Category: Tech news

Rounds, the video chat app and Israeli startup backed by $5.5 million in funding from Verizon Investments, Rhodium and DFJ’s Tim Draper among others, has been slowly expanding across platforms. Originally built as a Facebook-centric experience, Rounds expanded to the desktop last summer, launched Mac and Windows apps to allow its users to send and receive video calls without using their browser or signing into Facebook. A few months later, Rounds went mobile, officially debuting its first native apps for iOS and Android.

For those unfamiliar, the app essentially gives users the ability to not only participate in realtime video chat with their friends — from any media — but do so while watching YouTube videos together or simultaneously play interactive games, doodle on whiteboards, browse the Web together or send virtual gifts to each other and more.

However, up until now, most of those features have existed solely for Rounds users on Facebook, desktop and the Web, but an update to its iOS and Android apps today now allows friends to surf the Web together during live video calls. Rounds claims it’s the first hangout network to enable mobile co-browsing during video conversation.

A product of a partnership with Dutch startup Channel.me, the startup’s new co-browsing functionality synchronizes your mobile device’s touch screen with that of your video chat partner, allowing both parties to surf the web and navigate the same webpage at the same time.

Both users can click on links and type in new URLs, the company says, while each person sees the other’s live video stream in thumbnail form. This allows them to see each other’s reactions FaceTime-style, while giving you illusion that you’re actually there, together, and not staying at a Motel 8 on a business trip.

While users aren’t subject to any limitations when they co-browse during live video calls, and users can type in any URL, it would be impossible for Rounds to beta test every site on the Web. Instead, at launch, the startup is offering a handful of sites that it “stands behind technically” and fully support its synchronized experience, including Google, Wikipedia, Preen.Me, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Amazon, eBay, ESPN, The Huffington Post, wanelo, Imgur and TheFancy. Going forward, Rounds will continue to add support for the most-requested sites, based on user feedback.

The company also tells us that, in terms of security, the co-browsing experience displays usernames and email addresses but not passwords, and users must share a pre-existing Facebook friendship before they can participate in video chats together. Once they do, they can chat, browse, play games and watch videos together and add filters and doodles on top of their videos.

While some of these features may sounds particularly appealing to older readers, since the beginning, Rounds’ target audience has primarily been teens, who eat these kind of features up. As mobile devices proliferate, retailers and eCommerce players have been looking for more ways to capitalize on the fact that our mobile devices are always with us. Not only that, but considering the offline shopping experience is inherently social, they want to emulate that social experience on the Web and on mobile.

Rounds’co-browsing and synchronized navigation inherently offer a more social experience when visiting sites like eBay or Amazon, allowing young users to video chat while surfing, browsing for new clothes, gadgets or products — or even while doing their homework. Don’t be surprised if Rounds’ new functionality catches the attention of the big retail players or if social platforms like G+ (and Hangouts) expand to include more of these co-browsing and synchronous user experiences.

Today, Rounds has over eight million registered users, 500K of which are on mobile, with a fairly even breakdown between male and female users (52 percent female, 48 percent male) and teens representing the largest demographic. The company also says that 43 percent of its video calls are “meaningful,” meaning that they’re longer than the industry standard, and, on mobile, users are currently making 13-minute calls on average, for example.

Since its inception, Rounds has seen over 100 million hangout sessions across its networks, which include its destination site, (formerly) Wave, Chrome, Facebook and now mobile).

For more, find Rounds at home here.

As startups compete for the best talent, Homejoy is announcing a way for companies to offer employees an additional perk — a clean home.

Home cleanings may not be a standard perk yet, but they’re not an entirely new idea, either. Last fall, The New York Times wrote that in Silicon Valley, “the employee perk is moving from the office to the home,” with both Evernote and the Stanford School of Medicine experimenting with offering housecleaning to their employees. That can be especially appealing when startups ask teams to work long hours, so they don’t have time to clean their homes themselves.

There are, of course, other cleaning services, but Growth Manager Jeffrey Pang said that as with the company’s consumer product, the goal of Homejoy’s perks program is to make the process as convenient as possible. The company works directly with office administrators to set up Homejoy accounts for employees. Then, when an employee logs in, they should see a credit for their monthly cleaning, and they schedule a cleaning just like any other user. They can also see user ratings for their cleaners and offer their own feedback, and all of that data is also fed into Homejoy’s analytics system.

Homejoy charges the same as it does in the consumer version, $20 an hour — that’s significantly cheaper than most other cleaning services.

Pang said he’s already been testing the program out with some tech companies, such as Heyzap, and he anticipated that it will be startups that are most willing to adopt the program. At the same time, he said larger companies that don’t want to offer this to all employees (at least not initially) could also use it on a more limited basis, for example as a perk for the employee of the month or for expectant mothers.

“I think other industries have been slower to adopt something like this, but I could see it becoming more and more popular outside of tech,” Pang said.

Homejoy is now available in 19 cities, including he San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C. and Seattle. The perks program is available in all of those cities, and interested companies can sign up here.

The company is also promoting the program with a “dirtiest desk” contest, where people can submit a photo of, yes, their dirty desks. The winner will get a month of free home cleanings for their entire company — they’ll be selected via random drawing, but apparently getting people to like and tweet about your photo improves your chances.

Since I had Pang and Homejoy CEO and co-founder Adora Cheung on the phone, I also asked about something I’d been noticing as a Homejoy customer — so the wait times for a cleaning seem to be getting longer. (Maybe I was really just being a grumpy customer complaining about having to schedule cleanings several weeks in advance, but in my head, at least, it was a more substantive question about balancing supply and demand.)

“We want to bring on high-quality cleaners as fast as possible but not so fast that bad cleaners who don’t clean well come through our system,” Cheung said. “We’ve gotten better in recent weeks. We’re trying to balance supply and demand as much as possible.”

Pang added that the Bay Area is the only region where Homejoy has experienced “wait time issues.”

Also, in case it wasn’t clear, Homejoy is a startup itself, having been incubated at Y Combinator and raised funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others.

The mobile wave has been cresting for several years now, so when a decade-old web company is only now debuting its first ever native mobile app, it’s a little late to the game. The folks at TheLadders, which is launching its first iOS app this morning, understand that — but they are angling to make their “mobile last” strategy work in their favor in the long run.

It is indeed a beautiful app, and you can see it demonstrated by TheLadders’ co-founder and CEO Alex Douzet in the video embedded above.

First, though, a little bit of a background on TheLadders. The company was founded in New York City ten years ago in the summer of 2003 with the initial aim of being a job search site for professionals earning $100,000 and above. The company enjoyed solid growth in those early years, at one time having more than 300 employees serving an international market.

But TheLadders hit a few stumbling blocks amid a more competitive job search landscape, and has since expanded its purview beyond the six-figure salary market while cutting staff and axing its international businesses. And in the past 18 months, TheLadders, which had thus far been focused completely on the traditional web, has decided to shift much of its energy into rebuilding itself as a force on mobile devices.

The journey of TheLadders has been a varied one, and if anything it’s a testament to the benefits of how keeping some power and autonomy as a business allows you to be more flexible to change course. TheLadders is currently profitable, and has taken on only one round of venture capital funding, a $7.25 million series A back in 2004. If the company had taken on more investors or not focused on profitability, things might have come to a different end by now — it’s refreshing in a way to see a company that’s taken some hits to be still standing independent and adapting to changes on its own terms.

That leads us to today. The new app really re-thinks the way that people search for jobs in several interesting ways: There is no option for entering text, for example, and the “scout” feature that allows you to see details about who else has applied for the same position really plays nicely on the smaller screen. Once again, you can see a full demo in the video embedded above, as well as in a video produced by the company here.

TheLadders is certainly late to the mobile game, but Douzet says that has allowed it to really observe the landscape and create an offering that’s truly different. That argument makes sense, once you see the app. There is something to be said for getting something right the first time, rather than coming out of the gate with a mobile app early and then making users wait through several initial iterations. It’ll be interesting to see how this strategy ultimately plays out, and what kind of traction TheLadders is able to pick up in the crowded mobile space.

Google just added a new service to Google Cloud Storage that will allow developers to send their hard drives to Google to import very large data sets that would otherwise be too expensive and time-consuming to import. For a flat fee of $80 per hard drive, Google will take the drive and upload the data into a Cloud Storage bucket. This, Google says, can be “faster or less expensive than transferring data over the Internet.” The service is now in limited preview for users with a U.S.-based return address.

Platforms like AWS and Google’s Cloud Platform are obviously great for analyzing large data sets. As Google software engineer Lamia Youseff notes in today’s announcement, however, “transferring large data sets (in the hundreds of terabytes and beyond) can be expensive and time-consuming over the public network.” Uploading 5 terabytes of data over a 100Mbps line could easily take a day or two and most developers may not even have these kinds of connections.

Amazon, it’s worth noting, already offers a very similar service. It, too, charges $80 per hard drive, but in typical Amazon fashion, the company also charges a per-hour fee for importing the data. Importing a 5 terabyte hard drive to S3, Amazon calculates, will cost an additional $45 for an eSATA drive, which makes Google’s flat-fee service significantly cheaper. While Amazon also allows you to export your data using a hard disk, though, Google doesn’t currently offer this service.

Second-screen TV app startup GetGlue just keeps on trucking. Originally launched as an app for checking in to your favorite TV shows and collecting stickers, the company has been steadily expanding its business to include content discovery for shows on the iPad or on your TV. Now it’s hoping to better monetize its mobile and tablet apps, and has hired long-time digital media exec Evan Krauss as president to help with that.

Krauss has spent the last 18 years at a variety of entertainment companies, including Yahoo!, AOL, Excite, JumpTap, Looksmart, and Agency.com. His last big position was as EVP of ad sales for Shazam where he helped build out that company’s second screen ad business.

In addition to Krauss, GetGlue also recently hired Shelby Houston Haro as its EVP of sales, coming from Fandango and Flixster. In an email, GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold wrote, “Evan is joining us a President to lead all the aspects of the business, particularly focusing on revenue… With these two hires, we are now serious about building out and scaling our business.”

The hiring of its new sales leaders follows an attempted — and failed — merger between GetGlue and rewards-based TV companion app Viggle. The deal was first announced last November but called off earlier this spring.

Since then, GetGlue has continued to operate independently, trying to boost monetization along the way. No doubt the startup hopes that its new president Krauss will be able to expand its own business with advertisers. The company has been making a bigger push on that front with recent updates to its mobile apps.

That includes the introduction of a new advertising product for brands, networks, and studios called Promoted Entries. That enables networks and advertisers to highlight their products and shows in users’ Guides. Launched with Pepsi during the Super Bowl, the Promoted Entries offering is designed to boost engagement with viewers who are using the app while watching TV. It allows users to share promoted products with friends who also use the app, as well as on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

GetGlue now says it has 4 million registered users, and has accrued more than 800 million data points about what they’re tuning into. The company has worked with more than 75 TV networks and 10 movie studios to promote their content. It’s raised about $24 million since being founded in 2007, with investors including Union Square Ventures, RRE Ventures, Time Warner Investments, and Rho Ventures, among others.

Filepicker.io, the Y Combinator-backed “filesystem as a service,” is today rebranding itself as “Ink File Picker,” a name that, CEO Brett van Zuiden explains, stands for something much larger than the former, more product-focused title. In addition, the company is announcing a $1.8 million seed round of funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Highland Capital Partners.

Others in the round included SV Angel, Google board member Ram Shriram, Geoff Ralston (La La Media), Aaron Iba (Y Combinator), Pejman Nozad (Amidzad), Facebook VP of Business Development and Monetization Dan Rose, Ullas Naik (Streamlined Ventures), Hamid Barkhordar, Bobby Yazdani (Saba Software), Niall Browne (Workday), and Data Collective.

Founded just last year, Ink File Picker was created by four MIT grads, Anand Dass, Brett Van Zuiden, Liyan David Chang, and Thomas Georgiou, as a way to make cloud services interoperable. With tools for both web and, as of last summer, mobile developers, the company enables applications to connect to over a dozen of the most popular online services, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Box, GitHub, SkyDrive, Gmail, Instagram and more, as well as to the end user’s computer or device, and elsewhere.

Over the past year, Ink has seen increasing demand for its service, having hit 1 million files in November. Today, it sees just under 400 million files per month (over 10 million files per day). There are also 20,000 applications using the service from around 17,000 developers, including many well-known names like SurveyMonkey, Scribd, Livefyre, Fitocracy, Udacity, Haiku Deck, Crowdtilt, Urbanspoon, PlanGrid, RapGenius, Vidcaster, WeVideo, Funny or Die, TED, and others.

Van Zuiden says that the move to rebrand as “Ink” has to do with the company’s now larger vision, which is no longer just about a product that allows for uploading of files, but is instead more of a file management platform for developers. ”It does everything from connecting to all the 19 sources we work with, doing the image processing, and the further operations people want to do on this content, storing this content, and serving as this whole layer that deals with all the different types of content work that you want to do,” he says.

For example, in the new cloud-based word processor called Draft, Ink lets the app’s users import their files from elsewhere on the web (like Dropbox), then as they’re writing and editing those files, the updated versions are saved back to the service where those files originated.

“It’s sort of this notion of ‘what does a file system for the web look like?,” explains van Zuiden. “What are those APIs, what is that capability?” Originally, the answer to that was a file picker toolset (as the earlier name implied). Today, it’s about “helping applications and services work together,” he says.

With the seed investment, which actually closed back in September, the company has grown its team from four to eight and plans to reach 15 by next year. It will also continue its product development, with a specific focus on investing more resources on mobile, which has its own set of challenges.

On mobile, release cycles are different from the web, screen sizes are smaller impacting the user interface design, plus versioning is an important area to address. Longer-term, the startup plans to focus on the international market as well, in terms of not only localization, but also the services popular in other regions worldwide, as determined by customer demand.

Today, Ink File Picker offers a freemium platform where pricing is based on the number of files handled per month. Under 5,000 files is free, and a Pro plan for $99/month offers up to 50,000 files per month. Enterprise customers have custom pricing available. Around 5 to 10 percent of Ink’s customer base is on a paid plan, van Zuiden estimates.

The newly rebranded Ink website and Ink File Picker are now live for interested developers.

iZettle, the mobile payments company that has been described as a European version of Square, is today making a move that places it one national boundary away from the U.S. mobile payment company’s own backyard: iZettle is launching its iOS and Android service in Mexico. This is the Swedish company’s first move outside of Europe, and comes in the wake of a $6.6 million funding round from the Spanish financial services behemoth Banco Santander, announced just last week and made specifically to build out the solution into more markets globally.

Yes, the mobile payments market — like those chilies being sold by the small merchant pictured here, who probably only accepts cash payments today — is heating up.

To coincide with the launch, iZettle is also appointing a new MD for Mexico, Luis Arceo, who had been with Visa.

Jacob de Geer, the founder and CEO of iZettle, tells me that of the many markets where Banco Santander is active — the bank has operations across Latin America, the U.S., Portugal, Germany and Poland, in addition to the UK and Spain, with $1.86 trillion in managed funds, 102 million customers and 14,392 branches — it chose Mexico first for three reasons.

For starters, he notes that nearly all (99.8%) of the businesses in Mexico are small and medium enterprises, iZettle’s target market because, compared to bigger chains, they may be more likely to lack enough turnover to justify the investment needed for more tradition card payment processing services.

Similar to Square’s dongle and those of Here and many other competitors, iZettle’s smartphone accessory lets merchants and other businesses process credit cards using an app on a smartphone or tablet. iZettle’s particular service works on iOS and Android devices, and the company today is launching a new device that is all-in-one for all platforms and payment methods, be they chip or mag stripe. Interestingly, though, it looks like iZettle will be hiking up fees in the country. In Europe, the company charges a flat 2.75% fee, while in Mexico the fee for chip-based transactions will be 3.75% and for mag-stripe 4.75%. On top of that, merchants need to pay $499 (MXN) — about 40 U.S. dollars — for the reader, but Banco Santander customers will get a discount.

De Geer notes that 95% of cards in Mexico are chip-based. That, in fact, may be one reason why Square, whose dongle reads the magnetic stripe for transactions, may have yet to make a move here. (It’s thought that this is one reason why it has yet to launch in Europe as well.)

There is also the Santander angle: the bank is the third largest in the country and “growing rapidly,” deGeer notes.

And the third is perhaps the most contentious of all from a competitive standpoint: “Mexico is an interesting bridgehead given its geographical location,” deGeer notes. “With our new Chip & Mag reader that we’re launching, we could theoretically continue expanding north or south with the current infrastructure.”

Them’s fightin’ words, I think. iZettle, prior to today’s news, had operations in the UK, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. More specifically, in the past, deGeer has made a point of saying that it would not be looking to tussle with Square in any of the markets where it currently operates, which include the U.S., Canada and most recently Japan.

When iZettle picked up $31.4 million in June 2012 (it’s now raised $66 million in total), the intention was to be the biggest player of its kind in Europe.

“Our priority is to get the UK fully launched, and then look at other major markets like Spain, Italy, France and Germany,” de Geer told TechCrunch at the time. “We’re not interested in the U.S. They’re doing really well with Square and others.”

That tune has changed quite a lot in the last year. Rather than ruling out the U.S., now deGeer says, “Time will tell” when and if that move gets made.

Given that iZettle already has services in Spanish because of its operations in Spain, this will make one of the challenges of entering a new market a little less complicated. The backing of Santander will also help with connecting with and marketing to local small businesses. “The biggest challenge for us in any market we want to enter is always to localize the service in terms of language, currency, sign up process as well as finding the right distribution channels,” de Geer notes. “We live in a globalized world but to be successful you still need to act local. For those reasons, we believe our strategic partnership with Santander will be very valuable.”

For Santander, it will be one more way of picking up and locking in customers at a time of disruption across the financial services industry, as behemoths like Visa find themselves disrupted by much smaller startups, with everything else in between. “This partnership extends our offering of payment methods available on Banco Santander’s platform globally, and strengthens our position as the leading bank for SMEs,” noted Jorge Alfaro Lara, deputy general director of payment systems at Banco Santander Mexico, in a statement. “We are pushing the boundaries of banking with relevant technological innovation that helps small and medium businesses.”

Image: Flickr

Chicago company Proper Suit is bringing a dash of technology to the tailoring world.

We review 1dollarscan, a company that specializes in making high-quality electronic versions of the books sent in by its customers.

Hampton Creek Foods, a food tech startup backed by Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, is getting ready to expand beyond its initial product Beyond Eggs — though it’s not leaving eggs behind entirely.

The company recently released the YouTube video embedded below, which gives a brief glimpse of its upcoming scrambled egg replacer. And founder/CEO Josh Tetrick told me that he just got off-stage at TEDxEdmonton, where he gave the full demo.

Hampton Creek’s larger mission is to move the world away from animal-based foods by developing replacements that are cheaper, healthier, and tastier. Its first product, Beyond Eggs, is supposed to replace eggs in baked goods and other food products (the cookies with Beyond Eggs that I tasted earlier this year were delicious). Tetrick told me that the response to Beyond Eggs’ launch in February has been better than expected, with “more of an interest in the mission/purpose of our work than we anticipated.”

But Beyond Eggs doesn’t replace eggs as a standalone food. That’s what the scrambled egg product is supposed to accomplish. In Tetrick’s words, it’s “the whole damn thing – not an element in other food products.” And he’s hoping to start selling it in the next six months.

“We’re just using one plant to make it happen… and this one plant has awesome coagulation, texture, and springiness properties,” he added.

In a preview video for his TEDxEdmonton demo, Tetrick also offered some thoughts on the broader vision:

We think the food industry will change quite a bit. It will become a lot more humane, a lot healthier, and a lot more sustainable. And right now I think the big problem is that our food system is incredibly broken. And it’s broken because of its devasting impacts to our environment (greenhouse gas emissions), its devastating impacts to our health (rising rates of diabetes and heart disease), and its awful, almost bizarre brutality to animals.

Hampton Creek has raised a total of $4.5 million from Khosla, Founders Fund, Kat Taylor, and the Collaborative Fund.

Tristan O’Tierney, a co-founder at payment company Square, announced via tweet that yesterday was his last day at the company.

O’Tierney is less well-known than his co-founders, particularly the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey, but according to his LinkedIn profile (where he describes himself as an iOS engineer), his accomplishments include building the original iPhone app, as well as being a “large contributor” to its first iPad app, the first Pay with Square product, and the Register app.

In a Quora post (answering the question, “Why does Square have so many co-founders?”) O’Tierney writes that he joined with Dorsey and co-founder Jim McKelvey in January 2009. (His prior experience includes working as an iPhone programmer at Tapulous.) Apparently, in those early days the trio worked on Square in Dorsey’s apartment, and Dorsey had to flip up his Murphy bed every morning to make room for his co-founders.

In his tweet, O’Tierney says he’s not sure what’s next, “except for a bit of traveling!” In a tweet directed at The Next Web’s Jon Russell, he added, “I left on good terms. I just want to do something different. Square’s still in a lot of brilliant hands!”

I’ve emailed O’Tierney and Square for comment, and I’ll update this post if I hear back.

Update: Square declined to comment.

Why are so many app icons blue? The obvious answer is that so many tech brands contain blue in their logo or elsewhere in their tradedress. But why? What’s with the love of the blue tones people? I ask because the number of blue icons on my phone has reached a kind of tipping point where I’m often firing up the wrong app because I reach for the (wrong) blue one. And then I’m heading to Glide rather than Rdio, or the App Store not Dropbox, or Skype not Shazam.

I don’t normally arrange this blue collection on a single page but curious about how much of the stuff is hanging around on my homescreen I created a colour-co-ordinated arrangement (left) which serves to emphasise that it’s both big name apps, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and newer-comers like Glide and Rdio going for blue. Many of Apple’s native apps (in iOS 6) also rock similar blues, be it Safari, the weather app, stocks, the mail app and so on.

Initially this ‘blue period’ homescreen made finding apps even more confusing but I found that amalgamating all the blue tones actually tends to normalise them, making it easier for their distinct symbols and signs to stand out. So I’m tempted to stick with it. In the mean time, I’m still intrigued as to why tech companies are so hot on blue?

It’s possible there’s some deliberate mimicry going on, on the part of some startups. In seeking to establish their services, they want the user to think about other established tech services they know and love so they feel more confident about using a (similarly blue-coloured) alternative. Thinking of the likes of Skype for messaging and Facebook for social, say. In other words startups are hoping a resonating shade of blue will help them build a strong brand too.

Or they might be hoping to accidentally pass their app off as another the user is used to using; a sort of social engineering of where the user sticks their fingertip to steal taps meant for other apps. That’s risky, since the user didn’t meant to click on your app so may just get annoyed and delete it. Still, a swathe of startups clearly think it can’t harm if they project a similar visual aura to other established apps and services. It’s like the old adage ‘no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft’. Apparently no app icons ever offended by being painted blue.

There are other colour factors to consider too. Various colour preference surveys put blue on top, as the most popular shade for men and women globally. It’s certainly not a Marmite shade that polarises opinion — with so many natural instances of blue (sky, sea, flora) keeping things tranquil. Blue also apparently travels well, being more culturally neutral than certain other colours. Or so the theory goes. Colour theory also says that dark blue shades generate a feeling of reliability and stability (Facebook does have trust issues, after all), while lighter blues are apparently relaxing and calming (Apple’s native iOS 6 apps seem to fall into this category), or uplifting and energising depending on how bright the shade is (the bright blues of Skype and Shazam, say, or Twitter’s bird logo).

It’s notable that even when some tech brands’ logos don’t actually have that much blue in them, their app icon can often make blue tones far more prominent (like Glide’s icon for instance, right). Meanwhile Twitter, which has its trademark bright blue bird online, switches to a white bird silhouette on a more muted and steady looking blue background for its current iOS app icon. Perhaps the relationship between a mobile device and its user necessitates an extra injection of trust, being as these gadgets are so personal. Therefore developers reach for more muted blue tones when designing their app’s phone icon.

iOS 7′s coat of many colours

Apple’s iOS 7 redesign ushers in a new, more neon-colour palette which deliberately ramps up the energy level of the native apps’ colour tones. (You could say they’ve been turned up to Ive.) Apps that were a relatively relaxing shade of blue before now positively pop out — with undertones of teal green/turquoise creeping in. The result is definitely uplifting in the sense that the apps appear to float against the background (a parallax effect Apple is encouraging via other features in its redesign, such as translucent layers and subtle shading effects as you move the phone).

The new look iOS also replaces the blue undercoat on toggle switches with green, and paints some native apps a new shade (like the stocks app now a fittingly bleak shade of black rather than a calming mid-blue), to further highlight how Apple is creeping away from its old mid-blue comfort zone. At a glance, there’s definitely a greater colour range to how Apple is painting the iOS 7 icons, and a lot less blue jackets than there are in iOS 6.

Cupertino has been under pressure to refresh the iOS interface, thanks in part to the accelerated speed with which Google has been driving Android’s look and feel forward. iOS is also now a six-year+ old OS, with more new-look competition crowding in than ever before, whether it’s Windows Phone or BlackBerry 10. One way for Apple to create an impression of change — without having to do radical restructuring which might upset its existing user-base  – is a new lick of paint. The iOS 7 palette, including its blues, is certainly far more energetic than the old one — and that’s likely aimed at generating a feeling of renewal, without having to shift too much core furniture and functionality.

The other issue is that perhaps Apple has realised its old favourite blues are becoming a bit stale/invisible because they’ve been so widely adopted. The new iOS 7 palette repaints the goal-posts in more rainbow tones in the short term but, ultimately, app makers will likely fall in step by tweaking their own app shades to harmonise with Apple’s neon brights. So their mid-blues will probably also get dialled up and/or tinged turquoise and green. And before you know it the colour spectrum of apps on the  homescreen could be falling in step again.

Whether Apple stepping away from blue will help other developers to kick the coat off their own apps remains to be seen. Apple’s influence will count for something but there’s no reason to think the human eye’s long-term love affair with blue tones is about to be overthrown, no matter how idealistically psychedelic Jony Ive’s redesign.

Editor’s note: Chris Moore is a partner at Redpoint Ventures where he focuses on making investments in consumer Internet, online marketing and SaaS companies. Follow him on his blog and Twitter @Moorski.

This year alone, there is an $11.4 billion mobile advertising opportunity, which means there is tremendous upside for nimble and innovative startups with disruptive mobile-first models. As we saw from Facebook last year, the company was able to turn around and actually make something of its mobile business – a business that didn’t exist at the time of IPO. However, despite the potential of the market, and Facebook’s early success, we’re still a long way from realizing the promise of the mobile medium.

When looking at the opportunity, it’s clear there are a few core challenges that need to be addressed quickly in this nascent market. The startups that address these challenges first will be the companies to watch.

The Problems That Need Solutions

In many ways, we’re at the same juncture with mobile advertising as we were with the desktop web circa 1996-97. At that time we were limited by basic ad-serving capabilities, browser cookies to track visits and boring, static display ads. Search keyword advertising, the most compelling ad format and targeting method the web has seen, was only in its infancy (at Goto.com, which eventually became Overture) at the time.

Right now, the two most obvious hurdles to overcome are what smart companies are focusing on: developing a reliable and privacy-safe method for user targeting across apps, and developing smartphone native ad formats.

Cross-App User Targeting. On the traditional desktop web, browser cookies became a reasonably reliable and standardized method for recognizing and storing attributes of any given user in between visits to a site. Today roughly 80 percent of online ads leverage cookies or some other form of a user-targeting mechanism.

In the mobile app world, an analogous, reliable and standardized mechanism has not yet emerged across either iOS or Android, and until it does, relevance-based targeting will be less effective in the mobile environment and remain a giant missed opportunity for advertisers. Currently there isn’t a robust way to track users across applications after Apple deprecated UDID as a targeting mechanism. In order for cross-app user targeting to be fully realized, the tracking of users in a privacy-focused environment must be solved.

Smartphone Native Ad Formats. The first ad formats utilized on smartphones were borrowed from the web. As a result, users are inadvertently clicking on too-small-to-read banner ads, thus ensuring annoyed users. Instead of a fluid and seamless experience, users are pulled out of their task at hand and brought to un-optimized web landing pages in the mobile browser.

The only way mobile ad monetization will flourish is when smartphone native ad formats that enhance the immediate app experience are developed. The good news is that we’re starting to see a few promising native smartphone format candidates with notifications and Facebook’s Sponsored Stories. There is still plenty of room for innovation, as these formats aren’t 100 percent where they need to be. Users and marketers alike can’t wait for some savvy startup to develop innovative and reliable ad formats that fit within the app experience and engage the user without disrupting the task at hand.

The Winner’s Circle

Once the dilemmas of cross app user targeting and smartphone native ad formats are solved, there are some very promising areas within the mobile environment that are poised for the taking:

Online-to-Online Ad Tech Providers. The ad-tech player who can get the ambient context digital wallet and in-app context right for the Walmarts and Coca-Colas of the world will be a really big deal. There will be several winners in this area, each focused on a particular vertical of offline-to-online.

Cost-Per-Lead Advertising. Yes, cost-per-lead advertising. The web performance stepchild to cost-per-click could emerge as a first-call citizen in the smartphone medium. Why? Well, the medium happens to be attached to a phone, and guess what leads perform the best: phone calls. The smartphone promises to connect this intent to buy to a live person more seamlessly than any other medium to date. This will lead to higher conversion rates and thus higher monetization rates. Inadco, a Redpoint portfolio company that started in the web CPL space, is one startup helping these advertisers take advantage of the mobile phone.

Ambient Context and User Analytics Providers. The fundamental problem of user targeting and analytics within the mobile world must be solved. This solution will come from a clever startup, not the underlying platform players Apple and Google. Just as Omniture emerged to be an important platform company in web analytics, there will also be similar companies built within the smartphone medium. Native mobile app analytics companies like Flurry are promising, as are the emerging players in audience targeting like BlueKai (a Redpoint portfolio company).

While we are a far way from identifying the smartphone equivalent of paid search, it will absolutely exist (it has to) and it will leverage ambient targeting, the digital wallet and smartphone native formats that interrupt but don’t disrupt the user from the task at hand.

The market is big and the current players are just starting to crop up, which means the challenge is for the taking. The next two years will undoubtedly be exciting years to see it all unfold – not only to see who the winners will be, but also to see the innovations that make it happen.

It’s that time of the week for a new episode of CrunchWeek, the weekly show where three of us writers plop ourselves down in the TechCrunch TV studio for some real talk about the most interesting stories from the past seven days.

Colleen Taylor, Greg Kumparak and I chatted this week about private social network Path’s rumored $1 billion valuation and the company’s growth to 12 million users, which has been questioned over the past few months.

Next up with Google’s purchase of Waze, the reported price tage of $1.1 billion, and why the search giant spent so much on the social mapping startup. And we talked briefly about the big news from Apple’s developer conference WWDC, including iOS 7, and iTunes Radio.

Editor’s note: Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, a technology-powered real estate broker backed by Madrona Venture Group and Greylock Partners. He previously co-founded Plumtree Software. His last TechCrunch essays were The Maximum, Beautiful Product and Searching for Beasts in Silicon Valley’s War for Talent. Follow him on Twitter @glennkelman.

Well what do you know! After writing on TechCrunch for the past year about how Silicon Valley’s Gatsbyesque wealth couldn’t find much real estate to buy, Bay Area inventory is up. Bidding wars are down. And rising rates are squeezing buyers who have to borrow money. Below is Redfin’s quarterly rundown of what’s happening in Silicon Valley real estate.

Bidding wars are less intense. Bidding wars are still common, with Redfin agents facing competition on 95 percent of all homes in May 2013, the highest of any of the 21 markets Redfin serves. For example, Redfin Silicon Valley agent Brad Le reports that this nice-enough $2 million Cupertino listing got 12 offers, and likely went under contract in June for well above $2.4 million. But fewer bidders are competing. Since Redfin publishes competitive dynamics for every offer our agents write, we measure the average number of competitors in a bidding war, which has declined from a peak of 16.3 in January to 7.8 in May. As agents, we know that demand is waning not because buyers no longer want a home but because they’ve despaired of ever being able to get one. About one in four of our Bay Area homebuyers have told us at some point in the last three months that they’re taking a break from their search out of sheer frustration.

Also-rans are left behind. The decrease in competition hasn’t changed the pricing of the most sought-after properties. But occasionally, close also-rans languish. Redfin Silicon Valley agent Mia Simon noticed that two nearly identical Mountain View homes, one slightly better looking, sold at the same time last week: The beauty queen sold for $200,000 over asking, drawing all the attention away from its neighbor, which got only one offer and sold for $150,000 less than comparable properties in the area.

Flash sales. The fact that homes are still selling very quickly may reflect a fundamental change in consumer behavior rather than simply a hot market; the median days on market for Bay Area homes that sold in May was 12 days; last year at this time it was 18. Mobile instant alerts triggered by the debut of new listings have been behind this trend, with 302 listings in May going under contract in less than 24 hours. Some of our buyers don’t even like to go into a Costco for too long if it will block the cell signal they need to get instant alerts. This has also put pressure on real estate websites to get inventory quickly. On average, brokerage sites like APR.com, ZephyrSF.com, and Redfin.com get new listings days earlier than national portals; the reason is that the brokerage sites employ real estate agents with complete, direct access to the Bay Area’s four local Multiple Listing Services.

More homes for sale. Higher prices, and perhaps the fear that higher interest rates could dampen demand later, have at last drawn would-be sellers into the market. Bay Area inventory began the year down 59 percent from 2012, but has now improved to the point that it’s only 28 percent down from this time last year; by year-end we expect 2013 inventory to be up year-over-year for the first time since 2011. Redfin’s own Bay Area listing business has increased more than 100 percent over last year. In 2013, real estate’s spring may come in summer, and summer may come in fall. Sales volume will increase, and price increases may lose steam.

More new construction coming in the East Bay and in San Francisco: Builders are often slow to respond to inventory crunches, in part because it takes time to finish projects, in part to drive profits from a run-up in demand. This is why we’ve seen line-ups, lotteries and camp-outs among buyers competing to get units as they’re released by builders. But four new projects are releasing units this summer in San Francisco, where the total number of homes has barely budged since World War II: 300 Ivy in Hayes Valley, One Rincon Hill Phase Two near the Bay Bridge, The Icon in the Mission, and Linea-built projects in the Mission like Nove.

More inside jobs: We hear more reports of pocket listings, where the listing agent sells the home to one of his own clients or to one of his partner’s clients, without offering the property to the broader market. The actual data suggests that this is common only for homes priced above $5 million. Few sellers at lower prices would ever bypass the larger market, which can draw in enough buyers to spark a bidding war. But there are other types of inside jobs. “Some Redfin clients are trying to get creative,” reports Landon Nash, Redfin San Francisco agent. “I just closed one deal with a client who asked his landlord to sell, and I have another two — which may or may not close — in the works.”

Interest-rate anxiety: With interest rates increasing since May 1, and sharply since May 22, Bay Area homebuyers have felt more pressure to buy a home soon. On June 4, interest rates exceeded 4 percent for the first time in a year. “You know how analytical we can be in the Bay Area,” said Redfin agent Brad Le. “Some of my clients know down to the dollar how much more their mortgage is per month with the current rates, and others already stretching to afford a home have been priced out by the rate increase. The buyers who remain are even more motivated to find something.”

Buyers are withdrawing money from retirement accounts to compete with more cash in bidding wars. In the past week, three different Bay Area buyers did this, despite the penalties associated with withdrawals from 401(k) accounts. Bay Area sellers continue to have a strong preference for cash buyers, to avoid a second price negotiation if an appraisal comes in low from the buyer’s lender. Buyers are also getting help from their parents. Just last month, Redfin clients living in a one-bedroom San Francisco apartment with two small children needed extra dough to avoid being priced out of the Oakland Hills market, so the parents — who were already tired of staying in hotels during visits from the East Coast — just became a party to the purchase. Virtually every Redfin agent in the Bay Area has a story about this.

Surprisingly, fewer for-sale-by-owner listings: Of the Bay Area sales closed in May, 89 percent had been listed by an agent. By comparison, 85 percent of May 2012 sales were agent-listed. Usually, when the market makes it easier to sell a home, more sellers try to do it themselves. But the Bay Area is in such a frenzy that people here are hiring an agent in even greater numbers to play the game to perfection, and to get top dollar. Of course, as real estate agents ourselves, Redfin benefits from a decline in for-sale-by-owner sales. Nonetheless, Redfin’s website is the only one I know of that shows both all the agent-listed homes for sale as well as for-sale-by-owner listings.

A decline in commissions offered to buyers’ agents, from 2.65 percent for Bay Area listings that debuted in May 2012, to 2.56 percent in May 2013. Sellers have been emboldened by the market to offer the buyer’s agent less, with no fear of steering.

A still-exclusive club: Booms usually bring an increase in the number of agents. Not in the Bay Area. In May 2012, 6,008 Bay Area agents represented homebuyers on 9,456 transactions. By May 2013, 5,540 Bay Area agents represented buyers on 8,295 transactions. Because the market here has been inventory-gated, 2013 sales actually declined 12.3 percent, whereas the number of active agents declined 7.8 percent.

What does it all mean? The Bay Area real estate market is getting back to its own version of normal, which still isn’t that normal at all.