Category: Tech news

BRANDiD, a personal shopping site that presented today on the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield stage, is hoping to catch the eye of that particular demographic of men who would rather do anything else in the world than shop for clothes. Founded in early 2012, the site helps guys outsource this task to personal shoppers, who can pull clothing recommendations from any e-commerce site they want.

Originally London-based but now located in San Francisco, BRANDiD was founded by brothers Ankush and Arush Sehgal and Nicolas Kermarc, the CEO and engineers, respectively. The company won Seedcamp London that year and received $175,000 in funding. They are currently raising a seed round, the amount of which the team declined to disclose.

“We did all our alpha testing back home [in London] which is a notoriously difficult market to crack,” Ankush said. “When we began to show real traction there that’s when we knew we were ready to take on the US market.”

BRANDiD is currently available only in San Francisco and by invitation in order to balance supply and demand and ensure customer service, Arush said. The company will be releasing an iOS app later this year and looking to make hires in technical and community positions.

While a number of men’s e-commerce sites focus on customers who know fashion, BRANDiD is targeting the average Joe, who wants to look good but doesn’t really know how to get himself there. Converting that demographic into BRANDiD customers means making shopping ridiculously simple, from the selection process to the returns.

With personalization as the hot button topic in e-commerce, BRANDiD represents a subset of startups betting on a mix of data and human advice to keep customers coming back, rather than the solely algorithm-based recommendations that have become ubiquitous on other sites.

There are a number of good reasons to do so: data points won’t create an outfit that sings as well as a human eye does, and people are a more compelling sales force, especially when you grow to trust them. For those used to shopping offline, interacting with a salesperson is the most natural way to shop.

For those reasons, and the all-important laziness factor, BRANDiD is working hard to build a model with conversation at its core.

“It’s completely designed around the conversation. We threw away what we knew about e-commerce and completely focused on the conversation, which is live chat,” Ankush said.

On entering the site, customers go through an onboarding process powered by “M.A.L.E.” (BRANDiD’s Masculine Algorithmic Learning Engine). They answer multiple choice questions about their clothing preferences and check a “hit list” of clothing items that they need. That data is used to match the consumer to a shopper who best suits his style.

From there, the customer is put directly in touch with their “S.W.A.T.”(Specialist Wardrobe Augmentation Technician), and the two can connect over Facebook to talk about their options. When BRANDiD’s app launches later this year, it will include in-app messaging for S.W.A.Ts and their clients.

BRANDiD is looking to make itself especially appealing on returns, one-upping the free-shipping-label-included model that e-commerce sites like Asos to Warby Parker use to make things easy on their customers. Starting in San Francisco, BRANDiD will come pick clothing items up if they don’t work out, no paperwork needed. Want to leave it with the doorman at your office building? Totally cool.

With the tag line, “Kick shopping’s ass,” BRANDiD is going for a decidedly bro-friendly vibe. An onboarding question asks, “Who would win in a fight?” between Harry Potter and Tony Montana. The correct answer is Montana.

The site has a lot of personality, and it isn’t for everyone, the founders said. But those who like it will like it a lot, and they would rather build a smaller base of rabid fans than try to appeal to everyone.

“E-commerce traditionally was for women. They like to shop, learn about fashion, and they’re on the site longer,” Ankush said. “With guys this doesn’t work at all. If you look at the Gilt Man blog, there are zero comments on it every day. Everyone else was going after this fashionista guy, but from our experience in retail and serving men, we really know that when it comes to shopping what they’re interested in is they want to get their stuff and get the fuck out.”

BRANDiD also shooting to capture the vast majority of men who still shop in stores as they make the transition to online shopping.

“If you think about it, it’s an absolutely enormous market,” Ankush said. “The 93% of men who shop in stores, over the next five years, that is really going to shift online. Everyone knows about the death of retail. I’ve been in retail and experienced it firsthand. To make it a successful retail business, as That 93% is going to shift to more where women’s is. There’s a massive opportunity there. Those guys that shop will be shopping online. They need something that is made for them.”

S.W.A.T.s, who are selected by application, earn money on a 10% surcharge automatically added to purchases. Because many men shop in bulk a few times a year, the average tip comes out to a rate of about $20 to $30 per hour spent shopping. It’s enough to make for a good part time job, and BRANDiD is reaching out to local fashion schools like San Francisco’s Fashion Institute of Design and Marketing (FIDM) to find sartorially inclined candidates.

The personal shoppers can add products from any online retailer and customers buy through BRANDiD, meaning the site owns the credit card and the customer. Down the road BRANDiD aims to secure affiliate style deals with online retailers, a goal that the team sees as highly achievable given that the sale is a done deal once the customer has given the ok to an item of clothing. With e-commerce sites that simply forward the consumer to another retailer, there’s a good chance that the cart will get dropped somewhere along the way.

“We’re selling the retailers a guaranteed sale. It’ll take time for the industry to figure out what to do with that.”

Question & Answer

Q. You have a background in men’s fashion. There seem to be so many shopping sites. What’s special about yours? Is it the shopper? Are they incentivized by tips?

A. What differentiates us is two things: we live and die by our community, and the shopper is a unique thing about us. We have an amazing array of people working with us. The second thing is our try before you buy it feature. We’re anti-fashion tech.

Q. How are you going to scale labor?

A. Our shoppers are also the people who, when they’re not shopping, do collection. Very similar to Lyft, our shoppers come through recommendations.

Q. Are you starting in a particular city?

A. It’s San Francisco only right now. We need to scale supply and demand in an equal ratio. Rolling out city by city.

Q. So your shopper needs to love shopping but also drive around city all day…

A. It’s certainly up to you.

Q. Sounds labor intensive. How do you scale?

A. We’ve done retail and e-commerce, and one thing we’ve always wanted to avoid was logistics. What we do allows us to scale because of those reasons. Our distribution is distributed by shoppers. We never touch stock.

Today at Disrupt SF, Frontback co-founder and CEO Frédéric della Faille took the stage to introduce Frontback to the world. After 200,000 downloads in a month, everybody is trying to answer this intriguing question: why is this app so successful? Jack Dorsey, Ashton Kutcher and the Prime Minister of Belgium are all using Frontback, because they may know something that we don’t.

Michael Arrington grilled della Faille about Checkthis, the startup behind Frontback. While Checkthis has been around for a while, it hasn’t caught everyone’s attention. “The product is still around and doing well,” della Faille said. Yet, he made a revelation on the harsh life of consumer startups.

“We didn’t tell the investors that we were working on that”

“We were close to closing. Two weeks to closing,” he said. To post something on Checkthis, you need 15 taps. With Frontback, the team wanted to build a very straightforward product to create content. “We went from 15 taps to 5 taps,” he said.

Frontback was the startup’s last chance to finally find its right product. “We didn’t tell the investors that we were working on that,” della Faille said. That’s why Frontback was developed over the course of four weeks and released as an MVP.

Since then, the team has been hard at work on improving the product. It just released its first major update that brings much-needed social features. The app now comes with user profiles, making it possible to browse other people’s Frontbacks and more.

But it doesn’t explain why Frontback is generating hundreds of thousands of downloads. Its well-known users are part of the answer, but the product in itself is probably the reason why the app got popular. It is a very viral experience because it’s really fun to use. As della Faille said, Frontback is a smile-generating machine.

“I didn’t expect at all this kind of growth,” della Faille told me recently. Frontback was released in July, and it apparently played an important part of the launch. Many people took Frontbacks of what they were doing on vacation, having fun together.

Back in 2010, Instagram reported 1 million registered users in less than three months. Yet, Frontback is a very different experience and shouldn’t even be considered as yet another photo-sharing app.

With Snapchat, FaceTime and the smartphone front cameras, many people have progressively gotten used to taking selfies. Now that everyone is more comfortable sharing their faces, Frontback users open the app, smile, and show the app to their friends. It’s as simple as that.

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Backstage Interview

Shortly after Apple’s event this morning, Darrell and I got to spend a bit of time with the just-announced iPhone 5s and its more wallet-friendly lil’ brother, the iPhone 5c.

While we’ll wait until we’ve given both devices a proper spin before we do any sort of lengthy review, we wanted to drop a quick video hands-on and our first impressions.

iPhone 5s Impressions:

• Given the price and material difference, you’d probably assume that the 5s feels a good bit more slick than the 5c. You’d be right. The 5c still feels quite nice in the hand, but plastic is plastic.
• This thing is way speedy, presumably because of the jump to 64-bit. We only poked around the OS a little, but everything we saw was buttery smooth.
• It looks a lot like the iPhone 5. If you aren’t geeky enough to know how to spot the new color options, the Fingerprint-sensing home button, or the dual flash, you probably couldn’t tell the difference.
• The new slo-mo feature works REALLY well. We didn’t have any extreme sports stars handy to bust a kickflip or two for us, but it did do a really good job of catching us waving our hands around like dweebs at 120 frames per second.
• In our initial tests, the fingerprint detection works almost shockingly well. Setup takes seconds, and it worked consistently and instantly thereafter. After configuring a 5s to be on the look out for Darrell’s fingerprint, Greg’s fingerprint was immediately turned away. Once I added mine to the system, it worked immediately. There was literally zero frustration (the video above shows us lifting/tapping the fingerprint sensor multiple times while setting it up. It’s not failing to sense our finger properly, that tapping is just a prompted part of the process.)

 

iPhone 5c impressions:

• While it may be cheaper than the 5s, it certainly doesn’t feel cheap. It may not be as svelte, but it’s still a pretty dang nice looking phone.
• Between the price point and the bright colors and the commercials Apple showed today, the 5c seems aimed directly at a younger market.
• Greg says: Apple’s new 5c cases are… not my favorite. While the contrasting color options are nice, the case design doesn’t seem particularly inspired. As others have pointed out, they sort of look like Crocs. Plus, they make your iPhone say “hon” on the back.

That’s all for now, but we’ll go a whole lot deeper when we do our full review in the coming weeks. What say you? Is the iPhone 5S a big enough jump from the 5? Would you carry a 5c?

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, a young, teacher-led education technology startup called Skaffl announced the impending launch of an iPad app that aims to help teachers make better use of technology in the classroom. Its first product, “Braket” allows teachers to plan lessons, manage document workflow in the classroom and streamline communication with students and parents.

While it’s easy to celebrate how quickly technology is moving into classroom and expanding learning opportunities for both teachers and students — likeit’s also adding to the workload and stress teachers already experience on a daily basis. “It’s a double-edged sword,” says former high school teacher Rita Chesterton, with the most relevant example being the rapid adoption of iPads among K-12 schools.

While tablets increase the accessibility of learning content and make the educational process more engaging, she says, teachers have also found that even simple tasks — like distributing and collecting assignments — has become more complex. Chesterton and her three co-founders created Skaffl to develop mobile apps for K-12 classrooms to help teachers simplify the critical tasks they perform every day, from lesson planning to assessments.

The key, Chesterton tells us, is that the app has been designed to reduce the amount of work required to upload .pdfs or .docs and distribute those written assignments to students, while allowing students to complete assignments and annotate the documents directly before submitting them.

Teachers can then assess student work and return grades right from the app without having to open other apps, documents or tools during the process. While many Learning Management Systems (LMSes) provide similar functionality, the majority of adoption has taken place within higher education, with K-12 schools often balking at the price tag that comes with implementation.

Skaffl’s founders have a unique perspective on how schools are adopting educational technology and what tools teachers are actually using (and finding useful) in the classroom today, particularly Chesterton, who has spent the past five years helping schools integrate new technologies into their classrooms. Today, she serves as an “Instructional Technologist” in a K-12 district outside of Philadelphia, while her co-founder and COO, Mike Hanssen also happens to be the district’s tech director and brings 18 years of EdTech experience to Skaffl.

Somewhat surprisingly, the CEO explains that, despite the growing list of quality tools available to K-12 teachers, they haven’t yet seen anything that solves the workflow problem. While Google’s cloud-based software has begun to show up in K-12 classrooms around the country, she says, its tools are “great for collaboration” but lose some of their value when it comes to organization or simplifying workflow. Edmodo, too, has also become a popular platform among K-12, especially young students, the Skaffl CEO says, thanks to its being free. But it’s predominantly being used by students as a communication tool.

With Braket, the four-person team is putting all of its focus on simplifying the teacher workflow. As a result, the app lacks the bells and whistles one might find in some consumer-facing educational apps, but each feature is designed with teacher stress in mind. For example, the app allows teachers to work offline, and classwork stays cached on the device, so that they can grade assignments on the train or at a soccer game after school.

Skaffl is also working on a patent for a feature that enables students to flip back and forth between their notes and the assignments their teachers hand out in class. Chesterton says that, after watching students work in class over the years, she noticed that students have a tough time flipping between their notes, notes that teachers leave on lessons and the assignments they’re working on. So, the app comes with a built-in editor, which allows them to take notes in the app and save them for later, while making it easy to switch back and forth.

As to how they plan to monetize, the Skaffl CEO says that, while the app is free, the team plans on implementing a freemium model so that teachers can use all the basic features free of cost, while adding premium features as they go — like LMS integration, for example. Going forward, Skaffl also plans to add a recurring subscription model that will be sold to school districts.

Above all, Chesterton says, “each additional piece of functionality will be created with an understanding of what teachers need” and will focus on removing the barriers that stand in the way of adopting technology in the classroom.

Q&A With Judges

Jessica Livingston: Have you been surprised by anything in beta testing?
Not anything really surprising yet, as we’re keeping the feature set pretty simple in the beginning. Many of the features or tools that teachers do want to add, we’ve been planning to add and will as we move forward.

Niko Bonatsos: How big is the opportunity?
Current estimates are that there are 8 to 10 million iPads currently in use in schools, and our product will work regardless of whether or not each and every student has an iPad in the classroom. They don’t have to have their own, it could just be one in the classroom, that they’re sharing. But the amount of iPads is growing, and we’re looking to develop on Android as well in the near future so we’ll have bigger coverage.

Ilya Sukhar: What happens to the one kid without an iPad?
We’re initially targeting those schools that have a “1:1″ program, a program in place at certain K-12 schools in which they buy iPads in bulk to make sure that there’s an iPad for every student in every classroom. So, at least at first, targeting schools with these programs in place ensure that our app is being used by every student.

George Zachary: Is there translation required, how does the app deal with content?
No, we don’t make teachers provide their own content; we integrate with the platforms and tools that teachers are already working with, whether it’s Dropbox or Google Apps.

George Zachary: How do you get into the whole district?
We can have a code to go live on all iPads within a district, once we sell a district, and really it’s all about solving problems that really bother teachers … and not just one but all teachers.

Niko Bonatsos: What are the huge pain points and best use cases?
Students have to take a test, teachers have to open a gradebook app, and then put a grade in it, switch back and forth between apps, so we’re removing the work they have to do switching between them and so on …

For more, find Braket here.

When Apple holds its iPhone event in Beijing tomorrow — part of its push to simultaneously debut the product in multiple international markets — it looks like Apple could use the opportunity of new devices finally to close a long-anticipated deal with China Mobile, letting Apple better tap into a market of 1.2 billion mobile subscribers that is rapidly converting to smartphones.

A source familiar with the details of the Apple event tells us that China Mobile will in fact be there, and that this will be a “massive opportunity” for both, but we have also heard from another that this will not be the case.

CEO Tim Cook’s remarks during today’s presentation, welcoming viewers in Beijing, suggest that a stream of today’s Cupertino even will definitely be a part of the show. And to be clear, currently, Apple’s iPhone LTE availability page does not list support for any carriers in China. But cellular device specifications for the iPhone 5C and 5S models point to variations for both devices, respectively Model A1529 and Model A1530, supporting TD-LTE, the variety of LTE that China Mobile has adopted.

Without knowing whether China Mobile or any other carrier plans to subsidise these devices in the future, prices for the handsets in China will be at a premium: the 5C model will start at RMB4488 ($733) and the 5S model will be RMB5288 ($864).

According to Reuters, as of June, China had 1.18 billion mobile subscribers, with China Mobile accounting for the lion’s share of those at 740 million subscribers. In 3G, it also has the most subscribers at 138 million. China Mobile has yet to turn on its LTE network but has already been laying the groundwork by announcing several devices that will work on it when it is does get turned on.

China has long been a market that Apple has targeted, but it is one where growth has gone up and down, and where Android has stolen a major march. In Q2 of this year, Apple posted its biggest quarter ever for Greater China, with $8.8 billion in revenues. But then in Q3, revenues were down 43% but still accounted for 14% of the company’s overall revenues. Cook was defensive about what was going on. “China was weaker in the quarter,” he admitted, but said the “focus on revenue doesn’t tell the complete story…In the arc [of growth] I don’t get discouraged by a 90-day cycle that could have economic and other factors.”

What are those “other factors”? Cook doesn’t mention it by name but Android smartphones, collectively, have been a persistent competitive pressure on the company in China. Kantar Worldpanel estimates that Android took over 70% of all smartphone sales in China in the 12 weeks to July 31, growing by nine percentage points, while iOS took just over 22% of sales, dropping by four percentage points.

This is where LTE support could come in handy for Apple. On the one hand, it seems like offering LTE is simply table stakes in the smartphone world of today, but on the other it will make sure that Apple’s handsets will remain attractive devices to carriers keen to get their users spending more on their networks. As we pointed out yesterday, the iPhone has traditionally attracted more avid mobile data usage than any other smartphone platform — but Android, led by Samsung, has now finally overtaken it on a global basis.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Next Caller, a customer service call center tool announced that it has integrated with Zendesk in a bid to expand its customer base. It also announced that it has acquired information on 180 million phone numbers, improving the dataset that it depends on to vend information to call centers.

Next Caller has a twin value proposition: For businesses, it saves them time – and therefore cash – per service call; for consumers, wait times to speak to a human are reduced to essentially zero, and the company called has most of their information on file, ready to go when they dial in.

Next Caller picks up consumer data in two ways, primarily through the data sets that it has acquired. This allows it to offer call centers a pingable service that can bring up information about the phone number that is calling in, saving time. However, Next Caller is also built for consumer opt-in: A regular person such as you or I joins Next Caller, providing it with our name and address, which it then links to client call centers. You the user are shot to the front of the line, and your call should end up taking less time.

The company has one other trick up its sleeve that might prove useful: A web form that pre-collects consumer information directly before they call in, lowering the friction of providing normal information once on the call. It’s better to type your phone number than repeat it 4 times to a rep.

The question is whether you are comfortable handing off your personal information to a third-party in hopes that the next call center you dial will have partnered with Next Caller. If you spend much of your time on such calls, it might make sense. Though, I suspect that Next Caller will do more of its business based on the database model it is also pursuing through the bulk acquisition of data as opposed to through any form of opt-in effort. Customer acquisition costs in the latter model will be material.

Next Caller charges $0.10 per database ping. Even if it only provides the limited information that its record database can deliver, it should be well worth the purchase for the average call center. Full costs of picking up a customer’s information can run as high as $2 per call, according to the firm.

Next Caller is working in a pain-point heavy space with a number of ideas in hand to crack the market. If it can cut wait times, lower business costs, and protect privacy each at once, that will be an accomplishment.

Questions And Answers

Q: What about this is defensible?

A: We have a patent pending, so we’ll know about that in four to five years.

Q: How do already have so much information?

A: We license it directly from carriers, and have a data cleaning deal.

Top Image Credit: B4bees Telephone Photo: Daniel Oines

Over the years, the content creators have benefited from more powerful video editing software, but as the tools for editing have improved, the way content creators manage those edits hasn’t kept pace. These days, videos are produced and edited by widely distributed teams that mostly use email and spreadsheets to keep track of all the different assets and revisions that are being worked on.

First Cut Pro, which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, seeks to change all that. It provides editing teams with a cloud-based tool for collaborating and monitoring all the different changes that are made to videos during the post-production process.

The tool allows for editors to submit video files, which can then be watched directly through the platform. Different stakeholders can then make comments or feedback directly within the platform, which will pause the video being watched and time-stamp where revisions should be made. That’s a big step forward from how the process is normally done today — which includes lots of pausing videos, going into spreadsheets and manually making notes of timestamps and revisions.

Users can respond to feedback inline on the platform, or they can respond from email notifications that are sent whenever changes or comments have been made to a project. It allows stakeholders to manage multiple projects and revisions at once, and integrates directly into the editing environment.

First Cut Pro supports the ability to export markers into .CSV files for spreadsheets, .XML metadata files for Adobe Premier, After Effects and Apple’s Final Cut Pro, as well as .txt files for importing into AVID Media Composer. That said, videos aren’t stored in the cloud — they’re stored locally on the viewer’s computer or on network attached storage. That means that high-quality versions of the videos can be viewed instantly.

The platform has a SaaS-based licensing model for users, with variable pricing based on the number of collaborators and projects that are being worked on at once. Pricing starts free for individual accounts with up to five collaborators. If you need more than that, freelancer accounts start at $39 a month and go up to $119 a month for power users with up to 20 collaborators and 7 projects. Above that, and it can work on enterprise pricing plans.

Question & Answer

Q: How big of a problem is this?

A: Between movies, TV, and ads, there’s probably $30 billion spent on post-production. There’s probably 20,000 ad agencies. Just in advertising, it’s pretty sizable. Video is literally ubiquitous.

Q: How do you get the client to log in?

A: Our goal was to make it extremely easy to use. However if you do want to have an ongoing relationship, client gets notified when changes are made.

Q: What were customers using before this?

A: Typically they use emails and phone calls. One client used spreadsheets. You keep content on servers and we’ll work with that.

Q: How do you capture customers?

A: Today it’s very freelancer-focused. They work with different clients and use this tool, getting those clients to also use them.

Startup Alley is a veritable cornucopia of new technology companies. The world’s best descend on San Francisco annually for TechCrunch Disrupt. And this year, as in many previous, we had a pavilion from Israel. Here’s a run-down of the companies TechCrunch TV visited on Day One.

EventWith
“EventWith helps plan events together. Split up tasks, vote on time and place, and have everyone participate all in one central place.”

Numbeez
“Numbeez is a social platform that enables users to track, share and talk about numbers. Numbeez allows users to create their personal live dashboards containing all the numbers they’re passionate about and let other users follow those boards, comment and enjoy the community around the numbers. What can those numbers be? Anything from sports statistics and games results, through financial figures such as stocks prices and currency rates to cool and fun numeric facts.”

Peer2
“Face 2 face networking for professionals”

Gonavin
“Location:-based inside buildings doesn’t need pre-mapping

Quick update from the CrunchBase team. Our dataset has now grown to 400k profiles and 45k investment rounds thanks to our community of contributors and members of the CrunchBase Venture Program. We’ve also seen monthly contributions double since January reaching 50k per month, a reminder that this is truly a community effort.

Looking back over the first eight months of 2013, Techstars, 500 Startups, Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, SV Angel, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, First Round Capital, and Intel Capital have already participated in over 30 funding rounds. Not surprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area garners the most investment with New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington DC, Austin, and Denver, San Diego, and Chicago round out the top 10 US regions.

We’re publishing a data snapshot of the CrunchBase database today which includes all venture funded U.S. Companies. You can download the snapshot here and if you find any errors or omissions, please let us know. And, don’t forget to check out our new mobile site.

Would you buy a robotic drink maker from these men? I sure would. These are the creators of Monsieur, a robotic bartender that will squirt out a great margarita or a nice Manhattan in about a minute using Android, a bunch of pumps, and some booze.

Created by Barry Givens and Eric Williams and launching at Disrupt SF 2013, Monsieur allows you to select a drink – it includes pre-designed recipes and you can download “packs” that add different types of drinks to the mix – and the machine does the rest. Nozzles squirt out very specific amounts of plonk and mixers and your drink is ready. Every drink is exactly the same and, barring a bit of shaking, they’re ready to drink.

“Bartending and drink service have not been innovated in centuries,” said Givens. “There have been a couple attempts to create machines that pour cocktails but they failed to make a product that is intelligent, fun and elegant.”

Givens and Williams met at Georgia Tech. Givens has a BS in Mechanical Engineering and Williams has a Master’s in CS. He worked for Panasonic and Siemens before he began in on Monsieur. Angel investor Paul Judge, cofounder of Pindrop and VP at Barracuda, handed the team a bit of funding after seeing an early prototype.

Monsieur was born when Givens ended up waiting for an hour for a cocktail. “In frustration I asked why there wasn’t a machine to just make my drink. After leaving dinner that night, I started reading more about bartending and soon enrolled in bartending school,” he said. Early prototypes worked but didn’t have enough pizazz.

The team has deployed beta units at restaurants and bars in Atlanta and they’re working on partnerships with drink brands and sports arenas. They see this as sort of a “bartender in a box” that staff can roll into a room and let users order drinks without having staff on hand. The system maintains a log of what was served and the venue can ring up a bill at the end of the night. You can even change the strength of the drink from “regular” to “boss.” I had a “boss” drink when I tested the machine and it was, without a doubt, pretty darn good.

In short, it beats a bottle of vodka in a bucket.

“Our drinks taste great, people love using Monsieur and it helps businesses be more profitable,” said Givens. Plus who doesn’t want a robotic drinks butler named Monsieur? The team could put the box in a pair of spats and give it a pencil-thin mustache and you’ve got a real winner.

Apple introduced some cases to go along with both the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c. The iPhone 5c’s case looks a lot like Crocs shoes. It also makes for one of the most annoying Apple design missteps I’ve seen recently.

Just look at this. Look at it:

I mean, Apple had the iPhone in hand when it was designing these cases to go along with it. It could have easily made sure that the name was either exposed or covered. Or that the ugly regulatory text was obscured. Mais non.

Mood-based music streaming service Songza has raised a $4.7 million funding round, their second since they closed $2 million in 2011. Songza did not name a lead for the round, the investors for which include Amazon, William Morris Endeavor, Lerer Ventures, Deep Fork Capital, Metamorphic Ventures, Troy Carter, Scooter Braun, Gary Vaynerchuk, Geoff Judge, and Nicole Junkermann.

With this latest round, Songza will be scaling its sales team and developing its native advertising, having recently hired a dedicated brand manager. Technically it is the company’s Series D, as the corporation that owns Songza formerly owned AmieStreet.com and did two rounds of funding for that service, but it is the second round of financing for Songza, CEO Elias Roman said.

This summer Songza has been at work developing advertisements for Taco Bell, Samsung, Nissan, and Vitaminwater, among others, with the intention of making ads not just palatable but a desirable and natural part of the user experience. This takes the form of sponsored playlists of about 50-60 songs, paired with banner advertisements and a 15-second video at the start.

Songza gives advertisers’ playlists a spot as one of their six mood selection options; on a Sunday morning, “Getting Hyped With Taco Bell” sits beside “Drinking Gourmet Coffee” and “Falling Back Asleep.”

Roman said the goal is to create advertisements that are not just native to the platform, but also native to the user’s experience. Content-oriented advertising like promoted tweets accomplish the first but not the latter, he said, while sponsored BuzzFeed lists tend do do both.

Traditional advertisements are asking for a customer’s phone number before they’ve had a good conversation, figuratively speaking, Roman said. What Songza is aiming to do is create that conversation through a good music experience and then ask for the phone number.

Roman said that the Taco Bell and Samsung campaigns that Songza is currently running have received a ratio of positive and negative feedback that is actually better than the app’s other, organic playlists.

Earlier this month, Songza introduced Club Songza, a paid, ad-free experience that costs $.99 per week and gives users access to additional content. Moving forward, Roman hinted that Songza could be looking to expand outside of music.

“One of the things we’re hinting at is that we can curate outside of music. What brands and products make sense to surround yourself with? … You’re driving to work and what you need is the news in 15 minutes or less to be smarter about what happened in the last day. That’s a podcast. An ABC News clip. Just like we do with music, it’s surfacing the right content when you need it.”

Apple’s Cupertino keynote is finally over, but the ensuing sea of stories that emerged from the event can still be a little tricky to navigate. We’ve written plenty of full-length stories discussing what exactly Apple has just revealed today (with more to come, I’m sure), but for your reading pleasure here’s a quick primer for everything Apple announced or unveiled over the past few hours — think of it as a TechCrunch TL;DR for the day’s Apple happenings.

The Hardware

Apple finally revealed its two new iPhones, the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c. As the naming scheme implies, the 5s is the high-end successor to the iPhone 5 and it features (among other things) a snappy new 64-bit A7 processor, an M7 co-processor for tracking motion (you know, for fitness apps), and a Touch ID fingerprint sensor built into the home button. If it weren’t apparent at first glance, the 5s looks nearly identical to the original iPhone 5, though the black and white (sorry, silver) versions are joined by a gold model that was the subject of many a rumor in the weeks leading up to the event.

Also onboard is a much-improved camera — the 5s still technically has an 8-megapixel shooter, but it’s capable of capturing more image data thanks to a significantly larger sensor. That camera is also capable of shooting 120fps slow motion video at 720p, another feature that was teased in advance of the official announcement. Throw in the True Tone dual-LED flash for more accurate lighting and a 10 shot per second burst mode, and you’ve got yourself one heck of a mobile point-and-shoot camera.

All things considered it’s a pretty comprehensive upgrade to Apple’s venerable iPhone 5, but at this point it’s tough to see what sort of impact additions like the Touch ID will have down the road.

Curiously enough, it’s not the 4s that’s being removed from Apple’s lineup, it’s the year-old iPhone 5. It seems like a strange move considering it’s usually the oldest iPhone in the portfolio that gets the boot, but I suspect Apple didn’t want to split sales between the iPhone 5 and its slightly upgraded brother. You’ll be able to pick up a 16GB iPhone 5s for $199 on-contract, and the 32GB and 64GB models will cost $299 and $399 respectively with contracts on September 20.

The 5c on the other hand is the budget model that was the star of innumerable rumors and leaks over the past few months (and even years). As most of us expected, the 5c is clad mostly in colorful plastic, but Apple played up a steel frame that’s hidden beneath the surface that helps with the device’s durability and acts as an antenna. While the 5c looks awfully different from the iPhones of years past, its innards are all pretty familiar. It shares the same 4-inch Retina display as the iPhone 5, as well as the same A6 processor, so it’s hard not to look at the thing as an iPhone 5 replacement — Apple essentially decided to split the iPhone 5 in twain and take those resulting devices in divergent directions.

It’s pretty cheap if you’re looking to sign a multi-year contract, but it’s considerably less so if you’re trying to buy one outright: the 16GB 5c will cost $549 sans contract and the 32GB version will cost $649. More reasonable than other models, sure, but it may not be the sort of developing market buster many of us were expecting before the thing was actually revealed.

Our very Darrell Etherington was on hand in Cupertino to get a feel for these new devices, and he seems understandably pleased with both. If anything though, he sees good things for the future of the 5c.

Based on my first impressions, I imagine the iPhone 5c will have plenty of fans when it goes up for pre-order on September 13 – this is a phone that offers a lot of value at its price point, and improves upon the iPhone 5, which is a first for Apple’s smartphone lineup mid-tier device.

The Software

Today wasn’t just about iPhones. Apple also confirmed that the software that powers these new devices, iOS 7, will be available for the masses to download starting on September 18. Naturally, not every Apple iDevice will be able to run this new update, but a majority of the devices out there now can. If you have an iPhone or newer, an iPad 2 or newer, the iPad mini, or the 5th-gen iPod touch, you should keep your eyes peeled for an update notice in the coming days. We took a deeper look at what Apple had planned for iOS 7 when it was first unveiled at WWDC, but it’ll be interesting to see how the general public takes to the update.

If you’re a developer though (or friends with a developer who connected you to their account), you can taste a near-final version of iOS 7 right now — Apple had made the iOS 7 GM available to anyone brave enough to install it. As always, this new iOS update will be free for all, but that’s not the only freebie Apple announced today. Those who purchase a new iPhone, iPad or 5th-gen iPod Touch will also get free copies of iWork, iPhoto & iMovie applications (sorry, GarageBand will still cost you).

The Formlabs Form 1 prints objects by firing lasers into plastic resin, and it can print very tiny objects at extremely high resolution. Surprisingly, it’s crazy-easy to use.

Saddleback Leather’s Waterbag has rugged, laid-back looks, and is fashioned from a single piece of leather.