Category: Tech news

Pimply delivery boys will need to find a new way to make money in France: the province of Auvergne will pilot a drone newspaper delivery service in May. The official postal service, La Poste Group, has already been beta-testing the automated delivery service with 20 hornet-looking unmanned aerial vehicles. This is not an April Fool’s joke.

FedEx has been a vocal proponent of a drone-powered delivery service, and the FAA has been steadily approving regulations to permit commercial drones by fall of 2015. If this happens, say goodbye to the harkening of spring by sexy UPS men in short shorts.

At least one state, Virginia, is on the path to place a two-year moratorium on law-enforcement drones, but that doesn’t seem like it’ll derail FedEx’s plan for an army of automated delivery drones.

While the morning paper is nice, I can’t wait for the taco-delivery service, Tacocopter. Even though this flavor fairy was a hoax (which fooled The Colbert Report), we hope it’ll be a reality soon.

Flurry, an app analytics firm with a presence on some now 1 billion mobile devices, has taken another deep dive into its large data set to examine the increasingly fragmented selection of hardware form factors on the market today, in an effort to better understand consumer preferences. The report concludes that people most prefer and use apps on medium-sized smartphones, like those in the Samsung Galaxy line, and full-sized tablets like the iPad. “Phablets,” meanwhile, Flurry dubs a “fad,” saying that they don’t show significant, or even disproportionally significant, app usage.

To reach these conclusions, Flurry’s report looked at the top 200 device models in its database, which represent over 80 percent of all usage. It then broke down the devices into the following five groups:

1. Small phones (e.g., most Blackberries), 3.5” or under screens
2. Medium phones (e.g., iPhone), between 3.5” – 4.9” screens
3. Phablets (e.g., Galaxy Note), 5.0” – 6.9” screens
4. Small Tablets (e.g., Kindle Fire), 7.0” – 8.4” screens
5. Full-size tablets (e.g., the iPad), 8.5” or greater screens

You can see the distribution of these devices in the chart below – e.g., 16 percent have screen sizes 3.5 inches or smaller (in diagonal length); 69 percent are 3.5 to 4.9 inches – a large group which includes the iPhone; 6 percent are small tablets like the Kindle Fire and iPad mini; 7 percent are full-sized tablets like the iPad. Meanwhile, just 2 percent of devices are “phablets.”

But as you may already know, device distribution doesn’t always equate to how those platforms are actually being used by consumers. Android users, for example, despite the platform’s dominant global market share, show less engagement than iOS users overall, and watch less video.

So Flurry compared the device install base with the number of active users and app sessions. The conclusions support the trends we’ve been hearing about for some time. For instance, even though small-screened devices account for 16 percent of devices in the market, only 7 percent are “active devices,” once users per device are taken into account, and only represent 4 percent of overall app sessions.

For tablets, however, it’s the opposite – despite their small market share (7 percent of the top 200), they represent 15 percent of active users and 13 percent of active sessions.

Flurry says this is because on the small end, users are on older phones, like Blackberry models, so there are fewer active users per model. These small devices are also obviously not ideal for running and using apps. And tablets, of course, are.

However, on the in-between screen sizes known as “phablets,” their install base is 2 percent, while active users and sessions is just 3 percent. “Phablets are a fad,” proclaims Flurry in its post about this finding.

The OS-specific data is fairly obvious. Medium-sized phones are the dominant form factor across all operating systems except Blackberry, the report also notes. Android dominantes the “phablet” market, while iOS dominates large tablets. The only Windows Phone devices in the top 200 are medium-sized phones.

What is interesting is are the app trends across form factors. “Tablets are gaming machines,” says Flurry, noting that a third of time spent gaming now takes place on larger tablets like the iPad, as well as small tablets and phablets. “And while they command consumer time spent, they represented only 15% of device models in use in February and 21% of individual connected devices. These differences are statistically significant,” the post notes.

And oddly enough, despite the tablets’ larger screens, they don’t see a larger portion of time spent in the books and video categories. Flurry speculates that’s because consumers are consuming a lot of text and video on their smartphones already.

The report concludes that developers concentrate their efforts on medium-sized devices and tablets, not phablets and other small-screened phones.

Famo.us, the JavaScript framework designed for building crazy rich (yet super fast) interfaces in pure HTML5, is making two announcements out of the HTML5 Developer Conference in San Francisco this morning: the framework will be free to developers thanks to a few “huge hardware vendors” taking interest, and it’s getting a physics engine.

We’ve written about Famo.us a time or two before, but for those who missed it: Famo.us was started in 2011 by Steve Newcomb, just three years after his language processing company Powerset was snapped up by Microsoft for $100 million and rolled into Bing. While it confused a few of the judges when it debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012, Famo.us went on to raise a $4 million dollar Series A just six months later.

In a way over-simplified nutshell: Famo.us pulls off a whole lot of clever trickery to allow web developers to tap the GPU of a device (be it that of a computer, smart TV, tablet, or a phone) for calculations, no plug-in required. To the developer, that means being able to build interfaces that are simultaneously richer and faster. To the end user, that means super-snazzy user interfaces without having to install any plug-ins.

Check out a demo of a Famo.us-powered UI below (or check out http://www.famo.us yourself.):

So with a few million dollars raised, how will Famo.us start bringin’ the money in?

They could charge developers. For-pay frameworks aren’t unheard of, though they tend to be the exception. That’s not Famo.us’ plan, though. As of this morning, Famo.us has confirmed that their framework will be free to developers for “as many … apps as you’d like, for as many users as you’d like.”

Instead, Famo.us is relying on the interest of a few huge hardware vendors who are looking to Famo.us to power their UI on future devices. They’ll build (or help build) the UIs, then charge the vendors for licensing. Additionally, Famo.us will offer optional enterprise add-ons (think analytics, or the ability to record/replay user sessions to see how they navigate your design).

Exactly which hardware vendors have taken an interest here is currently under strict lock and key, but we can certainly narrow it down a bit. There are only so many “huge” hardware companies with the financial swagger to make something like this worthwhile. Apple is focusing mainly on native code right now (though they’ve done more than their fair share of contributions to HTML5 by way of WebKit), so it’s presumably not them. Meanwhile, both Samsung and LG have been dumping cash into HTML5-focused operating systems (Tizen and webOS, respectively) for their upcoming hardware.

Finally, Famo.us is also announcing that their framework, which has thus far been focused solely on rendering, has picked up a physics engine along the way. Steve says they set out to find a physics engine that fit three criteria: it had to be fast, it had to work on mobile, and all of the data had to render to the Document Object Model in a way that left it Google-friendly. When they couldn’t find one that matched all of the above, they decided to build their own.

It may seem strange for a framework that’s meant primarily to be used with interfaces to offer up physics functionality — it’s not a game engine, after all — but it makes sense: when you’re working with objects being thrown around in space (be it 2D or 3D space) it’s hugely advantageous to be able to work with forces that parallel the real world, like mass, gravity, and drag.

Plus, it fits hand-in-hand with the way Steve explained Famo.us to Anthony Ha just last month:

“We built a shitty game engine which is basically the best app engine ever built.”

Famo.us is currently in beta sign-up mode, and Steve says they have around 27,000 developers waiting to start building. Interested developers can find the sign-up page here.

Disclosure: We like to note when there are potential conflicts, so it’s worth noting that TC Founder Mike Arrington is one of the investors in Famo.us’ Series A.

Feedly, the RSS feed-reading client that is rapidly becoming the one to beat following the planned Google Reader shutdown, is today launching new versions of its Feedly Mobile client for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Android phones and tablets. This update, built-in response to user feedback, is focused on improving search, productivity, discovery and sharing. But the feature, which is likely to appeal to ex-Google Reader users the most is the new “title only” mode, designed to make headline scanning more efficient.

The startup says it has now seen 3 million new users sign up for its service in the wake of Google’s announcement that it’s shuttering Google Reader on July 1, 2013. Prior to this, Feedly had grown its own user base organically to 4 million users since its founding in 2008, to give you some perspective on how rapid this growth has been.

“We are thankful that so many Reader refugees have selected Feedly as their new home, and we will strive to make it the best home we can for them,” says co-founder Cyril Moutran. “Our main priorities over the next 90 days are to keep the service up, listen to new users for suggestions, and keep adding smaller features weekly.”

Feedly has been moving quickly to capitalize on the attention Google’s announcement brought the company, which has benefitted Feedly in terms of app store domination in particular, where its native clients have been topping the charts. The company has also been reassuring users that not only did it expect the Google Reader shutdown, it already had a transition plan in place: all you have to do is sign up for Feedly before Reader is gone, and you’ll be set.

Clearly, many people have followed that advice. But today’s changes are more about keeping those users around for the long haul.

What’s New

For starters, Feedly has revamped its search and discovery engines, a mostly under-the-hood improvement which improves the speed of searching, and brings over 50 million RSS feeds to the search engine’s index. A “smart topic completion” feature helps you find new feeds faster on mobile’s small-screened interface, as it means less typing is involved. Meanwhile, Feedly is now tapping into its community’s behavior to improve its search algorithms – recommending feeds based on popularity. This feature is designed to improve over time, the company says, noting that the more you use Feedly to search, categorize, follow and favorite feeds, the better the feature becomes.

Another new section called “Must Reads” allows you to track your most-watched feeds without the need for special folders. This now appears in the sidebar navigation next to the “Today” and “Saved for Later” sections. Moutran clarifies that, for now, this section is meant for personal organization purposes only – it’s a way to have quick access to the feeds you “absolutely want to see all updates from,” he says. However, he adds that Feedly might use this data in the future for search engine relevance improvements, but only in aggregate; it won’t show others which posts you’ve indicated are “Must Reads,” that is.

Sharing improvements have also been introduced, with support for Google+, and settings that let you pick which sharing options (including Pocket and Buffer, too) will appear as a shortcut on the main toolbar.

The company says it tested the beta of this new mobile release with more than 500 users over the past 10 weeks, giving a special shout-out to Squarespace founder and CEO Anthony Casalena, who has offered his own feedback, as well.

As noted above, the biggest benefit to Google Reader users, who are just looking to duplicate their same Reader experience elsewhere, is the more compact title-only view. Feedly has already been working to make it easier on those transitioning to its web client, and this is the continuation of those efforts.

Feedly’s Biz Model: Freemium

Most importantly, perhaps, Feedly is finally talking publicly about its business model. And yes, it will ask some users to pay.

“We’ve been asked the question of Feedly’s viability a lot recently,” Moutran says. “We have heard from a significant proportion of our users that they would be willing to pay for Feedly. They love and depend on our service, and want to make sure Feedly will be there in the future,” he tells us. “We have also heard from our power users that they would like deeper integration with other services they use and pay for, like Evernote and Dropbox. We intend to launch a premium version of Feedly this year on a subscription basis that would include new features for power users.”

Moutran also notes that Feedly has been working with publishers on efforts that would allow its users to discover, purchase and access premium content, such as those behind “paywalls,” or only available on a subscription basis, for example.

The updated Feedly mobile apps are appearing in their respective app stores as of 9 AM PT, or you can download them from here.

There are all sorts of startups looking to make life easier, including a whole bunch trying to make ordering lunch a no-brainer. Chewse is the newest entrant into the food delivery game, as it seeks to provide office admins a new, easy way to get lunch catered. To do so, the company has raised $1 million in seed funding from a group of investors that include Chris Sacca and 500 Startups.

Unlike Postmates’ Get It Now, Seamless, or GrubHub, Chewse is focused on getting offices of workers fed, and its target decision maker is the office manager tasked with making sure that all employees are happy. In that respect, Chewse is more like Y Combinator-backed startups ZeroCater or Caviar. The idea is to match those folks with good, high-quality food that can be delivered, mostly to cure lunch-starved office workers.

Like Arram Sabeti, who founded ZeroCater after serving as office admin for Justin.tv and being tasked with ordering the team lunch every day, Chewse co-founder Tracy Lawrence has a similar story. She too was the person who had to make daily lunch orders for her office, and after hours of daily phone calls and faxes, decided there had to be a better way to do it.

So Chewse was born.

The startup seeks to set itself apart by providing a curated list of restaurants that the Chewse team has already tried. See, Lawrence is a big foodie, and knew just about all the restaurants in her hometown of Los Angeles, where Chewse got its start. And she wanted to make sure that the meals available would pass her rigorous standards before they might, you know, make others happy.

Thanks to the curated aspect, Chewse customers are more likely to place orders than if they were faced with the unlimited choices of services like Seamless or Grubhub. “Customers see and trust that it’s curated, and they’re willing to try new things without worrying that the delivery is late or the food is terrible,” Lawrence told me. It’s also about giving those clients ways to place group orders that make navigating around dietary restrictions easy and painless.

The key for Chewse, in addition to finding good food, is to find restaurants that already do catering and delivery, and that can handle the demands of serving to a full office environment. For restaurants, the pitch is more business and more regular business from corporate clients. While the restaurants handle preparation and fulfillment, Chewse helps to find the customers — office admins who were otherwise at a loss for finding something new and interesting multiple times a week.

Chewse launched last July in L.A. and has been growing rapidly in that market ever since. It’s got a pretty good customer retention rate, with about 70 percent of all users coming back to place a second order. The company has had good luck with big corporate clients like Wells Fargo and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The Chewse team is looking to expand into new markets. That’s where the funding comes in. Chewse has raised more than $1 million in seed funding from investors such as Chris Sacca, Telegraph Hill, InnoSpring, Benjamin Ling, Richard Chen, and 500 Startups. Now based in San Francisco, the three-person team hopes to hire a few more people who can bring good meals to even more office workers in L.A. and beyond.

Lawrence wasn’t ready to say where the company’s second market will be. The first market, L.A., was picked mainly because that’s where the team was at the time it launched. But now in San Francisco, the company has some interesting choices ahead. The food delivery market in SF is crowded, to say the least, with aforementioned ZeroCater and Caviar already serving up to startup and corporate clients here.

“The first market is circumstance. The second market is more of a gamble,” Lawrence told me. The team was somewhat lucky to have started in L.A., which is the second-largest corporate catering market in the U.S. behind New York City. And while the Big Apple is appealing, she said there’s also opportunity in markets like Dallas and Seattle. Wherever it goes next, Chewse expects to open for business there in the next six-to-nine months.

For hungry office workers, that’s good news.

Percolate, a startup that helps clients create and share content, is taking a big step in what co-founder James Gross calls the company’s “visual strategy.”

Obviously, images are a big part of what businesses want to share on social media. While they could do that by sharing through Percolate already, the service didn’t include many significant features to make the process easier. That’s changing today, with the launch of integrations with Getty Images and Aviary.

Thanks to the Getty Images partnership, Percolate customers now have access to a broader library of photos, a library where they don’t have to worry about whether or not they have the rights to use the images (because they already know the answer is yes).

And that library is automatically sorted using Percolate’s technology, which tries to understand what topics are relevant to a company at a given time, and highlights photos based on those topics. Gross said the goal is to make the process as easy as possible, but if the algorithm doesn’t surface the image you’re looking for, you can also search the photos based on things like tags.

Once a client has found a photo that they want to share — either from the Getty Images library or from the images they’ve uploaded themselves — they can use Aviary’s photo-editing tools from directly within Percolate. Gross edited a couple of images for me, adding filters and text in just a minute or two, giving the photos a bit more flair as well as adding a relevant company or hashtag.

“Brands are trying to make photos look more and more organic, more and more like people are used to,” Gross said. “Adding any sort of filter can have a very powerful effect on what might be a very standard photo.”

In exchange for the simplicity of the interface, Percolate users are giving up some of the features included in a product like Photoshop, but Gross said, “They don’t need all the tools of Photoshop with 95 to 100 percent of these images.”

The Getty Images photo library and Aviary editing tools are now available to Percolate clients as part of the basic package. The company is also announcing that it has partnered with LinkedIn, so its clients can now share content on that network, as well.

Aereo, the streaming TV startup based out of NYC, has just scored a significant win in its ongoing court battles thanks to a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit today (via Verge). The Court rejected an appeal from a group of TV networks against an earlier decision claiming that Aereo did not in fact infringe upon broadcaster copyrights.

The appeals decision, rendered today, means that defendants including ABC, Disney, CBS, NBC, Universal, Telemundo and WJNU-TV will have to pursue an appeal with the Supreme Court if it wants the original decision overturned. The previous court’s decision to deny the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction means that Aereo will still be able to operate its services and transmit programs that are still airing on their parent networks. The decision in part hinges on the District Court’s finding that Aereo’s antennas operate independent of one another, like any HDTV over-the-air antenna, rather than as a single unit.

The decision is good news for Aereo’s plans to work with TV providers and ISPs to continue expanding its subscriber base. It would be much more difficult for the startup to curry favor with companies that count Aereo’s legal opponents as close partners. And the decision sets a precedent that helps more firmly establish its technology on solid legal ground, which is another bonus for negotiating with content and network partners capable of getting it in front of more users.

Update: Aereo has issued an official press release about the ruling. The release includes a statement from Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia celebrating the court’s decision:

Today’s decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals again validates that Aereo’s technology falls squarely within the law and that’s a great thing for consumers who want more choice and flexibility in how, when and where they can watch television,” said Chet Kanojia, Aereo CEO and Founder. “Today’s ruling to uphold Judge Nathan’s decision sends a powerful message that consumer access to free-to-air broadcast television is still meaningful in this country and that the promise and commitment made by the broadcasters to program in the public interest in exchange for the public’s spectrum, remains an important part of our American fabric.

We may be a small start-up, but we’ve always believed in standing up and fighting for our consumers.  We are grateful for the court’s thoughtful analysis and decision and we look forward to continuing to build a successful business that puts consumers first

The value of my Steam account is $492.65, and the sum of it requires 155.02 GB of space storage space. Awesome. And my Dad said I would never do anything worthwhile.

Steam Gauge is the product of Hacker News user jprusik and is worth several minutes of your time. It pulls data from public steam accounts through the Steam Web API and aggregates everything into a sortable and exportable list. You can even share the data on Twitter and Google Plus. And since it pulls public accounts, you can check up on your buddies’ obsession, too.

There are some caveats. It’s not 100% accurate. While my account might have a face value of $492.65, I didn’t spend that much. Steam Gauge clearly doesn’t pull how much you paid for each game, just the value of each game. For instance I know I didn’t pay $39.99 for Half Life 2: Lost Coast.

Hopefully future builds will show play times, which is the most telling stat available through the Steam client. I’m particularly proud of the time I’ve put into Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

Mailbird, a very Sparrow-like email client for Windows users, is launching into beta this week with plans to take its email desktop app beyond where Sparrow left off  before being acquired by Google last July. The similarity between the two clients is striking, but co-founder and CEO Andrea Loubier insists that Mailbird isn’t copying Sparrow – it’s using that mail client’s look and feel for inspirational purposes only. And those similarities are only skin deep.

“By no means are we copying Sparrow,” says Loubier of the two apps’ differences, besides the fact that one is for Mac and iOS users, while the other is for Windows. “What we’re using right now – it’s not like it’s something that only Sparrow did,” she adds. “It’s what we’re seeing as a trend in app design right now.

“We looked at different apps that have this modern, flat design and went with those. They’re not exactly identical,” Loubier notes.

To the layperson who’s not a regular Sparrow user, the differences might be harder to spot, of course. And now that Sparrow is Google-owned, it’s unclear to what extent Sparrow’s new owners will have an issue with the user interface inspiration. However, given that the app is starting off with support for Gmail and Google Apps on Windows computers, Mailbird will probably get the chance to fly.

Though it was important to address the look-alike issue out of the gate here, the differences between Sparrow today and Mailbird don’t extend much further than that. Under the hood, Mailbird is working to bring some unique features to desktop mail clients, the most notable of which is an email app store. The company will open source that part of its code on GitHub, allowing third-party developers the ability to build their own integrated experiences into Mailbird itself.

The Mailbird team has already written some integrations of its own – not full email apps, but extensions – for Google Calendar and Dropbox to start. “The idea is that you can access everything from your email application, rather than have to navigate outside of it,” Loubier explains. “It’s like a one-stop shop in that sense.”

Mailbird also supports more advanced features, such as shortcuts, for those who want them. In fact, it supports the same shortcuts found in Gmail today, and will also allow users to customize their own shortcuts for things like compose or inline replies, for example.

“That’s the thing about the app – it’s super lightweight and simple, but there’s a lot of deep functionality about it,” Loubier says.

Another idea on the roadmap is a plan to include an email dashboard called “Wingman,” which would show users how productive they’re being within their email (or, perhaps, the opposite) with stats for how long you spend composing messages, turnaround time for replies, who you email the most, and more. (That sounds inspired by Google’s own Account Activity Report or Gmail Meter, actually).

And Mailbird will move to support multiple accounts in the future, too. For now, though, it supports a “send as” multi-identity feature for Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo and Hotmail/Outlook.com.

Mailbird is currently based out of Bali, where’s it’s hosted under the incubator Contenga International, following Mailbird co-founder Michael Bodekaer’s Bali-based startup event, Project Getaway. Bodekaer has invested in the startup, but other than that, Mailbird is entirely boostrapped.

TechCrunch readers can gain early access ahead of this week’s official debut, as well as access to the Pro version for free for six months, which will include more features in the future. (Pro pricing is $12/year/user, will remove ads, and include “Wingman,” multi-identity and more; Business accounts with five-plus users will be $9/year/user). The sign-up is here: http://www.getmailbird.com/signup/?ref=techcrunch.

Mailbird works on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Windows 8 (desktop not tablet). Plans to extend to other platforms – yes, including Mac – are in the works.

The full-carbon Bronson is a unique bike for Santa Cruz — it is the company’s first with both a 1×11 drivetrain and 650b wheels.

Bonobos‘ newly hired San Francisco engineering team is fracturing, but there’s no disaster. Bonobos CTO Mike Hart has departed the company to become a co-founder, along with Cory Hicks, of a brand-new business.

After cooking up some hot new personalization technology at Bonobos, Hart and five other engineers from the team will be spinning out that technology into a standalone company separate from Bonobos.

Meanwhile, half of the remaining engineers at Bonobos will be relocating to New York, while the other six have left the company. To be clear, everyone in Palo Alto was offered a relocation package, but some chose New York, while others chose to stay and work on the Hart/Hicks venture, and the rest decided to leave. There were zero layoffs.

Here’s the story:

Cross-Coastal Dilemma

In late January, Bonobos CEO and founder Andy Dunn began to realize that the bi-coastal situation wasn’t working out — the Bonobos brand and retail teams worked out of New York, while the engineering arm remained in Silicon Valley. Not only was traveling back and forth all the time financially taxing on the company, but it was also physically exhausting.

“It was a different world in 2011, when we were looking to build out our engineering team,” said Andy. “We got the impression that NY was light on engineering talent.” For that reason, Bonobos built out an engineering office in Palo Alto and staffed it with 18 amazing engineers, including Hart and Hicks from Netflix.

But after seeing the cross-coastal offices play out, Andy soon realized that Bonobos required co-located employees, and decided to relocate the Palo Alto engineers to New York.

As Andy worked through this dilemma, Hart was also coming to a realization. He and his PA team were working on a new personalization product for Bonobos based on his years of experience at Netflix handling the same type of curation issues.

The Split

After a little A/B testing on the site using the new personalization tech, Bonobos saw a “really strong revenue lift,” according to Dunn. Within a few weeks, a decision had been made: Hart would stay in Palo Alto with a handful of developers from Bonobos who were truly passionate about this new venture, and Dunn would try to persuade the remaining engineers to head out to NY.

According to Dunn, the relocation package was a “meaningful one,” including a few five-figure checks. However, not everyone wants to pick up their life and move to New York, especially once they’re entrenched in the Valley, so the 18 developers in Bonobos Palo Alto office split three ways.

Six, including Hart and Hicks, will be working on the mysterious personalization product. Six product team members will come to New York, and the remaining six are no longer with the company.

But that’s not to say that Bonobos is reducing its engineering efforts — the opposite, in fact. The company plans to have 20 full-stack engineers on the team by the end of this year, and from there grow the engineering team to 30 over the course of the next two years.

Bonobos has also promoted Jon Czaja from VP of Operations to Chief Operating Officer. He was formerly Director of Supply Chain Operations at Walmart, and is the first COO at Bonobos.

“We just raised a $30 million round, with which we will become fully profitable,” said Dunn. “We want to make this shift at a time when we’re financially healthy and ready.”

The Hart/Hicks Venture

As for this new personalization product, Mike is keeping pretty mum about the whole thing. So far very little is known about the new company. According to Hart, this product is actually in A/B testing on Bonobos right now, though you’d be hard-pressed to notice it. It works a lot like personalization on Netflix, but “far more subtly,” says Hart.

The team is currently focused on product development, but Hart mentioned that he’ll probably start looking to raise very soon, and Dunn said that Bonobos would love to be a shareholder, considering the project is Bonobos-bred technology. Hart confirmed that Bonobos will most likely be a participant in upcoming funding rounds, and that Bonobos will probably be the first real customer on the platform if all goes as planned.

The Hart/Hicks Venture will be a platform-as-a-service company, handling the personalization algorithms for its clients.

The product is quite a ways away from a launch — the Hart/Hicks venture (as I like to call it) doesn’t even have an official name yet — but you should certainly expect to hear more out of Hart and Bonobos in the future.

Additional reporting by Josh Constine and John Biggs

Super Awesome SF Party A has just ended, and you need to figure out how to get to Super Awesome SF Party B stat… and preferably by spending as little money as possible.

So what do you do? Muni? Uber? Lyft? Sidecar? Hoof it? You could switch between half a dozen different apps and try to figure out which of the options is cheapest and fastest…

Or you could just open Corral Rides.

Corral Rides (“Corral” as in the thing that holds a bunch of cows, not “Coral” as in the amazing ocean animals) is a transportation aggregator. You punch in where you are and where you wanna go, and it breaks down the prices and times for each of your options. Walking? It’ll take you a while, but it’s free. Bus? The next one leaves in 10 minutes. Need to get there fast? There’s an Uber driver 2 minutes away, but it’ll cost you about $40 bucks.

(Note: Because of the services the app focuses on, it really works best in San Francisco at the moment.)

“But wait!” shouts a developer back at home. “Uber and Lyft and Sidecar don’t have public APIs! How are they getting this information?”

Yeah… about that.

In a nutshell: it’s a bit of a hack. But don’t panic! It’s the good kind of hacking. Or, at least, the not-terrible kind of hacking. The Corral guys had to sniff out the APIs that Uber and co. are using to grab data in their own apps, and use those. They stop short of tapping any private APIs that require user authentication for security reasons, which means that the app has to switch you over to the appropriate app when you actually try to summon a car.

“But wait!” shouts the developer who seems to really enjoy shouting things at his screen. “Isn’t there a chance those services will get upset about this?”

Yeah, of course. But Corral is willing to play friendly:

“If any of them email us and ask us to stop,” says co-founder Noam Szpiro, “we will. The way we see it though, we’re just sending them free traffic and customers. If they want to be the option not listed, that’s up to them.”

Corral Rides was built in about a month by Noam and his co-founder Snir Kodesh, both ex-Ooyala engineers. Corral Rides is actually a spin-off — a pivot, if you will — from a project they’d started a few months prior, which was meant to do a similar sort of aggregation across a broader array of apps (including things like restaurant reviews and reservations, movie times, etc.) When they looked at the data and realized that the vast majority of their test users were looking for transportation info, they decided to slim down.

Corral is thus far entirely bootstrapped, and they’re not searching for funding just yet (though they mention that they might look into joining an accelerator or incubator in the upcoming season).

It’s worth noting that this one app isn’t their entire long-term vision — it just plays a small part in it. They’d only fill me in on the big picture off-the-record, so I can’t say much — but what I can say is that if it all comes together, it’s going to be pretty great. These two guys are ones to watch.

You can find Corral Rides in the iOS App Store here, with an Android app being the next thing on the team’s to-do list.

Flipboard this week announced a new version of its app that allows anyone to make a “Magazine,” which is a curated collection of stories based on any topic that you can think of. The company has shared that over 100,000 magazines have been created since the feature launched.

We’ve decided to put together our own magazine called “TechCrunch Weekly,” which will be full of the best TechCrunch stories from the past week, refreshed every Friday afternoon.

As you know, our staff works hard to write about every technology topic imaginable, and it’s hard to keep up with all of it. Along with the really great “flipping” experience of Flipboard on mobile devices, using the app is one of the best ways to catch up on news that you missed because you were checking Facebook working, or to give yourself a chance to re-read something that you only skimmed the first time.

Just to give you an idea of what you’ll find in this week’s edition, there’s possibly a Facebook Android OS coming out, Bitcoin’s worth a billion, Google Glass explorers got the boot, BlackBerry did things wrong, OUYA is a real product and paying for things with fingerprints is a thing. We’ll also be sharing some of our more interesting guest posts from the weekend. That’s a pretty full week of news, and now you can sit back, relax and flip through all of the stories with Flipboard and TechCrunch Weekly on your iOS or Android device.

Click or tap here to check it out, or search for TechCrunch on Flipboard. Under the main navigation up top, find the magazine, subscribe, read and wait for a new edition to show up with new content every Friday afternoon.

This is the future of publishing and it’s fun to be involved.

AngelList’s Naval Ravikant joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for our Ask A VC series, where we put VCs in the hot seat.

Ravikant talked about the currency of Silicon Valley, which he says is deals shared, talent referred, and acquirers introduced. He explains that AngelList, a service he co-founded that matches early-stage startups with investors, puts these transactions online. We also chatted about his secret to picking the right startups for angel investments (Ravikant invested in Twitter, Foursquare, BranchOut, Codecademy, Uber, Heyzap and Disqus).

Check out the video above for more!

Constant, close contact with your friends. That’s the promise of a “Facebook phone.” The modified Android OS and mobile homescreen replacement that sources tell us Facebook will unveil April 4th pushes your social life to you so fetching it isn’t interruptive. The news feed brought us ambient intimacy, but Facebook’s homescreen could turn that social graph awareness into a sixth sense.

While it only takes a quarter of a minute each time, reaching for your phone, waking it from sleep, firing up the Facebook app, and loading your latest notifications does pull you out of the present. Checking the news feed for the latest photos and stories from your friends is a conscious decision. You’re either living your life or reading Facebook. The social network would surely prefer those to be one and the same.

If that data automatically fed right into your homescreen, every time you opened your phone you’d be instantly up to date on conversations with friends and get a peek into their lives. And if Facebook can pipe this content into the lock screen, it’d be even more immersive, like a true heads-up display. It’s a deeper way to plug in, where the shell disappears and you gain a more visceral connection to the people you care about.

This is the purpose of what Facebook plans to launch next week, which my sources got me the scoop on right when the big press event was announced yesterday. It’s a Facebook-ified homescreen that will be shown off on an HTC handset running a version of Android modified by Facebook, similar to what Amazon did to create the Kindle operating system.

Making Facebook an indigenous resident of your phone’s homescreen could accelerate your social life. It might reduce the time it takes you to respond to messages or continue a comment thread. If a friend is down the street, Facebook could have a better chance of advising you to join them. Giving Facebook a way to tell you more directly about what’s going on in your immediate vicinity could be important as it focuses more on local discovery.

If this all seems like Facebook overload to you, you probably won’t buy the HTC phone just to sport this new homescreen. In the past, sales and surveys of sentiments about a Facebook-integrated handset have shown little demand of a ‘Facebook Phone’ with a capital P.

But if it didn’t interfere with or detract from your other apps and overall smartphone experience, but just augmented it with live social info, a ‘Facebook phone’ with a lowercase ‘p’ and its social homescreen could become something you wouldn’t mind having. Maybe it wouldn’t be a priority when buying a handset, but “Facebook Home-enabled” could be another feature in a device’s “Pros” column. And if Facebook made a more basic version of the homescreen replacement available as a traditional app download for all Android phones, I think a fair amount of hardcore social networkers would install it.

After  all, it would put you on the cutting edge of Facebook’s technology. Similar to how Facebook uses its standalone apps like Messenger and its new Android beta club to field test new features with a set of guinea pig early adopters, Facebook Home could let people experience the next wave of social before it trickles down to iOS and the rest of the world.

That, combined with the immersive, non-interruptive experience I describe above are why I see Facebook’s new “Home On Android” as its version of the iWatch or Google Glass. It might not appeal to everyone just yet, but some will want to experience Facebook’s vision for the future of friendship.

[Image Credit: Iron Man / Marvel / Disney, Haxters Lab]