Category: Tech news

Photo-sharing startup Cooliris is continuing its push into two of the world’s biggest Internet markets, China and Russia.

The Kleiner Perkins-backed company has just partnered with Tencent in China, to pull images from Tencent’s microblogging platform, Weibo, into Cooliris’ mobile apps.

On top of that, it is also expanding its relationship with Yandex, the Google of Russia, to pull images from Yandex’s search engine and its cloud storage product, Disk, into Cooliris.

Financial terms of the two deals were not disclosed.

Cooliris made its name in 2008 with a browser-add on called PicLens, which would stretch a set of photos over a sphere or display them as a wall you could virtually walk across. It used to make its money through ads embedded in the “photo wall” it rendered in browsers, but since it transitioned to a mobile app strategy in 2012, freemium add-ons will be the way forward, said CEO, Soujanya Bhumkar.

The company plans to release premium features as part of a subscription plan later in the year, he said.

So it makes sense that it’s keen to push further into China and Russia. After its first move into China via a tie up with Renren, aka China’s “Facebook”, in December last year, it enjoyed a 30-fold traffic spike. Bhumkar added that the number of photos that has been interacted with—shared or expanded from the thumbnail view—has also gone up, from 300 million to 550 million in the past six months.

“We’re expecting to hit new milestones for user growth with these new partnerships bringing us to international users,” he said.

About 60 percent of Cooliris’ 3 million iOS users are in the US, with Asia its next largest market, at 30 percent. The company is looking to push further into Asia rapidly by working with established names there, he said.

This is not its first partnership with Yandex, either. In February this year, it struck up a deal with Yandex Fotki, Yandex’s photo hosting service. Yandex currently accounts for about 65 percent of Russia’s search market, and its Disk product rivals Dropbox, with about half of the several million files uploaded daily to Disk photos and graphics, according to Yandex.

Currently, Cooliris’ app already pulls content from Facebook, Evernote, Tumblr, Flickr, Google+ and Google Drive, Twitter and Microsoft’s SkyDrive. That combined pool gives it to date about a billion photos accessible within its app, more than double the 350 million it said were captured in the six months to February 2013.

For content providers, the benefit of feeding images to Cooliris is the potential of gaining an additional audience in the 3 million Cooliris users. And users are encouraged to share their photo streams with other users, or publish them on social networks, which could further increase visibility for the content.

Cooliris vice president of business development, Sebastian Blum, said Tencent hopes to bring Weibo’s content to international markets, and that the deal with Cooliris was part of that plan.

Although the company has pointed at an April release date for an Android version, its app currently remains iOS-only. It will release a Web version in future as well, said the spokesperson.

That’s a little strange, given that the company started from the Web before going mobile. But since July 2012, it has moved its focus almost entirely to its mobile product, and it looks like that’s where it’s going to park its resources for the foreseeable future.

Wedding Snap, a 500 Startups-backed online and mobile photo sharing startup is today expanding beyond its original focus — weddings, obviously — in order to target a wider user base who want to privately share photos and videos for other occasions like parties, conferences, events, reunions, trips and more. Though Wedding Snap is still live, it will now slowly be transitioned under the new branding: Eversnap.

CEO Sasha Eslami says that the company’s weddings product actually did fairly well for an early-stage startup. It grossed over $400,000 in its first year of operation through the additional services it sold to brides and grooms, including photo prints, large packs of instruction cards that instructed wedding guests how to use the app to share their photos with the couple, plus a live slideshow product that let the guests watch a moderated stream of photos in real time during the reception.

These services ranged from around $50 up to $200 for a photo-retouching option, which was also available, Eslami tells us.

“We noticed during the past year, over thousands of weddings, that we needed a bigger product,” he says. A lot of the customers and guests wanted to continue to use the product after the wedding for different purposes, he says, but it wasn’t really designed for that.

Eslami is aware that by branching out into group photo sharing, the company is entering a saturated market.

“Group photo sharing is not a novel idea,” he admits. “Many companies have tried to take a stab at it for awhile, but there isn’t really a good product out there that solves everyone’s needs.”

He notes that many of these competing apps have launched only on one platform — like iOS — ignoring the users who would want to participate using their Android phones, or, if lacking a smartphone, then via the web. Also, many apps only focus on photo sharing, while Eversnap will support sharing videos, as well. And finally, the service is designed with the needs of mainstream users in mind and not the Silicon Valley, tech-savvy ones, he says.

Having spent his time around this demographic himself — Eslami studied at Georgia Tech and later won a Startup Weekend in Atlanta with Wedding Snap — he thinks he understands the needs of “regular” users.

“What we’ve been focused on since day one is to make our product for middle America,” he says. “We knew that we had to make it very simple. When you open the application, it’s very clear what you need to do, and what you can’t do. That’s what really enabled us to take off.”

Before today’s official debut of Eversnap, the company ran pilot programs where the service was used at a variety of conventions and events, including one run by Microsoft and a street festival in Australia.

To use the service, which is free up to 15 participants, users create an album and set it as either secret (invite-only) or not. Guests and other event goers can then be invited to share via an app download link sent out via email or SMS.

The plan is to bring a similar paid tier like Wedding Snap had over to Eversnap, though the website doesn’t currently explain this. Photo prints are also available from the web, and in the future, the plan is to ramp up the service to help users better explore their own photo archives through hosting services and other organization tools.

“Overall, we’re moving towards the free model because what we’re doing has a lot of virality in it. We think we can take advantage of the social networking aspect of it,” Eslami says. Currently, users can like and comment on photos, but tagging will be supported soon. “For these people, it’s a small social network for that experience.”

The Eversnap app is live in the Apple iTunes Store and Google Play, as well as on the web here.

TechCrunch’s annual party at August Capital is a few weeks away and we just released another round of tickets. The first two batches went within 24 hours so jump on these quick. Space is limited.

We’ve hosted the TechCrunch summer party with VC firm August Capital since 2006. This year, as in years past, we’ll be partying on August Capital’s beautiful, sunny Sand Hill balcony on Friday, July 26. The party starts at 5:30 p.m. and goes til 9:00 p.m.

TechCrunch parties are a thing of legend. Case in point, back when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington used to hold these ragers in his Atherton back yard; Box founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith met one of their first investors, DFJ. In 2010, we spotted 500 Startups’ Dave McClure writing a check to then stealthy startup Tello (which was recently bought by Urban Airship in December) at the August Capital party.

If you’re not able to make it to Sand Hill Road, TechCrunch is bringing much of the magic to our regional Meetups + Pitch-Offs. We’re visiting Seattle on July 18th and San Diego on August 22nd. We’re accepting applications for the Seattle pitch-off now.

About the 8th Annual Summer Party at August Capital

• July 26, 5:30 – 9:00 pm
• 2480 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park CA 94025
• Get Tickets here, $80 based on availability. Tickets will be released in batches. Stay tuned to TechCrunch for releases as they sell out quickly.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here [email protected].

I was speaking with a friend in the CE industry a few months ago about Nook and he mentioned an interesting bit of apocrypha. Back when the e-reader race was still an actual competition, Wal-Mart was exploring entering the space with a device of their own. Everyone they talked to in the industry recommended they just buy Nook. However, at the time, the company wasn’t for sale.

Now it probably should be.

As CEOs crumble and demand flattens for Nook hardware products, it’s clear that something needs to change. Three years ago I wrote that the Kindle won. In the intervening years I have rooted hard for Nook and I have had excellent experiences with all of their products. The Nook Simple Touch is one of my favorite readers and I have seen no material difference in the Kindle and Nook bookstores. In short, Nook shouldn’t have to win… but now it has to lose.

As the company begins unwinding itself from the mess of competition, they should look for a partner that can put them in the remaining millions of homes that don’t have a tablet or e-reader. And that number is fast dwindling. Amazon got into millions of homes over the past few years and, one presumes (they don’t make numbers public), so did Nook. But e-readers, as standalone devices, are now niche and I’d wager even Amazon is having a hard time selling them. However, if Nook and, say, a retail partner like Wal-Mart, could get inexpensive readers in front of folks who may have missed the boat they could still stem the tide of bad news. However, Nook would no longer be a standalone brand, stalwart against the world. It would, in effect, turn the Nook brand into a badge for OEMs to license. It would, in the end, destroy the brand even as it saves it.

I don’t want Nook to go away. While I could tell early on that it would be a hard road for Barnes & Noble and that Amazon was already a few steps ahead, it’s hard to wish ill on a company that has helped turn reading from a paper-based pursuit into an online habit. The irony is that, before all this, the e-reader help gut the thing that birthed the Nook in the first place. I doubt many of us have set foot in a book store in the past few months (or years) and that was Nook’s doing. While I don’t want to get too sentimental, it seems that this war is over, as Arnold once said to his love, “the world, which seems/ To lie before us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new,/ Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;/ And we are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

“Today is about making life easier for all of you” said CEO Drew Houston to launch his company Dropbox’s conference. The company now has 175 million users, up from 100 million in November 2012. DBX also saw the launch of several new APIs for the 100,000 apps on the Dropbox platform

The platform, in fact, seemed to be the theme of Houston’s keynote. Unifying your data across all the apps and devices you use is the goal. Houston said “We have all these companies making all this amazing stuff, but they’re punching each other in the face.” He went on to explain that your phone and your apps are new little cracks for your stuff to fall into, where your stuff can get trapped. Dropbox wants to make it all instantly accessible from anywhere.

Houston said that while there wouldn’t be anyone skydiving into the conference hall in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center, he did tell us to reach under our seats to find a promo card for 100 gigabytes of Dropbox storage for life.

Announcements at the event included the Datastore API for letting apps save and protect user data added or changed while their device is offline. Meanwhile, the new Drop-Ins with native Chooser and Saver let apps easily pull in your files from your Dropbox into their apps. Houston says “Today is the first day of your life where you don’t have to worry about this stuff. You can focus on making a great app.”

Other announcements during the DBX keynote included a new version of Yahoo Mail for Android with a Dropbox integration was announced, and that Dropbox acquisition Mailbox is releasing a new iOS version with Dropbox integration too.

Still, most stunning might be Dropbox’s growth. It reportedly turned down some serious acquisition offers and the bet on itself seems to be paying off. Days storage is no longer an nerdy niche service. It’s becoming a necessity of modern life.

Houston’s watchwords for the day, the new mantra of the company he kept repeating, was “sync not save”. The idea is that Dropbox is going beyond just storing your files. It’s about creating a real-time two-way connection between your data and the cloud so you never lose, misplace, or can’t access your digital accoutrements.

Google teased the advent of rich Chrome notifications that would live in a discrete notification center outside of the browser back in May, but the company didn’t offer any inklings about when we non-beta users could start using them. Well, the wait is officially over… for some of us, anyway. According to a post on the official Google Chrome blog, notification support will go live for Windows Chrome users as soon as they install today’s update.

Alas, OSX devotees can’t join in the fun just yet, though Google was quick to assure them that the wait won’t be a terribly long one.

The notifications work pretty much the way you would expect. Once the update has been installed, a notification center icon will live in the bottom right corner of your taskbar, and you’ll start receiving card-like notifications from Google services like Gmail or Drive or other compatible Chrome apps and extensions — you’ll be able to configure exactly which services trigger notifications and which don’t. Granted, this may seem like a very minor thing to get worked up over, but these sort of notifications will play an important role in how people interact with the company’s passive data surfacing Google Now service.

Google hasn’t exactly been trying to hide the fact that Google Now is being prepared for a desktop debut — the ability to turn Now notifications on and off has been part of some beta Chromium builds for months now, though toggling that setting doesn’t do anything since the service isn’t active yet. Even so, that didn’t stop some lucky users (including CNET’s Stephen Shankland) from being asked via a Chrome notification if they wanted Google Now cards to appear among them.

And then there’s the notable visual connection — Chrome notifications appear as cards, an aesthetic touch that began with Google Now and has since spread to permeate the Google Play Store in a recent design overhaul. Google hasn’t officially weighed in on a potential timeline for breaking Now out of its strictly mobile confines, but as these notifications become more widespread, they become a better vector for the sorts of information Google Now is meant to highlight. If you’re digging into the finer points of cheese making in a desktop version of Chrome, you wouldn’t want Now to forcibly intrude on that experience by taking over your screen and showing you nearby artisanal cheese stores. Desktop notifications are a much subtler way of making Now work — now all we have to do is wait for Google to push it out the door.

As we shift more of our computing to mobile devices and applications, there’s also a need for a new crop of tools that help developers better build, design and test their creations, which are also specifically tailored to mobile. Newly launched, Y Combinator-backed startup Apptimize is one such service, offering a mobile A/B testing suite for both iOS and Android.

The company was founded by Nancy Hua, an expert algorithmic trader in the finance industry, and Jeremy Orlow, an ex-Googler and previous 3LM mobile security engineer, who has first-hand startup experience building apps like DrawChat. While Hua was inspired to build a startup in order to do something riskier with her life, both founders can speak to the gap in the market when it comes to current mobile A/B testing products.

“It’s not a new idea, as an idea,” admits Hua. “But it’s not been done very well for mobile, and it seems inevitable that someone would do it,” she says. “Right now, there’s just no incumbent. None of our users that we’ve talked to have ever heard of any of our competitors.”

Today, a lot of the companies offering A/B testing products are big, post-IPO businesses whose focus is on A/B testing on the web, not mobile. Meanwhile, startups like Pathmapp and Leanplum are still working to gain traction of their own, but typically target mobile game developers. There are also services provided by the likes of Amazon and Google, as well as smaller services like Twitter acquisition Clutch.io, but again, no real market leader.

Often, says Hua, companies in need of an A/B testing product simply use something that’s been built in-house, but those services aren’t usually very good.

With Apptimize, developers can instead place a small code snippet into their app then use the programmatic interface to make variations to the experiments they want to run, including which users will receive them and when. For example, developers may want to see if they increase conversions by offering a tutorial or making other changes to the first-run experience. They may want to adjust the pricing of in-app purchases or optimize the checkout funnel in some way, and much more.

Being able to test these sorts of things without having to roll them out to a large user base only to see them fail, is also of interest to larger app publishers, the co-founders explain.

“Any developer has a lot of ideas about what might make their app better or more interesting to users,” says Orlow. “But a lot of times — especially if you’re an app with millions of users who’s established and has some revenue coming from it — you get a little bit scared to make big changes that could rock the boat.”

For these more conservative clients, there’s a need for a mobile A/B testing product that not only gets the job done, but doesn’t affect the app’s performance or cause crashes.

“We’ve spent a lot of time on the reliability side of things which is important to a lot the enterprise customers,” adds Orlow. “Besides the performance aspects, which the games care about the most, a lot of the other features we’ve emphasized are targeted toward the enterprise customer.”

Apptimize lets developers load up multiple experiments that can be shipped out in one app update, and those can then be run and disabled at will without having to push out new versions to the associated mobile app stores. This feature helps those developers whose update cycles are generally longer. Enterprise customers also receive email and phone support, multiple user accounts, and, like all paid tiers, have access to the real-time results of the ongoing experiments.

The company has been testing Apptimize with dozens of developers for a couple of months, including two big-name publishers it can’t disclose, one of which is a game publisher. Today, it’s launching out of private beta and available to all who want to try it out themselves.

Though there is no “freemium” tier, interested developers can sign up for free and download the SDK before making the commitment to pay.

Apptimize is currently backed by YC and the YC VC fund, but has not yet raised a seed round.

Y Combinator-backed SpoonRocket was built to fundamentally change the way we think about food. More than just another food-delivery service, the company seeks to provide ultra-cheap gourmet meals that can be delivered within minutes of ordering them. By doing so, it’s providing an alternative to fast food and even cooking at home.

Today that vision is being realized in the East Bay, where SpoonRocket has been making deliveries from Berkeley to Emeryville. The startup has two food options available each day — one for vegetarians and one for meat eaters — but both of which cost just $6 each.

At that price point, it’s almost more affordable to order a meal from SpoonRocket than it is to cook on one’s own, and it’s certainly more affordable than ordering out from most other restaurants. It even beats the price of fast food restaurants — and they don’t deliver.

So what’s the secret to SpoonRocket’s ability to make these dishes available so fast and so cheap? One piece is its ability to make healthy meals in bulk and limit the selection to just two different meals per day. That drastically reduces the complexity around orders and deliveries.

To create those meals, they hired executive chef David B. Cramer who joined the team after heading up restaurants in Napa and Yountville. With Cramer as its chef, the startup works to make its meals from fresh, healthy ingredients that are an alternative to the overly processed foods at fast food restaurants.

As for the key to making deliveries fast — SpoonRocket co-founder Anson Tsui says that its average delivery time is about 10 minutes currently. Part of that speed comes from delivering within a limited area now in Berkeley and Emeryville, and from asking its customers to pick up their food with curbside delivery.

But part of it also comes from outfitting its delivery vehicles with heating units, ensuring that food is fresh and ready when it’s dropped off. Putting those units in the cars themselves makes it so that the cars don’t have to make round trips between a restaurant and customer every time someone places an order — all of which massively decreases delivery time and the volume that SpoonRocket can push.

It also makes it easier for the startup to scale into new markets. Tsui imagines a world in which meals can be shipped refrigerated and made available by any driver who has a heating unit installed in his car. With that in mind, SpoonRocket plans to expand soon to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and it could quickly find itself in other markets, as well.

Upstart speaker company Wren has made an excellent-sounding wooden speaker that runs on your wireless network and can be controlled by Android devices.

If you’re going to slap a case on something as slim and refined as your iPhone 5, at least make sure you’re getting a good tradeoff for what you’re losing in portability and visual elegance.

With the upmost respect for victims and survivors, may I question why we feel so compelled to personally spread bad news? Why with each bombing or disaster we all race to tell everyone we know what happened? We’ve realized the power of social media for distributing real-time news. It lets us express empathy, but can also spread fear and misinformation. It’s time to ask if and when we’re helping.

Spreading accurate information to those that need it is important. But how many of the retweets of a smoking fuselage or broken city street actually accomplish that?

If you’re on the scene, say what you saw. Tell friends that you’re safe and assist fact-checking news organizations to piece the real story together.

If there is still danger, those who are in danger must be informed. If a factory fire is pumping noxious fumes into the surrounding community, if a hurricane suddenly changes directions, if an armed suspect is on the loose. For those who have lots of followers in harms way, tweeting could get them out of it.

And everyone is entitled to their opinion to what they think is news and important to share.

But we need mindfulness.

Our brains are not wired for the modern age and the incredibly powerful tools we’ve built to transmit information. A few thousand years ago, literal word of mouth was all we had. If you heard something bad was happening, it probably directly affected you. “There’s a sabretooth tiger coming! Run!” “Don’t drink the water, it’s poisoned.”

We likely developed instincts to trumpet this information as far, wide, and fast as we could because it benefited our tribe. But without tools, that message rarely projected farther than it needed to go.

Now things are very different. The threats we face haven’t scaled as quickly as our technology. Danger to a few dozen, hundred, or thousand people instantly reaches millions. The barrier to passing along news has dropped to a single click. We may be so inclined to retweet tragedy because it’s our nature to care, feel sympathy, and wish we could help. But amplifying sad news too far too fast itself poses a risk.

Most objectively, being too quick to retweet can spread inaccurate information. Just today with with the Asiana plane crash at San Francisco airport, an eyewitness said she thought the plane rolled, which would likely have made injuries much more severe. No one can confirm that it rolled, though, and the wings remain attached yet that info had already been retweeted hundreds or thousands of times. In Newtown, a digital lynch mob gathered around Ryan Lanza when he was mistakenly accused of being the school shooter when the culprit was his brother. And in Boston, false information ran rampant, from erroneous stories of people killed to a fake campaign tricking people into thinking a dollar would go to victims for each of their retweets.

Then there are the negative effects of fear. Commercial plane travel is actually incredibly safe. Deaths are rare, and it’s almost infinitely safer than cars, where there are 1.27 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in the US. But each of today’s plane crash photo retweets sends a different message — that flying is dangerous. Not only could implied misinformation hurt the economy, but it could put more people on the road where they’re more likely to get hurt.

For terrorists, one of the main goals is to get attention, and social media provides that. Endlessly retweeting the destruction and heartbreak they cause may actually make their attacks more effective.

And on a more abstract level, we risk distracting each other from the present. From each other’s lives, contributions, and even ability to aid those impacted by the tragedies we talk about.

When we can use social media for good, we should. Campaign for donations to reputable relief funds and pass along information about volunteering. Make people aware of real danger when necessary. If using a one-to-many medium will spread that info too far, use private messaging. There’s no need to shove fear in everyone’s faces.

Right now, we are rubbernecking on a global level. Good news goes unheard as we fall into an eager chorus of shock and sorrow. Each of us has a choice of whether to simply parrot the problems our world inevitably faces, or use our voice to try to solve them. Let’s think before we tweet.

[Image Credit]

I just crash landed at SFO. Tail ripped off. Most everyone seems fine. I’m ok. Surreal… (at @flySFO) [pic] — https://t.co/E6Ur1XEfa4

— David Eun (@Eunner) July 6, 2013

An Asiana Airlines flight that follows a popular route in the tech industry between Shanghai, Seoul and San Francisco crash landed at San Francisco International Airport this morning, killing two people.

A Samsung executive who was aboard the flight, David Eun, reported that most passengers seemed unharmed in a photo he posted on Path. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was also almost on the flight, but switched to a United flight in order to use frequent flyer miles for her family. The flight originated in Shanghai, China and landed in Seoul before arriving at San Francisco at approximately 11:30 a.m. today.

We do not know if anyone else from our community was on board that plane, but Seoul-to-San Francisco is a pretty highly-trafficked route for tech workers who work for or do business with Samsung or any number of the larger gaming companies there.

Update: In a press conference held just now,  San Francisco mayor Ed Lee said that responders had not accounted for all of the passengers aboard. About 60 people are not accounted for. The city confirmed two fatalities with 48 initial transports from the scene. They said it was not necessary for another 108 passengers to require hospitalization.

Eun, who runs Samsung’s Open Innovation Center, said he and most of the other passengers just cleared customs. He said in a post on Path about 30 minutes ago: “Just went through customs. Adrenaline rush is subsiding. Just trying to process all this. Really glad that most everyone I saw seemed ok, with just a few minor injuries. Thinking a lot about family and friends right now…”

Sandberg said she nearly took the flight, which was run by Asiana Airlines and took off from Seoul at 5:04 p.m. local time, with her family. But she changed airlines in order to use United frequent flyer miles for her family. She had been in South Korea, promoting her best-selling book “Lean In.”

She posted earlier today:

“Taking a minute to be thankful and explain what happened. My family, colleagues Debbie Frost, Charlton Gholson and Kelly Hoffman and I were originally going to take the Asiana flight that just crash-landed. We switched to United so we could use miles for my family’s tickets. Our flight was scheduled to come in at the same time, but we were early and landed about 20 minutes before the crash. Our friend David Eun was on the Asiana flight and he is fine.

Thank you to everyone who is reaching out – and sorry if we worried anyone.

Serious moment to give thanks.”

It’s not clear why or how the plane crash-landed, but the tail apparently ripped off after the plane touched down. One witness told the Associated Press that the plane “cart-wheeled” down the runway.

The San Francisco Fire Department confirmed to CBS News earlier today that there were 61 injured in today’s tragic plane crash. The San Francisco Chronicle is also reporting that there are 40 injured with ten in critical condition, according to the San Francisco General Hospital. A spokesperson for the hospital said in a press conference later today that they had received an additional 17 patients. ABC News said that there were 141 Chinese, 77 South Koreans and 61 U.S. citizens on board.

SFO had suspended all flights earlier today for a few hours, with some apparently being diverted to Oakland and Las Vegas. They just re-opened two runways.

There’s been an interesting phenomenon occurring lately, thanks to the increasing ability of companies to reach and serve ultra-niche audiences — the rise of the app for the 1 percent. Now more than ever, you can download apps that you can’t actually afford to use.

The democratization of the app store, of course, has meant services that used to only be available for the ultra-rich are now within reach of ordinary users. Think Uber, for example. Once upon a time, it would have been unheard of for most people to call a black car, and yet Uber makes such a service a somewhat affordable, if still luxury, option. A once-in-a-while thing.

But then there’s that whole other side of the spectrum, in which a whole new breed of apps and startups have emerged over the last few years that aren’t for the 99 percentile of users at all. These are apps developed specifically to appeal to a select group of individuals who want the finer things in life.

It used to be that mobile apps for the extremely wealthy were largely a joke. The famed “I Am Rich” app, launched first on iOS and later cloned for Android and Windows Phone 7, was one example of a mobile application targeted solely at those who could afford to waste money on it. Now they’re becoming commonplace, and that’s offering regular users a view into just what they can’t have.

With that in mind, here’s a list of the best apps and services you probably can’t afford to use. Happy window shopping!

BlackJet
It doesn’t get much more 1 percent than an on-demand private jet service. And, well, that’s what BlackJet is. Ostensibly, the company hopes to bring the cost of private air travel down by making it more efficient. That might be true, but with a $2,500 membership fee and one-way flights that run thousands of dollars a piece, BlackJet is still priced out of range for most of us used to flying coach. But if you’re used to flying private jets, it’s supposed to be, like, a really good deal.

Inspirato
Even before American Express took a stake in luxury destination travel site Inspirato, it was positioned to be out of reach for the hoi polloi. Even just the name — Inspirato — sounds like it was translated from some foreign language to mean “you can’t afford this.” Anyway, this is a company that specializes in offers on exclusive vacation homes and resorts. But what do you care? You’re never going to use it.

Onefinestay
Onefinestay is a site for people who are so rich that they’re like, “Fuck it, I don’t want to stay in a hotel. I want to stay in another rich person’s house.” It’s like some bizarro Airbnb, where you actually pay more to sleep in someone else’s bed and raid their fridge. That said, you know the sheets are clean — they bring in their own linens — and you get a free iPhone during your stay. How baller is that?

Boatbound
You know what’s more personal than a car? A boat. Seriously, if I ever had a boat (and here’s betting that’ll never happen, because boats are expensive), the last thing I’d do is let some stranger off the Internet borrow the damn thing. And yet, there are people in the world who would do just that. I don’t understand how they can live with themselves.

Sotheby’s Catalogue
Yes, an app for perusing all the fine art stuffs that you can buy at auction. Sotheby’s Catalogue makes me wonder why I’ve even bothered to continue writing this list.

Tiffany & Co. Engagement Ring Finder
Fuck you, Tiffany & Co.! (See also: Diamonds Are Bullshit)

VIP Black
At first glance, iVIP’s VIP Black just looks like the next version of the “I Am Rich” app. You pay $1,000 and then what? Discounts, I guess. Only for those who have $1,000 just lying around to find out.

Operator
Would any list like this be complete without Dave Morin’s “custom-designed, one-of-a-kind bespoke app” to communicate and collaborate with his assistant?

It appears that flash sales site Ideeli has raised another $12 million in funding, according to an SEC filing from Friday. It’s unclear who the investors are in this round, but this raise would bring Ideeli’s total funding to $112 million. Past investors include Credit Suisse, Next World Capital, Cue Ball Capital, StarVest Partners, Constellation Growth Capital and Kodiak Venture Partners.

Ideeli, which launched in 2007, is part of the original crop of flash sales sites, which include Gilt Groupe, Rue La La, HauteLook (acquired by Norsdtrom) and others. At last count, the site had over 5 million members. For background, Ideeli offers 50 to 70 percent discounts on clothing and accessories over a several-day period. Products include clothing for men, women and children, as well as jewelry, handbags and home accessories.

Last year, Ideeli announced $30 million in new funding to expand beyond the flash-sales model. In 2011, Ideeli says it brought in $77.7 million in revenue.

It’s unclear if the site and its sales are continuing to grow at a fast clip. The flash sales model has faltered–Fab has moved on from flash sales, and even Gilt is exploring its options beyond the model.

We’ve contacted the company and will update when we hear back.

College Humor is putting out a feature film July 9 (via Verge), and it stars a bunch of people you might recognize, including Glenn Howerton (Dennis from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia), Adrianne Palciki (from Friday Night Lights), Ben Schwartz (Parks and Recreation), Steve Little (Eastbound and Down) and Josh Groban (yeah, the pop opera singer). It’s called Coffee Town, and it’s about a coffee shop aspiring to become a fancy bistro.

The film is something of an experiment, from its direct-to-digital release to its marketing campaign, which will be managed strictly through College Humor’s social media channels. The idea is to prove what it can accomplish by targeting its core demographic, the younger, digital native audiences that Hollywood would like to court so badly.

College Humor is famous for its skits and short videos, not for longer films. And while the movie will be screened in select theatres before an official premiere at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal at the end of this month, it’s the experiment in leveraging social media and College Humor’s existing mass fan base that’s exciting here.

Others have shown that eschewing traditional distribution models can result in big success, in comedy especially. Comedian Louis C.K. distributed his comedy special via his website by direct download for $5 per copy, with no DRM or strings attached. The special netted him over $1 million in gross profits, and an Emmy, so it’s safe to say that experiment panned out.

Coffee Town isn’t revolutionary in terms of its premise, as it sounds like a standard “guys get up to hijinks” affair, with the affable Groban starring as the buffoonish villain of the piece. It’s probably not going to win any academy awards. But it could be a proving ground for feature movies made outside the Hollywood system – and that’s reason enough to watch.