Category: Tech news

Whole worlds have been built out of LEGO and K’Nex and Meccano and a seemingly endless supply of childhood wonder, but the world is changing and so too are our toys. That’s where an ambitious New York hardware startup comes into play — littleBits is trying to create a sort of LEGO for a new generation of tinkerers.

The company just recently launched its new batch of Exploration Kits to bring its vision of clever, fun hardware education to the masses, and founder/CEO Ayah Bdeir joined us in our office to show off what people have managed to create with those cutesy components.

But let’s back up a moment first: what exactly are littleBits? They’re a bunch of color-coded components — think motors and lights and buzzers and sensors and batteries — that can be snapped together (thanks to magnetic connectors) to create honest-to-goodness circuits and systems. The beauty of these little things though is that they require precisely zero expertise, and encourage blind experimentation — I spent a few moments snapping a few of them together while shooting the video above, and I wished I had the rest of the day to just muck around further.

What happens when you connect a battery bit to a light bit? Or a light-sensing bit to a motor bit that can drive a small set of wheels? All it takes a few clicks to assemble those rudimentary designs, and just a few clicks more to refine and augment them further. And perhaps best of all, since the team are strong believers in the power of the open-source community, you could always download bit schematics from Github and modify those too.

That family of bits is growing by the moment, too.The startup raised a $3.65 million Series A last year and since then it’s been dutifully chugging along, configuring new kits to introduce to the masses and developing new bits to extend the value of the littleBits ecosystem. Bdeir also offered us a very quick peek at some of the more interesting new bits that are currently under development — expect to see a number bit and bits that enable wireless communication sooner rather than later.

As our own John Biggs noted while playing a with a very early version of the littleBits kit, these things don’t always come cheap. The most basic Exploration Kit offers up 10 bits and the accoutrements to make them work, and will set tots and tinkerers back $99. Meanwhile, the $149 Premium kit comes with 14 bits and the $199 be-all-end-all Deluxe kit ships with 18 bit modules. For some though, it’ll be a small price to pay into get their young ones and the people around thinking about hardware in a different light.

The purpose of Facebook’s Mobile App Ads seems pretty clear. They’re supposed to drive installations, right? Well, in a new blog post, the company says its ads can now help with what comes afterward, namely, keeping users engaged and active — and in some cases encouraging them to spend money.

To illustrate the challenge on the mobile side, Facebook cites a Localytics study that found that 66 percent of app users will only open an app between 1 and 10 times.

The idea of re-engaging users is a familiar one in online marketing. On Facebook, that can now take the form of targeting users who have already installed a mobile app and then presenting them with custom calls to action. The options include general actions like “Use App” and more specific ones such as “Shop Now,” “Book Now,” or “Listen Now.” Behind the scenes, an advertiser can deep link to a specific area in the app itself.

To illustrate how different advertisers could take advantage of the new options, Facebook offers the following examples:

• A retail app wants to drive existing users into a current sale or promotion
• A game wants to bring existing players to updated levels
• A music app wants to bring listeners to a new playlist
• A travel app wants to promote discounted fares and getaways

A Facebook spokesperson noted that the new calls to action should make the ads more tailorable to apps beyond gaming (as suggested by the examples above). They also said this won’t change the way the company charges for the ads.

According to the blog post, Mobile App Ads (which launched about a year ago) have driven more than 145 million installs this year for advertisers, including Target, eBay, HotelTonight, and Kabam. And mobile ads, of course, have become a major driver of Facebook’s growth.

A leaked image of what appears to be Logitech’s gamepad for the iPhone has hit the Twitter wire today, via the @evleaks account. The account has been known to reliably tweet images of upcoming products from a variety of mobile companies including Samsung, Nokia and others.

The gamepad looks a lot like the leaked prototype from earlier this year and images that were shown during presentations to Apple’s WWDC developer attendees back in June. The pad has four physical buttons on the right, what appears to be two bumper buttons on the top and a d-pad on the left.

Apple added support for gamepads with its iOS 7 update, but the gamepads themselves have yet to materialize. Logitech also teased the controllers last month with an image of empty hands and an iPhone.

There were three types of controllers mentioned during Apple’s presentations including two types of ‘case controllers’ and a standalone unit that communicates with the iPhone via Bluetooth. Any one of those controllers would offer more precise tactile control over platformers, shooters and any number of other game types that don’t do so well with touch screens.

Two of the possible designs that Apple showed off included dual thumbsticks, but it doesn’t appear that this design includes those. Logitech is an MFi (Made for iPod) member, so this would likely be produced under that partner program.

Previously, accessory makers had to rely on very poor Bluetooth keyboard hacks to simulate the button inputs of a gamepad. The new integration will allow not only physical connection via the Lightning port but also more precise button mapping and better response times.

The addition of gamepad support comes at an interesting time for Apple, as gaming revenues for Android and iOS begin to rival those from established giants like Nintendo. If these take off — especially if they do integrate analog sticks — it could spell real trouble for the powerhouse portable business represented by offerings like the Nintendo DS line.

Image Credit: Marco Crocoli/ Flickr CC

Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald took to Reddit today to answer questions regarding the NSA, Edward Snowden, and his current work breaking news concerning both.

The open-source interview is worth reading, but you are at work, so allow me to act as your guide. I have rephrased the questions asked for clarity.

Are more groundbreaking leaks coming?

There are definitely huge new stories to come: many more. I’ve said that from the start every time I was asked and I think people see by now that it’s true. In fact, as Janine said the other day, the documents and newsworthy revelations are so massive that no one news organization can possibly process them all.

With such a remote staff, how do you keep your work secret and safe from the very surveillance that you are exposing?

We use highly advanced means of encryption. Remember, the only ones whose op sec has proven horrible and who has lost control of huge numbers of documents is the NSA and GCHQ. We have lost control of nothing. All of the documents we have remain secure.

The British claimed to have cracked the confiscated computer of your partner David Miranda. Is that true?

They outright lied when they said he was carrying a password that allowed access to the documents. Indeed, on the same day they told that lie (to a gullible media that mindlessly repeated it as fact, as usual), the filed a separate affidavit saying it was urgent for them to keep possession of what they took from David because what he was carrying was “heavily encrypted” and they were able to only “reconstruct” 75 documents. Obviously, if he had a password that enabled access to the documents, then they would have been able to access them.

He did not, and thus they could not.

A comment on what mass surveillance means for free society:

A major reason why those in power always try to use surveillance is because surveillance = power. The more you know about someone, the more you can control and manipulate them in all sorts of ways. That is one reason a Surveillance State is so menacing to basic political liberties.

Have the documents proven that the government has broken the law?

I think there already are things clearly showing the government broke the law, including (but not only) the Constitution, but there is much more to come on that score.

Glenn Greenwald speaks with noted activist and polemicist Noam Chomsky and broadcast journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.

In my view, the two most overlooked stories we’ve published are the one you reference (about the secret presidential directive signed by Obama to prepare for offensive cyber operations: essentially the militarization of the internet) and the document we recently published showing NSA gives unminimized commuincations [sic] of US persons to Israel with very few binding safeguards. [Emphasis original]

What is the goal of the NSA?

I think the public – not just in the US but worldwide – now has a basic idea of the objective of the NSA: to eliminate privacy worldwide, literally, by ensuring that every human electronic communication is subject to being collected, stored, analyzed and monitored by the NSA and its allies (UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia).

On Democrats: 

When I first began writing in 2005, I was focused primarily on the Bush NSA program, and I was able to build a large readership quickly because so many Democrats, progressives, liberal bloggers, etc, were so supportive of the work I was doing. That continued to be true through 2008.

Now, a mere four later, Democrats have become the most vehement defenders of the NSA and the most vicious attackers of my work on the NSA – often, some of the very same people cheering so loudly in 2006 and 2007 are the ones protesting most loudly and viciously now.

Gee, I wonder what changed? In the answer lies all you need to know about the Democratic Party.

–

That is a taste. If you have time over lunch or a cocktail, I recommend the full suite of Greenwald’s answers. I also recommend checking out the Guardian’s page on its Snowden coverage and following Greenwald, colleague Janine Gibson, and the Guardian on Twitter.

While the mass media and political organs of this country are focused on a government shutdown and a dollar fight, the NSA machinations roll on. Given the extent of current and past NSA revelations, we can only imagine what is coming next. That said, Greenwald has supported his claims about upcoming document releases by releasing documents and breaking ground. I don’t see a reason to doubt that he will continue to publish. I’m not privy in any sense to what Greenwald has coming next, but will continue to cover what he breaks to the best of my ability. More as it comes.

Image Credits: Glenn Greenwald and Eden, Janine and Jim

Ali Rosenthal joined Facebook back in early 2006, when it was a 50 person startup with 4 million users and she quit at the end of 2011 when it employed 3,500 people and was closing in on a billion users. As a member of Facebook’s founding business team, she helped pioneer their mobile business, growing their mobile base from 100,000 to 250 million and leaving as the company’s head of mobile business development. But after a year as the Executive-in-Residence at Greylock, Rosenthal is back at a small startup. In July, she became the COO at MessageMe, the 17 person real-time mobile communications platform which raised a Series A round of $10 million in May.

So why MessageMe?  I asked her. Why would a heavy hitter like Ali Rosenthal join a little start-up?

I “bet on people”, she told me – reeling off a list of names at MessageMe including co-founders Alex Chee and Arjun Sethi. And, of course, it’s the product too. MessageMe is what Rosenthal calls a “multi-model messaging” system, built for “speed”, and designed to “mimic” real conversation. In contrast with Facebook, which she describes as a “web product”, Rosenthal sees MessageMe – which has been designed specifically for smartphones – as the future of real-time rich communications.

As an accomplished athlete, Rosenthal knows all about the importance of timing. She made a smart choice in 2006 when she joined Facebook. And I suspect that her decision to join MessageMe might well also look remarkably prescient in a few years time.

This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask a VC show, we have Battery Ventures partner Brian O’Malley in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.

O’Malley leads Battery’s Seed & Early Stage practices, while focusing on investments in e-commerce, online marketplaces and Internet applications. His investments include Bazaarvoice, BoostCTR, BrightEdge, Coupa, Duetto, H.BLOOM, Insitu (acquired by Boeing), J. Hilburn, Joor, HotelTonight, Peerflix (acquired by Live Universe), Serena & Lily, Skullcandy, Sociable Labs, Sosh, TradeKing, Viddy and World Golf Tour.

Prior to Battery, O’Malley spent several years at Bowstreet (acquired by IBM), as Director of West Coast Technical Sales and earlier as the company’s Technical Evangelist preaching the future of web service-based APIs. He started his career as a web developer for Motorola Computer Group while only a sophomore in college.

O’Malley has invested in a number of startups that are aiming to transform offline industries, so we’re interested to hear where he sees as the next big opportunity in offline industries in need of transformation. And considering that O’Malley is a seed investor, we’re curious on his thoughts on AngelList’s Syndicates.

Please send us your questions for O’Malley here or put them in the comments below!

The Internet Explorer 6 death watch continues, but the end is near. Microsoft’s ancient browser may still haunt web developers’ nightmares, but according to the latest data from Net Applications, its global market share has now finally dipped under 5 percent.

Even Microsoft will be quite happy to see this, especially given that, for Internet Explorer as a whole, the last month was pretty good (though it still has IE6 at 6.1 percent global market share).

While other browsers barely registered any changes in their global market share last month, all versions of Internet Explorer together now account for 57.79 percent – its highest number this year. Most of this is still driven by IE8 users, however, who account for 21.39 percent of users in Net Application’s stats and still make it the most popular browser version in its rankings. The reason for this is that Windows XP users just can’t upgrade beyond IE8 and as long as those XP machines are out there, that number isn’t going to change all that fast.

The launch of IE11 for Windows 7 and 8 is just around the corner. Microsoft’s latest browser is probably its best so far, but the IE legacy will forever be tainted by those earlier versions that got so much wrong and the fact that Microsoft has essentially abandoned them without any upgrade path beyond switching to another vendor.

While IE8 and 9 at least include some HTML5 features, IE6 predates so many of these efforts that drag-and-drop and @font-face are really the only semi-modern web technologies it supports.

Maybe now that it has fallen under 5 percent, developers can finally completely forget about it. IE8, however, and in some ways, has already become the new IE6, thanks to its lack of an update path and support for the latest web technologies.

Windows 8 picked up 0.61 percent market share in September to end the month at 8.02 percent, crossing the eight percent threshold for the first time according to Net Applications. In the same timeframe, Windows 7 snagged 0.80 percent market share to rest at the 46.43 percent mark.

As The Next Web’s Emil Protalinski points out, “this is the first time Windows 7 has gained more share than Windows 8 since the latter’s release.”

Microsoft is essentially selling two different operating systems to distinct market groups: Windows 8 to consumers and Windows 7 to its enterprise clients who often remain deep in their upgrade cycle away from Windows XP. Thus, strong performance from Windows 7 isn’t necessarily a knock against Windows 8, but it isn’t exactly a vote of confidence either.

Windows 8 continues its slow progress towards 10 percent market share. At 0.61 percent per month, Windows 8 should cross that barrier either in late December or early January, depending on how strong holiday sales of Windows PCs are during the holiday cycle.

I have a new phrase in mind: Fortress Windows 7. Companies are locking themselves into Microsoft’s beloved operating system at a pace that exceeds my prior expectations. This means that for a half decade or so, around half the PC market will remain happily ensconced in Windows 7. This is at once negative for Microsoft – it wants more people on Windows 8, downloading applications from its Windows Store – and a boon: By the time those PCs are ready for an upgrade, Microsoft will have presumably filed every rough edge from its Metro offering, and have a Windows Store sufficiently stocked to be above complaint.

And the amount of revenue Windows 7 brings to the operating system division of Microsoft is comparable with Windows 8, so the impact here is more strategic than financial.

Whatever the case, somewhere in Redmond someone is cheering that Windows 8 now has 8 percent market share to its name. It’s been a slog of a year for the operating system, with two points of light on its horizon: The coming Windows 8.1 update, and a new hardware crop for the end of the year, including two new Surface tablets. Both should come to its aid.

Still, total Windows market share is dangerously close to slipping under the 90% mark. That would be a far larger moment.

Top Image Credit: Dell Inc.

Uber, the company that makes hailing a car and paying for it as easy as dropping a pin on a smartphone, has recently launched a new feature that brings another level of luxury and service to the experience, Wifi in cars.

Through a partnership with Italian startup WiMan, Uber in Italy now offers free Wifi service in every car through a 3G/WiFi hotspot in every vehicle.

According to Uber Italy General Manager and co-manager for Europe Benedetta Arese Lucini, Uber Italy shows more demand for Wifi service in every car because most data plans offer less GB/month than we usually get in the states, and finding free Wifi at every corner isn’t as ubiquitous as it is in San Francisco.

Here’s how it works:

Users click into the WiMan-labeled Wifi network on their iPhones or Android devices, and are taken instantly to a landing page for sign-in. Users can sign-in with one touch to their Google or Facebook accounts.

Uber and WiMan can work together to customize the landing page, perhaps for special Uber-promoted events or campaigns.

WiMan is an Italian startup from the deep south of Italy, Puglia, where there is no Wifi. As with any truly successful startup, WiMan was solving a problem that it faced on its own, and now has over 600 bars/restaurant partners and is installed in 20 Uber cars in the past six months.

The team has raised a total of €100k from Nana Bianca as angels.

Uber will be testing Wifi in Rome for the next three months, at which point Arese Lucini will get together with other Uber leaders and decide if this should roll out further.

WiMan is currently testing 4G/LTE options to bring to Uber consumers, as well as WiMan’s 100,000 unique users. But for now, Romans can enjoy 3G Wifi for free within Ubers courtesy of WiMan.

Samsung is being called out by the highly respected and thorough Ars Technica for apparently “artificially” boosting the Galaxy Note 3′s performance specifically when it comes to benchmark testing.  The blog found that while under normal testing the Note 3 vastly outperformed the LG G2, which has the same processor, after stripping away some fancy benchmark-specific code, the phone scored about the same as its LG competitor.

Ars has a very good, very long explanation of how they arrived at their findings, and the end result is an artificial benchmark bump of between 20 and 50 percent in all areas depending on which benchmarking tools you use, including industry standards like Antutu and Geekbench. It’s a good read if you’re interested in that sort of thing, but the upshot is, you probably aren’t. Which is why Samsung has even more egg on its face.

Artificially enhancing performance benchmarks for a smartphone these days is like artificially enhancing the smoothness of your elbows via plastic surgery: it may mean that overall, you technically present a more attractive package on the surface, but no one’s really going to know or care that you’ve had any work done.

Apple’s iPhone 5s reportedly benchmarks up in the same ranks as some fairly recent Mac computers, for instance, but that’s not something your average iPhone 5s buyer is likely to know. Also, it doesn’t mean anything; benchmark scores doesn’t mean one device will be able to handle the same tasks as the other, like running a professional video editing software suite for example.

Long ago, Apple realized that a specs race wasn’t the same as the race for market dominance. Actual buyers cared about the phone experience, not abstract numbers which may or may not be borne out by really using software and apps. It’s true that Apple still talks about performance when it touts new devices – but it does so relatively, explaining only how much faster or more efficient something is compared to previous generations. That frames the discussion in terms that everyday users can understand, making it genuinely useful information.

The end result is that Samsung looks like it’s grasping when it takes an abstract (essentially meaningless, for all intents and purposes) number and artificially builds that up to win praise from some whitecoats who test these things for a living. It seems to be doing this as a matter of course now, as Ars says it’s seeing similar behaviour in testing the new Galaxy Note 10 Android tablet from Samsung as well. And, in the end, its unadjusted numbers were actually faster than competitors like the G2 anyway; if for some reason as an OEM you’re still concerned with winning a specs race on paper at this point (which you shouldn’t be), you don’t need to win by a wide margin, especially at the risk of looking foolish.

Unadjusted numbers would’ve won faint praise from the crowd that likes them, and gone unnoticed by most. Artificially altered ones attract a whole lot of negative attention and result in a net bad look for Samsung. The Note 3, like most high-end Samsung hardware, is probably a great phone, but now it’s embroiled in a doping scandal, over a number nobody really cares about.

President Obama just compared Apple’s imperfect operating system launch to the massive glitches plaguing the new government healthcare price comparison websites. Responding to the government shutdown in a sunny Rose Garden press conference, Obama took time to address some of the reported website issues:

“Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t. That’s not how we do things in America.”

Here’s the extended remark (transcript via Washington Post/Federal News Service).

Now, like every new law, every new product roll-out, there are going to be some glitches in the sign-up process along the way that we will fix. I’ve been saying this from the start. For example, we found out that there have been times this morning where the site’s been running more slowly than it normally will. The reason is because more than one million people visited healthcare.gov before 7:00 in the morning. To put that in context, there were five times more users in the marketplace this morning than have ever been on medicare.gov at one time. That gives you a sense of how important this is to millions of Americans around the country, and that’s a good thing.

And we’re going to be speeding things up in the next few hours to handle all of this demand that exceeds anything that we had expected. Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t. That’s not how we do things in America. We don’t actively root for failure. We get to work, we make things happen, we make them better, we keep going.

[Image Credit]

In April Apple announced that it would boost its share repurchase program from $10 billion to $60 billion, as part of a $100 billion effort, executed with cash, set to conclude by the end of calendar 2015. That represented a $55 billion increase on its formerly announced shareholder return efforts.

In Apple’s estimation, it would return about $30 billion yearly to shareholders over the course of the expanded program, calculating that rate with a starting point of August 2012. Apple has issued a dividend for just over a year, at current date.

The company now returns over $10 billion to investors yearly in the form of dividends.

Some investors are not content, including everyone’s favorite eccentric uncle of dollars, Carl Icahn. Having amassed a nearly $2 billion stake in Apple, Icahn recently had dinner with the company’s CEO Tim Cook. His pitch: A $150 billion buyback. The pair are set to discuss the idea in a few weeks.

Note that Icahn wants $150 billion in share buybacks alone and not in total return. The $90 billion delta between Apple’s current share buyback program and what Icahn wants is stunning, as it is a figure 150 percent greater than Apple’s already recently expanded program’s promise.

Presuming that Icahn expects Apple to pull off his $150 billion in share repurchases in the same time frame as the company had previously intended to buy back a mere $60 billion, it would boost the company’s per-year return cost for shareholders from $30.03 billion yearly to $57.06 billion, a near doubling.

Cost

Can Apple afford the expense? The Wall Street Journal reported today that Apple completed its most recent quarter with $146.6 billion in cash. In that quarter, Apple had a net profit of $6.9 billion, and cash flow of $7.8 billion. Assuming that Apple generated that same amount of cash for a year, it would only total $31.2 billion.

So, at Icahn’s proposed rates, the company would be forced to dip deeply into its cash position to execute the buyback. Why would he want Apple to greatly lower its cash stash (aside from enriching his investment, naturally)? He thinks that Apple’s stock is undervalued, and therefore it’s a prime time for the company to buy more.

Buy when the share price is cheaper than its value, and you remove stock from the market at a more efficient rate.

Apple currently trades for $488 per share. Icahn, in an interview with CNBC, said that Apple would still have low “multiples” at $630 per share. In his view, it would be “absurd” to not buy more stock now.

Assuming 10 quarters between now (including the current fiscal quarter, of course) at $7.8 billion per, Apple would generate $78 billion in new monies available for use. That tacked onto its current cash position of $146.6 billion, and Apple has a theoretical cash chest of $224.6 billion. Icahn wants to use $190 billion of that. That would put Apple’s (back of a vodka-stained napkin in charcoal pencil) cash position under the $35 billion mark. It would be odd for Apple to not be richer than Croesus.

Still, we’re discussing Apple removing around one-third of its total market capitalization off the market. That’s a sea change in its investor position.

Impact

If Apple is swayed by Icahn, it would set a precedent by which even rich buyback and dividend programs enacted by wealthy technology companies could be viewed as at-risk from a corporate perspective. Microsoft, for example, is under similar pressure from an activist investor of its own: ValueAct. That investor is parlaying 0.8 percent stake in Microsoft into a board seat and perhaps larger shareholder return. Google has tens of billions in cash, as well. Cisco, Oracle, even perhaps Facebook could be on the dock if they continue to perform.

In short, the age of tech companies running massive cash surpluses as weapons that can be used both offensively and defensively could be winding down. Apple could draw down its cash position from $146.6 billion to $35 billion in just over two years. Get ready for some balance sheet bingo.

Fact: Companies love cash cushions. It provides latitude to buy any rival they fear, and make long-term bets that would be infeasible at lower rates of accumulated wealth.

Icahn is not making a small claim: His buyback program totals more dollars than Apple’s entire current cash position.

And he might get it, too.

Top Image Credit: Mike Deerkoski

San Francisco-based real estate startup Reesio is announcing today that it has closed on $1.096 million in new funding for its transaction management software for real estate agents. Investors included Digital Garage, MicroVentures, Hiten Shah, and other angels. The company had previously raised a seed round of $205,000.

Reesio first launched in April of this year, where it was focused on selling its platform to agents using the SaaS-based subscription model at prices ranging around $15 per month per agent. And this was a pivot from an earlier idea focused on the FSBO (for sale by owner) market.

During the company’s participation in the 500 Startups accelerator program this year, co-founder and CEO Mark Thomas and his team found that by processing the transactions on its platform, they were accumulating listing and property data in real-time. Then, in comparing that transactional data to large portals like Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com, they found that Reesio’s data was more current and more accurate, leading them to realize that they might have something even more valuable on their hands.

Thomas claims that as much as half the data on the search portals was inaccurate for a variety of reasons  – it wasn’t being updated in a timely fashion, as MLS systems were protecting their data against scrapers, for example. He says that the portals would not have the current, correct status of a property (contract, pending sold, etc.), the right listing price, or the right property data, like number of beds, baths or square footage, in a number of cases.

The problem lies with how the large portals are collecting this data. They syndicate listings from the 900 MLS’s across the U.S. and pull in public record data. And the MLS systems themselves receive their data by manual input from real estate agents – and sometimes, it’s never input at all.

Reesio’s solution is to bring the transactions online, in a modern web-based system designed for brokers, transaction coordinators, and agents. The platform includes support for workflow templates that help agents to follow through with each step in the transaction process – a process which, traditionally, includes a large stack of printed paperwork. Instead of having to print out copies for everyone to sign, Reesio integrates DocuSign into its product so users can upload, share and sign all the files. The online file system also doesn’t have a storage limit like other cloud storage companies do – such as Dropbox, a service that’s fairly popular among agents today.

The platform itself is clean and simple in its design, which makes it easy for the sometimes less-tech savvy realtors to use, as well as the brokers who track their transactions. There’s a social element to it, too, with member profiles, an Activity feed, and an invite system that allows users to reach out to clients, other agents an third-party vendors to get them online.

To take on competitors in the space, including companies like Cartavi and dotloop, among others, Reesio has until now been focused on offering a lower-cost agent offering. Brokers and transaction coordinators also start at those same lowered prices ($15 per agent per month, on average), but increase based on the number of users in their brokerage. The pricing included the e-signature account option, as well, so that’s not a surprise fee later on.

To date, the company has signed up 1,700 real estate agents to use Reesio, but Thomas stresses that they haven’t yet focused on growing the user base because they were in the accelerator program and have been still fine-tuning the product and platform, as there are also a lot of legal and compliance nuances that go into something like Reesio.

WHAT’S NEW: REESIO GOES FREE, ADDS PREMIUM FEATURES

Now, with the additional funding the plan is to drop the $15 per agent per month pricing plan altogether. (The website still reports pricing as being $20 per month, we should note – a discrepancy based on discounts currently offered). Starting on October 29th, Reesio will begin going after scale and growth by giving its product away for free to agents, who can then create as many transactions on Reesio as they want. The company will then launch additional features on the platform at the same time.

“Most notably, we’re taking all of the transaction details and automatically using those details to create public listing pages that agents can use to market their properties and that buyers can find through Google searches. Agents will be able to subscribe and pay between $99/month-$399/month to receive buyer leads that come through their public listing pages,” says Thomas, explaining that the rest of the platform will remain free. Reesio is also going to be launching the ability to make, accept, and decline offers, schedule showings, and it will introduce a revamped documents and compliance section, he adds.

The longer term business model also includes an advertising component. Because Reesio knows when transactions occur, like a new listing is posted or a buyer goes into contract on a property, the software can present tasks in the workflow that point to third-party vendors who advertise with Reesio. This includes things like staging, home inspections, homeowners’ insurance, and more. “The buyer won’t be put off by that because they need to get it done,” says Thomas.

He also tells us the funding will be used to grow Reesio now four-person team by two more. They’re hiring an iOS engineer to bring Reesio to the iPad and iPhone – a top request because realtors are typically on the go. The remaining funding will be used toward marketing efforts, with the goal of getting 25,000 to 50,0000 agents online over the course of the next 18 months.

The Galaxy Gear is an impressive push in mobile technology, but the execution — both on the hardware and software side — isn’t enough to justify the $300 price tag.

At first glance, the reworked Q50 ticks off the usual boxes of model refresh upgrades. But the real differentiator here is the tech toys, the most supreme of which is the world’s first production steer-by-wire setup, which Infiniti calls Direct Adaptive Steering