Category: Tech news

Just as the wheels of time continue to turn, the 49 new startups out of Y Combinator continue to churn.

Batch One is now behind us, and a new group of startups are taking the stage. As per usual, TechCrunch is here to bring you complete coverage of each of these companies, ranging from a “hearing aid 2.0″ to a “Netflix for fashion” to “credit cards for old people.”

And without giving away too many hints, there might even be a Google Glass competitor in this batch.

Batch 2: Go!

Amulyte: Amulet for aged

Amulyte is targeting the 20 million senior citizens in the United States, providing a pendant and online portal that tracks their movements to provide help in case they fall. The pendant connects to cellular networks and has GPS, Wi-Fi and an accelerometer to detect falls. If a senior falls, it will alert contacts immediately and keep track of any movement.

The pendant sells for $149 and the service is $29 a month to provide a little peace of mind to seniors and their families. The company is working with a retirement home on a test of the service and to get it deployed in the market, but it sees a $10 billion market opportunity just in the U.S. alone.

Check out our earlier coverage of Amulyte here.

Le Tote: Netflix for fashion

It’s the age old cliché: The woman with a closet full of clothes, but absolutely nothing to wear. Some estimates say that the average woman only uses about 20 percent of the pieces in her wardrobe on the regular. Le Tote aims to solve that problem, by providing women’s apparel and accessory rentals for $49 per month.

The service, which Le Tote likes to call “the Netflix for women’s fashion,” has proven quite popular since it launched in October 2012: The company is making $70,000 in monthly revenue and is growing by 30 percent month-over-month. Its user base, which currently spans 48 states, has a retention rate of 93 percent.

Check out more coverage on Le Tote right here.

IXI-Play: Robot toy for kids

IXI-Play is building a smart, Android-based robot for young children. They can play games with it; they’ll show the robot cards and it will mimic emotions on them. It sees, hears, speaks and moves.

The toy itself retails for $299 but it will also come with an app store and other accessories. It’s a hardware platform that can have customizable skins for different characters so it can either build its own IP or license out IP from other toy companies.

Butter Systems: Restaurant menu on a tablet

Paper menus are static, costly to reprint with updates, and only work with a waiter. Butter Systems wants to “put a tablet on your table” with its mobile menu system for restaurants. Butter Systems menus are built for cheap Android tablets, can be updated on the fly from a web portal, support vivid brand customization, assist with translation into other languages, and let businesses highlight promotions and discounts. Most importantly, it lets customers order right from their tables.

Sam Brin, Butter Systems’ co-founder (and younger brother of Google’s Sergey Brin), says his product boosts average check size by 13 percent. It doesn’t have to replace waiters, but can help cut down their workload with buttons like “Check please!” They’ll have to keep people from stealing the tablets, and compete with E La Carte, iMenu, MenuPad, and more. Tablet menus do seem inevitable, so it should be an interesting battle to watch.

Check out more coverage of Butter Systems right here.

Asseta: Capital equipment marketplace

Asseta wants to be the go-to marketplace for used capital equipment, a $100 billion industry that is ready to be disrupted. Seeking to become the “eBay for used capital equipment,” it wants to connect sellers that have equipment they’re not using with buyers who want to buy it at a discount to its new price.

The big problem with previous marketplaces of this type is that companies weren’t properly incentivized to list their used equipment, but Asseta has collected more than 28,000 equipment listings. So far, it’s done $212,000 in sales, and sees a $5 billion market opportunity, based on the $100 billion in used capital sales and its own 5 percent commission.

Check out earlier coverage of Asseta right here.

Hum: Chat to replace email

Everyone hates email, which has led a lot of people to try to kill it. The latest is Hum, a product designed for collaboration. It organizes conversation into threads, lets you drop work requests into each others’ feeds, and syncs everything across your devices. Hum is focused on real-time conversation and presence.

It makes it easy to see who else is currently viewing a thread. You can “read later” any threads you can’t get to right now, or pin important conversations to the top of the app. The company made a lot of bold claims about how it will transition you away from email as you use it more, but didn’t provide many specifics. Hum will have a steep uphill battle against incumbents like Yammer and Asana, and email, which has been harder to disrupt than most people realize.

True Link: Credit cards for old people

True Link Financial is building a “safe” credit card for cognitively impaired senior citizens who might not have the ability to see through scams or recognize when people are trying to take advantage of them.

They give out credit cards to the elderly and route all transactions in the Visa network through their own servers, where they double-check the transactions to see if they’re reasonable (like spending a few dollars at an ice cream parlor) or to see if they’re from known scams. The company says credit card companies make $1.9 billion a year from this demographic.

Check out more coverage of True Link right here.

LocalOn: Web marketing platform for small businesses

Many local businesses aren’t ready for the digital age, and some are getting overwhelmed with pitches from startups they’ve never heard of or don’t understand. LocalOn wants to break through by working with newspapers that already do businesses with local merchants.

Together LocalOn and the papers offers businesses white-labeled tools for building websites and other utilities web hosting, directories member billing, and widgets. LocalOn also sells to the newspapers themselves. While it’s a crowded market that’s tough to scale, someone has to get these businesses set up on the web, and then hopefully mobile.

Check out further coverage of LocalOn right here.

Weilos: Weight loss coaching

Weilos is a mobile-first service built to help users lose weight through accountability. It works by connecting users with coaches whom they report to through their mobile phones. The accountability is motivating its users to quickly drop pounds, with active users losing an average of 1.3 pounds per week, compared to 0.3 pounds per week with Weight Watchers.

One of the reasons that Weilos works is that its coaches have been there — they’ve all lost weight themselves. Weilos is going after a HUGE market — the 200 million Americans in the U.S. who are overweight, and who spend $61 billion on things that don’t actually work.

Check out even more coverage of Weilos right here.

SoundFocus: Hearing aid 2.0

SoundFocus is starting out as an app, but eventually it will be far more than that. The company has developed software that detects the certain volume levels and frequencies for your particular ears. One of the founders, Alex Selig, grew up with hearing loss and after finding out that 600 million people in the world suffer from it, and that four out of every five people with hearing issues don’t have a hearing aid, he felt he had to act.

The app first gives the user a simple test, and once it understands your particular hearing ability, tunes your music from your iTunes music library or Spotify so that you can actually hear better. In the last week, SoundFocus reached 100,000 songs.

Eventually, the team will offer an adapter, and after that, wireless earbuds that will offer the same audio-tuned experience for all of your gadgets, not just the iPhone. Those headphones will only cost $70 but the total addressable market here is $9.5 billion.

Check out more coverage of SoundFocus right here.

Webflow: Responsive site builder for designers

Building a mobile or web app today typically requires a back-and-forth dance between a designer and a web developer before the product can actually go live. Webflow aims to replace the web developer role entirely, letting designers create content for any device and push it live themselves.

According to Webflow, this “automates away the middle man” (a characterization that web developers may chafe at, to be sure) because “everything developers can do in code, designers can do in Webflow.” It’s attracted a lot of attention so far: In the two weeks since Webflow launched, 25,000 people have used the service, many of them using the app for more than three hours a day.

Check out further coverage of Webflow right here.

Lob: Printing API

Lob is an API for mobile and web apps to incorporate printing. They call themselves “Stripe” for printing, paying homage to the payments startup that is one of Y Combinator’s brightest up-and-comers.

The company says that it’s a hassle for startups to handle their relationships with local print shops, negotiate pricing and send files back and forth through e-mail. So they’ve built an abstraction layer that does this with one simple API call. They say that they’re growing at a rate of 200 percent week-over-week.

Check out earlier coverage of Lob right here.

Estimote: Retail store sensors

Estimote is building a wireless sensor network for retail companies to let them deliver content to customers’ phones based on their precise locations within a store. Estimote utilizes Bluetooth low-energy technology (the same core tech that has been utilized in Apple’s iBeacon feature in iOS 7) to identify people’s locations down to the inch.

Ultimately, this aims to fulfill the same promise that NFC and QR codes have tried (and mostly failed) to deliver. So far, the response has been encouraging: The startup says it is already shipping devices to major retail partners all over the world.

You can check out further coverage of Estimote right here.

DoorDash: Restaurant delivery

DoorDash is a local delivery service that hopes to enable every restaurant to get into delivering food. Unlike Seamless or GrubHub, which have menus but don’t manage deliveries, DoorDash provides a better service by partnering with restaurants and handling the logistics of getting food from the kitchen to the customer’s door.

The company is averaging 44-minute delivery times, thanks to its logistics software — and it’s doing that in the suburbs, not in cities, like most of the big new delivery startups. But it sees a bigger opportunity than just restaurants: Positioning itself as the “FedEx of today,” it hopes to provide a logistics framework that goes beyond food and can be used for any type of on-demand order.

You can find more coverage of DoorDash right here.

One Month Rails: Teaches Rails app building

One Month Rails wants to teach you exactly what you need to know to build what you want to build. The company offers a one-month course, for $49.95, that reminds me of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but for learning to code.

Users can sign up, learn how to code in Ruby on Rails, but without going through a fully comprehensive curriculum like Codecademy and Learn The Hard Way. Instead, the user only needs to learn the essentials to build their intended finished product. For now, the company offers Ruby On Rails courses, but eventually the same product will be available for Python, JavaScript, etc.

Head on over here for further coverage of One Month Rails.

Regalii: Remittances to Latin America

Many immigrants to the United States send money to their family members who remain back in their native countries — it’s a way of helping to support the people who raised them by helping out with food and bills.

But the current status quo for sending money is Western Union, which comes with its own set of problems: The recipient has to travel to the Western Union location which is often far away, wait in line for as long as several hours, sacrifice a 10 percent transaction fee, and then carry cash back home through a possibly dangerous area. Regalii aims to cut out all these issues by allowing people to send money for food and bills to their family members through SMS, for a flat fee of $3 per transfer. The payments can be used directly at stores that Regalii partners with to purchase food and other supplies.

The service has taken off in a big way since it launched: It’s growing at a rate of 67 percent week over week, with 1,100 customers being served last week alone — and that’s just by serving one neighborhood in the Bronx of New York City, sending money back home to the Dominican Republic.

Meta: Augmented Reality glasses

Meta is building the augmented-reality glasses that perhaps many Google Glass users were hoping for. Their initial device, which TechCrunch colleague Greg Kumparak said was a bit of a prototype, has seen about a half-million dollars of sales in the last week alone. While wearing the glasses, you’re able to manipulate augmented reality objects. Kumparak said he was able to move a floating rectangle around and expand and close it based on how he moved his fists.

Check out earlier coverage of Meta right here and here.

Additional reporting by Colleen Taylor, Kim-Mai Cutler, Ryan Lawler, and Josh Constine.

This video shows you probably the closest we’ll ever get to seeing a physical representation of the Hyperloop. It is a 3D scale model made by a nascent company called WhiteClouds and it showcases the teams 3D modeling prowess and, more wistfully, shows what the Hyperloop could be.

The Odgen-based team printed the model on three different printers using three different materials. They added a bit of color to the seats, smoothed them out, and now are the proud owners of a small, non-working model of the Hyperloop suitable for children’s parties and futuristic stop motion animations. Now if they could just 3D print these things full-sized using aluminum tubing and billions of dollars of right-of-way land grants then I think they’d really be in business. Regardless, it’s a noble effort.

Google Play Services, the company’s client-side library for allowing Android developers to easily use Google-powered features like Maps and Google+ in their apps, got a major update today that includes a number of interesting new features. Many of these, Google notes, are meant to provide greater power savings, but the company says it has also made a number of performance improvements.

With this update, for example, developers can now use hardware-based GPS geofencing on devices that support it (including, for example, the Nexus 4). Battery consumption is one of the banes of location-based services, but Google says this technique can result in significantly lower battery usage.

To save even more battery, Google Play Services 3.2 now also allows the selection of a low-power mode for the Fused Location Provider, which manages Play Services’ location technology in the background. And a new Snapshot feature now allows developers to just display a bitmap image of the current map instead of an interactive map to improve performance and battery life.

Besides these location features, this update also brings a new and easily integrated, simplified sharing control to Play Services for developers who use Google+ sign-ins. In addition, Google says, it has “taken the opportunity to add some butter to the Google+ sign-in animation” (a reference to Project Butter – Google’s initiative to make Android’s animations a bit more fluid).

For developers who want to integrate Photo Sphere, Google has added a compass mode, so users can now view them by simply moving their phones.

Technical co-founder, angel investor and PayPal mafia don Max Levchin once wrote a blog post about a concept he called “high leverage individuals.” He described these individuals thus:

“People who act on their big ideas. They are capable of articulating a theory of how the world works today and how it should change, and then proceed to actually change the world, or at least attempt to.

They are the people that can describe big changes that impact major swaths of humanity (we will privatize space flight! we will sequence the human genome! we will find safe alternative to oil! etc), and then actually proceed to replace “we” with “I” through their actions, be it entrepreneurship or investing or volunteering.”

Though Levchin did not pinpoint himself as a “high leverage individual,” he is the epitome of such a person. Before he could legally drink, Levchin wanted to transform the way people exchanged value using the Internet, whether it be actual value like money via PayPal or recreational value like gaming through Slide. Though not always successful, what is admirable about Max Levchin is that he kept acting on his theories, i.e. building them and supporting other high leverage individuals, like Marissa Mayer, when they set out to do the same.

His latest project, HVF, is his most ambitious endeavor yet. It’s an incubator that focuses on harnessing the sheer amount of behavioral data produced by today’s tech advancement to make products more efficient and, yes, to change the world. The first product to come out of HVF, Affirm, aims to make paying from your phone as easy as tweeting from your phone by utilizing cues from social networks to determine whether you’ll make good on a loan.

And, in a complete 180°, HVF’s second product, Glow, wants to help women get pregnant through timing their cycles and then literally paying for (through a user pool) in vitro fertilization if the cycle timing doesn’t work. Imagine how many couples trying for children can rest a little bit easier with that kind of guarantee.

You don’t see many tried-and-true serial entrepreneurs and investors going after the fertility market, and perhaps that’s why Max is: “In the next decades we will see huge number of inherently analog processes captured digitally,” he writes. “Opportunities to build businesses that process this data and improve lives will abound.” It doesn’t get more analog than human reproduction.

Levchin will be talking about his past and our data-driven future onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. We’re honored to have him.

Image via Hubert Burda Media/Flickr

Max Levchin

A computer scientist, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor, Max Levchin focuses on building and investing in enduring technology companies.

Max’s latest undertaking, HVF, is an innovation lab focused on solving big problems and improving lives by extracting insights from the vast quantities of recordable information around us. HVF launched its first project, Affirm, in early 2013, and recently launched Glow at the end of May.

A graduate of University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (CS’97), Max co-founded PayPal and was its CTO, from founding through its acquisition by eBay. Max currently serves as the chairman of the boards of directors of Yelp and Kaggle and a director of Yahoo! and Evernote.

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The Chromebook world is a weird one where apps trickle out slowly and in a manageable stream, with the most interesting ones costly coming from Google itself. The latest is software that was originally demoed at the Chromebook Pixel launch, then released for that computer exclusively, and now has arrived for all Chromebooks as of today.

The Google+ Photos app, for those who haven’t been following its long and winding saga, is a standalone app that takes the best of Google+’s photos features and adds things like automatic backup from SD cards, offline viewing of recent uploads, and auto-sorting of the best shots as well as simple sharing.

Maybe the best part of Google+’s Photos app is that it uses the company’s new Auto Enhance magic to subtly improve the quality of any uploaded photos without any action required on their part, so long as it’s enabled, and the Auto Awesome feature that generates GIFs and collages.

At Google’s I/O keynote, the features around images were probably the best part of, at least from a truly useful consumer development standpoint. Photos in the age of digital photography are just sort of a bulk nuisance item that we plan to, but never actually get around to organizing, sifting and editing. Google+ now does a really good job of handling a lot of that heavy lifting.

Chromebooks are still niche devices, but software like this makes them ideal travel companions or even better tools for users with light demands and little know-how of programs like Lightroom or Photoshop. Keeping the Photos app exclusive to the pricey, even-more-niche-than-niche Pixel wasn’t doing anyone any favors, so it’s nice to see it become more widely available.

Having your dog or cat run away is pretty traumatic. And even if somebody finds your furry friend, they might not know where to find you. If your pet ends up in a shelter, chances are high that it will be euthanized, so Philip Rooyakkers, the CEO of PiP – The Pet Recognition Company, decided to see if he and his team could use facial recognition instead of tags to more easily report and find more lost pets.

PiP launched its Indiegogo campaign today. The company is looking to raise $100,000 in the next month to raise the final funds necessary to bring the app to market.

I ran into Rooyakkers at the GROW conference in Vancouver last week, and he told me that the company’s technology, developed by the image-recognition expert Dr. Daesik Jang, is able to recognize 98 percent of dogs and cats. With the help of some extra metadata (breed, size, weight, gender, colors etc.), this means PiP can recognize virtually every lost pet.

Here is how it works: Pet owners sign up for PiP and upload photos of their pets to the system. The technology then analyzes the pet’s unique facial features and stores the data in its database.

Anybody can download the app to report found pets. Pet owners pay a subscription to PiP (the plan is to charge $1.49 per month, with 2 percent of all proceeds going to local pet rescue charities) and the moment their pet goes missing, PiP will alert local animal control and rescue agencies, veterinarians and social medial outlets.

This “Amber Alert” for missing pets is at the core of what the service does. It will also scan social media for postings about found pets. “We will not only broadcast across all social media that the pet is missing, but everyone with the app (in that locale) will get a pop-up Amber Alert. We will contact the owner directly to listen, provide PiP’s immediate response, and offer support,“ Rooyakkers said in a statement today.

Whenever a pet is found, PiP will use its facial recognition software to see if it can find a match in its system. To avoid false positives, Rooyakkers told me, somebody will always look at the metadata to ensure everything checks out.

Obviously, there are a few other ways to identify lost pets, including ID Tags and microchip implants. However, there are numerous standards for microchips, so not every shelter or clinic can scan every chip. Facial recognition would also allow anybody to scan dogs or cats right after finding them without the need for any special equipment, which should make reuniting them with their owners faster and easier.

It’s that time again.

Y Combinator‘s Summer demo day is upon us, and we’re here live to bring the best and brightest new startups into your world. Forty-nine new companies will pitch their wares for the very first time today, but for now we’re focusing on the first batch, which includes everything from laundry services, legal help and immigration management to mobile A/B testing, real estate crowdfunding and food truck-based companies.

So sit back, relax, and grab some popcorn as we take you through the wonderful world of YC startups.

Batch 1: Go!

GoComm: Yammer for mobile workforce

GoComm bills itself as “Yammer for the mobile workforce” with a tool for managing large events. It works like a transparent Twitter-like feed to coordinate with teams that lives on your mobile phone. Co-founder Travis Dredd was inspired to build the company after his experience serving as chief of staff for the Democratic National Convention. During the DNC he didn’t have the tools to coordinate with all the members of his team and the press when the convention needed to be moved from a football stadium into the nearby arena.

With the product built and working with clients, the company has already become profitable — having signed one large, $150,000 a year contract — and sees the opportunity to go after the $450 million events space. It also can be applied to industries like construction, security and hotels, according to Dredd.

Simple Legal: Analyze legal bills

With the stated goal of being the “Mint.com for legal spend,” SimpleLegal is a software platform that reads and analyzes the paper data that companies receive from their law firms. According to SimpleLegal’s founders, who have spent a combined 10 years in the legal industry, law firms on average over-bill their clients by 10 percent. By automatically flagging inappropriate charges, SimpleLegal says it can cut down on those costs in a big way. The startup has seen 50 percent week-over-week growth in the five weeks since it launched its platform.

Read our earlier coverage on SimpleLegal here.

RealCrowd: Crowdfund Real Estate

RealCrowd is a crowdfunding site for commercial real estate investments. The team, which includes two longstanding real estate investors who have helped close more than $3 billion in investment transactions, is looking to help a broader set of investors participate in multi-million-dollar real estate investments. In their first couple of weeks, they’ve racked up 500 accredited investors to participate in the site and have raised $7.5 million. An offering three days ago has attracted $550,000 of a $1.35 million target.

Check out our earlier coverage of RealCrowd here.

Apptimize: Mobile A/B testing

Every company is building a mobile app, but it’s tough to know what to change to optimize sales and other key performance indicators. Apptimize has developed an SDK that developers can install with their apps to run real-time A/B tests on changes to on-boarding flows, button placement, images, colors, fonts, and whole features without the need for engineers.

Developers can then watch the results of their tests and roll out the changes that benefit their business. Apptimize was started by algorithmic trading expert Nancy Hua, and ex-Googler and mobile security engineer Jeremy Orlow. The company says 1,000 developers have now installed their SDK, pushing them to 1 million user devices. They’re competing in a crowded market of A/B testing suites, but many are run by big post-IPO companies focused on the web, or small startups who haven’t gotten serious traction. If they can win the space, they could score a cut of massive ecommerce marketing budgets and make apps better for everyone.

Check out our earlier coverage of Apptimize here.

Watchsend: Clicktale for mobile

Watchsend is an analytics tool that captures video of mobile app interactions, allowing developers to determine where users are running into problems in their apps. That provides more data than developers would get from more traditional analytics tools like Mixpanel or Flurry.

The founders built the tool after they ran into their own problems determining what was wrong in their own mobile app. The company could now tell where users were dropping off and what problems they were having. Just two weeks after launch, Watchsend has 50 companies using its analytics and is looking to get more signed up.

Check out our earlier coverage of WatchSend here.

Graft Concepts: Swap phone case backs

If you want a case for your smartphone, walking into any mall or Best Buy shows you what you already know — there are thousands of options out there for you. GraftConcepts aims to be the go-to case to let you have all those options available at the same time, with a two-piece iPhone case design that allows you to interchange the back plate for your case easily. It’s already seen a ton of success — GraftConcepts has sold $2.25 million in product to date, and is on track to sell a total of $7.5 million worth of its flagship product alone. Those numbers are impressive, but the addressable market is even more so: Today, some $29. 6 billion in smartphone cases are sold every year.

Check out our earlier coverage of Graft Concepts right here.

Glio: Yelp for Latin America

Glio is a local listings site like Yelp for the Brazilian market. They’ve grown 40 percent month-over-month and more than 100,000 users have used Glio over the last month. The co-founders include a former Brazilian poker champion and the team applied to Y Combinator three times before getting in. Eventually, they’re looking to expand to other South American markets.

Check out our earlier coverage of Glio here.

Toutpost: Reviews for everything

Yelp is around to help you figure out what restaurants to go to or businesses to patronize. When you’re making a buying decision on, well, anything else, Toutpost wants to be your go-to service. The way that Toutpost says it will incentivize people to contribute user-generated reviews is by tapping into the argumentative know-it-all in all of us — by pitting two products against each other (say, a Sony Playstation versus an Xbox) and encouraging people to debate their pros and cons with each other. It’s been successful so far: In the six weeks since Toutpost launched, the site has attracted 6,000 users.

Check out our earlier coverage of Toutpost here.

SpoonRocket: Food-truck service

SpoonRocket has figured out a way to deliver healthy organic meals for just $6, and in fewer than 10 minutes. The company, which is just operating in Berkeley right now, claims to do more orders in one day than GrubHub does in a full month. That’s 850 meals per day, or a run rate of $2 million.

How does SpoonRocket do it? The team controls the entire process: It writes the code, makes the food and does the deliveries. It hopes to go nationwide, expanding the market opportunity to 300 times its existing market, or $600 million annually.

Check out our earlier coverage of SpoonRocket right here.

Prim: Laundry service

People spent $15 billion on laundry last year, and most still dislike the experience. Prim wants to make laundry lovable. You throw your laundry in trashbags, book a pick-up time on its website, a driver comes and picks up the bags, they’re washed and folded at a high-quality local laundromat, nicely bagged in nylon satchels, and delivered back to you at a time you choose within 48 hours. It’s $25 a bag, with $15 for additional bags.

I’ve used Prim and it was a huge help. By negotiating bulk orders with laundromats, Prim can charge about as much as you’d pay to drag your laundry to a laundromat’s wash and fold service, and you get delivery included. Prim is seeing 65 percent of customers return for more service, though its 10 percent a week growth is low by Y Combinator standards. It faces local competitors in San Francisco like LaundryLocker, Sfwash, and Sudzee, but hopes its founders’ computer science background and online customer acquisition skills will help it beat them.

Check out our earlier coverage of Prim right here.

7 Cups Of Tea: Listener marketplace

Everyone has a time in their lives when they just need to talk about their troubles — when they’re going through a divorce, an illness in the family, issues with anxiety, and the like. There are typically two options for them: Family and friends, which is free but often comes with baggage; or therapy, which is expensive and often intimidating. 7 Cups of Tea aims to situate itself in the middle of those two options, with an online marketplace that connects people anonymously with trained “active listeners” that provide an empathetic ear for free or a voluntary fee or “tip.” 7 Cups, which takes a 40 percent commission on all transactions, has seen solid growth since it launched eight weeks ago: It now has 160 active listeners on its platform and is now fielding more than 1,800 call and chat requests per week.

Check out our earlier coverage of 7cups right here.

StatusPage: Status pages

This startup provides a seemingly simple, but very important service: Providing a hosted status page indicating metrics such as downtime for any company that has a website, service, or application. This way, customers can plainly see if an app is “down for everyone, or just me” — and gather more data about what exactly is going on.

For a monthly fee that ranges between $19 to $249 a month depending on the size of the company and services provided, StatusPage provides a website with an easy-to-understand dashboard, as well as the ability to access information via email and text.

Check out earlier coverage of StatusPage here.

Kivo: Git for documents

Kivo has built a tool to improve collaboration on documents between teams. By keying into Microsoft Office, it’s created what it calls a “Git for documents.” In the same way that Git has solved the versioning problem for collaborative development. Kivo helps teams manage documents that multiple users can edit, all at the same time.

Today, Kivo has already signed up a bunch of consultancy firms like Deloitte and McKinsey to enable their teams to work on documents in Microsoft Office, PowerPoint, and Excel together. But there are a billion users of Microsoft Office tools out there. At $10 per user, the revenue opportunity for Kivo is pretty huge.

Check out our earlier coverage of Kivo here.

Teleborder: Immigration management

It’s common knowledge by now that immigration is a huge problem for many companies — if you’re not a behemoth like Oracle or Google, if you have an employee that you’re trying to secure a visa for, the process can be hugely time-consuming and difficult. Teleborder aims to ease that pain by providing a software program for companies that purportedly scales, automates, and replaces all the functions typically done by an immigration lawyer — gathering documents, collecting information, and sending information to the government. Teleborder charges $5,000 per visa application, giving it a $4.5 billion addressable market in the United States alone.

Check out our earlier coverage of Teleborder here.

Floobits: Simultaneous editing

Floobits lets pair programmers use native text editors to collaborate on code in real time. They say they have 7,000 users signed up with eight hours a day on average per usage. The two co-founders Matt Kaniaris and Geoff Greer used to pair program together while at Rackspace, and after leaving, they realized that they wanted to build something that could help others do the same.

The service offers freemium pricing, where free accounts have up to five workspaces available. But to work privately, a paid account starting at $15 per month is required.

Check out our earlier coverage of Floobits right here.

EasyPost: Stripe for shipping

It’s a big hassle for technologically savvy businesses to integrate with antiquated shipping services like UPS, USPS, and FedEx. EasyPost removes the friction by sitting between developers and the shippers, and offering a RESTful JSON API to connect them. This lets developers access the best shipping rates, tracking information and more. It charges $0.05 per shipping label, and is aiming to take a nice cut of the $26 billion shipping industry. It’s been growing 179 percent month over month, has handled 70,000 shipments, and raised $850,000 from investors, including SV Angel. It’s facing competitors like Postmaster and ShipHawk, but hopes to win the market by specializing in top-notch support so businesses always know where their shipments are.

Check out our earlier coverage of EasyPost right here.

Standard Treasury: API for commercial banks

Standard Treasury is working on APIs for commercial banking that help ease transactions like transfers. They’re currently in negotiations with 16 banks, including three of the five largest ones in the country. Those contracts could be worth anywhere from roughly $2 million to more than $15 million and they have potential banking clients asking for APIs down the line that tap into mobile and core banking.

Check out our earlier coverage of Standard Treasury here.

Additional reporting by Colleen Taylor, Kim-Mai Cutler, Ryan Lawler, and Josh Constine.

A recent posting on Apple’s Web Server notifications page issues credit to Ibrahim Balic, 7Dscan.com and SCANV of Knownsec.com for the discovery of two web security issues. Balic, you may recall, discovered a vulnerability that he later publicly claimed was responsible for the weeks-long outage of Apple’s Developer Center.

The posting was discovered by 9to5Mac.com who claimed that Apple was crediting Balic with reporting the issue that took down the Dev Center.

However, my sources confirm that Balic’s report is not responsible for the outage. The issue that Balic reported had nothing to do with why Apple took down the developer center. That was a completely separate vulnerability. Indeed, the entry related to Balic is annotated with the iAd Workbench portal address, not the Developer Center address.

The vulnerability reported directly below Balic’s entry was credited to 7dscan.com and SCANV and is annotated with Apple’s Developer Center address. It seems far more likely that these two researchers are the ones who discovered the remote code execution vulnerability in the Developer Center which caused the outage. For researchers who are in this game, the credit from a company is the reward, so they most likely reported it to Apple. Once it had been confirmed, Apple was worried enough to take the Dev Center down to fix the problem.

The fact that Balic was not responsible for the aggressive response and rebuilding of the Developer Center by Apple was previously posited by John Paczkowski at AllThingsD and Charles Arthur at The Guardian. Our own Chris Velazco also spoke at length to Balic about his breach of the iAd portal. He also expressed skepticism that Balic’s report was the cause of the Developer Center outage. It turns out that this was the correct deduction.

Balic maintained that he was simply performing research (for which he has been thanked by other companies) and retained no user information. He went public with the security issues related to the Dev Center in a YouTube video after he says he got no response from Apple.

When contacted to inquire about the actual cause of the Developer Center outage, Apple declined to comment.

Image Credit: Flickr/Martin Abegglen

Right in line with its usual update cycle, Google today released version 29 of its Chrome browser for Mac, Windows, Linux and Chrome Frame. There are no real surprises here, but just like most updates to the stable channel, Chrome 29 does introduce some smaller updates. On the desktop, this means the Omnibox — Chrome’s combined URL and search bar — now also bases its suggestions on the recency of the sites you have visited.

This new Omnibox algorithm, Google says, should result “in more timely and contextually relevant suggestions.”

Mac users will be happy to hear that Chrome 29 now supports Google’s rich notifications, “so you can keep up with what’s happening within your apps and extensions.”

Another new feature of the desktop version is the ability to reset your browser settings with just a few clicks. As Google notes, this should come in handy when you “got overzealous with fun extensions,” for example. The reset will allow you to keep your bookmarks, themes and apps in place, but it will delete all of your extensions.

With this update, Google is also bringing a number of new APIs to Chrome, many of which it introduced to the beta channel earlier this year.

WebRTC On Android

The most important update in Chrome 29 is actually for Android. Google’s mobile browser now offers support for WebRTC, the increasingly popular format for plug-in-free video and audio chats and data transfer in the browser. With this, mobile WebRTC is now something developers will soon be able to take for granted, which should help the adoption of WebRTC in the short term. To give it a try, Google is hosting its own WebRTC video chat app here.

The Internet is broken. It is burning. Facebook and Twitter fiddle while it smokes and we, the sapped members of the Internet class, watch the flames and wonder what’s next. Say what you want about the politics of whistleblowing or the tendency of the exhausted sysadmins to finally give up, now is the time to fix this before all we hold dear – the freedom that NSA snooping was ostensibly designed to protect – is gone.

Ignore this moment at your peril. To be clear, what the NSA is doing is far from technologically advanced. It is simple signals intelligence. It is grep writ large. However, the degree to which it has ensconced itself into the fabric of the Internet is breathtaking and the nonchalance and ignorance of the government officials involved is stunning. Now is the time for the nerds – and I mean this with all seriousness – to rally.

How can we start? Encrypt everything. Enough dilly dallying. My public key is right here and yours should be in the same spot. Sign your emails. Encrypt missives between yourself and the significant other, even messages as mundane as the shopping list. I’m well aware that this level of paranoia borders on insanity, but rest assured that while you may not need this protection now, there will be a point when your private correspondence is interesting to someone, somewhere. To not encrypt is the security equivalent of leaving your ground floor window open while on vacation. Maybe no one will notice.

Encrypt your hard drive. Require security connections for sites that ask for private information. Kill your Facebook account. Support seemingly goofy ideas like secure Twitter. If you’re worried at all, make your concerns count.

Require transparency and control of your service providers. All mail clients and browsers should support encrypted communications. All of them. That I have to pay $2 to be protected on iOS is ludicrous. The same goes for Android, although the open source on that side of the mobile fence is fairly strong – but still not strong enough.

Support open source. I’m about to put my money where my mouth is and begin using Ubuntu as a primary laptop OS. It will take time, but it can be done. As insufferable as some open source zealots can sometimes seem, Cory Doctorow is right to buy only Lenovo Thinkpads running Ubuntu. If I were a startup hacker concerned with privacy, I’d do the same.

Don’t consent to be identified or use hardware that does. Sure, this is hard, but it’s necessary. We go along blithely signing up for service after service – I’m the worst offender, to be clear – and there are computers with radios on my body that count my steps, heart rate, and current position. I’m an idiot, but you don’t have to be. My job is to putz around with services and hardware. Your job is to remain secure and human in the face of massive inhumanity.

The absence of privacy is tragic and dangerous. As Groklaw founder Pamela James notes, Janna Malamud Smith’s book Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life details the absolute value of privacy even in situations fraught with absolute terror.

You are all smart people. You are building social networks, ways to buy and sell, and supporting innovation. If you are not taking privacy into consideration, you are failing. Your product will fail and you will be forced to start over. Because the Internet routes around damage, and this, that endless shuffle of important data through thin pipes overseen by faceless contractors who repeat the endless mantra “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear,” is damage.

Accel Partners is leading a $1.8 million investment in Collegefeed, a service that combines crowdsourcing with social networking to connect students with each other and potential employers.

Collegefeed uses data as the foundation of its service. It offers a Facebook-like news feed where students can access tuition help, job opportunities, interview-preparation help and access to alumni and mentors. And last month, the company launched a recommendation tool. With algorithms and crowdsourced data from CrunchBase, AngelList and other sources, the service makes recommendations about what employers and students should be interested in. Over time, it will recommend particular jobs and similar people based on their own profiles and other data.

As the network grows, it will connect students in a variety of ways, including how they compare competitively to their colleagues across shared interests.

The Collegefeed service launched in May to three engineering-focused schools in the Silicon Valley: Stanford, Carnegie Mellon SV and the University of California at Berkeley. It is now broadening to other universities and catering to students studying the liberal arts, sciences and other disciplines.

It also offers unique packages such as its award service that it plans to launch in September. Employers will offer challenges with winners receiving cash awards and opportunities such as expense-paid trips to spend a day with potential employers.

If Collegefeed can continue to build services based on the data it collects, then it should have no problem establishing itself as a service that students and employers flock to in order to connect.

Today in a keynote at Gamescon, Sony and Twitch announced a partnership that will see the upcoming PlayStation 4 console support the game streaming service that has found a massive audience online.

Twitch, formerly Twitch.tv, allows gamers to stream their play to viewers online. If that sounds niche to you, you are a bit behind. Twitch serves content from more than half a million streaming users to 38 million unique viewers each month.

It has long been a PC-focused service, as it found its start and footing in the PC gaming world. However, with today’s announcement of its work with Sony, and a similar partnership already announced with Microsoft and its upcoming Xbox One console, Twitch has effectively taken over the console market. Also included in the partnership is the ability to watch Twitch streams on the PlayStation 4. Again, the Xbox One link-up has the same feature.

Game streaming is now essentially equal opportunity. In the case of the PlayStation 4, gamers will be able to press the “Share” button on their controllers, and their streaming will kick into gear on their Twitch channels. That’s simple. On the PC front, streaming has always been a slightly wonky affair. For many, it was perhaps too complex to get started to make the effort worthwhile.

Streaming on the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One appears to be far simpler. This could lead to more adoption. And, critically, this could be a key moment for e-sports. The most competitive titles at the moment — League of Legends, Dota 2, and Starcraft 2 — are PC games. Mass streaming of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 titles could shift the gravity of e-sports.

All titles on the PlayStation 4 will be streamable, but it is not clear if all publishers will allow for them to be streamed. This is another key victory for Twitch, which has two fresh shots of espresso coming right up. Frankly, I’d argue that landing both Sony and Microsoft has put Twitch into a place where it can, once the new consoles come out, accelerate its growth rate.

Let’s hope they’ve bought enough new servers.

Have you had one of those moments where you wondered, “Damn, what did I actually do this weekend?” Or maybe where you couldn’t think of the name of that awesome restaurant you visited last week? A new iPhone app called Rove might help you remember.

The app was created by the company behind social travel service Zetrip, which wasn’t getting enough traction, according to co-founder and CEO Edouard Tabet. Rove was initially designed to address one of Zetrip’s shortcomings — Zetrip pulled social data from Facebook friends to provide “travel inspiration,” but there were lots of gaps.

“[With social data] you can’t reconstruct this whole experience, and [users] couldn’t remember where they went, even though we tried to make it very simple,” Tabet said. “So we decided, ‘Let’s try to automate that process.’”

In other words, Rove pulls GPS data from your iPhone to create a full record of where you’ve been. Once you turn the app on, it’s basically working in the background and requires no additional work from the user, although you can edit the locations, as well as add photos (either directly from your iPhone camera or from social networks) and comments. At the end of the day, or the week, or whatever, you can open the app and see the record that’s been created for you.

And while the initial inspiration for the app was travel, there’s no reason this can’t be used in your daily life — for example, when Tabet demonstrated the app, he showed me the record of his day, including his commute from the Rove office to the TechCrunch office.

The Rove team has put a lot of work into minimizing battery usage, he said — basically, it can detect your activity level, so if you’re staying in one place the app should be fairly inactive, and “the more you move the more we take measurements.” There are other nice touches, like the fact that Rove distinguishes between moments when you’re in transit and when you’re stationary (so if you drive from Palo Alto to San Francisco, it won’t try to convince you that you were actually spending time in one of the cities that you passed through on your drive).

Tabet also emphasized Rove’s approach to privacy, saying that while you can share records for a given period of time over email, Facebook or Twitter, nothing gets posted automatically. (In contrast the similar-sounding life-logging app Saga recently added automated sharing features, and it’s taking more of a social network-style approach, albeit with plenty of privacy controls.)

I tried the app out over the weekend, and the experience isn’t quite as seamless as I’d hoped. Apparently the app shut down after about a day of use, probably because I restarted my phone, meaning that I didn’t record any data for Sunday. (Tabet said that in iOS 7, it should be easier to automatically restart the app.) Also, the app guessed incorrectly about a number of the locations. Still, the editing process was quick and painless, and regardless of some inaccuracies, having the automatic record was pretty cool. And the battery drain wasn’t noticeable.

Tabet said he isn’t focused on making money yet, but he expects the business model to involve advertising and affiliate links when records are shared. So if I use Rove to tell friends about the great hotel I stayed at over the weekend and they make a reservation of their own, Rove could get a cut.

You can download the Rove app here.

Adobe’s PhoneGap mobile app development framework for bringing HTML5 hybrid apps to mobile devices is incredibly popular, but even though developers love the fact that they can write cross-platform re-usable code with it, it’s not exactly known for being very fast. Steroids.js, a new project from AppGyver which officially launched today, aims to bridge this gap by combining PhoneGap’s solution with access to native user-interface components, navigations and animations.

Steroids then lets developers easily add these to PhoneGap HTML5 apps to allow them to build “HTML5 hybrid apps with animation and other performance results that are indistinguishable from those of native apps.”

As AppGyver founder and CEO Marko Lehtimaki noted when I talked to him earlier this week, the system is fully compatible with PhoneGap and even supports PhoneGap plug-ins. The tool has been in development for about 18 months now, he told me, and has been in private beta for almost a year. Now, the AppGyver team believes, it is ready for prime time and “fully battle-tested and production ready.” Lehtimaki told me his team has spent almost eight man-years working on fixing PhoneGap’s performance issues.

The use of PhoneGap at the core of Steroids also means you get the same kind of hardware access as regular PhoneGap apps, including support for the device’s camera and microphone, for example. Steroids also has built-in CoffeeScript and Sass support and allows you to quickly set up a Ruby On Rails-like scaffold for your apps, featuring a number of generators to get your started. Overall, Lehtimaki estimates, using Steroids can speed up development times by up to 30 percent.

For developers, one of the nifty features of Steroids is that you can easily connect it to your device and see your code in action right away. Pushing an update to the device just takes one click and for debugging, the team integrated the Safari Development Tools to let you make changes to your code on the fly.

For easy ad-hoc distribution of the new app, Steroids uses a QR Code that you can quickly scan to load the app onto your device.

Steroids is free for developers who want to just give the service a try and for anybody who wants to develop open-source software with it. AppGyver also offers a commercial license, starting at $60 per month, for those who plan to release an app under their company name and for freelancers who will be developing for companies.

Between Rockstars and Red Bulls, Thiel fellow Ben Yu and Deven Soni believe there is a $45 billion market up for grabs.

They’re looking to attack it with not another consumable drink, but rather a sprayable form of caffeine that you absorb through your skin.

Called Sprayable Energy, it’s an unscented mix of caffeine, water and a derivative of tyrosine, which is one of 22 naturally occurring amino acids that cells in the body use to synthesize proteins. They’re raising at least $15,000 on Indiegogo so they can order an initial batch of bottles to retail for $15 each.

Each bottle has about 160 sprays and each spray is the equivalent of about one-fourth a cup of coffee. So you’re looking at about 40 coffee-sized doses of caffeine for about $15.

Yu, who is one of Peter Thiel’s “20 Under 20″ fellows, says he started working on the product because he’s actually too sensitive to caffeine.

“I’ve always been really frustrated with existing energy drinks,” he said. “I’d drink them, get all this caffeine into my body and then get this jittery feeling. When I drink them, I can’t concentrate and then I crash.”

He started studying the structure of caffeine, and noticed some similarities with nicotine, which is already used in skin patches to fight cigarette habits. He did some tests on himself and started working with his dad, Chongxi Yu, a Ph.D. in chemistry who already has several drug-delivery patents to his name. Normally, caffeine isn’t that soluble but the addition of water and tyrosine makes it more readily absorbable by the body.

Around the same time, Yu started working with Soni, who used to be at Highland Capital Partners before starting a European seed-stage fund. They clicked on a trip to Antarctica and then started collaborating during the Startup Chile program.

“We both worked on comparison shopping and even used the same dental floss,” said Soni, who is about 10 years older than Yu and has done work in investment banking as well.

They’re looking to market the product to people who are really sensitive to caffeine or quantified self junkies who want to meticulously calibrate their daily caffeine intake.

They say the spray usually takes about 15 to 30 minutes to take effect. While there haven’t been any long-term studies on how in-taking caffeine through the skin compares to ingesting it, the company does follow FDA guidelines and produces its sprays in regulated facilities. They also pointed to some studies that suggest that caffeine might actually guard against skin cancer.