Category: Tech news

A new startup in Los Angeles called IRIS.TV wants to give video publishers the tools to make streaming video more personalized and keep viewers hooked for longer. The company is coming to market with $1.7 million in seed funding from angels in the media and finance worlds.

IRIS.TV was founded by the folks behind Jukebox TV, which sought to provide a continuous stream of interesting videos to consumers. After a few years working on a consumer-facing product, the team decided to take all their learnings and technology and apply it to the B2B market instead.

The pitch to video providers is that IRIS.TV can build that same type of continuous experience, but do so in a way that keeps users tuned in to their video properties. The technology is mostly designed to string together short-form videos that create more of a lean-back experience for casual viewers. Rather than having to search for the next video to watch once the current one is over, consumers are offered something they will (hopefully) find relevant and enjoyable.

Of course, the idea of offering up that kind of continuous streaming isn’t new, and most video publishers these days have already implemented some sort of auto-play feature into their video players. For IRIS.TV, the difference comes in making that stream more personalized.

While most auto-play experiences now just offer up the next video in a queue or playlist, IRIS.TV seeks to offer up videos that will be relevant on a user level. To do so, IRIS.TV uses a proprietary algorithm to extract and process video metadata, which allows it to apply complex business rules. It then has an adaptive stream management system that inserts a series of videos into a player and updates that playlist based on user interactions.

It wraps that all up by providing detailed analytics of video performance, including locality and demographics data of the viewers who tuned in.

Since being founded officially in February, IRIS.TV has been busy building relationships with major media companies and their technology partners to make its technology work with their video players. The company has therefore partnered with online video platform providers like Brightcove, Kaltura, Unicorn Media, and Viddler.

It’s already gaining interest from some large major media corporations who are interested in deploying the technology on their web and mobile properties. While the company can’t name any of those customers yet, IRIS.TV co-founder and CEO Field Garthwaite says it will be integrated in a TV app and a mobile app soon. But it expects to be more broadly used in the field in Q1 or Q2 of next year.

IRIS.TV is based in L.A., because that’s where all the media companies are, and its founding team has experience at places like ABC, Deluxe, Yahoo, Hulu, Disney, Universal, Rubicon Project, and Rand Corp. That includes Garthwaite, CRO Robert Bardunias, COO Richie Hyden, and CTO Sunil Ingle.

The team has raised a total of $1.7 million from angels in the media and finance worlds. That includes folks like Bob Jacobs, who was Bill Cosby’s long-time agent and is considered the “godfather of television syndication”; Nick Rau, co-founder of Vizu (which recently sold to Nielsen); former Viacom exec Jimmy Barge; and entertainment attorney Jor Law.

I def saw more than 1 member of congress putting a few back on Penn earlier. Ran into 2 in the liquor store.

—
  (@KateNocera) September 29, 2013

Here’s a novel way to spend some mandatory vacation time: serve your fellow co-workers top-shelf alcohol. The government shutdown has most of Washington’s public sector furloughed, so Tom Power — the White House’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer – decided to take up bartending. Washington D.C.’s shutdown is like a Catholic school prom: all that pent-up frustration has finally been set loose.

According to The Washington Post, the furloughed tech advisor sent out an invitation to his friends to enjoy some happy juice specials at Gypsy Sally’s, one of many DC waterholes taking advantage of mid-week celebrations.

“The only restriction is that if you do telecom work in the private sector, you can’t tip me when I pour you a beer,” he wrote in an email. “How much better can it get?”

I'm not over exaggerating when I say I can smell the booze wafting from members as they walk off the floor.

—
Ginger Gibson (@GingerGibson) September 29, 2013

Aside from Power winning the award for awesomest bureaucrat, it shines a light on just how little our government can do during a full-on shutdown. Power is one of my go-to experts on all things telecom; he helps the federal government with the tricky issues of allocating wireless spectrum. If you’ve ever dropped a call, you desperately want the issues he deals with resolved.

For some folks in the country, such as 8-year-old Maddie Major, who has her experimental cancer treatment on hold, the shutdown is a disaster.

For the tech industry, not so much. Startups and tech companies regularly do business with the government; it may not be disastrous to wait a few weeks on any particular project, but it is costing the tech industry untold dollars in wasted time. It’s still a damn shame, though. Until then, may Power and his sauced D.C. brethren live it up.

[Image Credit: Flickr User Kirti Poddar]

Gillmor Gang – John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session for today has concluded. Like the Gillmor Gang on Facebook at facebook.com/gillmorgang

A startup called Loom, which begin its life as the Y Combinator-backed photo-sharing startup Popset, is working to build a better iCloud for both consumers and developers. Currently, the company offers a cloud storage and syncing service, in the form of a mobile application for iOS and desktop app for Mac. And today, Loom is also announcing $1.4 million in seed funding to continue to build on its vision.

The round included participation from Google Ventures (MG Siegler, disclosure: previously a TechCrunch employee and current contributor); Tencent, Great Oaks VC, Overbrook Entertainment (Will Smith), Damon Way (founder, DC Shoes), and a few other angel investors.

The company first announced its follow-up to Popset in May, and then entered into beta this June. At the time, co-founder Jan Senderek explained the team had realized that they were trying to solve the wrong problem with Popset – people weren’t lacking tools for group photo-sharing, but they did need a better way to organize and manage their photo libraries. Thus, Loom was born.

The iOS application is fairly straightforward in its design, in an effort to appeal to a broader mainstream user base. After signing in, you simply start backing up photos to the cloud where you’ll receive 5 GB of free storage. A Mac app allows you to also import photos from your computer, and includes a one-click iPhoto export option. Additional storage requires a subscription, and conversion rates for Loom are now above 3 percent, Senderek tells us. However, the company is not disclosing the number of users or actives it currently has.

What makes Loom useful, however, is not just its file-syncing and online storage capabilities, but that it’s designed to serve as your mobile device’s default photo album replacement while saving you storage space on your phone. To do so, Senderek explained earlier that Loom itself stores photos in their original size on its servers, then creates multiple, smaller versions for access on mobile. Users can then clear out their iPhone’s Camera Roll, but still have access to all their photos in Loom, where they can organize them into albums, or share them with friends.

Alongside news of the seed funding today, Loom is also announcing an iOS 7-optimized app with full RAW support for more than 130 types of RAW formats (meaning it will now store the original RAW files on its servers, to serve up the smaller versions on mobile). More importantly, it’s opening its doors to all interested users as it exits beta.

In addition to building the front-end apps for consumers, the longer-term plan is to bring Loom to developers too as an alternative to the iCloud tools provided by Apple. Other things on the company’s roadmap include video streaming, improved sharing (easy album sharing to Facebook, for example), support for more imports (Aperture, Flickr, Instagram, etc.), and additional, premium plans with higher storage caps. Android support is not in the immediate future.

Beyond product development, Senderek says the eight person team is looking to add a few more engineers with the new funding, and hopes to be around ten or eleven by year-end.

“When Jan presented the idea for Loom, we realized that the idea seemed very elegant and organic, but actually there wasn’t anyone in the market doing ‘photos in the cloud,’ in a very broad sense, well yet,” says David Wallerstein from Tencent, Loom’s largest seed investor. ”Loom is very focused on being the one destination in the cloud for all of your photos, across all devices, and facilitating the sharing of those photos, especially collections of photos, across the Internet. The fact that they are very focused on this particular mission, in this way, set them apart,” he adds.

Of course, Loom is not the only company doing photo sharing and sync. It will have to take on some big names, including Facebook, Google+, Yahoo’s Flickr and perhaps even up-and-comers like Amazon (with Cloud Drive) or Dropbox. It will also have to solidify its value proposition to users who may be content with the free offerings they have elsewhere, which could affect its revenue potential.

Interested users can sign up for Loom here.

A number of companies today are attempting to bring the photo album to the mobile era, often through apps which let you organize, then print and ship customizable photo books. The latest to attempt to break into this space is Palo Alto-based Kindred Prints, a mobile software company which offers photo printing apps for iPhone and Android.

The company was founded by Stanford grad students Alex Austin, Mike Molinet, and Mada Seghete just this June. Austin led development on three iPhone apps and has worked in startups before. Molinet has experience delivering consumer products to market, and Seghete was previously Director of Product for Yola.com.

Says Austin, the team was inspired to create the Kindred app because they didn’t like sending impersonal emails with attached photos to family and friends. They wanted to offer a more personalized experience, but for “the price of a latte.” Today, Kindred Prints’ books are just $5.00 each.

That price point is what makes Kindred Prints compelling – it sounds almost unsustainably cheap. Other photo printing apps cost at least twice that, if not more. However, the trick is that the books aren’t just $5.00 – Kindred Prints is actually a subscription play. The company also charges users a small monthly fee of $4.95, which allows it to lower the price on each physical book that’s being sent out. If anything, this is about reducing the psychological barriers to entry that come from seeing prices like $10, $20 or even $30+ in other photo-printing apps. Five bucks feels doable, even if you’re technically paying more.

For those who prefer not to commit to the subscription, a one-time fee per photo book is $11.95, which represents the truer cost here.

As for the books themselves, they are soft-cover 20-page creations built using photos from your phone, Facebook or Instagram. The app can also automatically put together a booklet for you of your top recent photos on Instagram and Facebook. Though I don’t have one in my hands yet to speak directly about quality, from the description and photos, they don’t look much different from the other soft-covered books I’ve ordered over the years, generally speaking.

The app itself, though, is well-designed and easy to use. It’s fairly quick to get up and running and build your first book. Kindred Prints pulls in all the photos for you and you just tap through the ones you want before sending. There aren’t a ton of customizations to slow you down, but you can tap on individual photos to add notes, if you choose. Kindred Prints will also remind you monthly to send a book so your subscription doesn’t go to waste.

During a beta period and other testing, the company shipped 250 booklets. Now that the app is live, they have committed orders for at least 300 books over the next month so far.

Going forward, the team plans to open its API to the public so any website or app can integrate with its service, similar to how Sincerely works today. They’re also working on photo book automation tools that will build book using metadata. For example, the app could automatically build books or you and your friend just ahead of their birthday and alert you when the book is ready to ship.

The company is currently bootstrapped and hoping to fund growth off the subscription revenues, but they may consider a seed round at a later point.

Kindred Prints is available for iOS and Android here.

The $750 Lensbaby Pro Effects Kit comes with two selective-focus optics, two macro converters, and a carrying case. It’s a lot of money to spend on something that should probably be used sparingly.

On the outside, the Asus MeMo Pad HD 7 isn’t much to look at. But this 7-inch budget tablet comes packed with some impressive specs and features.

Eton’s BoostTurbine 2000 rechargeable USB battery pack lets you charge you mobile gear the traditional way or with a built-in hand crank.

This summer, Identified pulled back the curtain on a new artificial intelligence technology, called “SYMAN,” which it developed to help organize and clean the swaths of unstructured professional data that today lives on the Web. In doing so, the startup moved away from its original focus — a kind of Facebook data-driven “Klout score for professionals” — essentially admitting that if it were going to give job seekers and companies a better way to connect and find talent, it would have to address the elephant in the room: Data.

To deliver a quality search or analytics product that could compete with LinkedIn (and actually produce some actionable insight), Identified teamed up with a group of former LinkedIn data scientists to help clean social media data with SYMAN and then productize it to enable customers to power their recruiting, human capital management, CRM and others. After beginning its mining and cleaning operation with Facebook’s professional data, the startup now has the help of one of the lead data scientists at Facebook, whose job it was to craft strategy around that very dataset.

Today, the company officially announced the hiring of Mohammad Sabah, the former Manager of Data Science and Analytics at Facebook, who will be joining Identified to lead its data science and engineering team as “Chief Data Officer.” At Facebook, Sabah led data science and analytics for the “Identity Team” at Facebook, where he was responsible for building the team and developing strategy for key products like Timeline, Profile Completeness and Privacy.

Essentially, the Identity Team owns and cultivates Facebook’s most valuable asset: Your personal data — and the data generated by the 1.2 billion people (and their relationships) on its platform. Sabah and his team tackled the challenges of deciding what are the most relevant stories that should be surfaced in your Facebook profile’s Timeline and figuring out ways to encourage Facebook users to complete their profiles, increase accuracy of those profiles and so on.

Before joining Facebook, he was a principal data scientist and engineer at Netflix, the Rubicon Project and Yahoo, where he focused on large-scale machine learning algorithms to improve personalization, search, click prediction and keyword recommendation — among other things.

Identified began its data mining by targeting the healthcare industry (and jobs in medical fields) in particular, and Sabah joins Identified to help develop the company’s patent-pending tech, build a team of data scientists around it and help apply it to new industries.

Prior to launching SYMAN earlier this summer, the company had remained fairly quiet over the last nine months as it pivoted in this new direction and began hiring a team of data scientists that would help lead the way. While Facebook may not seem like the go-to source for professional data (usually, that’s LinkedIn’s expertise), the co-founders point out that its dataset is actually five-times the size of LinkedIn but far less complete — and structured. Plus, it helps that there are over one billion people using the social network today.

So, essentially, the data architecture they’ve developed since enables machines to more quickly draw inferences about Facebook’s data entries based on context, natural language and a host of other signals. Knowing that someone has listed their title as “Analyst” on Facebook isn’t much good to a recruiter, however, if, by digging into context and related data, SYMAN can help hiring managers deduce that the person is actually a “Systems Analyst” at Salesforce, then you have something recruiters would probably be willing to pay for.

Identified began testing SYMAN with around 30 companies, including enterprise health clients like Kaiser Permanente, but is now in the process of expanding to target other industries like finance, education and retail — a number of customers has since grown to 58 since we last covered the startup in May. The company has raised $22.5 million to date from investors like VantagePoint Capital, Capricorn Investment Group, Tim Draper, Innovation Endeavors, Chamath Palihapitiya and others.

WSJ: Apple Now Holds 10% of All Corporate Cash: Moody’s

QZ: Apple is sitting on 10% of all US corporate cash

Reality: Apple’s foreign and domestic cash reserves, if taken in aggregate, constitute around 10 percent of U.S. corporate cash, if you discount financial corporations. So if you take all the cash reserves of an international company that happens to be headquartered in the United States, call it a U.S. company, ignore the most cash-rich genre of all U.S. corporations, and compare the Apple tally to the artificially constrained aggregate, it has around 10 percent of corporate cash.

That’s far less impressive than the Wall Street Journal’s headline, and a firm discount on QZ’s. But we’re being a bit pedantic. Let’s take a look at Apple’s bank stash.

An internal document dated May 21, 2013 detailing how Apple arranges its affairs to avoid paying taxes – a perfectly legal and expected endeavor – indicates that the company had $145 billion in cash, of which $102 billion, or 70 percent, was foreign.

That’s to say that Apple the international conglomerate has $102 billion in cash, equivalents, and marketable securities abroad from its titular home country of the United States. Cash is not mobile across certain borders. If Apple wanted to bring that money “home” it would pay a stiff corporate tax rate. So, most of its cash is essentially exiled in perpetuity.

To count it as cash that sits under the jurisdiction of a company that we can deem a U.S. firm is to therefore bend the definition of what is reasonable.

Apple’s domestic cash is around $43 billion (May data is the best that we have here regarding the foreign/domestic split). The Wall Street Journal reported that, according to Moody’s, aggregate U.S. corporate cash totals $1.48 trillion. Apple domestic cash is therefore around 3 percent of that figure. That’s less impressive.

But we are in a further muddle here, as we are comparing domestic cash of one company to aggregate cash of others. And, we are still dealing with cash of non-financial corporations (not all), so we are too far down the rabbit hole to see light.

Apple remains immensely wealthy. Today, however, activist investor Carl Icahn announced that he is pressing the company to add $90 billion to its share repurchase program, which would strain Apple’s cash position.

The proper way to compare corporate cash would be to find breakdowns for the 1,000 firms that Moody’s rates (those are the firms from which it created the $1.48 trillion figure, I believe) and compare domestic cash to domestic cash and foreign to foreign. That’s provided you wanted to compare the subset of global corporations that call the United States home.

It would be far more interesting again to compare all wealthy global corporations and their aggregate cash position. Have fun.

Top Image Credit: Steve Snodgrass

Yiftee, the service for sending local gifts to friends, has opened its “GiftUp” API with the hope that developers will incorporate its gift-giving capabilities into their own apps. Yiftee is banking on the notion that people will be more inclined to send gifts in context. When a calendar app notifies you of a friend’s birthday, for instance, it could also suggest that you buy her a cupcake from the local bakery.

At the moment, Yiftee has homed in on dating apps and social network platforms as their primary targets, CEO Donna Novitsky said, since the holidays and Valentine’s Day mean that people will be looking to buy presents for others. Through a partnership with Mastercard, Yiftee works with more than 2 million retailers.

The big competitor here is Facebook Gifts, which recently underwent a redesign that ended the sale of physical gifts in favor of digital gift codes or Facebook’s Gift Card. Although Facebook Gifts manager Lee Linden, previously the CEO of gifting app Karma before it was acquired by Facebook, said revenue from gifts is increasing, it has historically proven to be a tough sell to users, paling in (revenue) comparison to ads and games.

So can Yiftee do Facebook one better? Since integrating with Yiftee’s gift functionality now only involves adding a few lines of code, it wouldn’t be surprising to see apps testing it out to see if it takes, since it could be an easy point of new revenue.

“One of the main feedback points we’ve had is that we’ve talked to all these awesome apps, but they don’t have a way to monetize,” Novitsky said. “With apps, there are in-app purchases, and this gives them another channel to monetize.”

Yiftee will monetize on this through revenue sharing, with the plan to charge a $1 or 3 percent convenience fee for in-app gift purchases, whichever is greater. It takes a 75 percent cut of that.

Last we heard from the startup, they had raised $850,000 in seed funding from Scott Cook, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and other angel investors. In August, the team launched a feature for gifting to college students, an update on care packages.

BlackBerry announced today that its Enterprise Service and BlackBerry 10 handsets have been approved by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to handle classified communications up to the level of “Restricted.”

The new certification theoretically allows BlackBerry to sell its new smartphones to 28 member countries’ NATO workers. The question is whether there is demand for its hardware among those nations.

There might not be. Here’s TechCrunch’s Chris Velazco on how BlackBerry managed to lose almost a billion dollars on under $2 billion in revenue:

“[T]he total GAAP loss from continuing operations came in at $965 million, right in the middle of the company’s forecasted range. The big culprit? A hefty writedown (think around $934 million) incurred thanks in large part to a glut of unsold BlackBerry Z10s.”

BlackBerry is a troubled company on the cusp of accepting a buyout offer for $9 per share that will see it head private for about $4.7 billion. The company’s most recent earnings report saw it lose a stunning $965 million on $1.6 billion in revenue.

Prior to this certification, BlackBerry was drowning under insufficient demand. In fact, that Z10 writedown was larger than the infamous Microsoft Surface writedown that totaled $900 million. The Microsoft loss has been deemed by some as partial reason for the exit of current CEO Steve Ballmer.

So, well done BlackBerry on the certification. Let us know if anyone wants a Z10.

As an aside, here’s the first line of BlackBerry’s own corporate explainer: “A global leader in wireless innovation, BlackBerry® revolutionized the mobile industry when it was introduced in 1999.” Can you spot what is wrong?

Once upon a time, there were few places that the not-so-technically-inclined could go to secure their own slice of web real estate and build themselves a professional-looking websites. Either they had to speak Internet, or they’d have to pay someone who did a boatload. Just as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and others would put blogging, content creation and the ability to chronicle what your cat is having for dinner into the hands of the public, Wix.com launched in 2006 to do the same for website creation.

Capitalizing on the maturing Web and growing demand for DIY creation and publishing tools, the Israel and U.S.-based company has grown to 400 strong, raised $60 million from investors and built a user base of 34 million-plus. Behind its continuing growth, the company announced today that it is officially headed to the public markets — the New York Stock Exchange, to be precise — under the ticker symbol “WIX.”

The company took its first step in this direction in June, submitting its draft registration statement to the SEC, signaling its full intent to go public. It wasn’t clear how long Wix would delay, if at all, before taking the plunge, but the answer came today, as the company filed its official registration statement with the SEC. While the number of shares sold and price range have not yet been determined, the company will list its ordinary shares on the NYSE, and plans to raise up to $100 million for its initial public offering.

According to the statement, the $100 million IPO will be underwritten and managed by J.P. Morgan Securities, BofA Merrill Lynch, RBC Capital Markets and Needham & Company — with the latter two acting as co-managers.

J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and BofA Merrill Lynch are acting as lead joint bookrunners for the proposed offering. RBC Capital Markets, LLC is acting as other book-running manager and Needham & Company, LLC and Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. are acting as co-managers.

In terms of the aforementioned growth, in its filing today, Wix reveals that it has “achieved 14 consecutive quarters of sequential growth in its premium subscriptions, growing revenues from $9.9 million in 2010 to $43.7 million in 2012, while collections grew from $13.8 million to $52.5 million, respectively.

For the six months ended June 30th, the filing reads, Wix brought in revenues of “$34.1 million, collections of $41.9 million and a net loss of $10.1 million,” on the back of its 679,536 premium subscriptions (as of August 30th).

Updating

Yahoo is set to acquire Hitpost, the maker of a handful of sports-centric mobile apps, to beef up its own sports offerings on iOS and Android, say sources familiar with the deal. The company’s team of seven or so is heading over to join Yahoo.

The company was co-founded by Aaron Krane who learned the science behind making social games at Slide. He wanted to marry that knowledge with products that appealed to sports fans. The idea was that there was an unexploited sweet spot in between freemium games like Zynga Poker and sports media. (We hear that Krane, who shifted into an executive chairman role from the CEO position, isn’t joining Yahoo. But Courtland Alves, who took over, is.)

Indeed, betting on sports is probably as old as sports are to human civilization. But an analogue to this behavior hadn’t really existed on mobile platforms.

So for the last two years, Hitpost has made a series of apps that support live discussions and polls on sports. They also supported virtual currency bets (not real-money gambling, though). The biggest one, SportsBet, appears to have between 1 and 5 million installs on Google Play.

In the app, players can make bets on who will win games, or which player might end up having more rebounds in basketball or strikeouts in baseball.

Their expertise in building these sports apps enticed investors like Floodgate’s Mike Maples, Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures and Quotidian Ventures to put in more than $2 million into the company.

So now Yahoo is pulling the team in to augment its own mobile sports offerings. This actually comes on top of another fantasy sports-related acquisition earlier this year, with Yahoo picking up a one-man sports app shop called Bignoggins. The company also unveiled a new sports app in the second quarter.

The company’s mobile acquisition strategy has been to pick up talent to bolster six or seven different core product areas like mail (Xobni), weather, Flickr, search (Qwiki), sports, news (Summly), and the main Yahoo! portal.

Angel investing in the US this year looks like it’s falling back towards 2011 levels, after a record 2012. Meanwhile, there are more Series A rounds than ever, based on our latest CrunchBase data. The much-feared ”Series A Crunch” has yet to materialize.

Early-stage founders and investors have been mulling the possibility of a flood of new angel investor money overwhelming the venture industry’s ability to fund all worthy young startups. But here’s what we’re seeing.

In the first three quarters of 2013, the enormous annual growth of Angel investments has been falling, especially in relation to first venture rounds. From the period of 2007-2012, the number of Angel investments grew by almost 6x, while Series A rounds only grew by about 1.6x. However, according to our dataset the total number of 2013 Angel investments are unlikely to reach the 2012 peak of 1,520 deals, while 2013 Series A investments are already very close to eclipsing the 2012 total at over 960 and counting.

In total dollar terms, the trend reversal is equally striking. In the first three quarters of 2013, Series A rounds have amassed $5.43B, nearly surpassing the 2012 total of $5.96B while year to date Angel investments of $545M are well under the $707M total of last year.

At this point, we’ll pause to note the various caveats with early-stage funding data. Not all early-stage funding data shows up here immediately, because financing mechanisms like convertible notes let startups legally delay announcing the money until they raise a venture round. Some seed and angel rounds have also gotten quite large, in the millions range similar to a traditional first venture round. Large outlier rounds in any category can also make them skew large.

This said, our data is based on a composite of data provided by companies and investors, cross-referenced with public filings and news reporting. We believe it’s the most accurate public data set out there.

So what’s happening with angels? We can speculate that they’ve been scared off by a Series A Crunch concerns, or anything else. But instead how about you take a look for yourself using our latest data set — download the September 2013 Data Export and let us know what you find.