Category: Tech news

In the aftermath of the dot-com crash, a new era for the web began to take hold – a turning point whose seismic shift was hyped under the moniker “Web 2.0.” The concept referred to the web becoming a platform, a home for services whose popularity grew through network effects, user-generated content and collaboration. Blogging, social media sites, wikis, mashups, and more reflected a changing consciousness among the Internet’s denizens – one which Tim O’Reilly, whose Web 2.0 conferences helped solidify the term as a part of our everyday lexicon, once described as a “collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain.”

Since that time, because of humans’ intrinsic need to apply a structure to amorphous things to give them a semblance of order – things like the web, for example – there have been many attempts to define what “Web 3.0″ might be. At one point, the assumption was that Web 3.0 woud be the “semantic web.” A place where machine-readable metadata is applied, allowing the web and the services that live upon it to understand the content and the links between the people, places, and things that fill its servers.

To some extent, the semantic web did arrive in things like Google’s Knowledge Graph, an upgrade to Google Search whose underpinnings include a database filled with millions of objects and billions of connections between them. But semantic technology never became so widespread so as to define a new era of the web itself.

Meanwhile, others claimed Web 3.0 would be the shift to mobile devices, the rise of the “Internet of Things,” or would emerge from web services growing more personalized to their users – Google’s predictive search service “Google Now” could be seen as one example of this, perhaps.

But none of these got to win the Web 3.0 branding, either.

So what will come next?

Will another notable turning point for the web as we know it ever evolve?

Yes, of course, and it’s happening now.

It’s harder to spot because this time around because it’s not growing out of the ashes of a largely desiccated web as with Web 2.0, which blossomed following the dot-com era’s end. Instead, the new web is growing up alongside the web of today. It could, one day, take over, but that remains to be seen.

And we don’t have to call it Web 3.0. That’s a bit simplistic. But it does deserve recognition.

A Rebellion

In retrospect, what Web 2.0 meant to the vast lot of the web’s users was a large number of lightweight services – software perpetually in beta that ran online not out of a box. It harnessed the wisdom of the crowds and the willing contributions of user data, which, in the end, became the services’ value.

Facebook’s social graph and profile data, for instance, is now the product it sells to advertisers who target anonymized demographic groups based on things like age, education, location, and more. Wikipedia grew from the efforts of thousands who aggregated their time and knowledge to building an online encyclopedia. Even the “blogosphere” is a Web 2.0 product, one where a network of writers and publishers linked and commented, reblogged and shared.

But the web is not a static thing. It grows and shifts to reflect the society it serves.

For those who saw the web emerge in their lifetimes, the ability to publish and connect with a vast audience around the world is a marvel. To rediscover long-lost friends on social networks, or chat with someone on the other side of the globe, or share photos with your friends and family so easily, still amazes.

But today, a new group of web users is coming of age. They aren’t in awe of the connectivity and openness the web provides, that’s just the way it’s always been. And sometimes, they even kind of resent it. Barely able to remember a time when the web didn’t exist, this group has been forced to grow up online, living in public like the artists in the human terrarium under New York City once did in an art project-slash-eerie premonition of a future yet to come.

“In the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire,” said Ondi Timoner, who documented this and other controversial human experiments in his 2009 film “We Live in Public.”

He also warned us of the dangers of living our lives exposed, with what now sounds like common sense:  ”the Internet, as wonderful as it is, is not an intimate medium. It’s just not,” he said. “If you want to keep something intimate and if you want to keep something sacred, you probably shouldn’t post it.”

But we did it anyway. We posted it. We liked it. We shared it. We hashtagged it.

And when we ran out of things to document about ourselves, we turned towards our children.

Now of age, those young digital natives whose lives we cataloged without their consent are rebelling. They’re discarding the values of the previous generation – those of their parents, the authoritarians – and defining new ones.

They don’t want open social networks, they want intimacy. They don’t believe every action has to be meaningful and permanent. The imagine the web as deletable.

The Rise Of The Ephemeralnet

The incredible growth of Snapchat, the “ephemeral” messaging service where pictures and videos are taken, shared, then discarded – allowed to become memories – is often pointed to as the key trend defining this new era, but that’s just wrong. It’s only one example.

Among its active users, Snapchat is engaging and addictive, and representative of an increased desire for privacy. However, it’s not the only service out there defining a different kind of experience. The global messaging market as a whole has given way to a fragmented collection containing dozens of similar services each with millions of users of their own. While these may not have the parlor trick of “disappearing” messages, they also represent a rebellion against the “one network to rule them all” concept.

These messaging apps are often used with a close set of friends or family members, where data shared remains fairly isolated and private, as opposed to publicized and findable on the larger web. It’s not about anonymity. It’s about a different type of community. One not cluttered by bosses or parents. One less searchable.

Even Twitter is returning to its SMS roots among these younger users, who revel in its semi-private nature. Twitter users can adopt pseudonyms, and you can’t surface tweets older than a week through Twitter search, which makes it feel like less of a permanent record, and a freedom to be “real” without consequence.

Meanwhile, on the youth-dominated social service Tumblr, users also don’t have to sign up with their “real” identities. This allows them to explore and experiment with new identities and sub-cultures, the way young adults naturally do in the offline world.

And on a growing mobile social network for sharing secrets, Whisper, which this month saw over 2.1 billion pageviews, users can express their innermost feelings – even those they’re ashamed or scared of – and become connected with a community for support, or, in the case of darker impulses, with actual help. And all this before they identify themselves by name.

While some confuse the “Ephemeralnet” with the so-called “SnapchatNet,” in reality, it’s not only a new way to socialize online, it’s a new way to think about everything. You can see the trend also in the rise of the (somewhat) anonymous and untraceable digital currency Bitcoin. Unlike traditional transactions, Bitcoin is decentralized and doesn’t require banks or governmental oversight or involvement. And though it’s not entirely anonymous, there are already efforts, like Zerocoin, working to change that.

There are also efforts at making other forms of communication more ephemeral, too. Phone calls become more private through apps like Burner, SMS secure through apps like Gryphn or Seecrypt, and internal business communications unarchivable through apps like O.T.R.

As we head into the post-PRISM era, there’s even a chance that this trend towards privacy will become further entrenched. Take for instance, a little-known service like anonymous search engine DuckDuckGo saw traffic spike by 50 percent in just over a week after the PRISM reveal. If it can now find traction for its online service and accompanying mobile apps based not just on PRISM fears, but on connecting with this larger trend of impermanence, then it could even have a shot at siphoning away a big enough handful of users to sustain its business.

But at the end of the day, the Ephemeralnet may never get to become as defining a trend as Web 2.0 once was. Though it may find adoption beyond the demographics of its youngest participants, it will continue to share the web with the services that preceded it – services too big, too habitual, and too lucrative, to die off entirely.

But in the meantime, a new social norm could still be established. One where those who play for the cameras are outed and ostracized; where we value human connections enabled by technology over meaningless “social” scores; and where we care more about our relationships, and less about the number of likes and shares we have.

@aweissman you only use hashtags if you want to be found. I think there’s a certain stigma around people who try too hard on the Internet.

— ninakix (@ninakix) June 17, 2013

Image credits: giphy; lead – unknown via Weheartit

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

There is an interesting shift occurring in consumer websites and apps where users perform microwork that reshapes experiences. Classic examples of this are how Pinterest users are grabbing images from the web, personally reorganizing them, and, in the process, building a new image search engine, much like Google Images. And some would argue even better and more relevant. Or consider Instapaper and Pocket users who grab content to read later, stripped free of bloated ads and other unnecessary information. There are more and more services fitting into this trend, which I’ve called a “web of extraction,” and one emergent property that’s doing this in a novel way is one you may not have heard of: PandaWhale.

Go to PandaWhale and you won’t be visually impressed. The site isn’t winning design Webby’s any time soon. Users who come to PandaWhale create “stashes” of images and/or links to share publicly with others, and each stash represents an entirely open web page entirely crawlable by search engines. On each page, like a Quora thread, Tumblr post, etc., users can log in via various sites to PandaWhale and do their own patched-together version of a RapGenius annotation or commentary on the stashed item. The product tends to appeal to web users who want to save and organize links, as well as allow others to comment and co-create with them.

Based on that description, PandaWhale doesn’t sound too different from many other sites that do these sorts of things, but lurking under the hood is a wily strategy that is being rewarded by one of the biggest dogs on the street: Google.

The name PandaWhale partly derives from the theory that there are whales and pandas on the web, where a few whales who have big ideas and big audiences create and organize content, and where many pandas sit peacefully and consume that content, much like a panda would graze on bamboo. In startup-speak, the pandas are the unique visitors who somehow end up on a site like PandaWhale, and the whales are the rabid collectors who stash content and interact with others through a variety of online personas, some real and some through pseudonyms. While it’s important to have many whales stashing, it’s really about the quality of each new page, as well as how much each whale creates.

The juice behind PandaWhale’s recent growth is that this small group of whales subtly conducts important work for Google by bringing content (including images) from regions of the web where Google’s crawlers cannot easily explore. These whales stash images from Bing or GIFs from Tumblr and other types of media appended with social data that Google can’t quite rank, and then, as each stash is an open web page, it becomes visible to the search giant. In the same way Pinterest toiled for years before their growth spurt of 2011, PandaWhale could be on a similar path. Who knows?

There are many places to share and communicate around images and links, such as Reddit, and many of those sites have dense networks around them. Perhaps that’s why PandaWhale isn’t over-designed visually, but carefully designed and architected in such a way such that it’s searchable, organized by topic, and encourages new images and links in every stash. So far, Google’s algorithms like it.

Finally, while the architecture and user behavior may be the juice, PandaWhale’s secret weapon is that it was built as the digital reflection of a real, offline community of startup geeks and technology veterans who meet in-person and help each other out without, in my opinion, want of fame or fortune. That’s how I found out about the site when it popped up, why it may sustain the ephemerality of today’s launches and mindless growth-hacking tactics, and why I’ve been using it to essentially find random facts and opinions on technology and get the pulse of what the whales think. For what I do, I can’t look around the same places everyone else does for information — this is one of my secret places to test theories and form ideas from others. I don’t know what will happen to PandaWhale in the sense that it doesn’t look like a business (yet), and it doesn’t do any marketing or PR. Nor does it have crazy, insane-in-the-membrane email settings (I love the daily digest email), and the site is all fugly, to be honest, but perhaps that’s its charm.

Well, let’s see what happens. People all over Twitter and in the tech world often bemoan finding new, great, uncontaminated sources of information. VC firms are now directly hiring journalists and investing in content. Years ago, Marc Andreessen penned a great answer on Quora about what he would like to see in tech journalism, with a focus on discovering people and companies that “don’t have heat on them.” Traditional tech media for early-stage startups is saturated, but that’s not to say they’re covering everything and moving in a good direction. We’re in the middle of a media shift — a shift where powerful entities are taking on more editorial control, but also where individuals in networks are creating new types of information and surfacing things even the best editorial couldn’t. PandaWhale may be part of that shift. Or, at least, it certainly has been for me.

The NSA/Prism controversy rumbles on. Today the European Parliament President Martin Schulz said there could be a severe impact on EU-US relations if the claims that the US had bugged EU offices in America and accessed computer networks turned out to be true. He’s said he’s ‘deeply worried’ about the issue and called for clarification from the US over the stories that have appeared.

Respected German magazine Der Spiegel made the claims today in the the latest in a series about alleged NSA spying. Spiegel claims a “top secret” US National Security Agency (NSA) document from September 2010 has been taken by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. It says its journalists have seen the document and claims that it goes into detail about how the NSA spied on EU offices and internal computer and phone networks in Washington and at the UN.

The magazine reports that over five years ago security officers at the EU noticed missed calls and traced them to NSA offices within the Nato compound in Brussels. It also reported that the NSA had looked at half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany in a typical month and had put Germany in the same class as China.

Earlier this month the European Commission (not the Parliament) raised the Prism matter with US authorities at a meeting Dublin.

Observe, ladies and gentlemen, the lyrics of true seduction.

Dejamor, a startup that creates subscription romance-filled boxes to help couples spice up sexy time, has now launched a new product called Sexy Tales — yes, Sexy Tales — which lets you leave a sexy play-by-play recording for your partner.

The service lets you call a specific number, enter the number of your partner, and walk them through all your dirty fantasies. It’s a lot like a “Choose your own adventure” book, but with lots more dicks and snatches. And audio.

Now, the folks at Dejamor have a solid product in the Dejamor subscription box, which packages instructions, ingredients, and all the detailed flourishes you’d need for a more fantastical evening with your partner.

At first, it may feel a bit canned, but the point is to break the ice — not to carry your fumbling, lazy, or downright selfish ass from seduction to completion.

Sexy Tales has the same intent behind it, and the team admits that it could be far more hilarious than it is sexy. Especially when you consider the sample scripts Dejamor has provided for those of us without enough of an imagination to create our own “wetness.”

A few nuggets of awesome from the male read script:

“This is the best. I’m circling kisses around your deliciously wet cave.”

“Oh, honey, I want to taste a mouthful of your gooey sweetness, and you are heating me up.”

“…mixing your juices with my precum into a miraculous lubricant.”

Unless you’re dating a slutty Emily Dickinson, I’d stay away from language like this, gentlemen.

Apparently ladies need to offer their men two levels of saucy, mildly spicy and very spicy. Unfortunately, even though women tend to be the brains behind most phone sex (so says Dejamor), the female read scripts aren’t much better than the male:

“Wow, is it just me that’s hot? I’m unbuttoning my blouse and guess what I have underneath? That’s right baby, a black lace, see-through bra. I can feel your eyes on me and it’s making my nipples so hard they’re poking right out.”

“Yummy! Not only are you a big, smooth steel rod, but your creamy wetness is helping me glide my hand up and down your rm shaft.”

“Ooh! You are so tasty. Like eating a popsicle only hot. (slurping noises)”

Don’t forget the slurping noises, ladies.

Luckily, Dejamor provides a build-your-own script template for anyone who wants to test the Sexy Tales waters and not sound like they’ve never, ever had sex before.

Look, we’ve all heard the rumors that Google is toiling away on a smartwatch, and the company has said the Nexus Q isn’t completely dead, so part of that recent report from the Wall Street Journal doesn’t completely out of the blue. That said, Google is reportedly also working on an Android-powered game console in response to murmurs of a similar Apple gaming push in the works.

Pretty ballsy, if you ask me.

We can’t know for sure how good Google’s intuition is when it comes to Apple’s gaming ambitions, but the folks in Cupertino are clearly looking at gaming with some level of interest — iOS 7 includes improved support for game controllers, and was at one point rumored to be working on its own controller hardware.

As the past few weeks have illustrated nicely though, there’s plenty of jostling among established gaming companies as they attempt to lay claim to our living rooms, and yet Google apparently wants to throw itself headlong into the fray. In light of this potential hardware push, Google Play game services doesn’t just look like a shot across Apple Game Center’s bow — it’s a way for developers to create Android games with that incorporate some of the features that console gamers have all but taken for granted at this point.

If this information pans out and Google does release an Android-powered console at some point in the near future, the company’s problem isn’t just the pressure it faces from entrenched players like Sony, Microsoft, and even Apple. The past year has seen plenty of upstart hardware companies attempting to shoehorn Android into tiny little packages with tiny price tags, and with varying levels of success.

One of those ambitious little doodads garnered more attention than the rest — it’s damned near impossible to think the words “Android game console” and not follow up with “Ouya.” Hell, Amir Efrati’s WSJ report points out that Google has been paying particularly close attention to the Kickstarted startup, which guided its namesake device to a retail launch earlier this week after spending the past few months shipping pre-release versions to backers and developers. The Ouya temporarily sold out on Amazon, and it’s still backordered on Best Buy’s website — not too shabby, considering its unabashedly geeky pedigree.

At this point it’s tough to say whether that’s a result of extreme demand for the $99 console or just limited supplies, but either way it seem as though a decent chunk of people have been waiting for this. That said, the company is awfully cagey on what it specifically hopes to get out of this retail push. During a recent chat CEO Julie Uhrmann wouldn’t disclose how many units would need to be sold at retail for her to consider the Ouya successful — she instead responded with platitudes about how she wanted Ouya to be available to everyone to wanted one.

Uhrmann also said that she didn’t want anyone on the team even thinking of Ouya 2.0 until this current model has established a foothold in the market. It’s a curious thing to hear from the head of company that will probably live and die based on the strength of its annual hardware refreshes. The incentive is there to keep iterating and iterating and iterating until the Ouya succeeds — is Google (or whatever hardware partners it may tap) prepared to do the same?

And all that said, early reactions of the Ouya have been a mixed bag. I’ve been fiddling with an Ouya myself for the past few days, and though a full review is forthcoming, my first impressions can essentially be summed up with a single syllable: meh. And the Ouya is just one example — now there are GameSticks and Gamepops and MOJOs, to say nothing of a whole host of Shenzhen specials. Sony and Microsoft have the top-end well accounted for, and the race to the bottom for Android gaming in the living room has already begun.

So, when it comes down to it, can Google really crack the game console market? It’s possible, sure. Google may just be able to use its resources and developer clout to carve out a niche in a stupendously crowded gaming environment. It’s also worth noting that video game history is littered with the carcasses of dead, ill-conceived consoles, consoles that had great controllers, great games, and even net connectivity ahead of their time. The lesson to be learned from those dusty heaps of plastic is that (sadly) innovation is no guarantee of success, so Google is going to have to be terribly, terribly clever if it wants to have any lasting impact in our living rooms.

Two veteran investors who have been integral in the development of a new generation of Israeli startups are on a mission to reverse a trend in a country that has traditionally favored later-stage and enterprise-skewed venture capital. Benchmark’s Michael Eisenberg and Genesis Partners’ Eden Shochat are teaming up to create Aleph — a new fund that aims to bring some much-needed local, early-stage support to Israeli startups. TechCrunch hears that the VC’s first fund is nearly closed and is in the region of $120 million.

Given that the venture capital (and startup) landscape in Israel is at a potentially significant juncture — the most recent exit being Waze to Google for $1.1 billion — the founders want to strike while the iron is hot. And they’re setting the bar high: They want Aleph to become the go-to early-stage venture capital firm in Israel, our sources tell us.

Israel has a long, prolific history when it comes to supporting innovation in science and technology. Today, the percentage of its population working in science and tech — and the amount it spends on R&D (relative to its GDP) — is reportedly the highest of any country in the world. One can begin to see why Israel has become home to the R&D centers of over 250 multinationals, including Google, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.

It also helps explain why Israeli tech has, traditionally, been known for its focus on hardcore technologies (like software and semiconductors, for example) and enterprise. Yet, in spite of the fact that local venture capital has favored deep-tech and later-stage investments, over the last few years, a new generation of consumer startups has begun to emerge. (And produce some big companies and exits — like addictive traffic app, Waze, which just sold to Google for $1.1 billion and website creation platform, Wix, which recently announced its intentions to go public.)

So far, Aleph has been very tight-lipped on the actual existence of the fund, and what its aims are going to be. Initial reports, which first surfaced in Israeli newspaper The Globes earlier this week, pegged the new fund at $100 million. Though the founders have declined to share details at this point, and Israeli publications have floated several different figures, the consensus from our sources indicates that the total will be around $120 million and that it is expected to close in the next few weeks.

But why should you care about some Israeli venture capital fund — or the size of the fund, for that matter? Great question, reader. I like you.

For starters, this is a sign of how startup tides are beginning to change in Israel. The success of companies like Waze and Wix could be a signal to the country’s entrepreneurs that there’s opportunity in not just “consumerizing,” but in making “tech-focused” consumer plays — like, say, in applying intelligent, “Big Data” technologies to consumer-facing services. For example, Waze, while it is known for it’s fun, animated, cartoony interface, considers itself a Big Data company and is obsessed with building infrastructure that can allow it to crunch enormous amounts of realtime traffic and navigational data points, which it can then use to personalize its maps and optimize the turn-by-turn navigational experience.

Plus, the fact that Aleph is raising a $120 million-plus early-stage fund shows that it’s serious and gives it enough capital to begin making a difference in a relatively small tech ecosystem. It’s not clear yet how much Aleph will invest in its chosen startups, but if we can assume it will be investing somewhere between $5 million and $8 million in each deal, that means it will be making anywhere between 15 to 25 investments. There’s room in that part of the market in Israel, and at those amounts, Aleph can provide enough early-stage capital to potentially change the fate of Israeli startups that have been struggling to find access.

In comparison, Pitango Venture Capital, which Haaretz calls Israel’s biggest VC firm, has reportedly raised $150 million of a $250 million fund, which will be its sixth. Furthermore, Magma Venture Partners, which was one of two Israeli firms to invest in Waze, recently raised $100 million. Qumra Capital is also in the process of raising $100 million for its first fund, according to Haaretz.

But all in all, we hear that local funds are, by and large, having difficulty raising in the current climate, while, in comparison, Aleph has will already be in the same league with some of the country’s biggest funds. And, while the founders declined to share details or confirm any of the above (or below), we’ve also heard that the founders initially set out to raise $100 million, but extended the target to $120 to $150 million after finding plenty of interest. With its model, in combination with the current landscape and maturing startup economy, the founders think the timing is right for a new, dominant venture firm to emerge in the Israeli market.

It’s way too early to say either way, but the other important factor at play here for Israeli startups is how much experience both Eisenberg and Shochat bring to the table as investors (and entrepreneurs). Eisenberg has been a general partner at Benchmark Capital in Israel for over eight years and has served on the Board of Directors for companies like Answer.com and Shopping.com and currently sits on the board of directors at Gigya, Seeking Alpha, Clarizen, Conduit (whose last raise valued the company at $1.4 billion) and Wix. Shochat, on the other hand, has been a General Partner at Genesis for almost three years, but also has significant experience as an operator.

In that capacity, he is probably best known as the co-founder and chairman of Face.com, a facial recognition technology company that sold to Facebook for upwards of $60 million. He is also the co-founder of Aternity, has led investments in successful startups like Any.do, JoyTunes and Commerce Sciences and helped manage and lead “TheJunction,” a program created by Genesis to support early-stage entrepreneurs by offering co-working space and acting as a startup accelerator and alumni organization, a la 500 Startups.

Shochat reportedly left Genesis in April, and Eisenberg will be leaving his role at Benchmark. With their prior experience, sources tell us that Aleph’s goal is to dominate early-stage IT, cloud, Big Data and mobile investments in Israel, leveraging what they perceive to be a maturation of next-gen local entrepreneurs looking to build big, global (and even consumer-facing) companies. For them, standing out from the crowd will be about focusing on Series A investments, rapid decision-making, local support and being decidedly entrepreneur-friendly,

Not only that, but our sources indicate that, in spite of the fact that Eisenberg is leaving Benchmark to start Aleph, Benchmark is one of the new firm’s first investors. Not to overstate it, but if these reports are in fact true, it’s a notable vote of confidence from Benchmark and shows what they think of his track record.

Regardless, the emergence of Aleph is an auspicious sign for the Israeli startup ecosystem, giving entrepreneurs another critical lifeline during the early stages, and another indication of how much Israeli tech stands to benefit from the global attention following a string of high-profile exits, chief of which is, of course, the newly minted “GoogleWaze”. (Or Wazoogle, if you prefer.)

We’ve reached out to the founders and will update with their comments if and when they respond.

Editor’s note: Ankur Jain is an investor at Nexus Venture Partners. Nexus invests in early stage companies across sectors in India and US, and manages $600 million in assets. Follow him on Twitter @Ankur_Jain_VC.

The rapid growth of mobile device use has created major gaps in CRM capability. As smartphone adoption has exploded, companies have scrambled to launch mobile apps, many of which are disconnected from an organization’s broader CRM capabilities.

Many organizations have little knowledge about the people using their mobile apps, how and why they are using them, how to effectively communicate with them, and how to support them — all of which are critical to providing a tailored mobile customer experience. Indeed, failing any one of these things can lead to users abandoning an app at a time when the competition among apps is increasingly fierce:

• The average phone in 2013 has 41 apps, up from 28 apps the year before (Nielsen, 2012).
• Average user retention rate for a mobile app is 54 percent after 30 days and 35 percent after 90 days (Flurry, 2012).

In order to drive a differentiated experience and service level for every mobile customer, mobile businesses should strive to segment their user bases on a variety of metrics and then leverage the data to drive user acquisition, retention, engagement, transactions and upsell, as well as cross-sell opportunities.

If a frustrated or confused user leaves an app, they’re far less likely to return.

Often overlooked but equally important is enabling users to communicate with businesses via the mobile app. Rather than a one-way channel, users should feel empowered to provide feedback or instantly and easily get help without needing to leave the app, send and email or make a phone call. Remember the user retention rate: If a frustrated or confused user leaves an app, they’re far less likely to return.

In addition, it is incredibly important for the business to measure the customer experience: Is the app delivering the right service levels to the right customers? What is the level of customer satisfaction and how does it compare to user retention, user engagement and app reviews?

The Mobile App CRM Players

Many businesses are leveraging CRM for their web and retail businesses, but have yet to apply their CRM strategy to mobile customers. Indeed, mobile-app CRM is a continuation of traditional CRM that sits inside the mobile app, enabling the same capabilities — but for mobile customers. Here are some of the startups that are helping businesses bridge the CRM gap on mobile.

• Flurry helps answer the first question that organizations have: “Who are my mobile app users and how are they using my app?” Though an ad network by business model, Flurry is used by mobile apps to provide CRM metrics, such as number of active users, user retention rates, and more. Flurry helps segment users into categories and measures ROI on user-acquisition spend compared with user-retention and engagement rates.
• Urban Airship provides a simple way for apps to communicate with their audience via push notifications and supports context-aware notifications. It’s among the most popular third-party notification platforms used by mobile apps today.
• Crittercism initially focused on providing mobile developers with a platform to identify and analyze crashes and bugs in their mobile apps similar to Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter) and BugSense. More New Relic than Salesforce, Crittercism now also offers broader application performance management with system logs and tracing.
• AppBoy offers analytics, segmentation and communication from one dashboard and has the ability to manage rich marketing profiles at an individual user level. It also allows messaging via multiple channels: push notifications, in-app messages, and email.
• Helpshift recently launched the world’s first native customer service and support solution for mobile applications. Helpshift enables businesses to provide a contextualized mobile customer experience by unlocking customer information and device diagnostics for in-app service, support, and marketing. Helpshift also integrates with enterprise CRM systems like Oracle and Salesforce for a seamless CRM solution across business units.

Forward-thinking businesses are realizing the need for integrated CRM capability across all revenue streams, the value of a multi-channel view of their users, and the ability to interact effectively with these users across their lifecycle. Any organization that has deployed CRM software would be wise to integrate it with its mobile app, just as it would integrate it with web and call centers.

And that raises the question: Why should mobile app CRM be different from traditional CRM? The answer is that it shouldn’t be. And traditional CRM vendors who have been slow to move have provided a unique opportunity for these fast-moving startups to capture this market.

While it would not be surprising to see enterprise CRM vendors like Salesforce, Oracle or SAP acquire any of these startups to fill the glaring gap in their offerings, a more interesting question is whether these startups can be the enterprise CRM behemoths of tomorrow. In other words – can the next big enterprise CRM be mobile first? We may be a few years away but it’s possible. One thing is clear: We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Note: Nexus Venture Partners is an investor in Helpshift

[Image via Shutterstock]

As Twitter nears its IPO, CEO Dick Costolo seemingly refuses to focus on the money. “We think of revenue like oxygen. Essential to life but not the first thing you think about in the morning,” he told Katie Couric at The Atlantic’s Aspen Ideas Festival. “I don’t try to get caught up in short-term thinking about the company.”

Given the impending IPO, this is likely Costolo’s last interview, so these quotes will haunt them as the $10 billion IPO frenzy ramps up.

Couric asked him if he had learned anything from Facebook’s epic IPO blunder. Costolo, in a transparent dodge that got laughs from the audience, said, “I don’t like to think about reacting to what other people are doing in the market. It’s like driving while looking in the rear view mirror.”

The goal, Costolo said in true buzzword-happy fashion, is to become a “global town square.”

Costolo completely bypassed questions about the National Security Agency’s Internet snooping program. “We have to obey the rule of law,” he said, noting that Twitter was not one of the nine companies named as part of the PRISM program.

It should be noted that Twitter isn’t the only company that claimed to fight the NSA. Yahoo reportedly tried to block the NSA’s spying but lost. So while it’s laudable that Twitter isn’t part of PRISM, it may be because Twitter doesn’t collect the kinds of user identification data most valuable to spy agencies (you can sign up for Twitter with a pseudonym).

Ultimately, Costolo said he wants Twitter to be an interesting place to work. All money and no play makes Twitter a boring business. “That’s not a fun place to go to work in the morning. It’s not particularly innovative.”

[pic via michaeljstubbs]

Whatever happened to the slow and lazy summer news weeks of yore? This past week certainly wasn’t one of them, as evidenced by all the fun stuff we had to talk about during this episode of CrunchWeek.

Leena Rao, Anthony Ha and I piled ourselves into the TechCrunch TV studio to discuss some of the most interesting tech news stories from the past seven days: Sean Parker’s epic guest post on TechCrunch in which he tackled the criticism of his wedding and the larger state of modern journalism, venture capital firms such as First Round Capital expanding into publishing their own content, and SnapChat’s $80 million round of funding ($20 million of which went straight to the app’s two young cofounders.)

This will be our last CrunchWeek for a little while, as we’re taking a two week summer hiatus — next week, we’ll be off at our July 4th barbecues grooving to Andrew Mason’s upcoming Hardly Workin’ album, and the week after that a bunch of us will be in Los Angeles covering the startup scene there. So enjoy this episode, and until we meet again, enjoy the next couple weeks of summer!

Google Reader is dying come Monday, and the whole Internet is sad. I’m not sad. I won’t miss it at all.

I used to use Google Reader a lot, as in every day, and it was once a key component of my arsenal of work tools, too. Reader was the pulse of the Internet, my way of staying up to date with everything that happened while I was waking or sleeping. In tech news, having a resource like Google reader is important. Or wait no: was. Was important.

At one time, news happened at a pace that allowed it to be digested relatively slowly, in batches resembling what we were used to from the one or two-times a day print newspaper schedules. Google and RSS were fine for that; it’s like a digest that builds in near real-time, putting everything in one convenient place for you to come back to whenever you need to. Which is what some people still need it for, and that’s great.

But for me, and I’m sure for others like me who work in the online news space, at some point Google Reader just stopped feeling current enough, fast enough, and comprehensive enough. If Reader was the Model T, tools like Twitter and more timely and true real-time reporting tools that tell you when pages are updated the instant they’re updated became Edsel’s Model A.

Reader is still arguably a nice way to keep up with more evergreen and long-form content, from blogs that post irregularly and that you’d like to collect in one place. But for that, I again trust recommendations from my Twitter peeps, and add content to Instapaper or Pocket for later reading instead of looking to individual sources. This adds an additional filter layer for longer content, meaning I’m less likely to end up wasting my time reading something I’m not all that interested in. And recently, endeavours like The Magazine and Medium have made tracking that evergreen content even easier.

At first, I stopped using Reader for work around two years ago. I’d actually open it as an escape, tracking things that I was personally interested in but that weren’t really relevant to my specific coverage areas, per se, including gaming news. Tapping it open via Reeder on the iPad was a pre-bedtime activity, designed to provide some relaxing light reading before hitting the sack.

Then, eventually, I’d tap that icon less and less, finding fewer and fewer articles that I hadn’t already seen, or grasped the content of from Twitter posts and interactions. Finally, I moved it from my iOS dock to the standard homescreen, and by around a year ago it was relegated to a page towards the end of my series of iOS homescreens. I haven’t used it in months.

Reader was good stuff, and plenty of people still use it. But there are no shortage of alternatives, and by and large, the Internet has moved on. If people haven’t, it might be because Reader provided a comfortable standard that was easy, giving them little reason to look around. Reader’s death isn’t a bad thing; it’s just a chance to put your head up and look around to see what’s changed in aggregation over the course of the past few years.

Internet Explorer is a hard product to love. It was so bad for so long and Microsoft abused its position of having the dominant browser for so many years that even today, with a few solid releases under its belt, IE still feels like the browser you should hate. But with IE11, which just launched with the Windows 8.1 Preview, Microsoft is finally stepping up its game to the point where there’s a reason to take IE seriously again. And it deserves another look from both developers and users.

Microsoft didn’t go into all that much depth when it discussed IE11 during its Build keynotes, but during an IE-focused press briefing, the company opened up a bit more about the state of its browser. The main takeaway from that session, at least for me, was that Microsoft believes that the fact that it only has to focus on one platform allows it to build a superior browser. Other browsers, the message was, have to work on so many platforms and that means the developers have to make too many compromises.

With being fully focused on Windows and Windows RT, Microsoft argues, it can include fast hardware-accelerated features like WebGL and even significantly faster font rendering. It’s not just 3D content where IE is now competitive (and often ahead of the competition). While Microsoft often shied away from putting standard JavaScript benchmarks on it screen and argued that “real world” performance was more important, it now proudly put the usual Kraken, Octane and SunSpider numbers on the screen. The results are indeed impressive. I repeated some of these benchmarks myself and IE11 always easily beat Chrome and Firefox in all of these (arguably unscientific) tests.

If you want to see an impressive example of IE11 in action, try out Microsoft’s new Lawn Mark 2013 and Levitation demos.

There are other features that make IE11 interesting, too. The new pinned sites feature in the Start Menu, for example, allows any site to create an app-like experience on the Windows 8.1 desktop. Bookmarks are now synced over SkyDrive and the browser is integrated with the new Reading List feature in Windows 8.1 (though sadly, there is no Instapaper-like, distraction-free reading mode).

Microsoft is really focusing on touch in the browser, and with Pointer Events, it’s working to make this a W3C standard for all browsers.

All of this doesn’t mean IE11 is perfect, though. Far from it. While it now finally supports standards like WebGL and has support for SPDY (something Microsoft did not exactly highlight), WebRTC is still missing in action. The Metro/Windows 8-style version of IE is also still decoupled from the desktop version. It’s also still not clear whether IE11 will ever come to Windows 7, though Microsoft pretty clearly hinted at this during its Build press briefing.

Overall, IE11 gives Microsoft a shot at being taken seriously again in the browser game. Even though it’s not a dominant player anymore, it still owns a lot of market share around the world. And no matter how you feel about Microsoft, a better IE makes for a better web ecosystem for both developers and users.

Back in 1990, then relatively young venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson started thinking about how to expand the firm’s presence outside of Silicon Valley and share ideas and diligence with other VCs in the industry. DFJ created a partner network of independent VC firms across the globe that adopted DFJ branding. It was the closest thing to VC franchising at the time.

The first firm who joined was DFJ Polaris, who was based in Alaska. This network was an early version of the agency model that many VCs have adopted in the past few years as the affiliate VCs and DFJ combined created an extended network of resources (both in the U.S. and globally) for portfolio startups. Now DFJ is announcing that the firm is restructuring the network to clarify branding and create a governing board around the body.

To date, there have been 16 outside funds who have joined the network, 11 of which are outside the U.S. These include DFJ Mercury, DFJ Athena Korea, DFJ Frontier, DFJ Esprit, among others. As mentioned above, these firms are independent when it came to fundraising, LPs, and decision-making on when to fund startups. In turn for the branding and access, DFJ would have some carry in the funds that joined DFJ’s network (and there was also income paid to DFJ in the form of dues).

As part of the restructuring, DFJ will be creating a governing board, who will oversee the entire network, which includes DFJ’s own funds, DFJ, and DFJ Growth. The board is composed of a DFJ partner and includes representation from other network partners. Along with the board, the partner networks will be dropping the DFJ-branding from their names. For example, DFJ Mercury is now Mercury Fund.

So why the change? As the firm explains, the partner funds have matured, and are self-sustaining, meaning the DFJ branding is no longer necessary for these funds to create deal flow and more. DFJ Partner Don Wood, who also holds a seat on the governing board of the DFJ network, says the “restructuring wasn’t necessary per say, but instead it was an evolution and improvement of network.” He adds, “The benefits of the network remains the same, it’s just that the governance of the network has changed and actually gives a strong and equal voice to all the members of the DFJ family.”

In terms of the branding decision, Wood explains that the DFJ name attached to these independent funds caused confusion, especially amongst LPs and entrepreneurs.

As for the board, the benefit is two-fold, he says. First, it clarifies any confusion on how the network works. And second, it makes the network more of a democracy. For example, if a new firm wanted to join the network, the board will make the decision. This was previously made by DFJ in the past.

The board itself will help coordinate benefits, such as discounts to office services, to all startups in the network’s portfolio. Another interesting change–DFJ itself will no longer have any direct economic benefit to firms joining the network. Member firms still pay their dues (though now to the board), and DFJ will not get any carry in network firms. Dues from the partner networks will go towards creating services and making hires that can manage the relationships and networks between firms.

The question many may ask how the network firms have responded to this change. According to DFJ, they have embraced these changes and also found the existing structure to be confusing to both LPs and startups.

DFJ JAIC, which is going to be known as Draper Nexus, launches a cross border VC firm with around $50 million to invest in Japanese and US startups. The firm joined the network in 2011, and saw DFJ as an opportunity to give startups a global network of access points. “Our four person fund has limited brainpower and we wanted to tap into a larger knowledge base, and take a more global view to managing and helping our startups,” says Quaaed Motiwala, Managing Director of the firm.

Wood says that since the decision was made (which was unilateral across the network), no firm has dropped out of the DFJ partner program. In fact, many of the partners from DFJ network firms decided on the new infrastructure themselves.

DFJ, who last closed its tenth, $327 million fund back in 2010, says that this was the natural evolution of the partner program. You also have to wonder if the firm is raising a new fund, and decided to take some of this feedback from LPs into account. It should also be interesting to see whether any other VC firms follow suit in creating a similar structure.

It’s been a little more than a year since former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry first launched RebelMouse, a service allowing users to pull their content together from across social networks. To mark the occasion, Berry stopped by the TechCrunch office to look back at the past year and hint at his plans for the future.

Overall, Berry said that the service’s growth has backed up his initial vision.

“We haven’t done any pivots — we’ve just been following the core path,” he said. “A year ago, I had all these hypotheticals of how people could use the product. Now there’s an insane amount of anecdotal evidence.”

As shared in a company post, RebelMouse is now reaching 5 million unique monthly visitors, and its users have created 300,000 sites. Publishers like the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch- and Huffington Post-owner AOL, and Time have used the technology, as have brands like GE, Patagonia, and Sprout Organic Foods.

One thing you might notice about all of those links is that they don’t go to RebelMouse site itself, but instead to the websites of the publishers in question. Berry said that’s as it should be: “We want to be very clear to everyone that it’s not as important to us to be the destination as it is to help the open web.” That goes back to the original vision, where Berry realized that it’s “too hard” for many people to build and update a website using a traditional content management systems. With RebelMouse, you can take advantage of all the content that you’re already posting on other sites to create a unified, up-to-date presence, whether the “you” in question is a person or a company.

And if you want to pay RebelMouse for the privilege, even better. The company is already making money through a subscription program where users pay $9.99 a month to host their RebelMouse site at their own domain. The next step in Berry’s monetization plan is advertising, specifically the term that everyone is embracing nowadays, native ads.

Berry acknowledged that native “is a highly abused term” (in his view, native advertising means that the ad has to match the look and the content of the site), but he argued that RebelMouse can deliver sponsored content in a real-time way that’s sensitive to the user’s context: “We can give publishers native advertising at scale.”

Other future plans include the launch of smartphone apps (although Berry noted that mobile already accounts for a significant part of RebelMouse’s traffic.)

And of course, as RebelMouse evolves, so does the social media context in which it’s operating. The past year has seen the new social apps explode in popularity, and Berry predicted that the process will continue.

“It’s surprising, but social graphs, instead of gaining value over time, well, there’s an aspect that’s true, but there’s the opposite, where they lose value over time — people enjoy new networks,” he said. “That’s why RebelMouse’s goal is to remain the Switzerland of all of this.”

After biding it’s time in emerging markets, free messaging app Nimbuzz has ben ratcheting up the news and partnerships lately. It’s hit 150m users globally, is strong in Asia, India and Saudi Arabia, has been adding new apps for platforms like Windows 8, and signing telco deals.

Of course, Viber, WhatsApp and GroupMe are doing well, but these startups concentrate on smartphone apps. Nimbuzz emerged on feature phones and still has a story feature phone user base. But Nimbuzz is unique in that is has opened up its platform for third party messaging services which behave like little chat bot apps.

These bots are called Chat Buddies. There are Weather bot apps, or you can chat with a horoscope app that behaves rather like a text-based Siri. Independent developers have added ‘chat games’ like Hangman or an app called “Stranger Buddy” which is like Chat Roulette in text form. Brands are gradually realising this is a very clever way to interact with users, especially in emerging markets. These chat apps are hugely popular in regions where text messaging works and where data is expensive.

Now Nokia has developed its own Chat Buddy called Nokia Lucky Sunday. From tomorrow this will appear as a contact on the roster of all Nimbuzz users in India and start to quiz users and reward them with prizes. That’s over 25 million users, or a quarter of the entire mobile Internet population of the country.

With every correct answer, the user moves a leaderboard and the top users stand a chance to win Nokia smartphones at the end of every Sunday. Vikas Saxena, CEO, Nimbuzz, says the move “is a translation of the belief that brands have in our platform.”

This is obviously going to remind feature phone users who may still be on Nokia to opt for a Nokia smartphone when they change handsets. But because Nimbuzz works across all smartphones, it means Nokia can try and entice them back via the Chat Buddy.

Nimbuzz is available on all major platforms such as BlackBerry 10, Android, iOS, Symbian, Windows Phone, and J2ME, as well as Windows and Mac computers. It’s pre-loaded onto all local OEM handsets in India apart from Nokia, Samsung, LG.

First-world problems don’t get much bigger than having to pick out a chair in which you can sit comfortably all day while you’re using your computer.