Category: Tech news

If the plethora of “aspirational” shopping companions has left you with something of a bad taste in your mouth for encouraging overspending, here’s a palate cleanser: a couple of newer apps for iOS, Dollarbird and Earmark, are focused on making responsible money management as enjoyable as browsing through personalized feeds of product recommendations.

Well, almost.

Track Your Cash Flow

Dollarbird, which launched in July, is a calendar-like app that aims to mimic the way those living from paycheck to paycheck tend to still handle bill paying, expenses and tracking spending. It marks up a calendar with what gets paid or spent when in order to figure out how much that leaves you for other necessities, like Ramen noodles or gasoline.

But the app doesn’t just appeal to the hand-to-mouth crowd. Because of its attractive looks, and smart feature set, which includes support for things like tracking recurring transactions, bill reminders, CSV export, and automatic balance calculations, Dollarbird makes sense for anyone who wants to keep a closer eye on their cash flow for better financial planning purposes.

The calendar interface gives Dollarbird an at-a-glance visualization of when you owe money for things like rent, utilities, car payments, or anything else you want to track, and can also serve as a way to keep a log of which bills have already been paid. You can use its built-in, color-coded categories or create your own, as well as add little notes to each expense, or enter your income if you’re also tracking your available cash.

The app’s name comes from its own take on Clippy, with a little bird that offers up financial tips and tricks. (You can shut this guy off in the settings, if virtual assistants aren’t your cup of tea.)

Dollarbird is made by Halycon Mobile, a Romanian-based agency founded by Levi Szabo and Szabi Szekely which, since 2005, has focused on designing apps for clients. The company first released the app as a paid offering ($1.99), but is now in the process of making a switch to a more sophisticated business model (details to come), the company tells us. With the launch of its next major release, Dollarbird will include support for multiple accounts, syncing calendars between users (handy for couples or roommates), and other advanced features.

Dollarbird is available for iOS here.

Save First, Then Spend

Meanwhile, Earmark is a new social savings app released in August that encourages users to not just immediately spend their money, but push themselves toward frugality so they can save up for something they really want, whether big or small. It’s designed for those who justify purchases by cutting other areas of everyday expenses – like eating out, buying that morning coffee, resisting the latest gadget, and so on.

To use the app, you enter your top five splurge items then track the things you don’t buy with those items in mind. For example: you didn’t buy that latte? You’re saving $X per week by quitting smoking? Those little things can add up. And as you limit your unnecessary purchases in search of a larger reward, you can optionally also move money from your bank account to a Dwolla account to keep the savings out of sight until your goals are reached.

Earmark also includes a social element, which allows Facebook friends to make suggestions as to what you should spend your money on, or give you feedback on your “earmarked” items. It’s like the flip side of all these social shopping apps, such as Wanelo, Wish, Wantworthy’s Fresh, Polyvore, Fancy and others: instead of having friends’ recommendations push users into spending money they may not have, the social involvement is meant to foster a more responsible approach to managing money. It’s a “yes, save for this” kind of sentiment, rather than a “yes, buy it now!” one. And that seems more practical in today’s still deteriorating economic reality.

Founder and CEO Josh Chambers, whose ad agency background saw him working with brands like Nike+ FuelBand, Reebok and others, explains that Earmark eventually wants to connect brands and retailers with potential customers whose purchase-intent data is clear. They would be about to deliver you offers and coupons in the app, to convince you to spend your savings on their products, which is not a bad idea, and one that could give the app continued life even after users give up on what may become tedious — the manual entry of their every responsible decision.

The company just passed half a million in spending intent, since its release in mid-August, Chambers says.

Earmark is available on iOS here.

The Fujifilm X100S is the camera you want without even knowing it.

Locket, the startup that pays Android users to engage with ads, is now asking those users to weigh in on the type of ads that they want to see.

When users install Locket, they’ll start to see ads on their lock screens, and they can swipe left to claim a deal, watch a movie trailer, or whatever the desired engagement is. (Or they can swipe right and go back to using their phone.) Users are paid 1 cent for each new ad they see. That may not sound like much, but co-founder and CEO Yuna Kim said it can add up over the weeks and months, and users can then donate the money to charity, put it on a gift card or just cash out.

Since Locket launched a month ago, Kim said the team has received “thousands of emails” from users requesting ads from specific brands.

It might seem a little strange to be actively asking for ads, but Kim attributed this to the fact that Locket only allows high-quality ads into the system — she described the lock screen as a “sacred, personal space.” (Another possible explanation: If you’ve got an incentive to look at ads, you might as well try to get ads that you find interesting and relevant.)

So earlier this week, the Locket team launched a MyAds page where users can submit the names of brands whose ads they’d like to see, and they can vote on the brands submitted by others. The company then promoted the page with a Locket ad, and the top brands, which are currently — in descending order — Sony, Samsung and Google, now have more than 1,000 votes.

Not that an early lead means users will start seeing Sony, Samsung and Google ads in the next week. ”We have to do a good job with that,” Kim said. “If someone says, “Hey, I want to see Samsung ads,’ I can’t just call them and have them advertise. There’s a sales cycle.”

She added that her goal is to bring ads from the most popular brands into Locket by this holiday season.

Locket has been downloaded nearly 90,000 times since launch, Kim said, and there are about 80,000 active users.

Instagram has just made its first acquisition, buying both the team and technology of Y Combinator company Luma (formerly known as Midnox). Luma created a video-capture, stabilization and sharing app, which will be shut down soon. In fact, one source tells us Luma’s stabilization technology is already live in Instagram.

Luma’s iOS app has been pulled from the App Store but existing users will continue to be supported until December 31, 2013. Users can download their videos here.

We were tipped off to the acquisition, and Facebook has since confirmed that it is Instagram’s first, and the deal is for both talent and technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Luma team writes: “Eighteen months ago, we embarked on a mission to make capturing and sharing beautiful videos easy without expensive software or heavy equipment. By joining the exceptionally talented team at Instagram, we’re taking another big step towards realizing that mission.”

Unlike the rash of acqui-hires in Silicon Valley, this deal comes with Luma’s technology. This includes video stabilization, which Instagram is apparently now using to improve its own stabilization tech that launched alongside its new video sharing feature in June.

Instagram might also make use of Luma’s “non-disruptive” video filtering technology, which allows videos to be shot with filters turned on, but switched or removed after a video has been recorded. Luma also had a suite of video-editing tools that could aid Instagram’s 130 million+ users. These include sliders for changing the brightness, contrast, saturation and exposure of videos. You can see its “Infinite Filter” technology in action in this short clip.

This impressive technology led TechCrunch to name Midnox/Luma one of the 10 best startups from Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 Demo Day.

The acquisition highlights the increasing differentiation in product and strategy of Vine and Instagram. Vine is trading on simplicity and spontaneity. Its app features a quicker publishing process for its six-second videos with no need to choose a cover frame. You also have to shoot videos entirely within Vine, making it more of an art form in and of itself.

That contrasts with Instagram, which is trading on power and flexibility. You can add filters to its 15-second videos and enable stabilization, but also have to sacrifice speed to pick a cover frame so your video look good beside photos in the Instagram feed. You can also upload previously shot (and edited) videos, allowing for more professional clips that could be a hit with advertisers one day. This all makes Instagram more of a sharing medium than its own art form.

If that’s the route Instagram chooses to take, it needs the best video editing technology it can buy, hence the Luma deal. The challenge will be making these tools available at a moment’s notice without bloating Instagram into a mobile Final Cut Pro.

Conferences can be dull, soul-sucking enterprises. Too often, the stage is filled with the same speakers saying the same things and providing too little value to the people who’ve paid to attend. Those sessions are sometimes complemented with sponsored messages from universally bad companies touting their latest new thing that probably sucks.

They’re a necessary evil, I know. Conferences are how businesses like TechCrunch actually make money, because display ads ain’t gonna pay the bills just on their own.

At best though, most conferences are just an opportunity to see people you haven’t seen since the last conference you went to, and to discuss all the things that haven’t changed while you’re chatting over lunch. Which is a horrible way to network, because most conference food sucks.

There’s something different about TechCrunch Disrupt, however. Last year, I joined TechCrunch about a week before Disrupt NY and they flew me out to attend, and it was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. We had Fred and Karp and Borthwick on stage. The U.S. Government announced its open government thing. Josh asked Tim Armstrong how he felt about looking like a dark overlord. I drank Adrian Grenier’s beer.* Anyway, it all kind of blew me away.

Then a funny thing happened. Last year’s Disrupt SF was even better. I mean, Zuck. I could probably just drop the mic right there, but what about Ben Horowitz, Jack Dorsey, Kevin Rose, Matt Cohler, Reid Hoffman, Ev and Biz? Jim Dalrymple’s beard, on our stage to talk about the iPhone 5?

This year’s Disrupt SF promises to top both of those, and I’m not just saying that because I work here and Alexia assigned this story to me. I mean, look at the agenda and see for yourself. I’ve been told this might be a good place to put in a link where you can buy tickets. Anyway, here are the things I love about Disrupt:

There’s no bullshit

Unlike so many other conferences I’ve been to, Disrupt doesn’t invite big name speakers to get on stage and say nothing interesting for 20 minutes. Or, worse, to trot out all the same talking points that we’ve heard from all the same people over and over again.

“The reason I find [Disrupt] worth attending is that I want the people on stage to be on stage more than they do,” my colleague Alex said the other day. And this is coming from a guy who was our competitor until about a month ago.

The other thing about the speaker lineup is that we have people coming out for Disrupt who don’t normally do these things. I mean, we’ve somehow gotten folks like Sir Michael Moritz and John Doerr to come out of hiding for this one. (Maybe this time I’ll have the guts to corner him?)

The speakers are also attendees

Last year at Disrupt SF, I saw something pretty amazing. At some point during Arrington’s interview with Reid Hoffman, I look over and there’s Marc Benioff sitting in the front row, taking the whole thing in. I mean, how often do you see the CEO of a company with a $20 billion market cap just hanging out in the audience at a conference?

It’s not just Benioff, though. Folks like Mike McCue and Vinod Khosla don’t just come and sit on stage, they also can be seen walking through Startup Alley, meeting with entrepreneurs and seeing what’s new. Which is pretty damn cool.

Startup Battlefield

There’s nothing quite like watching today’s technology leaders for half a day and then seeing a group of fresh new startups coming up to the stage and presenting for the first time the thing they’ve been working on. As Ingrid said the other day, the juxtaposition of the two “creates a spark.”

And then there’s the quality of the startups competing, which is just so, so good. I mean, where else are you going to find a motorcycle that can’t be tipped over** competing against a peer-to-peer marketplace for mechanics?

Arrington

Love him or hate him, the man is a pro. He’ll do five or six interviews at one of these events and he’ll always be the best-prepared person taking the stage. Oh, and that no bullshit thing I was talking about? A lot of it comes from Arrington, because he’s not going to let you sit there and say nothing interesting for 20 minutes.

Everyone loved the Zuck interview last year, and it was pretty great. But for my money, the highlight of Disrupt SF 2012 was watching Arrington grill David Sacks about how there’s supposedly no more innovation happening in Silicon Valley.

To do so, Arrington reads off a long list of famous quotes that ended up being disproven, much like Sacks’s much-maligned prediction that “Silicon Valley as we know it may be coming to an end.” Spoiler alert: It’s not.

==
* It was not delicious
** Lit Motors was robbed

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we hosted Menlo Ventures’ managing director Mark Siegel in the TCTV studio.

Siegel, who focuses on investments in enterprise and advertising, has recently penned a presentation on the opportunities in mobile, social, cloud computing and data, titled the “The Right Now Economy.” While many companies like Uber, Netflix and others are taking advantage of some of the current opportunities, explains Siegel in the interview, the next wave of startups taking advantage of this trend will likely be in health care, education and financial services.

Siegel also talked about what metrics he looks at when evaluating a company for investment at the seed or Series A level and more.

Well, it’s official — Uber has confirmed that it raised $258 million in new funding and added a couple of new members to its board of directors to help move it forward. In a blog post that appeared briefly but was quickly taken down, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick confirmed that the new money came from Google Ventures and TPG.

The company plans to use the funding to move into new markets and begin marketing efforts, as well as to fight off protectionist, anti-competitive efforts, Kalanick wrote. And while the money will surely help, the backing from the new investors and board members should be equally as important.

Along with the funding, Google SVP of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond will be joining the board. On Google backing, Kalanick said the company will be looking to connect strategically around product initiatives. Also, the startup will likely lean on Google for help with local governments and regulatory bodies as it expands.

TPG founding partner David Bonderman will also be joining the board. On the TPG side, Kalanick wrote that it will look to the private equity firm for some of its operations and their regulatory know-how.

Since the blog post has been taken down, here’s the text of the announcement as it first appeared:

As many of you have seen in the press today, Uber recently closed a financing round. We wanted to put out the official word to make sure the facts were clear and confirmed. This round is $258 million with proceeds to be used to expand into new markets, begin marketing efforts, and fight off protectionist, anti-competitive efforts.

The financing was led by Google Ventures with TPG Growth participating. David Drummond, Google’s SVP of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer will be joining the Uber board. David Bonderman, founding partner of TPG, will also be joining the board.

The numbers on this financing are fairly substantial. It is a reflection of our growth to date and continuing success. But with this new investment, expectations naturally increase and there is a new standard of excellence and accomplishment that we seek to live up to. Our vision is to build a technology company that changes transportation and logistics in urban centers around the world and this financing gives us the fuel to make that a reality.

We couldn’t be more excited to embark on the next phase of our journey with our new partners, both truly great in their respective industries. I like to talk about this combination of investors as “Bits and Atoms.”

Bits

On one end we have Google, a technology powerhouse, with billions of users on an incredibly complementary product suite ranging from Google Maps to Android to self-driving vehicles. We look to Google for the strategic connectivity to their product initiatives alongside the expertise that comes with evangelizing new technology with governments and regulatory bodies around the world.

David Drummond is our partner at Google who will help us navigate the company and provide strategic advice as our regulatory efforts follow our launches across Europe and Asia.

Atoms

With TPG, we have partnered up with one of the most prolific private equity firms in the world. Why does that matter? How are they different than any of the traditional venture capital firms? It’s really simple: TPG owns and operates companies. The Uber deal is obviously very different, but their deep rolodex of operations executives and their regulatory know-how in highly regulated, “atoms”-based industries in the farthest corners of the globe is where TPG shines. David Bonderman’s vision and relationships will be invaluable to Uber as we become a global brand.

So that’s the news. I hope this clarifies what Uber is looking to do with this new funding, and sheds some light on the groundbreaking investment partnership we’ve put together for Uber’s next phase of growth.

Uber On,

Travis

Facebook Gifts is getting a major redesign that will end sales of physical gifts. It will now focus on suggesting you buy friends digital gift codes or Facebook’s omni-Gift Card credit to spend at brands and local businesses they Like, which now get their own Gifts landing page. These two types of Gifts made up 80% of sales, cost less to ship and support, so it makes sense to invest in them in the rollout coming the next few weeks.

Facebook launched Gifts in September 2012 to fanfare that it might challenge ecommerce kingpin Amazon. Gifts fell short of those lofty expectations, though.

The product let you buy physical gifts like chocolate and stuff animals or digital gift cards to Starbucks or Uber for friends on special occasions like their birthday. Facebook later added alcohol sales and iTunes Gift Cards, plus began surfacing opportunities to buy Gifts in mobile. Still, sales were suspected to be slow and Facebook reported $5 million in earnings between Gifts and User Promoted Posts in Q4 2012, giving the product a low maximum impact on the company’s bottom line compared to ads and game payments.

So Facebook tried something new. It launched its own Facebook Gift Card. It’s a credit-card style plastic slice you could buy for friends that Facebook would mail to them. It would come loaded with the Gift credit you bought them, and could be remotely topped-up with money to spend at different specific brick-&-mortar stores if other friends bought them Gift credits.

With time, Facebook saw that only 20% of total Gift sales were for physical products, while gift credits to Starbucks and iTunes were the biggest sellers. It turned out it was difficult to recommend specific products to buy for friends. However, Facebook’s data on people’s interests, location, and social graph made it easy to recommend whole brands or businesses to buy friends digital gift codes and Facebook Gift Card credit.

So starting today, 10% of the U.S. user base will receive the redesigned version of Gifts that eliminates physical gifts. The rest of the U.S. will get it over the next few weeks.

Facebook Gifts manager (and former CEO of gifting app Karma that Facebook acquired to power Gifts) Lee Linden tells me it was worth it for Facebook to invest in the product and not kill it off entirely because revenue from Gifts is “definitely going up. It’s been steadily going up since the beginning of the year and I think it will keep going up with this.”

What’s New With Gifts?

Beyond the disappearance of physical gifts, there’s a bunch of changes to the product and buying experience that you’ll see in the Facebook website birthday’s section, on friends’ walls, and in the mobile feed.

Landing Pages

Previously, the Gifts buying interface opened in a little overlaid window on Facebook’s website. Now it will have its own Gifts marketplace landing page, and each brand will get their own URL for their gift shop.

That means businesses can finally share a direct link to where you can buy Facebook Gifts from them. That makes it much easier for brands like Williams-Sonoma, Whole Foods, and Express to promote their store front. Before, they had to tell people to sniff them out inside the cluttered Gifts window. Businesses could even buy Facebook Promoted Post ads to boost traffic to their store, or Facebook might consider a special ad unit for Gift shops. This means Facebook could double-dip, earning money to drive traffic to Gifts as well as a revenue share when people buy them.

Depending on the business, you’ll be able to buy gifts codes that can be instantly redeemed on ecommerce websites or in apps like Uber, or load up a friend’s Facebook Gift card with credit they can take to the mall and spend in person.

Recommendations

Because it doesn’t have to recommend you specific products but just whole businesses, Facebook is going to be leaning more heavily on your friends’ personal information to suggest where to buy them Gifts from.

To go with the greater emphasis on brick-&-mortar shopping through the Facebook Gift Cards, Facebook will now be heavily factoring people’s check-ins and photo locations into recommendations. So if you check-in at Olive Garden (unlimited breadsticks!), Facebook might suggest your friend buy you Facebook Gift Card credit to the italian restaurant chain. You’ll also be able to buy gift credit in any denomination, so you could gift me $29 to Target for my 29th birthday.

Linden tells me “The whole point of Gifts is to learn about commerce on Facebook and build a product that users wants. We’re going to improve commerce overall on Facebook in a number of ways. Gifts is a natural extension but not the end.” He explains the other components include commerce discovery from seeing apps your friends use as well as mobile app install ads, and Facebook’s new mobile payments test to help you automatically input your billing details when you buy other ecommerce apps.

Together, Gifts, ads, and payment info input could combine to help Facebook prove it delivers return on investment to advertisers. If Facebook is selling the gift or involved in an off-app payment that began with a click from one of Facebook’s ads, it can tell businesses the exact ROI of their ad spend. That’s key to getting them to spend more.

Facebook is finally realizing its synergies in commerce. Hawking a random scattershot of kitschy physical gifts didn’t play to its strengths over other ecommerce providers. But what Facebook does has is personal data. It knows what your friends are interested in and where they go. By harnessing that information to recommend what you should buy them, Facebook is taking the guess-work out of gifting. If you’re going to get someone a gift card, it may as well be to someplace they Like.

In this decidedly dorky edition of Fly Or Die, yours truly and TC’s resident Canadian Darrell Etherington duke it out over Nvidia’s curious Shield game console and what it means for the future of Android gaming.

In a surprising twist (well, surprising if you haven’t already read his review), Darrell is absolutely smitten with the thing. Honestly, it’s a little hard not to be — we both agree that the Shield is a top-notch piece of kit, with hearty spec sheet, one of the best screens we’ve seen on a mobile device, and a level of fit and finish that puts most standalone Bluetooth controllers for smartphones to shame. Throw in the ability to stream full-blown PC games from computers with the prerequisite graphics cards, you’ve got yourself an awfully compelling little package.

Meanwhile, I’m a little more skeptical of the Shield’s chances. My main beef is that the Android ecosystem doesn’t yet play home to the sorts of games that make a $299 portable console like this worth owning. That’s not to say it isn’t going to get there — Android recently vaulted over more traditional rivals like Sony and Nintendo when it came to game revenue so there’s clearly a consumption shift in effect here, but I’d argue there isn’t much in the way of AAA Android games just yet.

In the end, we just had to agree to disagree: Darrell gives it a fly, I give it a die, and all’s right with the world.

A brief aside: as it turns out we couldn’t contain the full brunt of out Shield debate in this video, so the conversation spilled over into this week’s edition of the TechCrunch Droidcast. Tune in to hear us dissect each other’s argument in greater detail.

Today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer met his critics head-on by announcing that he will relinquish his title within the next 12 months. Microsoft’s stock ticked higher on the announcement, adding about $18 billion to the company’s market capitalization.

The market responded to the impending leadership change not with exultation, but with grim relief.

Microsoft is a company struggling to be reborn, but its new trajectory is something Ballmer steered. Were mistakes made under his tenure? Certainly. But that doesn’t mean Ballmer isn’t leaving on a high note. In fact, his exit is classy: He stuck around longer than few others would have, and the concluding years of his tenure as CEO have been his best.

You can view Microsoft from a pre-Windows 8 and post-Windows 8 perspective. And by pre-Windows 8 I mean before the company embarked on its new creation. That was before Apple released the iPad, as you certainly recall. Since then, Microsoft has enacted a number of changes that bear remembering. From the re-org to a new business model to cloud-based businesses and back to app stores, it has been a big few years for the company, and Ballmer stayed until a new path was forged.

Let’s take a look at the Microsoft Ballmer is leaving behind.

Re-Org And A New Way To Sell Software

Microsoft recently made two massive internal changes to its management and goals: A complete internal reorganization to better align its efforts and a business model switch away from selling software to instead vending both services and devices.

In practice this means that Microsoft broke its famously bickering business units into new groups in hopes of better synergy. Hardware was aligned, and the like. And some rose during the changes, such as Terry Myerson who is now the head of the Operating Systems Engineering group, and some fell, such as my personal favorite Tami Reller, who slipped from co-running the Windows group to head of marketing for the company.

However, the change dovetailed nicely into the company’s new business model: No more software in a box. Instead, have a service on a subscription payment and a device. The new Microsoft is potentially more nimble, precisely as the company moves to a faster software cycle (think Windows 8.1 in a single year). You can’t have one without the other, as the old fabric of Microsoft would have rent under the stress.

Bringing this back to Ballmer, the man stuck it out until all this was set and underway. He could have shrugged it off and shipped out, but instead he ensured that the company he was leaving was as prepped for the future as possible.

We don’t know yet if the reorg will succeed, or if the device side of Microsoft’s new business model will find market acceptance. However, we can say that the old Microsoft was becoming quickly obsolete. Big bets and big changes were needed.

I can’t predict the future, but the Microsoft of five years ago would have been fucked by it.

New Products Driving Revenue Growth

In the past few years, Microsoft has minted several new billion-dollar businesses, products that generate 10-figure revenue each year. Azure, Office 365 and Lync are driving Microsoft’s top line forward even as Windows slips with the contraction of the PC market.

These efforts are, respectively, out of character, gutsy and proof that some old formulas can still work. Azure, born from a slit in Bing’s stomach, is Microsoft’s cloud computing service that plays nicely with open source and any competitor. Office 365 is a reformation of the Office product, an essential profit cannon for the company; it is a realization that an old model is failing, even as it prints cash. And Lync is old-school Microsoft, selling a service to enterprise customers in the way that it always has: Through its massive partner network.

But Lync is also baked into Office 365 SKUs, making it a SaaS product like the rest. Forget per-seat one-time fees. The future is recurring revenue and Microsoft knows it. The company is busting a hump to reform its products to fit that new norm. Done? Not even 10 percent. But some of the products that will solve the Windows revenue slump are now mature enough to walk alone.

Platforms, Baby

Microsoft, until quite recently, was the platform. Then Apple came along and blew that up, followed by Google’s Android, which further exploded Microsoft’s hegemony as the platform company de rigueur.

Well, those days are over, and it can be argued that Android is now a larger platform than Windows. But rather than retreat from Windows, Microsoft’s response to this, under the gaze of Ballmer, has been to greatly expand the damn thing — from your desktop to every screen you can imagine. Phones? Yep. TVs? Yep. Tablets? Yep. Trick bit on that last one, as Microsoft’s core Windows experience is built for tablets, unlike Apple’s OS X.

The kicker here is that Microsoft is bringing a shared operating experience to every possible slice of pixel. And it is uniting it with a shared code base that will allow developers in the future to build once and run everywhere. You want a bold gambit? That’s one.

Microsoft is not there yet. But as we have seen before, Ballmer stuck at Microsoft until the vision was firmly under way. Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, and the Xbox One are the bones of this transformation, and all were released under Ballmer’s time in the driver’s seat. (This assumes Ballmer doesn’t race out the door before the Xbox One goes on sale. I don’t think that will happen).

A short coda on Windows Phone and Surface. Talk about the peanut gallery. Ballmer has been hit, dinged and shellacked for both products. Windows Phone 7 Series — as it was once called — was a joke, people said, that would never work. The market would only bear two platforms, so the thinking went, and Android and iOS were the best. So forget it, Microsoft.

Billions of dollars and years later, Ballmer has carved out a growing seat at the mobile table. Few thought this was possible. Ballmer spent and pushed.

The same will come true, eventually and in one form or another, with the Surface product. Microsoft views the project as core to its future as a device company. Therefore it is playing a five- or 10-year game, and not one in which short-term revenue is god. The company is richer than Croesus, and generating staggering profits each quarter. Not Apple money, mind you, but big sums all the same, and so it can afford the journey.

–

If Ballmer had exited, say, during the Windows 7 period, I think that his time at Microsoft would have deserved a different badge. However, missteps included, the recent few years have been a fundamental shift for Microsoft, leading it to functional preparation for the future, which is to his credit. If the company had failed, we would have blamed the leader. So as the company finds new success, we should laud the boss. Let’s be consistent, at least.

Presuming that Ballmer’s successor is competent, he or she will be inheriting a firm in transition, but one with a future that is quite interesting. And it hasn’t been too long that we’ve been able to say that about Microsoft.

So, all right Ballmer, you never would have dinner with me, but points for the classy exit.

Top Image Credit: D.Begley

SalesPredict has raised $1 million in seed funding for its predictive analytics platform designed specifically for sales and marketing staff. The investment was equally led by Pitango Venture Capital, AfterDox and RSL Venture Partners with participation from angel investors.

“We are not trying to resolve a generic problem,” said Co-Founder Yaron Zakai-Or. “We are taking generic algorithms to work for salespeople.”

The algorithms, built into a SaaS developed by Co-Founder and CTO Kira Radinsky, formerly of Microsoft Research, is tightly integrated into Salesforce App Exchange. Customers will download the Sales Predict app from AppExchange when it’s available in the next few weeks and integrate the predictive analytics technology into their sales lead processes. The service will then score a company’s leads to help salespeople decide what to prioritize.

The leads are enriched with Salesforce data, social data and other information sources, such as website traffic from Alexa and data.com, the Salesforce contact database.

The company then looks at past data and characterizes the attributes that differentiate a good lead from one that is less likely to be fruitful. Over time, the model gets updated to account for changes in the lead pool.

Earlier this month, InsideView raised $19 million for its platform, which aggregates information and then adds it to a customer’s CRM installation. Lattice Engines also competes in this space as does Infer, which helps sales organizations add predictive scoring to their sales toolboxes.

And then there’s Salesforce, which has largely let partners provide analytics but now is showing interest with its acquisition of Prior Knowledge.

There is a lot of tough competition in the sales intelligence space, but there is plenty of room to provide customers with better ways to manage sales leads.

The Ubuntu Edge may have been the most successful crowdfunding campaign in history, but that doesn’t mean it made its goal. Meanwhile, yet another smartwatch joined the fray this week, coaxing John’s money out of his wallet by being just a tad “smarter” than the rest. Makerbot released a scanner this week called the Digitizer, which lets you scan objects to then print them, but we’re not sure we’re down with the high price tag. And last, but certainly not least, we all pretty much agree that a gold iPhone will make its way into the world come September 10.

We discuss all this and more on the latest episode of the TC Gadgets podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington, Natasha Lomas and Romain Dillet.

Enjoy!

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Given the challenges facing the recorded music industry, touring seems like an ever-more-important way for musicians to make money. Yet TourCommand co-founder Asad Yusupov said there hasn’t been that much done to make it easier to actually manage a tour.

“There are very few tools for the backend of the music industry,” he said.

So Yusupov and his three co-founders (Joshua Gunter, Ivan Veskov and Brian Putt) have built online software that’s supposed to make the menial touring tasks easier. They launched the company two months ago with the ability to manage the guest and equipment lists and make hotel reservations. These are things that artists and managers could have done before, but TourCommand brings them together in one place.

And now they’re launching TourCommand 2.0, which Yusupov said should make the platform particularly useful for “entry-level artists who want to become touring professionals.”

The new features include the ability to create custom artist pages, to share directly from TourCommand to Facebook and Twitter, to track tour budgets, and to search a database of different venues. These features aren’t necessarily for newbies only, but Yusupov said the marketing tools in particular can help someone who’s trying to start their career. (It also puts TourCommand, whose main competition on the tour management side was Master Tour, in a position where it could be competing with services like ReverbNation and BandPage.)

“The way we’ve set up TourCommand is that it is the artists’ tour kit,” Yusupov said. “You can literally go in there and build the beginning stages of your career.”

Although Yusupov talked up the number of customers that TourCommand could potentially serve, he also acknowledged that new musicians don’t necessarily have a lot of the money, and they might not stay in the business for very long. However, he said there are always new people entering the business. And to make TourCommand affordable, pricing starts at $7 a month (the team is probably hoping some of those users will find success and graduate to a higher pricing plan).

By the way, even though Yusupov and his co-founders are young (their ages range from 20 to 25), they claim to know the touring business from real experience. Yusupov, for example, co-founded booking company EMG Management — he said the company booked appearances by the Jersey Shore cast among others.

He added that TourCommand is being tested by companies including record label Roc Nation, and no one has canceled yet.

Facebook is cracking down on Pages that try to trick their way into your News Feed. Today it announced a feed algorithm change for Pages that gives more visibility to timely, relevant, sharable content from trusted sources. Meanwhile, it punishes Pages that ask people to Like their posts and that post “low-quality” memes. The update could drive more traffic to reputable Pages while strangling spammers.

Earlier this month Facebook announced that it would start publicizing changes to the News Feed. It revealed that there are hundreds of thousands of signals taken into account when customizing the feed for each person. Instead of tuning the algorithm quietly, Facebook decided that the impact on users and businesses is so large that it’s best to be transparent and explain the changes in detail.

The first set of changes were focused on content from friends. These included Story Bumping to make sure you don’t miss great posts, Last Actor to show you more about people you’ve recently interacted with, and Chronological By Actor, which is still in testing but could help people follow along with real-time updates.

Now Facebook is focusing on how Pages appear in the feed, a more sensitive topic because so many businesses have grown to depend on the News Feed for content. Many Page admins vocally criticized Facebook for starting to ask them to pay to reach their existing fans. Much of the fervor stemmed from Facebook simultaneously getting more stringent about demoting spammy posts.

The problem was that Facebook wasn’t up-front about these changes, leading to rampant speculation that it was trying to extort Pages by not showing them in the feed unless they paid. By being clear about what’s going on this time, Facebook should avoid much of the backlash.

How News Feed Is Changing For Pages

Facebook says it did a survey of users asking what they thought made a Page post worth seeing. The questions included:

• Is this timely and relevant content?
• Is this content from a source you would trust?
• Would you share it with friends or recommend it to others?
• Is the content genuinely interesting to you or is it trying to game News Feed distribution? (e.g. asking for people to like the content)
• Would you call this a low-quality post or meme?
• Would you complain about seeing this content in your News Feed?

It took the user feedback and built a better machine-learning algorithm that can distinguish between high- and low-quality posts, and then show the best ones higher in the feed.

Facebook says that in its tests of the changes, “we saw a significant increase in interactions (likes, comments, shares) with this content” and “People in the test group also hid fewer stories overall”. That showed the algorithm tweaks were a success so it will begin rolling out the update over the next few weeks. Facebook says the impact should be minor for most Pages.

The most important thing for Pages to know about the change is that posting Lolcats-style memes with overlaid text on images might not be the best strategy going forward. I asked whether Facebook’s machine-learning algorithm will be able to identify these kinds of posts and demote them, and it seems that it can. The company tells me:

“Pages producing some low quality, meme content can expect to see a slight decrease. Pages that are exclusively posting low quality, meme content might see a bigger drop. The magnitude of the change will be greatest for Pages creating high quality content. Generally, these Pages should see increased distribution.”

In general Pages should focus on a strategy of posting great, engaging content that doesn’t use dirty tricks to get Likes. And that should mean that more of what you see in your News Feed is worth your precious attention.

With its mobile business humming, what is Facebook focused on now? Well, Mark Zuckerberg’s got some big ideas, like helping the whole world get on the Internet. And he’s going to share them with our audience when he gets on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September. His talk at our conference last year boosted Facebook’s share price almost 9%, so we think this one is going to be eventful too.

Zuckerberg has been running Facebook for almost 10 years now. It’s gone from tiny college startup to juggernaut social network, business darling to Wall Street black sheep and back again. Now it helps 1.15 billion people connect with friends, family, businesses, and increasingly, other applications.

In the meantime, Zuckerberg has tried to retain his hacker mentality while maturing to manage an increasingly complex business. He’s led Facebook to some big successes this year. It’s grown mobile to 41% of the company’s total ad revenue, and $FB shares have clawed their way back above the $38 IPO price.

Not everything has gone smoothly, though. Facebook Home has been slow to gain traction, even if features like Chat Heads have done well on their own. An exodus of veterans employees and designers has shook the company. Facebook was able to buy its way out of competition with Instagram,but new photo sharing and international messaging apps are nipping at its heels. And despite a lack of conclusive evidence, critics continue to claim Facebook makes us sad and teens are tuning out.

But the most fascinating thing about Facebook might be Zuckerberg’s ambitious plan to bring affordable Internet to the five billion people without it. Tuesday, he announced Internet.org, a partnership with six mobile companies to make the web accessible to everyone, and published a 10-page roadmap for getting there. Disrupt will be his first public talk since the Internet.org launch, where we’ll see if he can convince the world it’s really an altruistic endeavor, and not just a long-term user growth strategy.

We’ll ask Zuckerberg about all these topics and what else he’s pondering at Disrupt SF on Wednesday, September 11th. Also taking the stage will be Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, and the world’s top venture capitalists. Check out all of the influential speakers and guests joining us on the full Disrupt SF agenda.

Get your tickets now while you still can. We are only a week and a half away, so don’t delay if you want to come. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be found here.

Students can also come be a part of Disrupt SF. We have limited student tickets available, so be sure to go here to find out how to get yours quickly.

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Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Chairman and CEO, Facebook

Mark is the chairman and CEO of Facebook, which he founded in 2004. He is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company, leading the design of Facebook’s service and the development of its core technology and infrastructure. Mark studied computer science at Harvard University before moving the company to Palo Alto, California.