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It’s that time of the week for CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few of us TechCrunch writers together in the TCTV studio to chat about the most interesting tech news stories from the past seven days.
This week, Greg Kumparak, Jordan Crook and I chatted about announcement of Samsung’s new smartwatch, the Galaxy Gear; Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia’s devices and services business, and the rumors of acquisition talks between payments gateway Braintree and Square and PayPal.
The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon not only marks the beginning of Disrupt SF 2013, but it also marks the beginning of potentially hundreds of new products, services, and gadgets.
1,200 hackers have filled the San Francisco Design Center to build whatever their heart desires. They’ll have a handful of incredible APIs at their disposal and a slew of prizes worth $40k hanging in the balance.
They’ll eat pizza, they’ll get in the zone, and they’ll probably participate in some late night tom-foolery (the last two hackathons involved impromptu dodgeball games and Nerf wars). Eventually, they’ll run into obstacles and get frustrated, and subsequently overcome those hurdles.
Finally, a day later, with dirty hair and crusty eyes, they’ll get on stage and have 60 seconds to present their work to some all-star judges like Twitter’s April Underwood and Pinterest’s Kent Brewster.
One will be crowned Hackathon winner, and many others will walk away with prizes, but all of them will be forever changed by the awesomeness of the experience.
We’ve seen amazing things come out of the Hackathons of the past, like a smart lock, a knife-wielding robot, and even GroupMe, which was sold for millions.
What will this year’s batch of young coders yield? Only time — 24 hours, to be exact — can tell. For now, sit back, relax, and take a look at the entrepreneurial hopefuls as they get crackin’.
If you’re interested in attending Disrupt SF 2013, tickets are still available and can be purchased here.
Security expert Robert Graham has done a bit of research and posts that the encryption standard used by earlier versions of the “secure” Tor protocol is most probably insecure and readable by the NSA. The vast majority of Tor servers run version 2.2 of the software which uses 1024 bit RSA/DH encryption. This is the same encryption standard that has been publicly cracked by the NSA and can be subverted in a few hours using very expensive custom chips.
What does this mean for you? Not much unless you value anonymity. Tor offers anonymous browsing, a feature important to activists, reporters, freedom fighters , and other folks who need to browse out of the limelight. That said, the fact that, in its most popular incarnation, its encryption can be (fairly) easily broken is bad. Couple this with the fact that this same standard is used in many SSL “secure” Internet interactions and things get worse. In short, writes Cory Doctorow, if the NSA can pull this off then we can be certain that other, less savory groups, have the same technology.
These tools are open source and can be salvaged. The current cipher used for Tor version 2.4 is far worse for the NSA than any 1024 bit key and it’s easier to encrypt methodically, Tor-style, than use brute force solutions to crack haphazardly, NSA style. We’re still winning, but it takes a village to keep encryption strong.
Facebook may have a billion users, and Twitter may be raking in the revenue.
But if you were to ask the next young, hip person you saw which social network they love most, odds are they’ll name Instagram.
But as Instagram grows, annoying behaviors sprout up like weeds. Beware, dear Instagrammers, these pitfalls that will make people hate you. (Or worse, unfollow you.)
Let’s be clear: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with selfies.
There is, however, something wrong with only selfies. If the only thing in your life interesting enough to photograph is your own face, you need to get out more. Equally frustrating is a handful of selfies that are only minutely different. For example, the selfie of you, followed by the selfie of you wearing new lipstick, followed again by the selfie of you wearing lipstick and your new sunglasses.
Pick one, please.
The absolute worst type of selfie is the humblebrag selfie: the one when you’ve just finished working out, or just woken up, and your caption explicitly states how un-cute you are right now. If you’re not looking your best, why are you posting pictures of your face?
Again, I reiterate, there’s nothing wrong with selfies. In fact, your Instagram feed is equally flawed without any selfies. I follow you, dear friend, and want to look upon your lovely countenance. Just don’t overwhelm me with it. Keep me in the loop on your new haircut. Show off them pearly whites. Just don’t put all your eggs in the selfie basket.
Not all screenshots are bad, only most of them. But by far the most egregious screenshots are filtered versions of inspirational quotes you’d find on Pinterest. We’ve all seen them before: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Not only are these quotes shamefully overused, but most of them don’t even make sense. If you try to shoot yourself to the moon, and you miss, you’re essentially lost in space.
It’s also worth noting that Marylin Monroe didn’t actually say most of the quotes attributed to her. If you insist on posting inspirational quotes, at least do your research.
Remember, Instagram is for pictures. Images. An image of text does not an Instagram make.
There are a number of suitable outlets for your inspirational quotes. Facebook and Twitter are built for your constructive locution. They yearn for it. Give them what they want.
(Inspagrams taken from the Notes app are doubly awful.)
This brings me to the second worst type of screenshot on Instagram: your text message conversation.
Once in a blue moon, a text screencap is worthy of your Instagram feed. For example, autocorrect nightmares are hilarious to just about everyone.
Still, in most cases your text message conversations can only appeal (or make sense) to a small group of people. I follow a wide range of people on Instagram, from close friends to professional acquaintances. The vast majority of those people, however, are not people I speak to on a regular basis.
That’s the magic, isn’t it? Checking in on the wedding of a high school friend or seeing a fellow tech reporter’s vacation in Miami is delightful.
But just because you have funny text conversations with your mom, or your best friend, it doesn’t mean that we’ll get it (or that we care). These are what we call “inside jokes” and they aren’t so funny unless you’re on the inside. Don’t leave people out, Instagrammers. It’s rude.
I know what you’re going to say: why do I care if people like my photos?
There isn’t a fair answer, other than it feels good. Like count is a measure of the audience’s feelings toward a certain photo. If photos of my new gadgets get an average of two dozen likes, while pictures of my food get two or three likes, I soon learn that my audience is more engaged with photos of gadgets. More gadgets, then, I post. Less food. You see where I’m going.
By commenting that my picture of a kitten is cute, but not liking it, you’re throwing off my mental gauge of what to post in the future.
It’s also selfish to be posting photos yourself, with the expectation of getting likes, and yet never handing them out to others. We’re all on Instagram to communicate through photography, and your likes are a major part of that communication. If you want to be in the game, play along.
The stingy liker makes little sense. There’s no record of what you like on Instagram. Your likes don’t cost you anything besides a little extra effort from your thumb. Why, then, do some people comment on photos without liking them?
I have a friend, who will remain nameless. This friend (let’s call her Betty) posts at least five photos from every single activity she’s involved in. She goes to a bar with friends, and boom, six new Instagrams. She goes to a concert? Expect to see at least nine photos of the band, the crowd, and herself.
I love my friend Betty, and I love peering into her world in real-time to see what she’s up to. But the Instagramaholic is like that person who tends to repeat themselves. They say something once, you get it, and then they say it in a slightly different way eight more times.
No dude, I got it.
Those collage apps like PicStitch are built explicitly for this.
The opposite of the Instagramaholic is the World Traveler, that one guy that only pops up in your feed when he is doing something outrageously awesome, like driving a motorcycle in Paris or surfing in Bali. Months go by, and nary a photo from the World Traveler until suddenly, ten photos of Rome’s greatest treasures appear.
Obviously, we’re all more disposed to sharing our lives and photos when we’re doing interesting things. There are a list of mundane objects that every Instagrammer has taken: their feet in the sand, the plane window, an unusually beautiful latte. This can be annoying, but it can also be quite pleasant.
This is why Instagram is real-time to begin with. The next photo in your feed might be yet another plate of food, but it’s also a quick glance into what your friend is doing at that very moment, eating a delicious meal. I’d rather have a window into your real life, vacations and the everyday, than just few photos from your trip to Antigua.
I’m not saying to post boring things all the time, but posting pictures of only the most amazing tidbits of your life makes you seem like a show-off. A healthy Instagram feed is a mix of all things you, not just the glamorous stuff.
Don’t be shy.
The Hash-Hole could be the worst person on Instagram. Their flagrant substitution of quality for quantity is offensive. There should never be a hashtag in front of the word #the. Still, there are 16 million photos tagged with #the. Why? Seriously, an explanation for this would surely entertain.
#Not #only #does #this #make #your #caption #unreadable, #but #it #makes #you #look #incredibly #desperate #for #Instagram #love. There are clever ways to implement hashtags in your captions, and they can still get you likes or new followers.
And beyond popularity, hashtags have more intimate uses (which, in my opinion, are far more fun). Choosing a random, insidery hashtag for a certain event or group of friends can create a single location for all of your photos to live forever. I’d much prefer inside joke hashtags than far too many hashtags.
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — why September 10 will be a turning point for Tim Cook, why the Microsoft/Nokia acquisition/Ballmer resignation had it backwards, why iWatch stands for software not hardware.
Confusion makes for interesting times, or something like that. We’re caught in a vortex of boredom, say some of us, waiting for rescue by a leader with a dream. But while we wait, the house of cards known as the technology business continues its dramatic push forward, with no end in sight. It’s a Golden Age of the Movies, a Renaissance of the Possible, a time to enjoy the show.
@stevegillmor, @dbfarber, @jtaschek, @scobleizer, @kteare
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
The near-unthinkable has happened. The dinosaurs are finally evolving. The publishing industry’s long war against technology, the future, and its customers may finally be coming to a close.
This week Amazon introduced Kindle MatchBook, “an innovative new program which enables you to offer your Kindle book at a discount when readers purchase your print book,” to quote its email sent to authors. About time, too; but we expect a certain amount of innovation from Amazon. The truly astonishing thing happened on Thursday, when Oyster, a “Netflix for books,” launched — complete with the participation of HarperCollins.
You may not appreciate how epochal this is. HarperCollins is one of the “Big Five” publishers, all of whom until now have fought subscription model tooth and nail. Granted, they’re only making a subset of their titles available, mostly backlist as far as I can tell; but it’s the principle of the thing that matters, especially since Oyster is reportedly “in negotations” with all the other major publishers. Barring some kind of major reversal, this is the first step down a road that will end some years hence with the majority of all books ever written made available via subscription services. That’s a big deal for everyone.
And so, just as you’ve (presumably) already discarded almost all of your DVDs and CDs, or at least moved them into some kind of musty storage, it will soon be time to jettison the vast majority of your books, since they’ll all be fully available electronically.
It pains me to say this. I grew up in a home with an overstuffed bookcase in every room, and I spent six years of my life as a full-time novelist (published by HarperCollins, in fact.) So let me be the first to say: books aren’t like CDs or DVDs. Books are special. Books are different.
…Well, some of them are.
But let’s face it; most books are really not that special, and not that different. I see both sides of that; I’ve written one or two novels which people genuinely seemed to love and want physical copies of, but also a clutch of crime/thriller novels which were well-received, and a lot of fun to write and (hopefully) read, but probably didn’t much change the course of many lives.
In the same vein, I want to own and keep physical copies of maybe a hundred books — the ones I love, the ones that matter to me, the ones I refer to regularly — but I’ve read thousands, and I’m quite content to leave most of them resident in the electronic ether. I’ll regret the loss of their tangible editions mostly because I enjoyed leaving them on public transit for others to find and read.
I confess to being somewhat disconcerted by the possibility of remote editing/erasing of books controlled by online services, as highlighted by Amazon’s sudden and arbitrary erasure of George Orwell novels from Kindles a few years ago; but, again, keep physical copies of those books which actually matter, and that becomes less of a problem. I’m also slightly worried that Oyster might pay authors as poorly as Spotify does musicians, but since, unlike Spotify, they’re competing with Amazon royalty rates of up to 70%, this seems unlikely.
The presumed growth in subscription-model book servides also means it becomes increasingly advantageous for authors to make their books available for free via a Creative Commons license. I’ve now done that for all of my books (except the Vertigo Comics graphic novel I scripted; they still control its rights.) I don’t know of anyone else other than Cory Doctorow who has CC-released their entire oeuvre, but I expect our number to grow, as authors realize that most readers will eventually wind up using some Oyster-like service, so we’ll receive royalties even though our books are also freely downloadable.
With luck we’re entering a world in which readers have access to any and every book for a flat fee; authors get paid depending on how much they’re actually read; publishers remain a vital but decreasingly visible part of the process; physical books are still available via online print-on-demand and niche physical stores; and zillions of CC-licensed books are freely available to readers in the poor world who can’t yet afford books or subscription services. Call me Pollyanna, but it seems to me that that’s a win for absolutely everyone.
Image credit: Vanity shelf, yours truly.
Editor’s note: Colleen V. Chien is an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law who researches and writes and has testified before Congress on patent and patent-reform issues, including how they impact startups. Follow her on Twitter.
You have an idea for a product that is going to change the world. For years you work day and night, and over time, that hard work turns into a company. You have users, revenue and, finally, the business of your dreams. But as you get traction, you also have a patent troll letter. The timing couldn’t be worse. As you find yourself spending more and more time with lawyers and learning patent law, you understand why, “[p]atents are one of the most painful parts of running a startup, and that’s saying something.”
This story, adapted from a radio ad campaign profiled by NPR, is the one that you usually hear about patent trolls. But there’s another side to the story that sounds like this: Your company is doing okay. Well, maybe not so okay. And it has some patents that you think might be worth something. You poke around and find out that they are actually really valuable. So you put the patents on the market and end up selling them to an infamous patent troll who is actually great to work with. You earn seven figures from the sale — no dilution — and get back on your feet. And now you are able to say about the money: The “company would have died without it — instead we grew.”
The quotes are directly from a survey of 300+ startups and VCs that I just published with the good people at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, which builds on an earlier survey. While the study looks at a number of things, the question that looms largest is whether, net-net, trolls help or hurt startups. And whether they help or hurt, some of the experiences, they shared with me, and that I include below, can help you inform your own experiences.
Help Or Hurt?
President Obama and Congress are poised to tackle litigation abuses (through at least six pending bills) to deal with the growth of patent trolls who brought an estimated 60 percent of all patent suits last year. But the sentiment often expressed in reaction to those who oppose trolls, or patent assertion entities (PAEs), is that they’re not all bad, and, in fact, “make it easier for a failed startup to monetize its patents, providing some insurance for venture capitalists.”
Do they, though? I found some evidence that trolls did help: An estimated 5 percent of portfolio companies of responding VCs had monetized their patents (vs. 20 percent of startups, based on VC and startup responses, who had been hit with the demand — see Figure 1).
Often the money was helpful, funding a pivot or paying for new hires (N=30). But the folks who took the survey and talked to me about the overall impact on companies and on innovation were negative about it (see Figure 2).
One investor, California-based Don Ellson (details changed) talks in the report about how his companies had both “trolled” and been trolled. And actually, the patents from one of his portfolio companies ended up being used to sue another, which also happened to Fred Wilson. According to testimony Ellson gave for my report, for the company that sold to trolls and was trolled, the “benefit of selling patents — their own use of the system — didn’t offset the pain of the lawsuits, particularly when they came… I’d rather there be no patents than the current system.”
When I asked 42 VCs what they thought about the positive impact of NPEs on innovation, they were similarly skeptical (see Figure 3): 78 percent strongly disagreed that “the ability of my companies to enforce or monetize their patent through NPEs/trolls helps innovation” and 67 percent strongly agreed that NPEs/’trolls’ are harming innovation in my industry.” These were not folks that were anti-patent. In fact, they generally liked them (Figure 4).
I hope lawmakers will consider these complexities and, more importantly, the stories that are included in the report in order to understand what it is like to be a startup facing a patent demand — though it’s not always easy reading.
In addition to discussing some of the more popular proposals out there, e.g. abolish software patents (see Figure 4), I also propose my own recommendations:
1) Fund the PTO so that only truly novel inventions get patents and make low-cost and collaborative access to post-grant review available.
2) Make patent cases about the merits, not who can outlast or outspend the other side.
3) Make patent risks more manageable for startups.
4) Make startups less-attractive targets.
Help Or Hurt, Help Yourself
But in the meantime, if you get a demand, you need a solution right now. You often hear different tactics like “slaughter ‘em,” lay low” and call your representatives in Congress, and your lawyer will have no shortage of suggestions. There are also new defense solution ideas and providers popping up every day, such as EFF’s Trolling Effects, which allows you to share and get information on demand letters, not to mention Google’s patent pledges and Twitter’s patent hack.
To really get a feel for what options are out there, and what does and doesn’t work, I asked startups, lawyers, VCs and service providers for advice and information. The report includes a list of 17 defense service/solutions providers and how to engage them, as well as a list of 21 different tactics and what experienced counsel inside companies and law firms, as well as public-interest attorneys, think about them.
It also contains five stories from those who know what it’s like to face patent suits – including from two investors and two startups. For example, Laura Smith (not her real name), discusses how not to pick litigation counsel and what it’s like to win against a patent troll. And Kate Endress, founder and CEO of Ditto.com, discusses the unconventional strategy that ultimately worked for her: Work with famous contingent counsel for a piece of her company.
Knowledge is power, and my hope with this report is to share with you the wisdom of those who’ve gained it the hard way.
Wantful, a San Francisco and New York-based gift giving and personalized e-commerce startup founded in 2011 is shutting down after failing to secure follow-on investment. According to founder and CEO John Poisson, the company had launched a series of well-received products for web, tablet, print and in-store, but did not achieve the kind of “highly accelerated growth” needed to secure the additional capital.
One of those additional investments, as it turns out, was from Nordstrom, which had taken a stake in the startup earlier this year. A Nordstrom spokesperson claims the retailer was “just a small minority investor,” and declined to comment further on Wantful’s shutdown.
Poisson agrees that the closure should not be characterized as being directly related to the Nordstrom investment, or lack thereof. “As a startup, we were looking for additional capital. We looked to the venture capital markets, but didn’t have the growth curve required as a post-Series A company.” Nordstrom, he adds, was a great partner, “but you can’t look to a strategic partner to fund the whole business.”
Wantful had a number of other high-profile investors, including Polaris Venture Partners, Harrison Metal, Greylock, Forerunner, and angels Arjun Sethi, Dave Morin, Matt Mullenweg, and others. In total, it had raised $5.5 million in Series A funding.
Poisson says that Wantful was looking beyond Nordstrom and the Series A investors, for additional investment.
When the company first launched ahead of the holiday shopping season in 2011, it began by offering personalized product recommendations for those you were buying gifts for, after you first provided the site with information about your friend’s gender, tastes and preferences. Around a year later, the company introduced what it called “phase two” of its vision, introducing both an iPad application and print magazine to the lineup.
At this time, Wantful began moving away from gift-giving and toward more personalized e-commerce. That is, instead of just finding gifts for friends and family, users could find items for themselves as well. But this move also put the startup up against a host of competitors, including other e-commerce services and aggregators like Wanelo, Wish, Fancy, Svpply’s Want, Polyvore, and more.
In addition to the iPad app which blended both content and commerce, Wantful also tried a different approach by sending its most active customers their own personalized, print magazine featuring stories about retailers and products.
Today, the Wantful website informs visitors that the company has suspended operations, but customers can reach out via email for support. (Clicking the “OK” button to close the message just feels wrong, though, you know?) Wantful had a number of happy customers, and the service will be missed.
Still, it seems inevitable there will be some consolidation in the personalized e-commerce space in the months ahead. Poisson agrees, noting “it’s difficult in the later stages of an e-commerce business to get the kind of growth curves venture capital naturally and rightfully looks for – it’s easy to get a start, to get a toehold – but it’s difficult to really scale that mountain,” he says.
Meanwhile, other companies grow quickly out of the gate, like flash sales and daily deals, for example, but those that survive end up having to pivot from those earlier models, as we’ve seen. As for Wantful, the company was trying to build a long term, high value customer relationship, but it didn’t scale as quickly as it needed to.
Though Wantful has suspended operations, Poisson notes that they’re “looking at all their available options” before entirely shutting down.
The company had 16 employees at the time of closure. Poisson declined to comment on customer base, transactions, or revenue.
Below, the full blog post from CEO John Poisson, detailing the shutdown:
I’m profoundly disappointed to announce that Wantful has suspended operations.
We accomplished a great many things in our 18 months in market: an enormously well-received gift offering; widely-lauded experiences for web, tablet, print, and in-store; a network of 600 vendors creating the most exceptional products around, with a robust and streamlined logistics architecture to support them; an assortment and an approach to content that inspired and engaged; and the brilliant and tireless team responsible for it all.
What we did not accomplish yet—both by circumstance and execution—is the kind of highly accelerated growth required to secure later-stage venture capital, despite the enduring enthusiasm around what we’ve built.
The coming holiday season was shaping up to be pivotal for us, but the loss last week of a planned follow-on investment leaves us little time to secure an alternate source of capital, or to pursue the other opportunities on the table.
Our top priority right now is exploring all our options in an orderly fashion—and in taking care of our customers and the team—but if I can be of assistance please reach out to me personally.
Whatever the outcome, we’re deeply grateful for the support and encouragement we’ve received from our customers, friends, investors, and partners through these past two years, and honored to have had the opportunity.
More and more of America’s young people are coming to grips with a nasty truth: college can be incredibly, stupidly expensive. Drexel University student (and Philadelphia Dorm Room Fund member) Christopher Gray knows that all too well, so he and partners Bryson Alef and Nick Pirollo developed a mobile app called Scholly to help students easily search for scholarships.
Here’s how it works: once you’ve installed the app and fired it up, you’re prompted to divulge a bit of personal (but not identifiable) information to help find scholarships that you fit the criteria for. It’s all very basic stuff — the state you live in, race, GPA, gender, major, and grade are all there, and you’re given a choice between need and merit-based scholarships.
There are also what Gray calls miscellaneous factors to be aware of: if you’re an athlete, a vegetarian, or Jewish (among other things), there are specific scholarships you should know about. And just in case you need a little help nailing those pesky application essays, Scholly comes with a handful of examples of successful ones to help get the juices flowing.
Of course, not every scholarship out there is completely on the up-and-up, which is why Gray and his partners manually curate the database themselves. All of the scholarships in the app were ones that Gray or his acquaintances had themselves received, or culled from school-sanctioned lists and prominent corporate programs (think Google, McDonald’s, Walmart, and the like). That fastidiousness is a blessing and a curse — scholarships listed in Scholly are known to be legitimate and worth pursuing, but it does mean that not every single scholarship that fits a student’s needs is going to appear there.
But why focus solely on the smartphone? It seems awfully limiting at first — after all, there are comprehensive sites like Fastweb that are meant solely to help kids find ways to pay for school. According to Gray, it’s all about accessibility, especially considering many of the students who could use those scholarships the most may not have the means to search for them on anything but a smartphone.
“I come from a low-income background,” Gray said. “We had smartphones but we didn’t have a computer.”
Gray, who managed to amass a whopping $1.3 million in scholarships to fund his education, isn’t alone. The Pew Research Center reported in 2010 that 21% of teenaged cell phone owners who didn’t use traditional computers to go online instead used their mobile phones for internet access. Considering how we’re right in the middle of a golden age of mobile telephony, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that number grew over the past few years.
“You can email yourself the list if you have to go to the library,” Gray added. “You don’t have to waste time trying to find scholarships — you can just apply for them.” That said, the three person team is working on closing the circle and letting would-be scholars apply for those scholarships directly from their phones.
It’s hard not to look at Scholly as a labor of love, but Gray is gearing up to turn the app into full-fledged business. The team has worked up a pretty savvy B2B angle here — iOS and Android users can download the app for $0.99 a pop, but Gray said they’re talking with banks and organizations to allow them to buy the app in bulk and make it available to students en masse for free. There’s also talk of potential white-label deals in which partner organizations can throw their own coat of paint over the app for distribution, but Gray wouldn’t confirm how far along those discussions were.
Skout, the app for meeting new people that picked up $22 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz last year, is adding a feature for travelers who want to scope out people in new cities before they land.
The Travel feature is a paid premium feature, where Skout users can spend a little bit of virtual currency to meet users in another city. (Normally, you are only connected to users near you.)
It’s especially useful if you’re traveling to a place where you don’t know anyone. It also slides into the company’s current virtual goods-oriented model, where users pay for points to send wink bombs or feature their profiles. At about 100 Skout points, “traveling” to another city should cost around 20 cents or less.
The past year has had some major highs and lows for Skout.
After a safety scandal tied the app to a few rape cases, the company banned minors from the service until they instituted safeguards that they confidently felt separated adults and children. They set up a Trust and Safety board to regularly review the company’s policies and haven’t had a bad incident since then.
“It was a really challenging time for the company,” said Christian Wiklund, Skout’s CEO, who has seen the startup through half a decade of existence and many near-death experiences.
Because of that initial bad publicity, they’ve kept their heads low. Even so, the company has grown its number of monthly active users by three-fold (although they don’t release the raw monthly active user figure).
They also facilitated more than 200 million connections between users last year, up fourfold from 54 million connections in 2011. In total, they’re adding about 1.5 million new users every month and their most active locale is Hong Kong.
Initially pegged as something of a dating app, Skout broadened its focus out toward helping people meet one another. But in the meantime, newer apps like IAC-backed Tinder that are specifically focused on dating have gained momentum. Tinder has facilitated more than 100 million matches in less than a year after launch.
“Dating is a subset of what we do, but we think the opportunity is much bigger than dating,” Wiklund said.
Disrupt SF kicks off on Monday, September 9th. TechCrunch has put together an incredible array of offerings from our partners to make your Conference experience even better. As always, Disrupt SF will be a busy and boisterous event so use the following guide to get the most out of the show.
Official Email App: This year, Disrupt Battlefield Alumnus Ark is the Official Email App of the conference. To get in on their inbox experience, you can create an account here.
Photo Sponsor: One of the best things post-Disrupt is to thumb through the photos and you can do that thanks for DoMEn, our official photo sponsor. A widget with event photos can be found here.
Our conference app: This year we’re working with Crowd Compass for the event app. This app provides a wide universe of networking capabilities to the Disrupt SF community. Once signed up, you’ll be able to see who is attending the conference, request to add attendees as contacts, view the agenda, receive updates instantaneously regarding the conference and peruse the list of sponsors. You can download the app here or if you’re HTML5-inclined, here’s that version.
Startup Alley: We have an amazing group of startups exhibiting in Startup Alley. Take a quick preview of the companies here. On this page you’ll find company descriptions, details about when the companies will be exhibiting, and contact information so you set up meetings or get in touch with the teams.
Hardware Alley Sponsor: A highlight of the conference this year is Hardware Alley, which is sponsored by Flextronics Lab IX. You can visit their booth adjacent to the Alley.
Official Browser: Our friends at Opera have developed an iPad browser that they’ll be showing off at Disrupt. Use it on Monday and Tuesday at the conference as a way to vote for Startup Alley Audience Choice Award and give Opera a test drive. Volunteers will be circling with said iPads and said browser to make it easy for your to vote. This is how democracy should work.
Conference transportation: Uber has offered Disruptors, who are first time users of the app, a $25 off code — it’s applied to the first ride. Visit the app or m.uber.com and enter in SFDisrupt13.
Watch Disrupt on the web: If you’re an armchair Disruptor, thanks to Ustream you’ll be able to view the conference action from the TechCrunch home page or SF Disrupt event page.
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The days are getting shorter and the air is growing colder, which means that students across the country are trodding back to school once more. For a subscription e-commerce startup called Co-Ed Supply, that means it’s time to really get down to business — their forte is curating and shipping much-needed care packages to the country’s college students.
I know, I know, the world now has another subscription service. And it’s not even the only one out there catering to the needs of our nation’s in-bound college students — Pijon launched in early August and has talked up the strength of its distribution deals with our own Romain Dillet.
Was the launch of a close competitor worrying to the Co-Ed Supply team? Of course — especially since Co-Ed actually quietly launched a few weeks earlier. When Co-Ed Supply opened its doors in late July it was more concerned about drumming up interest in person than anything else. The team started with pilot marketing programs at Miami University, Drexel University (go Dragons), and the University of Cincinnati, and planned to line up campus ambassadors at some 15 other schools. Now they’ve got about 30 ambassadors stationed at schools across the country trying to spread the Co-Ed Supply gospel, and the first batch of boxes were shipped to subscribers yesterday.
The concept is a basic one — the student (or their caring parents) can select from either the Classic or Deluxe care packages, which costs roughly $20 and $35 per month respectively. The big difference between the two? You get 7-9 goodies in a Classic box, and between 12-15 in the Deluxe package. Simple enough, right?
And what’s inside those boxes? A curated selection of what co-founder and CEO Marissa Hu calls “college essentials” — toiletries, diversions, and of course, food. Contrary to the popular notion that college students subsist on a diet of Doritos and cheap beer, Hu says that healthy snacks top the list of things that students have asked for.
Co-Ed Supply’s big angle is that it shares consumer information with the brands and companies that provide their supplies. Players like Procter & Gamble, Epic Records, and Dollar Shave Club get access to a slew of young consumers they may not have otherwise reached, and more crucially, they net information about how well-liked their products are amongst the members of Gen Y by way of a follow-up survey. From Hu’s perch, that’s a valuable stream of data that isn’t always accounted for when it comes to those sorts of school-time brand interactions.
“When school starts, the brands are going around campus and giving out free samples,” Hu explained. “That sample sort of walks away with the student, and the brand has no data about that student or how to target them.”
If everything goes according to plan (which is always a big if), Co-Ed Supply may be able to turn those consumer insights into cold, hard cash. As you’d expect, the lion’s share of Co-Ed Supply’s revenue comes in the form of those recurring subscription fees, but Hu hopes that the sort of consumer feedback those surveys yield is valuable enough to be worth a chunk of a company’s market research budget. Hu says that just about half of Co-Ed’s subscriber base is made up of students ordering boxes for themselves which doesn’t help either — it’s her hope that the people who willingly throw their hat into the ring will also be the ones who are most open about sharing their product perspectives.
Now that those first shipments are safely out the door, Hu feels even more vindicated that the team is on the right track. Even with a new competitor to worry about, the plan is to stick with what has been working: building out that personal presence on college campuses through move-in day, homecoming, and beyond. The world may not be big enough for two like-minded startups, and I suspect we’ll soon see which of these companies really has the right stuff.
It’s time for another episode of Ask A VC, where we grill VCs in the TCTV studio! This week, Trinity Ventures’ Patricia Nakache joined us to chat about e-commerce, marketplaces and much more.
Nakache, who via Trinity has backed a number of e-commerce companies such as Beachmint, ThredUp and others, talked about the secret to Zulily’s (a Trinity-backed company) success. At its last funding round, the flash sales site for moms was valued at $1 billion.
We also chatted about the biggest change Nakache has observed in the VC world over the past 14 years. Check out the video above for more.
Here’s another startup trying to turn content recommendation into a business: Ideal Media.
Similar in concept to Outbrain and Taboola, Ideal Media works with publishers to add a recommended content unit to their pages. Then it makes money by including sponsored content in the mix. You can see an example in the recommended content under this photo on the OneBigPhoto site (there’s a screenshot below). Director of Sales Matthew Mosk told me via email that Ideal Media is building customized, native integrations, so the look will change from site to site.
Mosk added that Ideal Media’s units won’t just work on the web but also on mobile, social media, and tablets, and that it has “a highly targeted channel strategy (automobiles, sports, tech, health, women’s, etc). “But the real differentiator, or at least the one he emphasized, is the fact that the company isn’t just promoting content but helping customers create it, too — the Ideal Media team will offer free content marketing services to its advertisers.
Why is that important? Well, Mosk said his company will be able to create content that’s actually interesting and relevant, rather than just being a straightforward ad:
Many brands are just realizing that web users are ignoring display ads and becoming aware of the value of a more subtle and nuanced approach, Content Marketing. Also, web users are becoming so savvy that they become super frustrated when they click on a link that they think is a story, but ultimately leads them to a blatant ad (which happens on some Content Discovery Networks). Ideal Media is bridging that gap.
(Unfortunately, Mosk wasn’t able to provide me with a sample of Ideal Media’s content-creation skills, so I can’t firsthand whether the content in question is actually better than most ads.)
And yes, Mosk said Ideal Media plans to continue offering content creation for free, though it may start charging for more premium content marketing services.
Just to compare, I also asked Outbrain if it provides any content marketing services of its own. A spokesperson told me that the company doesn’t write any content, but it did acquire Scribit, which allows customers to search for content from publications like the Huffington Post.
Getting back to Ideal Media, the company was founded by Eder Holguin, whose past roles include serving as the chief revenue officer at the Virtual Fan Network. It’s funded by Holguin, along with friends and family.
The personal shopping site Keaton Row has raised $1.6 million in a second round of seed funding led by Menlo Ventures, an early investor in Fab and Warby Parker, with participation from Rho Ventures and Grape Arbor Ventures. The site, which launched in 2012, previously raised a seed round of $1 million led by Rho Ventures.
Keaton Row is an e-commerce site that puts the “person” in personalization. After a quick style quiz to understand taste, needs, and body type, the site matches customers with a personal shopper, who draws from it’s partner retail sites to make suggestions and create lookbooks for their clients. The stylists, who are paid by Keaton Row on commission, apply to the site at an acceptance rate of about 60-70%.
On the consumer side, the site appeals to women who have money but don’t want to shop for themselves, or don’t know how to navigate the massive world of online retail. The personal shoppers, meanwhile, are fashion-savvy people who want to use their taste make a bit of cash. And although diametrically opposed sartorially, both groups are easily scalable.
“The Keaton Row customer is a professionally oriented woman. She has money to spend, but doesn’t have time. She isn’t an active reader of Vogue or The Coveteur, so she wants it to be curated and convenient. There’s a higher level of personalization, and authentic personalization,” co-founder and co-CEO Cheryl Han said.
Keaton Row is partnered with online retailers like ShopBop and Les Nouvelles, meaning shoppers have access to over 10,000 products.
With this latest round of funding, Keaton Row plans to build out its user platforms for stylists and customers, grow its retail partnerships, and expand its national presence, which for stylists is currently focused on metropolitan areas like New York and LA.
While other e-commerce sites rely on algorithm-based style quizzes and click-throughs for personalization, Keaton Row is one of a few retail sites leveraging an abundance of human fashionistas who can provide the same advice with better customer service. On the men’s side, Brandid has developed a similar model. Han and Elenor Mak, her co-founder and CEO, said that many of their customers see their stylists as friends and turn to them for advice on other areas of their life, like shopping for their home, child, or boyfriend.
That kind of trusting, personal relationship can be a powerful motivation to keep customers coming back. The shoppers are often most useful when the customer is on a deadline to find a specific item for an event, Han and Mak added.
The site’s network of personal shoppers is also an important route to bringing in new customers, as she has an incentive to grow her own client roster.
The idea is that the personal shoppers can turn Keaton Row into a part-time business and potentially more, depending on how aggressive they are. The site works with them on analytics to understand their customers better and set goals. They are essentially like digital age Avon saleswomen, so it’s no coincidence that Mak worked at Avon for a few years managing 10,000 of its New York sales reps.
Han and Mak said Keaton Row stylists listing that role on their LinkedIn page could be a real launching pad for a career as a stylist, which is a nebulous path. To that end, Keaton Row is building out customer reviews and portfolios to allow shoppers to build a name for themselves.
“[The shopper] may be in editorial, working at a magazine, so it’s a way to make a side income. For people who would love to get into fashion, this is a way to establish credibility.”