Category: Tech news

Here’s some encouraging news for the European startup scene, and London in particular. TransferWise, the online currency exchange that uses the crowd to undercut traditional money transfer services, has announced that it’s closed a $6 million series A round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures — the first investment in Europe by the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor’s international fund.

We also understand that Ron Conway’s SV Angel has joined this round, along with a small number of angels, and TransferWise’s existing backers IA Ventures, Index, Seedcamp, and TAG. This brings the total raised by the company to $7.35 million since its launch just two years ago.

Originally billing itself as the “Skype of money transfer,” TransferWise enables individuals and businesses to send money between countries for a fraction of the price that banks and others charge, using a peer-to-peer, “crowdsourced” model — where money destined for transfer doesn’t unnecessarily actually leave each country. It passes on these saving by charging a small flat fee per transfer.

(It’s the P2P element that playfully draws the Skype comparison, as well as the fact that TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus was the Internet calling giant’s first employee, while other members of his team also worked at the company.)

The company also pitches itself as the preferred method of money transfer for European startups, recently garnering some decent PR with an offer to waive the fees for a total of $100 million worth of international money transfers for qualifying startups using the TransferWise platform. Interestingly, Thiel was one of a host of names publicly endorsing the campaign, so we probably should have known something was going down.

Hinrikus tell me that the new funding will enable TransferWise to continue expanding, both in terms of the number of currencies it plans to support, and in raw head-count. It started out offering British Pound and Euro transfers, and has since added support for the U.S. Dollar, Swiss Franc, Polish Zloty, and Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Krone. In total, the company claims to have transferred over £125m worth of customers’ money, saving £5 million-plus in banking fees (though it isn’t without competition). Meanwhile, the team has grown to 33 members of staff.

“There’s another dozen currencies to be launched this year and 20 more people needed in the team,” says Hinrikus. “Also we need to launch locally in key European markets – Germany, France and Spain.” Hinrikus says TransferWise continues to grow between 20-30 percent a month, which to date equals roughly 10x year-on-year growth. “Doing what’s in the pipeline puts us on track to do another 5-10x this year,” he says.

Staying on message, London-based TransferWise (with an office also in Tallinn, Estonia) is now calling itself a Tech City startup. Tech City, headed up by Joanna Shields, ex-Google, AOL/Bebo, and most recently Facebook’s head of EMEA operations, is the UK government’s re-branding of the London tech scene and, specifically, East London’s “Silicon Roundabout” area.

Cue the now prerequisite statement from Shields: “Transferwise is a shining example of the successful businesses that make Tech City a thriving ecosystem. London has a real strength in financial services and technology, with many companies like Transferwise transforming financial services for consumers, for the better.”

That said, TransferWise’s HQ is on Shoreditch High Street, which doesn’t get any more Silicon Roundabout than that. And certainly, a $6 million series A is no mean feat for a European startup, and nor is attracting a top tier Silicon Valley investor like Peter Thiel.

Formspring, the pioneering Q&A site that allowed people to invite other internet users to “ask me anything” anonymously, is apparently back from the brink. In a tweet and a company blog post, Formspring announced that it has been “saved” and is now “under new management.”

Great news friends, Formspring has been saved and is now under new management. Get ready for some cool and exciting new features!!—
Formspring (@formspring) May 13, 2013

It was just two months ago that Formsping announced plans to shut down, with founder and CEO Ade Olonoh writing in a company blog post (which has now been deleted) that it had “been challenging to sustain the resources needed to keep the lights on.” At that time, the company planned to close down its online Q&A platform on March 31st and eliminate users’ access to their data on April 15th. The last-minute deal announced today indicates that the planned closure didn’t go through after all.

Details on who exactly is in charge now, and what Formspring has in store now that it’s sticking around, have not been provided. We’ve reached out to Olonoh and several Formspring investors for more information and will update with anything we hear.

It’d be good to see Formspring get another lease on life, as vague as the details around its resurrection are at the moment. The company raised a total of $14 million and garnered a huge following in its heyday. Though Formspring’s novelty wore off as young people moved on to other social networking trends, it’ll be interesting to see if they can somehow recapture its audience with a new spin on its old app — or something new entirely.

With the proliferation of smartphones, we’re now able to use these mobile, mini computers to do just about everything we would do on our desktop while on the go. Yet, in spite of this evolution, mobile payments seems to be lagging behind. We use our phones to capture pictures and video, and share them instantaneously, but the average smartphone carrier is less comfortable with the idea of paying for a meal by swiping their phone. People want a mobile wallet, and it seems only a matter of time before someone gets it right, even if a winner has yet to emerge.

Part of the reason for the slower rate of adoption is the perception that mobile payments are insecure, rife with hidden fees and are the very opposite of seamless — or cross-platform. Akimbo launched its eponymous card in March to take on the increasing number of players in the mobile payments space each taking a slightly different tack, from Green Dot and NetSpend to LevelUp and Dwolla. In contrast, the Akimbo Card is designed to be an alternative to your walled-in virtual bank account, with a social and mobile spin.

Like LevelUp, Akimbo wants to stand out from the pack by offering a fee-free platform through which users can send and request money to any email address, Facebook friend or mobile phone. Simply put, it’s PayPal meets a Visa pre-paid card. In other words, Akimbo allows users to access transferred funds from ATMs and any location that accepts Visa debit cards. In an effort to target the some 10 million young people who use prepaid credit cards, Akimbo enables users to link and load the card with their bank accounts with cash or via direct deposit.

This means that the startup’s proprietary platform not only allows cardholders to send money via email, Facebook post or SMS, but to reserve sent funds to be added to future card accounts, meaning all sent funds are guaranteed to the recipient. Once the funds are collected, the recipient receives the money, along with a depository account and payment tool to access the funds. The Akimbo founders believe that it is the first and only Visa payment product to offer this capacity.

By building a cardholder network, Akimbo believes that it can establish a more defensive position and benefit from some barriers to entry (and competition). Currently, almost 40 percent of cardholders use their Akimbo account to share money — a number Akimbo will look to increase as it moves forward to give it some protection from the growing number of competitors in this space.

Going forward, the founders want to turn Akimbo into the first prepaid card product with an account management portal based in HTML5, and the team is currently working to release a new website (and account management tools) that “auto-optimize” to all devices, be they mobile phones, tablets, TVs or desktops. With young people increasingly accessing the Web primarily from their smartphones, the founders see this mobile accessibility (and flexibility) as critical to the mobile payment user experience, overall, and to getting a step ahead of the competition.

Going forward, the startup also plans to integrate with PayPal and Amazon, along with adding credit and debit card-loading and card-linked discounts and deals. Akimbo sees the “prepaid industry” as one that’s been slow to innovate and has thus found it difficult to capture new audiences. So, by adding capabilities that enhance prepaid as not only a payment tool but as a budgeting tool as well, Akimbo sees the potential to create a prepaid card that’s actually valuable — something you’re not embarrassed to be carrying around with you.

To move forward with its planned integrations, discounts and HTML5 development, Akimbo is announcing today that it has secured $850,000 in angel funding. The investment was led by Rackspace Chairman and co-founder, Graham Weston, former CEO and Chairman Emeritus of Cullen/Frost Bankers and Akimbo co-founder Tom O. Turner.

The round adds to the $500K in seed capital that Akimbo raised around its founding back in 2010, bringing its total to $1.35 million. The startup spent the next two years building out its technology, officially launching its social and mobile bank account alternative in March. Since then, Akimbo attracted 50K users, as the company has grown to over 15 employees, and, if growth continues at the current rate, the founders say they hope to hit profitability in early 2014.

For more, find Akimbo at home here.

If you want a digital detox, you’re going to have to pull the trigger yourself. Social Roulette is an app that would delete one in six users’ Facebook account data, but its founder confirms it’s been blocked by Facebook so it no longer functions. While there’s no specific policy prohibiting apps from deleting your data, Social Roulette is clearly counter to Facebook’s mission and business model.

Social Roulette launched on Saturday as an online version of Russian Roulette, the lethal real-life game where a player places one bullet in a six-chamber revolver pistol, spins the cylinder, and fires the gun at their head. You die, you lose. But on Social Roulette, it’s implied that having your Facebook account deleted means you won. If you’re hit that one in six chance, the site explains “we can completely remove all your posts, friends, apps, likes, photos, and games before completely deactivating it.” Otherwise, it just posts to Facebook saying you survived the game, and encouraging your friends to risk their digital lives.

Social Roulette describes itself, saying “Everyone thinks about deleting their account at some point, it’s a completely normal reaction to the overwhelming nature of digital culture. Is it time to consider a new development in your life? Are you looking for the opportunity to start fresh? Or are you just seeking cheap thrills at the expense of your social network? Maybe it’s time for you to play Social Roulette.” Co-founder Kyle McDonald tells me he came up with the idea a few weeks ago, but hacked it together in just four hours with Jonas Lund and Jonas Jongeja after Lund had an idea for how it could actually work.

The app capitalizes on exhaustion with social networks. The dizzying stream of information, constant success theater, and perceived “responsibility” to be contactable can grow tiresome after a while. When I asked co-founder McDonald about the philosophy behind Social Roulette, he told me”Everyone talks about deleting their Facebook account, but we rarely take action. Sometimes we need a simple game to help take the responsibility off our shoulders, and provide a moment for reflection. Social Roulette is more of a provocation rather than a tool.”

Social Roulette seemed to be looking for a fight, considering it’s selling t-shirts of its logo, which rips off Facebook’s and sticks it inside a chamber of a six-shooter pistol. Facebook has aggressively pursued others who’ve tried to coin off of its trademarks. Facebook has also recently shut off API access to apps it perceives as competitors like Vine, as well as ones like Voxer that don’t share much back to it.  Facebook has also blocked apps without specifying a reason but that have been accused of spamming like Path.

Now McDonald tells me, “It took us 4 hours to create the project, and it took another 4 hours after the launch for Facebook to respond by blocking the API key and restricting our ability to create Facebook applications. The app was flagged by an automated system for ‘creating a negative user experience.’ After review, they decided they don’t like our logo either. We tried to follow the branding guidelines but we must have misunderstood them.” You could say the shut down was a bit murky as there’s not a specific platform policy that the app’s data deletion function violates, but Facebook typically enforces the spirit, not the letter, of the law. It might end up adding a specific provision banning apps that focus on deleting your data.

Facebook tells me in an official statement, “We take action against apps that violate our platform policies as laid out here: https://developers.facebook.com/policy/, in order to maintain a trustworthy experience for users.” It didn’t specify which policy, though. However, the app did allow users to circumvent Facebook’s account deactivation feature, which is designed to let people turn off their account but turn it back on later without losing their content and connections. This could be considered a violation of Facebook Platform Policy I.3 that state “You must not circumvent (or claim to circumvent) our intended limitations on core Facebook features and functionality.”

Without API access, Social Roulette can’t let people login with their Facebook account, or delete content from their profile. Surprisingly, McDonald is optimistic that Social Roulette will win Facebook’s approval and live on to kill another account. “We’re currently working to address this and other issues and expect a return to normal service some time this week.”

I wouldn’t hold my breath, though. Facebook’s goal to connect the world and earn money through advertising based on their personal data is directly threatened by Social Roulette. Facebook purposefully makes deleting your account tough so you don’t do it in a momentary fit of anger. Even if it receives jeers for shutting down apps at will, it’s not going to put that gun in any third-party developer’s hands.

If you’re an old-school gaming nerd, then you might remember a little game released by Atari called Breakout. The idea was simple: just hit a ball around and break things. Don’t let the ball get past you, or you lose. It was heavily influenced by Pong.

The game’s introduction was 37 years ago, in 1976. Whether it was in April or May of that year, Google has decided to commemorate the occasion with a little easter egg in image search that will suck all of your free time from you. It’s good to see Google doing these kinds of things away from their normal doodle, especially since a lot of their users might not remember Breakout.

Go to Google image search and type in “atari breakout.” You won’t get to click through images though…instead the experience gets turned into a fully interactive and playable Breakout game, using the search results as blocks:

Kick some butt and then share your score on Google+:

Of course, if you’re really looking for images of Atari’s Breakout game, then you can simply click on “return to image search.” But that’s no fun. Happy Breakoutting.

The crescendo of media reports about the advent of a DIY printable firearm has caused an understandable uproar. In the wake of so many high-profile, mass-casualty incidents involving firearms — and a lot of impotent rage by our elected officials — it seems counterintuitive that, as we circle the wagons around the idea of passing rational gun legislation at the federal level, we can also literally create a gun.

When I was in high school, some classmates brought a crinkled copy of “The Anarchist’s Cookbook” that they printed off the Internet. I, being an inquisitive teenager, flipped through the pages with a certain morbid curiosity. I didn’t know you could make a tennis ball bomb, or even develop thermite plasma that could melt through steel, in your basement or garage. Of course, the rational part of me knew I would never experiment with such ingredients, but I couldn’t help but be a little concerned about the people who would.

Now, the Internet is no longer the provenance of a select, geeky few, but rather is a mainstream information source that often eclipses television and leaves radio and print media in the dust. What was once accessible only by people in the know is now highly publicized.

The Liberator is the first widely distributed 3D-printed pistol to hit the Internet. It can be manufactured using a commercially available 3D printer. The instructions, created and given away by cyber-vigilantes/anarchists Defense Distributed, even contain a step to include a piece of steel to avoid running afoul of the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, though how they plan on ensuring that less-than-scrupulous DIY gunsmiths don’t simply ignore that step remains unclear (however, the point could be moot, as the law is set to sunset in December of this year if it is not renewed). Numerous tests have confirmed that when properly assembled, the weapon can fire at least one .380-caliber round without harming the user.

There is no question that the ability to use a 3D printer to create, on-demand, just about anything you can draw up in a CAD program is the future. The disruptive potential across nearly every industry for this technology is incalculable. From the medical field to manufacturing, empowering consumers to produce will surely up-end the natural order in mostly good ways.

However, removing all friction from the process of obtaining a lethal firearm could put a functional handgun in the hands of someone acting impulsively. How many times have you been brought to a boiling rage? The kind of fury where everything that connects you to the human race fades into the background and you feel like you could almost kill. If you were peeved enough to go through with it, you likely couldn’t obtain the requisite gun before your anger subsided to a manageable level where the thought of killing repulses you — as it should.

So much of the conversation about tightening gun legislation in the U.S. is focused on keeping guns out of the hands of the criminally mentally ill. But what about when an otherwise rational person is driven to a near-murderous rage? Aren’t the hurdles to obtaining an impulse-buy handgun a buffer between the fleeting notion (and temporary desire) to harm another human being and an actual violent crime? If pushing a button and snapping a few puzzle pieces into place was all it took to convert that inert, lethal rage into something real, would it lead to more crimes of passion? The U.S. State Department seems to think so, and has demanded that links to plans for the Liberator be removed from the web (good luck with that).

This technology is already being used for the betterment of mankind. 3D printers are already being used to create an articulable replacement hand for a child in South Africa. Even NASA recognizes its potential and has plans to create a zero-gravity 3D printer, which is slated to be taken aboard the International Space Station sometime next year.

This technology is in its infancy, and, to paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm, learning what we can do with it will hopefully not outpace learning what we should. Free information advocates and gun advocates alike defend the distribution of the Liberator’s plans as the latest battle on the frontier of Internet freedom, saying that all information should, without vetting, be easily accessible by anyone and everyone. But the stakes are higher than ever. We’re not talking about shutting down sites hosting illegal copyrighted material for download. We’re talking about life and death now. Guns exist for one purpose — to shoot stuff.

Some people point to the high price of a 3D printer as an obstacle to a world with an unknown number of amateur gun distributors, but if there is a profit to be made, a few thousand dollars becomes not much of an impediment. The high cost of the materials and equipment has certainly not stopped large-scale illegal drug laboratories from being operated by the rankest amateurs.

Should we support an avenue for people with more intellect than sense to manufacture deadly weapons simply because of the perceived freedom it entails? I’m not sure. But I, for one, had hoped we’d perfect a 3D-printed replacement heart valve or water purification device for developing countries before yet another way to kill people.

Learning a language is never easy. One thing that’s usually missing in the way students learn a new language is the ability to use their new skills while talking to a native speaker. LanguageTwin, a startup I met at the Willamette Angel Conference in Corvallis, Ore., last week, aims to do just that. The service brings together language learners for peer-to-peer interactions to give students the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom while having a conversation or acting out real-life scenarios.

It’s worth noting that this is not a freemium service. LanguageTwin only plans to work with colleges and K-12 schools right now and will charge these schools a $10-$25 fee per term (or a slightly discounted price per year). The idea here is that the service will pair students from two different countries and then allow them to talk to each other over video chat. Right now, the team is focusing on students who want to learn Spanish (with French, German, Mandarin and other languages on the roadmap) and has run a number of tests with 5,000 students from over 100 universities in the U.S., Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Chile, Costa Rica and a number of other countries.

As the name implies, the original idea behind LanguageTwin was to assign a “twin” to every student in the system. Say you are learning Spanish. LanguageTwin would set you up with a student in a Spanish-speaking country who is trying to learn English. The problem with this, as the founders told me, is that it’s not easy to coordinate the schedules of two students living in different parts of the world, and students shouldn’t be penalized if their twin decides to forget about a meeting or turns out to be flaky. The system the team now uses is more flexible than the original scheme and allows users to find new ‘twins’ every time they use the system.

The twist here is that teachers can use the system to assign students to use LanguageTwin for a set number of minutes every day or week. All of the chats are recorded and teachers can play them back at their leisure. Some teachers who have used the system, the company’s co-founder Michael Lucia told me, also pick one random LanguageTwin session from their students in place of an oral exam.

The video chat, which is at the core of the service’s platform, also features text chat capabilities, a translation tool and, most importantly, a folder with assignments and a few ice-breaker questions to get less-structured conversations going. Professors can, of course, upload their own content to the service.

As Lucia told me, it’s this framework around the chats (plus the ability to record them) that makes LanguageTwin very different from just using Skype to start a conversation.

Who’s ready to party, ya’ll?

That’s right. It’s finally happening. The TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-Off series is officially underway, starting with the beautiful, historical and sometimes rowdy city of Austin. We want to see who has the chops to represent the great state of Texas in our 60-second pitch-off competition.

Tickets are $5, and are available here. The event will be held at Stage on Sixth, and begins at 6pm on May 30.

Even if you don’t have a startup to launch in the pitch-off, come on over and have a beer, talk tech with myself and John Biggs, East Coast Editor and Matt Burns, Senior editor and watch entrepreneurs fight against the clock to impress the likes of us and some local tech big wigs and VCs.

But perhaps this is the big break you’ve been waiting for? Entrepreneurs, dreamers, visionaries, and founders, we beseech thee. Apply to present in the pitch-off, wow us with your wares, and maybe take home one of our amazing prizes. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013. Second Place will receive two tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt, and Third Place will receive one ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt SF.

Plus, all those startups who are selected to pitch at the meetup will get 15-minute one-on-one meetings with TechCrunch writers and editors to discuss your pitch, product, and get feedback.

More mature startups who wish to present their wares to the attendees rather than be judged by us TechCrunch folk can also purchase a demo table here.

Our past meetups have been a huge success, and when we added in a 60-second pitch-off competition, where entrepreneurs have one minute to pitch the judges with just words and mic, the TechCrunch meetup series really found its stride. The New York Pitch-Off led to a few startups getting into the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt, and the pitch-off winner found itself launching on-stage in the Disrupt Battlefield.

But New York was only the beginning.

Austin, you’re up next. So make this Texas girl proud, and show the world how the stars at night are big and bright (clap, clap, clap, clap) deep in the heart of Texas.

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

Lucky Sort, a Portland, Oregon-based startup behind a visualization and navigation engine called TopicWatch that helped to discover patterns in live data streams, has been acquired by Twitter. Terms of the deal were not immediately available, but the company has announced via its website that it will be shuttering its service in the coming months, and several members of the team will now be relocating to Twitter’s San Francisco offices to join the company’s “revenue engineering department.”

The startup had operated somewhat stealthily until early 2012, when word came out that it has raised a half-million seed round from Neu Venture Capital, Invite Investments (founders of Invite Media) and several angel investors, including Adam Riggs (Shutterstock.com), BankSimple co-founder Alex Payne, plus chaos theory physicist, quantitative trading pioneer, and roulette wheel hacker Norman Packard, Ph.D., who became the Chief Science Officer at the firm.

Packard is not joining Twitter, but CEO Noah Pepper, Jesse Smith, and Daniel Fennelly, are moving to San Francisco.

With the company’s first product, TopicWatch, users could sift through social media, government filings, news and commentary in real time to find, summarize and analyze any text-based content. It was more than a “social listening” or “sentiment analysis” firm – those were only subsets of its overall capabilities.

Analysis of Twitter data was also only part of what this platform could accomplish, as well.

In effect, Lucky Sort was a big data play – it used NLP (natural language processing) techniques to discover information from huge, unstructured data sets. What made it unique was its ability to derive structure without having to first define a database of nouns, verbs, etc. as traditionally would be the case with NLP. Instead, Lucky Sort was moved towards data mining through statistics rather than input ontologies.

Last November, the engine was put to practical use through a partnership with the social network for traders, StockTwits. The relationship offered the entire historical database of StockTwits (everything that had been tweeted or shared within the community), as well as a real-time feed coming into its service. These data sets were made available in Lucky Sort’s analysis interface, allowing investors to come in and examine how chatter in the StockTwits community has correlated with price action.

This could produce visualizations (like the one below), which could be operated via touch – including on the iPad.

Today, Lucky Sort says that three of its team members are headed to Twitter, and a plan to transition customers off of its platform is underway. Asked what he meant by Twitter’s “revenue engineering department,” Pepper would only say, “it’s where we’ll be shoveling coal into the money printing machine.”

However he did say that as far as he knew, Twitter is not interested in getting into the finance vertical itself. “They wanted our technology and expertise for other things,” he says.

Lucky Sort had raised a total of $600,000 before the acquisition, with $100,000 coming from Howard Lindzon, StockTwits CEO and co-founder.

The startup joins other recent Twitter acquisitions, including another previously data-focused service called Ubalo, as well as others like We Are Hunted (which led to Twitter Music), Vine, Crashlytics, Bluefin Labs, and more.

The company’s official announcement is below:

Lucky Sort acquired by Twitter!

Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis.

Today I’m very excited to announce that our journey has entered a new phase: Lucky Sort has been acquired by Twitter!

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization give us a shout.

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

In building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour.

Best,

Noah Pepper
Chief Executive Officer
Lucky Sort

This story is developing….

Correction: An earlier version of this post said Packard was joining Twitter. He is not. 

Google’s big annual developer conference kicks off on Wednesday, and while Android lead Sundar Pichai has downplayed big new announcements at Google I/O this year, we’ve also seen reports that suggest the Nexus line of Google-branded hardware won’t go completely untouched.

Nexus Phones

The rumors suggest that we won’t see a brand new Nexus phone at Google I/O this year, but what we could see instead is a mid-cycle upgrade for the Nexus 4. In fact, the existing version seems tailor-made for a couple quick internal hardware upgrades to inject some fresh life into sales and activate some new buzz around the product, which by most accounts has been selling fairly well, especially when compared to previous Nexus flagship phones.

What we’ve heard indicates that the Google Nexus 4 will appear at I/O boasting a 32GB internal memory upgrade, along with built-in LTE support. There’s an LTE-capable wireless radio built into the current Nexus 4, but it lacks a proper signal amplifier and as such remains officially disabled. Nearer the Nexus 4′s launch, you could activate it with a backdoor hack, but Google quickly shut that down.

Both these spec bumps would be easy enough to accomplish, and are both considered the most noteworthy obvious flaws on an otherwise very impressive device. And a new spy shot making the rounds today backs up earlier claims we might see a white version of the Nexus 4, which so far only ships in black, which could be another factor in convincing new buyers to take the plunge.

It’s not clear how exactly Motorola’s devices will fit into the Nexus line, but it’s also worth mentioning that a new device labeled the “Motorola XT1058″ has just been spotted making its way through the FCC, which suggests it might arrive very soon. What precious little info the filing contains suggests that this could be the fabled XFON we’ve been hearing Motorola is working on for Google, and it could theoretically make an I/O appearance, but this could also be yet another smartphone already on Motorola’s roadmap pre-acquisition, and there’s no guarantee we’ll see it at the show either way.

Nexus Tablets

There’s less buzz around new Nexus tablet hardware making an appearance at I/O, but there are some indications we could see some upgrades there, too. KGI Securities analyst Mingchi Kuo says there’s a brand new Nexus 7 coming, with a high-res, 1920×1200 display, an improved processor and a decent rear camera.

Reuters also reported earlier that a next-gen Nexus 7 would arrive, powered by a Qualcomm chip just like Kuo reports, but they’ve pegged that tablet for a release in July, which suggests we might not see it at I/O after all, except maybe in a preview capacity. Google demoed the original Nexus 7 at I/O in 2012, however, before bringing the device to market in mid-July 2012, so we could see a similar pattern repeat itself here.

I’d hesitate to suggest we’ll hear about much more beyond the Nexus 7 in the tablet category. Sales of the Nexus 10 have reportedly been quite low so far, and that device was only introduced in partnership with Samsung late last year. Google will likely want to give it a bit more time to try to pick up sales, or might focus its Nexus tablet efforts on the apparently more popular 7-inch market instead.

Earlier rumors suggested we might see a Nexus 11 make its initial appearance at I/O, too, but while it reportedly sits on Samsung’s roadmap for the year, there’s been nothing so far to indicate we’ll see it at I/O.

Nexus Q (LOL)

We won’t see Google’s bizarre boondoggle make an appearance at this year’s conference, and we didn’t really need AllThingsD’s reported confirmation of that fact to predict its absence, but it’s nice to have it.

The Nexus Q was Google’s attempt at answering the Apple TV and AirPlay if you recall, but it was an overpriced, precious gadget that essentially screamed “niche,” and a small one at that. Kuo said in the same report that detailed updated Nexus hardware that we’d see Google come back up to the plate with a stronger Apple TV-type device later this year, but it doesn’t look like we’ll see that at I/O.

Pichai said in his Wired interview this morning that Google doesn’t have “much in the way of launches of new products” at the moment, but that leaves wiggle room. It sounds like he’s trying to manage expectations, and a couple of upgrades to existing product lines would be right in line with something Google hopes will impress, but not on the scale of something like a new smart watch or the original Google Glass reveal.

After weeks of teasing, endless itty-bitty leaks, and about a zillion radio plays of the one track they’d released so far, the entirety of Daft Punk’s new Random Access Memories has just hit iTunes, days before the official release.

The catch: it’s streaming only right now. You can find the link right here. Hit the “View in iTunes” button, then just tap the “Listen Now” button. Enjoy your early taste of the album you’ll be hearing all summer.

While a few sites are declaring this a “leak”, that’s almost certainly not the case. Apple did something similar to this leading up to the recent release of Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 album, and the promotional text of the stream specifically suggests that you “pre-order the album” — which isn’t something they’d say if it wasn’t intended to go up a bit early.

“Why would they do this?” you might ask. “Isn’t this just giving pirates a hi-fi copy to spread around?”

Yes — but that’s very much not a worry at this point. We’ve got just four days before the album’s official street date. The album is almost certainly on trucks around the country. Once it’s on the trucks, it’s being ripped and uploaded to the Internet, almost without fail.

Streaming your album early, on your terms, is the new “accidental” leak. It’s fighting piracy with the only tool that can really fight it: convenience. A massive chunk of people who download leaks do it just to get a taste; to say they heard it early. By giving those people the taste they want through a sanctioned, official, high quality means, you’re nixing the need for them to download a bootleg copy.

Will it eliminate piracy of the album? Of course not — but it’s one small nudge upwards in a hugely uphill battle.

(Plus, artists make most of their money by way of touring these days anyway — and if there’s any show worth seeing live, it’s Daft Punk)

ASMALLWORLD launched its invite-only social network for the rich and famous in 2004. Today it’s becoming even more exclusive and pivoting away from its advertising model, as its relaunching as a subscription travel club where the elite meet to enjoy perks around the globe. With $105 a year and an invite, ASMALLWORLD (ASW) helps you make friends with its trusted 250,000-member community wherever you go.

Though it was supposed to be ready this morning, ASW tells me its site should go live this afternoon. Until then the site is password-protected, but you can get a sneak-peek below.

Have you ever been on sites designed for “meeting new people”? They’re often pretty seedy, filled with spammers, fakes, and swarms of sketchy dudes. They’re by no means premium, and not where you’d want to find a stranger to hang out with far from home. But there’s a real market for meeting not just new people, but great people. Whether for some laughs, networking or romance, paid access to a curated subset of humans and activities to share with them could work. Every concert, conference and travel method already has a VIP option for this reason. ASW could be a VIP club for the world if it keeps its standards high.

CEO Sabine Heller explains that with ASW, “You can turn up in a city where you don’t know anyone and you can have a social travel experience, a sense of belonging. You can go to Capetown and through ASMALLWORLD you’re entitled to five hotels that will do something nice for you, five tours where you get a perk, and groups of locals and travelers you can tap into. It’s not about logging onto the website, it’s that you might meet your husband through ASMALLWORLD, or get a job, or meet a whole new group of friends.”

To create a trusted community that people aspire to join, though, ASW had to give some bad actors the boot. “We did a round of thousands of membership terminations,” says Heller about expelling people from the old ASMALLWORLD club. Lindsay Lohan and Tiger Woods were among the people kicked to the curb as the startup seeks a more reliable image. If you’re meeting strangers off of ASW in the middle of the night in Beirut, you might not want them to have Lohan’s nasty habits.

The business model needed an overhaul, too. ASW was profitable for a while, which helped convince film producer Harvey Weinstein to buy a majority stake in the 45-person company before selling to Swiss investor Patrick Liotard-Vogt. But with a purposefully small but geographically distributed userbase, selling tiny ad campaigns to luxury brands around the world was a drag. No matter how influential the audience, advertising is still a quantity game. The startup’s new subscription model trades on the quality of its community. Travel destinations give ASW perks and free services to pass on to its members in hopes that they become regular customers.

Considering most social networks are free, what does $105 a year get you? First there’s the website with authenticated profiles to help you meet other ASMALLWORLDers. The ASW app helps you plan trips and read custom ASW travel guides. But what’s special is the membership card that gives you access to a wide array of perks including:

• Discounts – special access and deals for hotels, airlines, salons, spas, gyms, and luxury designer goods
• Nightlife – membership to global nightlife concierge service “The World’s Finest Clubs” and guaranteed access to 120 nightclubs (which retails for $2,500)
• Events – 5o yearly events organized by ASW, including parties, getaways and concerts
• Workspaces – A spare desk in New York and Berlin where you can do some work or print something
• Car Service – Free airport pickup from New York, London, Paris and Milan
• Vacation – A free one-week stay at a Caribbean resort

Those perks add up to well over the $105 subscription fee. Hell, a desk in Manhattan alone is worth much more. The idea is that by getting high-powered ASW clientele to try their services, these hotels, airlines, clubs, and what have you will develop loyal customers. It sounds good on paper, but ASW will need to show its sponsors return on investment if it hopes to make the model sustainable. Luckily between Liotard-Vogt and a small, secret funding round it recently raised, ASW doesn’t have to break even right away.

Today, ASW will begin emailing existing members of its old site ASMALLWORLD.net about the transition towards travel, and Heller tells me it will invite its “more valued members” to subscribe to the new service. A percentage of members will have the ability to invite others to join.

And that is what will decide whether ASW thrives or fails. Managing membership of any exclusive community is a dark art, requiring a careful balance of beauty, wealth, success, excitement, and interconnection. Too little of any and the whole thing breaks down. Nobody wants to be in a club of creepy old tycoons, gold-digging young moochers, or boring people willing to pay a price for friends. Creating a vibrant, coveted community will be ASMALLWORLD’s real challenge. With the right buzz and people, it could have everyone clamoring for an invite. Otherwise, it might end up a glitzy ghost town.

It seems like every other day an upstart wireless service provider inks a wholesale deal with someone like Sprint or T-Mobile and effectively sells access to those big carrier networks under a different banner. And every other day, I ignore most of them, because they’re just so damned boring.

Zact isn’t boring. In fact, Zact — an upstart service provider created by Andreessen Horowitz-backed ItsOn that uses Sprint’s network — has the best approach to wireless plans I’ve seen in a long time.

Consider this scenario: you’ve signed up with Zact (no contracts here) and chosen a plan, say, 500 minutes, 1,000 text messages, and 1GB of data. That plan’ll cost you just shy of $40, and once you’ve signed up, you use the plan just as you would any other.

At the end of the month though, it becomes apparent Zact’s approach flies in the face of how more traditional carriers handle billing. While carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and the like are happy to keep quiet and accept your money for minutes, messages, and data you haven’t even touched, Zact goes back and credits you the difference between what you’ve paid for and what you’ve used. Yes, these people are actually trying to build a business by giving your money back to you.

Now as neat as that is, that sort of no overage approach isn’t exactly new — MVNOs like Ting have been running with that model for over a year a now. Zact manages to take things a bit farther than Ting thanks to some interesting feature-centric plans for people who don’t need gobs and gobs of data each month because they only need to do a few things. Take Facebook for instance: Zact offers a $5/mo feature that offers unlimited access to the social network that bars users from using the data connection for anything else. After all, some people may never use their smartphone for anything else anyway, so why charge them for all the extra cruft? Mixing and matching features is certainly more work than what most carriers have us doing now, but I’d much rather have the option at least.

Users can also tweak those plans by way of some deeply-integrated Zact software with a surprising level of granularity at any point during the month, and those changes go into effect immediately — no chatting with customer service drones required. Those plans are intrinsically shareable too so if you and four friends can scrape by on 200 minutes a month, well, feel free. Getting close to your minute or message limits? You’ll be notified while you’re gabbing on the phone or when firing up the messaging app respectively.

Throw in some savvy, instant-on parental controls (you can remotely disable apps on other devices on the account if you’re an admin) and you’ve the makings of a very promising service. The folks Andreessen Horowitz and seem to agree, as they collectively pumped some $15 million into Zact parent company ItsOn last October.

Curiously, ItsOn’s ambitions extend beyond just running its own MVNO (except they really don’t like it when you call Zact the “m” word). CEO Greg Raleigh told TechCrunch that the cloud services that make those on-the-fly plan changes and suggestions possible has garnered ItsOn attention from carriers around the globe, a few of which can be found right here in the States. According to Raleigh, the vision isn’t so much about giving all those carriers a run for their money, it’s about getting them to adopt the same sort of granular approach to plans.

Ah, but there’s a catch (isn’t there always?). As a Sprint wholesaler, Zact only has access to two Android smartphones (well, three if you count a color variant) right now, and either of them are terribly eyecatching. Ting is a slightly more attractive option right now if only because of the wider array of hardware available, but I’ll be keeping my eyes on ItsOn and Zact — they’re definitely on to something here.

In the interest of protecting children, a new iOS application called AppCertain has debuted a monitoring application aimed at parents. The app, whose goal is to alert parents about the nature of the applications their kids are downloading, involves the use of a “configuration profile” – special software Apple originally intended for enterprise use, not consumer-facing apps sold through its App Store marketplace.

But Apple reviewed the application – for longer than most, founder and CEO Spencer Whitman tells us – and subsequently approved it. For how long that will remain the case, however, is unknown.

“We think we are on a gray line with respect to Apple, but we don’t really know,” Whitman admits.

Configuration profiles, for those unfamiliar, were designed for the enterprise environment, allowing I.T. departments to manage the iPhones and iPads used by a company’s employees. They’re typically employed by Mobile Device Management solutions which use the software to configure, track and/or restrict a number of system-level settings like Wi-Fi, VPNs, app settings, permissions, and more.

But more recently, a handful of startups have started using these same profiles to work around Apple’s App Store’s restrictions in order to accomplish tasks which wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Apple is aware this is happening, and seems to be handling each app submission on a one-off basis for now.

We’ve seen mobile data compression utilities like Onavo and Snappli take advantage of the technology to intercept, re-route, and compress web data in order to save users’ bandwidth, for instance. Social search engine Wajam also uses a configuration profile to inject its own search results into Safari, though this is done outside of the Apple App Store.

Onavo is still live on the Apple App Store today, though Snappli has since disappeared. (We reached out to the company for details, but have yet to hear back. It’s possible that Apple simply didn’t care for the fact that Snappli had publicly shared data showing how iOS users were dumping the then newly-launched Apple Maps application.)

But frankly, it seems odd that Apple would knowingly ever let these types of applications into its consumer-facing app store in the first place, given the security risks they could pose. If used unscrupulously, a malicious configuration profile could remote control a user’s device, manipulate user activity, and hijack their sessions, or so explained security researchers at Skycure back in March.

AppCertain isn’t a malicious developer, though, and its intentions are not to control or restrict how an Apple device is used, which would then be stepping on top of Apple’s own, built-in Parental Control features. Instead, it only monitors app downloads and reports back to parents via email that an app was downloaded, explaining what the app does, as well as what sorts of permissions it requests, and more.

The idea is to alert parents about the apps their child uses, including whether or not they have educational value. It doesn’t prevent the child from actually downloading or installing apps.

The service, staffed by a number of Carnegie Mellon University alumni, first launched to the web in February after being incubated by seed and studio fund Birchmere Labs.

Whitman explained at the time that the company wanted to help busy parents, who often have a hard time keeping up with what their children are installing and using. It’s not only a problem that affects tech novices, he had said. Even savvy parents often forget or get too busy to keep a close eye on their children’s devices. And these devices, little mini-computers that they are, are not without risks.

Parental Controls Outside Of Apple’s Control

While AppCertain is trying to go the official, Apple-approved route with its creation, another company, a small German app consultancy called Mocava, is not. Its new Parental Control application is an over-the-air install only, knowing that Apple would never approve it for App Store download.

Mocava owner Vinh Phuc Dinh says that he created the app to address a situation he found himself in all the time. “I have many nephews, and would pass on my device for them to play,” he tells us. “Unfortunately, there is no easy way to restrict access on the iPhone and save the desired preferences. So we built it ourselves.”

What he means is that though Apple offers parental control features, it’s not the right solution for those who only need controls on occasion. With his Parental Control App, you can quickly turn on restrictions without having to reconfigure them from scratch them each time you hand your phone or iPad to a child. Even if Apple’s restrictions are turned off, the tool will remember your settings.

You can restrict certain default apps from being accessed or certain content from being viewed. You can disable in-app purchases, or specify that an App Store password is always required, and more. To get started, you configure your settings on the web, then download the profile the company provides.

The mere fact that this app and AppCertain even exist speaks to one of the problems with Apple’s strict control over its OS. Unlike on Android where apps like  KIDO’Z, Kytephone, Play Safe, Kid Mode and others allow parents more granular control and insight, Apple’s settings are cumbersome. If you turn on age restrictions, for example, the child can’t watch Netflix. You can disable the web browser, but not whitelist websites, and so on.

These devices are computers, and while parents may disagree on what level of involvement on their part is necessary, it’s fair to say that as with “real” computers, children – especially young children – shouldn’t be given free rein with no parental oversight. Too many parents think of iPads as toys, blindly typing in their password every time their kid begs for a new app. They, perhaps, put too much trust in Apple’s “family friendly” policies – just because apps are rated and ranked, pornography or gore-free, that doesn’t make everything appropriate for every child.

It will be interesting to see how far Apple allows these companies to push into this new territory, before it decides to crack down or otherwise change its policies.

AppCertain is available for download here on iPhone and iPad.

Gone are the simple days of running a small business; gone is the time when a disgruntled customer’s voice had a lifespan of a few days, and could travel only as far as their social circle allowed.

We live in the future now, where reviews live forever. Where a few lil’ red stars can make or break your business.

OwnerListens, a startup that spun out of a hummus shop in Palo Alto, is trying to give customers a more direct alternative to Yelp — and they’ve just raised over a million bucks to do it.

Through OwnerListens, customers can send messages directly and anonymously to a business owner, who can then respond immediately via SMS. Feedback doesn’t have to be negative, of course — it can be positive, or even just a suggestion.

The logic behind OwnerListens is pretty straight-forward: if you give customers a direct, pain-free line to the owner, they’ll (hopefully) try to get things fixed instead of storming straight to Yelp to punch out a 200-word tirade. And because it’s anonymous and private, customers will — at least theoretically — be honest and upfront.

OwnerListens began its life at Oren’s Hummus, a spot that most Palo Alto locals — and, you know, Paul Graham — can tell you all about. As he built up the restaurant, owner Oren Dobronsky noticed two big pain points:

• When something went wrong, customers always wanted to talk to the owner. Oren couldn’t be at the restaurant all the time
• When he’d ask customers how things were, they’d smile to his face… only to go home and write nasty reviews, chipping away at his hard-earned ratings.

Within weeks of the restaurant’s opening, Oren had decided that OwnerListens was an app that needed to be built. He needed something that went straight to his phone, that allowed him to respond quickly, and that let customers share feedback anonymously. He convinced co-founders Adi Brittan, Michael Passey, and Niv Caner to hop on board, investing about $240k of his own money to get the ball rolling.

Since then, around 1,200 businesses have hopped on board. They’ve pulled on everyone from lil’ Mom-n-Pop shops, to mid-sized chains like Philz Coffee, all the way up to big ol’ mammoths like Whole Foods Palo Alto.

And if a business hasn’t registered with OwnerListens? They’ll still show up within the app, and customers can send messages their way. OwnerListens immediately sets out to hunt down the right inbox, something they say they’re able to do about 70% of the time. Of those they get in touch with, about 15% convert into users.

This morning, we’ve got the exclusive word that OwnerListens has just closed a $1.1M Seed round from the likes of Menlo Ventures, Promus Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Subtraction Capital, Steve Blank, Jeff Epstein, Cary Rosenzweig, and Marc Abramowitz amongst others that have opted to go unnamed.

If you’re paying particularly close attention and know waaaay too much about the world of VC, you might notice that their list of investors is… surprisingly varied, geographically. These aren’t just Valley firms — there’s folks from New York, Chicago, Philly, and a bunch of other major cities in there. OwnerListens says that was intentional; since they rely on local businesses, they figured it was better to have people championing them across the nation as opposed to just the Valley, so they’ve aimed to pull in investors from coast to coast.

Of course, not everyone would want customers to have a direct line to the head honcho. Even at Oren’s own shop, he was met with some pretty hilarious opposition: one manager was caught trying to hide the signage they’d put out. That manager is … no longer with the company.