCC certification in late July, making it the first wearable mobile device with full two-way voice capability to do so. Earlier that month, Peachey joined the Filip team from Virgin Group, where he was the CEO of Virgin Management USA and later an advisor to Sir Richard Branson.

It took about two years of engineering effort to get the product to a place where it could enter FCC testing, Peachey said. During that time the engineering team built a large scale prototype and then spent nine months shrinking it down to the size it is today.

An official drop date isn’t set yet, but the device will land in stores in the next few months.

Has Google done enough annoying stuff to drive users elsewhere in search of other, less privacy-trampling search engines? Security focused rival DuckDuckGo apparently got a post-Snowden bump, as some users switched to punish Google for participation in the NSA’s Prism data collection program. So there would seem to be a degree of scope for user churn away from search category leaders. Perhaps more scope for alternative search engines than in a long time.

Add to that, privacy-trampling isn’t the only complaint people have about Google either. Its penchant for self-focused spam by seeding organic search results with its own vertical services has drawn ire in Europe. The European Commission is currently undertaking an antitrust probe to consider whether Google’s search results are biased – i.e. by the company injecting its own content at the top of results, and pushing down rivals’. ‘Don’t be evil’ never looked so sardonic.

It’s Mountain View’s penchant for larding search results with increasing amounts of spam (its own, and paying advertisers’) that Hong Kong based startup Verbase — which currently bills itself as “a search engine with clean and pure results” — reckons gives it a chance to inch into a market so sewn up by Google that few would bother to even try.

Antoine Sorel Neron, founder and CEO of Verbase, cites a 2012 Pew study that suggests nine percent of search engine users aren’t always finding what they’re looking for when they go a-hunting data on the Internet. Of course, that still leaves a massive majority — 91% — who are getting the info they seek from Google et al so presumably aren’t crying out for alternatives.

Indeed, the same Pew report goes on to note:

 Asked which search engine they use most often, 83% of search users say Google.  The next most cited search engine is Yahoo, mentioned by just 6% of search users.

Verbase is clearly not afraid of a daunting challenge, then. That said, Neron stresses his search engine is not actually trying to compete directly with Google. Because, well, that doesn’t make a lot of business sense when so many users (apparently) remain satisfied with Google. But he does believe there is a niche to be carved out for a different approach to search — to try to serve that fractional minority who purportedly aren’t finding what they’re after with the current search tools.

“With Google, you might see a whole page of ads before you even get to any organic search results,” says Neron. “It actually makes for a biased search experience and it’s to the detriment of users.”

How exactly is Verbose different to other search engines? It’s taking a crowdsourced approach to improve the relevance and type of search results it returns. Verbase is using Yahoo’s API to provide initial search results but then adds its own special (de-biasing) sauce on top in the form of an algorithm designed to filter out spam. Plus, it’s also factoring in its own users’ interactions to rate search results and (hopefully) improve relevance. This crowdsourced element should improve over time, says Neron.

“We don’t need to be as big or as publicly held as Google,” he adds, pointing out that crowd-powered vertical search engines are already successful for products such as YouTube, Google Maps and Waze (albeit, all those products are now owned by Mountain View).

Verbase users can directly rate search results, by clicking on the Verbox button next to a result and making their vote on its relevance/usefulness (choosing from a word list, which also displays other users’ preferences as percentages as an additional crowdpowered guide).

The search engine also lets users filter search manually by selecting categories after they search to help narrow down results — which helps feed more human-powered relevance data into Verbase’s own database, so it can keep improving.

Users can also create content for particular search queries themselves (via the Bases tab), and sign up to live online chat events that could be attached to search queries (as another way to locate sought-after info).

The basic idea for the crowdsourced element is to supplement algorithmic search with human-centric content creation and discovery, says Neron. ”We provide more than one way to find what you’re looking for — allowing you to engage with information that’s not just a page of links,” he tells TechCrunch.

However, Verbase is by no means the first to think of crowdsourcing as a mean to improve search algorithms. One high profile earlier attempt that springs to mind — the Wikia Search project (backed by Jimmy Wales) — deadpooled in 2009, after just over a year trying and failing to make it stick. Bottom line: you need an awful lot of users to make crowd-powered search fly.

So, unsurprisingly, the Bases and Chatbases aspects of Verbase look very threadbare indeed at this early stage in its development. Verbase launched in beta at the start of this year.

Discussing usage, Neron says it fielded some 50,000 unique searches last month. With spam and adverts to be kept out of results in the short term, he’s hoping it can keep pushing that figure up to reach a point where it can start to generate useful crowd-powered results, and give its users some genuinely relevant social search results (rather than just a few Google+ pages, a la Google).

Neron notes that Google’s marketshare of the search engine space has been flat for a few years. And then of course there’s PRISM- and privacy-gate to perhaps make people think about alternatives. Not that Verbase is billing itself as a privacy-focused search engine, like DuckDuckGo. Rather it’s playing the anti-spam, anti-advertising card for now, while it waits to see if it can accrue enough users to build its Mechanical Turk, crowd-powered engines.

Verbase’s business model will require ads to be incorporated into results in future — Neron is up front about that. But, in the meantime, its users get to enjoy an ad-free search life. And when adverts do come to Verbase they will be kept entirely separate from search results, says Neron, likely sectioned off to the right-hand side in a separate pane, rather than being allowed to contaminate the main feed.

Answering the charge that it’s a hopeless task to wade into a pool that already contains such a vast, well-resourced competitor, Neron is upbeat. ”A search engine is a very viable effort if it’s made in the right way because this market is so big,” he says, adding: “It’s a huge market opportunity. All of the major competition are putting ads at the top of results.”

Albeit, he needs to be upbeat, having put in around $120,000 of his own money to fund Verbase since development work started, back in 2011. If the fledgling search startup can keep attracting users, he says it will likely look to raise external funding next year.

To hammer home Neron’s point about ‘spam free’, here’s the results Verbase returned when I searched for the following query: ‘what is Bitcoin’:

And here are the results I could see on my laptop screen (i.e. as above, without scrolling down to see more results) when performing the same search query on Google:

Google spammy? Absolutely.

The question is whether enough people notice such a strong smell of spam issuing from Mountain View that they go seeking alternative search tools. Verbase will certainly be hoping that a disgruntled nine percent end up knocking on its door.

Internet access is astonishingly expensive in some parts of the world. The International Telecommunications Union estimates that fixed broadband costs 30 percent of the average monthly wage within the developing world [PDF]. To address this, Google, Facebook, USAID and a host of top-tier tech companies have teamed up to make the Internet universally affordable. The newly launched Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) aims to achieve the UN development goals of keeping Internet access costs below 5 percent of monthly income worldwide.

Unlike Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet access nonprofit, Internet.org, the Alliance will focus on policy-driven solutions, including “innovative allocation of spectrum, promoting infrastructure sharing, and increasing transparency and public participation in regulatory decisions.”

According to the ITU, there are roughly 2.7 billion people online. More details about the alliance are available on Google’s blog.

And in this week’s episode of absolutely bizarre behavior from Fox News, we bring you BATS, officially known as big area touchscreens.

The media outlet responsible for bringing fair and balanced news into our lives has today released a video that shows off the network’s brand-new Fox News Deck studio, a room filled with video walls and giant 55-inch touchscreens that will henceforth deliver the news to Fox News viewers, along with Shepard Smith.

Why, you ask?

To deal with “the new reality” as Senior Executive Producer Kim Rosenberg puts it, which includes “smartphones, apps, the internet, your computer.” As viewers change, so too must Fox News, and the only way to deal with the constant presence of the Internet is to build it right into the studio.

According to the promotional video disguised as an interview, the remodel has lasted almost a month and the team has been training for “weeks” in order to learn how to use “new cutting edge computer programs” that are capable of showing three or even four tweets at a time.

Some of the new tools include a 38-foot video wall, which Smith can manipulate with a Wii-style remote, as well as another large display wall that shows tweets under investigation, and “confirmed” tweets.

But the real stars of the new Fox News Deck are the BATS, short for “big area touchscreens.” These Windows 8-powered computers are constantly monitored and used to surf for and confirm news, which is then chosen by Smith to stream live on television.

Why these computers need to be 55-inch touchscreens remains unclear. But will the information specialists working on them be exhausted after a days work? Absolutely.

John Underkoffler would be proud.

This weekend we learned that President Barack Obama’s NSA surveillance panel, built at least in theory to vet our intelligence activities and weigh their performance against the right of privacy, went on hiatus after the government shutdown froze its funds. It was an emblematic moment. As a nation we couldn’t even keep the farce of oversight in play long enough to have it ultimately disappoint us.

A pattern has become clear, regarding the surveillance activities of both the United States and the United Kingdom, most especially when it comes to their keeping tabs on their own citizenry: Clarity with the opacity of wet mud.

Senator Corker of Tennessee complained directly to the president last month that while he had received some information that proved useful, classified briefings that the NSA held for Congress “have generally been limited to simply discussing the facts underlying specific public disclosures and have not provided a fulsome accounting of the totality of surveillance activities conducted by the federal government, and in particular, by the NSA.”

Corker went on to state that he regularly learns more “new revelations” about the activities of the United States’ surveillance apparatus in newspapers than in provided briefings. This, he notes dryly, means that Congress is left to decipher why “prior briefings provided by the Executive Branch did not cover the material contained in these articles.” In other words, why the hell aren’t you keeping us in the loop?

Senator Corker is the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee. In a short blurb before his letter, the Senator linked to the damning report in the Washington Post that the NSA violated its privacy rules thousands of times each year. The implication is that he hadn’t been told.

Former Member of Parliament (MP) Chris Huhne recently wrote in The Guardian that the public would not be surprised at how much MPs know, but instead by how little. (Huhne departed from Parliament following a bit of skullduggery, which is worth reading up on but irrelevant in this context.) A short excerpt from his column (Note: The GCHQ is like the British NSA):

When it comes to the secret world of GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA), the depth of my “privileged information” has been dwarfed by the information provided by Edward Snowden to the Guardian. The cabinet was told nothing about GCHQ’s Tempora or the NSA’s Prism, or about their extraordinary capability to vacuum up and store personal emails, voice contact, social networking activity and even internet searches.

He goes on to note that even during his time on the National Security Council he did not learn of either program.

Final oversight of the government rests in the hands of its people, regardless of who currently stands elected. However, as we’ve seen several times in recent months, the government isn’t too keen on the public learning much. Aside from directly lying, the United States and the United Kingdom have taken such courageous steps as detaining the spouse of a journalist and threatening and intimidating him in the process, as well as blocking folks from filming outside the datacenter in Utah that it is building to greatly expand its storage capability in order to store more collected digital information.

So the U.S. Congress isn’t kept informed of the NSA’s activities, and Parliament is hardly kept abreast of the GCHQ’s surveillance work. That, and the public is blocked and generally harassed when they try to uncover information that could help them be functionally informed, and therefore have a say in their own government.

Oversight? Out of sight.

Top Image Credit: Medill DC

There are more angel-backed companies in the US than ever trying to capitalize on a favorable economic market for startups. In 2012, more than 1,500 startups received a round of angel funding. As these companies mature and look for the next stage of financing, venture capital investors are adapting to the new Series A landscape.

And something else is happening.

We’ve noticed a significant new trend in our ongoing effort to analyze the fast growth in early-stage funding over recent years. Angel-backed companies are taking extra long to close Series A rounds, according to our latest funding data from CrunchBase. Venture is more available than ever for angel companies, as we covered recently. It’s been angel investors who have reduced the number of deals and amount of money they’re putting in versus 2012.

Meanwhile, many companies can choose to wait longer. They are raising larger angel rounds early on, as we’ve also covered, allowing them to last longer without going to VCs. They can also secretly raise additional angel money via convertible notes, too. And many companies have more ways than ever to monetize what they’re creating on web and mobile — they can bootstrap and push for the terms they want, or even self-finance their growth.

Angel-to-A deals that closed in 2012 took an average of 434 days between securing an initial angel investment and closing the first venture round. So far this year, Angel-to-A companies that closed a Series A round in 2013 had taken 526 days on average between the two funding rounds, an increase of over 21%.

The funding gap is the largest since 2009, in the midst of the economic downturn. However, not all investors are concerned with this apparent Angel-to-A lag. Looking at the largest angel firms both in deal number and size, we found that many top firms have quickly and consistently followed up their portfolio angel investments with venture rounds. If you broadly define angel groups to include both accelerators and non-accelerator angels, Techstars and Lerer Ventures‘ companies managed to find venture investors within a year on average. Y Combinator had a much slower pace at 506 average days, but their relatively small angel rounds have produced Series A rounds of over $21M on average. That Angel-to-A size increase of about 45x is nearly double that of any other major angel investor.

Despite the longer wait for Series A money, in the first three quarters of 2013 the number of angel-to-venture deals has actually risen considerably, suggesting venture firms are still eager to fund angel startups. The difference may be that Series A deals are being made at later stages and looking more like traditional Series B rounds as we pointed out earlier.

As always, download the CrunchBase September 2013 Data Export and let us know what you find.

[Image: Flickr]

There was a bit of a user uproar when it came to light that browser advertising blocking service Adblock Plus was actually providing some advertisers, like Google, the opportunity to show some ads despite installation of its software through a whitelist program. It seemed like a straight-up commercial play, with Adblock Plus acting as a gatekeeper for precious users and charging big ad companies like Google money to bypass its own restrictions.

Now, the company has revealed some of the info behind its program, shedding light on some statistics in an effort to get more transparent about what the whitelist is and how it works. In a blog post, Adbock Plus PR Manager Ben Williams notes that over 50 percent of whitelist applicants are rejected for not meeting the company’s criteria, and that over 90 percent of the 148 formal whitelist proposals (final stage before acceptance) they’ve received have been submitted without any cost, as in without a revenue upside to Adblock Plus.

Williams reminds readers that Adblock Plus began as a way to help advertisers and users, by providing guidelines on how to make ads less annoying and intrusive, and whitelisting ads that met those criteria as a way of developing best practices. But that’s not the news; the numbers behind the program are the news.

In total, Williams says Adblock Plus has fielded 777 applications for whitelisting since its incorporation in 2011. Only 9.5 percent of those applications ever result in whitelisted ads, but a huge chunk of those are eliminated right away as they’re fake or incorrect. Finally, even if the paperwork is done correctly, still more than 50 percent get rejected. But Adblock’s approval queue is a process, he says, and as such they work with advertisers to bring ads into compliance.

The blog post makes no specific mention of Google or other major advertisers, but it does claim that the vast majority of whitelisting happens without money changing hands, and claims that the money it does take in is necessary in order to maintain its constant monitoring and review process for whitelisted domains and their adherence to its good behavior policies.

In case you’re not aware, these are the principles in brief that Adblock Plus follows in determining whether an ad is whitelist-appropriate:

1. Acceptable Ads are not annoying.

2. Acceptable Ads do not disrupt or distort page content.

3. Acceptable Ads are transparent with us about being an ad.

4. Acceptable Ads are effective without shouting at us.

5. Acceptable Ads are appropriate to the site or tweet that we are on.

There’s also an entire section on the site devoted to the subject of acceptable ads. Of course, this doesn’t answer all the questions users might have around commercial relationships between Adblock Plus and large organizations, but it does provide a lot more transparency about the business and how it’s run.

Mobile payments company Square is announcing today the opening of a larger, expanded San Francisco-based headquarters. In addition, the company announced plans for new offices in both New York and Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada — a location that could help the company take advantage of recently laid off employees from beleaguered Waterloo-based company Blackberry which saw massive layoffs just last month.

Square moved into its new corporate headquarters at 1455 Market Street in San Francisco last week, it says, and as of today, the offices are open to visitors. The office is more than 150,000 square feet, which is three times the size of the company’s previous space in the San Francisco Chronicle building. Meanwhile, the number of worldwide employees have doubled year-over-year, going from approximately 300 in 2012 to nearly 600 at present, says Square.

The growth has led Square to seek out new office space outside the Bay Area, in locations that are both strategic for Square’s growth as well as areas where engineering talent can be found. In New York, the company has signed a lease for an office in the SoHo area, and plans to triple its engineering presence there within one year. The Canadian office – Square’s first permanent office in the country – will open in 2014.

Square also has offices in Atlanta and Tokyo, the company notes.

Square Wanted To Be A New York Company

A few weeks ago, Square CEO Jack Dorsey hosted a roundtable at Columbia University to weigh in on recent developments in smartphone tech, Square’s future, and specifically New York as a suitable spot for startup growth.

At the time, he noted that Square Wallet in particular would play a crucial role in the company’s growth. As with all new payment schemes, however, Dorsey said he believes that ushering in a new sort of consumer behavior will take a broad stretch of time.

“We believe we can shorten that time frame significantly with Square Wallet,” said Dorsey.

He also explained that the direction of Square Wallet is in line with the direction of all technology, in that technology is slowly fading to the background and pushing focus on the people using it. “With Square Wallet, you walk up to the counter and confirm your name and you’re done,” said Dorsey. “You’re paying with who you are, and all you need is you.”

Where outside innovations are concerned, Dorsey said he believes that Apple’s new fingerprint reader is a slight boon to the evolution of payments on mobile. “Anytime there is better protection on the forefront, to even enter the device — people have a lot of sensitive information on their phones — that will help with changing behavior towards payments,” he said.

However, Dorsey doesn’t believe that the implementation of finger-print-level security is squarely focused on payments. Rather, building security into the phone is there to protect the entire package, not just to facilitate or protect a single part of the phone.

Dorsey also pre-announced the NY expansions then, revealing that Square will be growing the New York offices by three times by the end of the year, a plan he calls “aggressive.” He noted also that he felt that Square belongs in New York for a number of reasons.

“We actually tried to start the company in New York almost five years ago, but we weren’t able to hire the engineers and designers we needed to at the time,” said Dorsey.

In his perspective, New York had more of a marketing problem than a talent shortage, as it seemed that engineers and designers weren’t meeting in a single place on a regular basis. In other words, there was a lack of community. Luckily for New York, Dorsey says that isn’t a problem anymore, which is a theme we’ve seen play out elsewhere.

For example, Bonobos moved its team to New York from San Francisco in March.

“This city has something very different from Silicon Valley,” said Dorsey. “New Yorkers are facing different issues, and the people in New York are actually living the problems we are trying to fix.”

Dorsey wasn’t entirely clear on the type of hires he’s looking for to fill out the rapidly expanding SoHo office in New York, but he did mention that the company will be “heavily investing” in bringing more women on board as they offer a “different perspective” for Square.

Exiles is hoping to build the online home for sports fans who aren’t rooting for the local team. The company hasn’t gotten much press in the 18 months since it launched, but according to co-founder and president Peter Ragone, it’s ready to expand and start making money.

The idea, Ragone said, is to replicate the hometown experience for “out-of-market” fans. In other words, if you’re rooting for the Giants or the 49ers and you live in San Francisco, you can head over to any sports bar and have a good time with other fans. But if you’re out here and your heart belongs to a New York team, well, you probably feel a bit more isolated.

So Exiles has created sites like Yanks in Exile, where fans can have that communal experience online. For example, if you go to the Yanks in Exile site now, you can browse and discuss news stories, share fan stories of your own, respond to community prompts and surveys, and more. Fans can also form local chapters that host in-person meetups.

The company’s founding team is drawing on some unusual experience (at least for the tech world) to address this problem. CMO Theo Yedinsky led social media efforts for former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (who’s now lieutenant governor of California) while Ragone has has a long résumé in politics, including working as Newsom’s press secretary and running a “boutique public affairs firm” that was involved in the recent campaign of New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio. (Their third co-founder, CEO Leigh Goldstein, has a more traditional tech background,spent spent eight years at eBay and founded his own mobile startup Discovereez)

By the way, the aforementioned plight of a New York fan in San Francisco isn’t hypothetical — that’s basically how Ragone described his own experience. He added that Exiles is applying some of the same community-building principles of successful politicians like Newsom and Barack Obama to sports.

As for the experience of working on a community-focused startups, Ragone said, “It has the happiness of politics without the dread.”

One of the keys to this approach, he said, is to build a separate community for each team. Even though there’s a big community of out-of-market sports fans (more than 100 million in the US, by Exiles estimate), people don’t care about out-of-market sports per se — they care about specific teams. Thus far, Exiles has built 10 communities, which collectively attract traffic that’s “approaching 1 million pageviews,” the company says. Traffic is growing 20 percent each month, and Ragone said the company is attracted a loyal audience, not just churning through users: “The relationship has to be emotional.”

Ragone added that those initial communities were really about experimenting and proving the concept. Now, however, “We have a formula, we can tell you exactly how much it’s going to cost to build an audience,” and Exiles can start launching new communities more quickly, both in the US and elsewhere.

In addition, the company is experimenting with a big piece of its monetization strategy — fantasy sports. Like the rest of Exiles, it’s very team-focused, with people creating fantasy lineups drawn solely from a single team.

Exiles’ investors and advisors include Typekit co-founder Bryan Mason, as well as Hugh Evans head of venture investment at 3D Systems.

Microsoft quietly shut down its U.S.-only daily deals aggregator Bing Deals earlier this year and relaunched it as Bing Offers in April, but things got rather quiet around the service since. Today, however, Microsoft is launching a limited test of a new Bing Offers feature in the Seattle market that could give it an edge over some of its competitors. In this test market, Bing Offers users can now link their credit cards to their Microsoft accounts. Thanks to this, they can then just swipe their credit cards to redeem an offer instantly instead of having to print coupons or show QR codes on their phones.

This project is the first result of a new association to promote card-linked offers Microsoft announced at the Money 2020 event in Las Vegas today. Microsoft joined Bank of America, Discover, Deem, Facebook, First Data, Linkable Networks, LivingSocial, MasterCard and others to create The CardLinx Association. This group of companies aims to “reduce consumer and merchant friction for payment-enabled offers and ads” and to promote the growth of card-linked offers.

In Seattle, Microsoft is now working with Pizza Hut, Mooyah Burgers, Buca Di Beppo and a number of other vendors. The Bing Offers team expects to roll the service out to other U.S. cities “soon.”

Just like competing programs, users simply sign up, buy a coupon and then use their credit or debit card when they make a qualified purchase at a participating business. They are then immediately notified about their savings and receive the discount directly on their credit or debit card statement.

Bing Offers currently aggregates about 200,000 offers in about 14,000 cities and town in the U.S. These includes deals from Groupon, LivingSocial, Restaurant.com and a very large number of niche deals sites. As Microsoft notes, however, users often complained that they would forget to use their pre-purchased coupons and that “people didn’t like the added hassle of having to print up coupons or display QR codes to redeem savings.”

The concept behind card-linked offers isn’t all that new, of course. Edo, for example, has already raised more than $50 million for a similar solution. The CardLinx Association’s reach, however, could help it to quickly sign up a large number of local businesses for this service and create enough incentives for users and businesses to join the program. With LivingSocial and Facebook on board, it’ll be hard to ignore this alliance.

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