Category: Tech news

Aaron Batalion, the co-founder and CTO of daily deals site LivingSocial, is leaving the company. He announced his departure in a post on his personal blog published Friday afternoon.

Here is the full text of his blog post:

“Moving on to new adventures…

What an incredible journey it has been since June of 2007, when the four of us knew only our direction, but definitely not our destination. After much soul searching, I have decided to leave LivingSocial to pursue some new ideas. No new adventure to announce yet, just a urge to go create… that there is more to do.

As I look back today, we have processed billions in commerce transactions and have sent tens of billions of emails on technology we created. We took a simple two-week prototype and scaled it to an international business with thousands of fellow employees around the world. We built a culture I am proud of and millions of consumers around the world have experienced their local cities because of our products. More importantly, we created an incredible team with many more strong moves yet to come. Knowing this makes me confident in LivingSocial’s future and the vision of local we have all been fighting for.

I am incredibly proud of what the team has accomplished to date and have been so fortunate to play a role in this amazing journey. My decision to depart has in no way been easy. The experience and, most importantly, the friendships… have been the best of my career.

Always live hungry,

Aaron”

And here is the internal memo regarding Batalion’s departure from LivingSocial’s CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy:

“Hey folks,

I wanted to pass along an update.

Over the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Aaron Batalion, first at Revolution Health, and then as a co-founder of LivingSocial. Now we’ll get to see what else is in store for Aaron in the future. He’ll be moving from a day-to-day role as an employee to an outside advisory role, where he’ll help me and the company with hiring senior technologists and act on a consultative basis with the technology team, among other things.

Aaron has been an important part of LivingSocial’s story since there wasn’t even a LivingSocial, just a Hungry Machine and he’ll continue to be important moving forward. I’ve tried to emulate his consistent drive and passion, but with limited success because there is only one “Tank”. We owe him a great deal of thanks for the long days, nights and weekends he has given to this company and in helping to grow and scale our technology team. Please wish him the best of luck as he moves on to whatever is next outside of LS and transitions to an advisory role at the company. If you’re ever in SF, where he’s been based since last summer, don’t hesitate to drop him a line.

– Tim”

Batalion’s departure comes just one month after LivingSocial raised $110 million in a massive new round of funding. The company has raised more than $800 million since it was founded in 2007. It’s been a complicated road in some ways lately for the company, which laid off some 400 staffers back in November. While its 2012 revenue was $536 million, the company is not turning a profit, posting a net loss for the year of $650 million.

The fresh funding secured in February (which was raised at a $1.5 billion valuation) is sure to kick off some new projects for LivingSocial in the months ahead, but it seems that one core member of LivingSocial’s team will not be a part of them.

The next version of jQuery, the popular JavaScript library, will drop support for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft isn’t very bullish about getting developers to use jQuery 2.0 and HTML5 to develop “a new wave of jQuery-based Windows Store applications.”

As Microsoft announced today, Microsoft Open Technologies, the company’s wholly owned open source-focused subsidiary, and the JavaScript experts at appendTo, have been working with the jQuery community to ensure that the next version of the framework offers full support for Windows Store applications.

Developers could obviously already build Windows Store/Metro apps with jQuery, but thanks to this cooperation, the process for developing jQuery 2.0-based Windows Store applications should now be smoother, safer and more streamlined.

As appendTo’s director of support Jonathan Sampson wrote in today’s announcement, jQuery always met the language criteria for Windows Store applications, but “Windows 8 exposes all the WinRT APIs within the HTML5 development environment, which comes with a new security model that made some code and common practices of jQuery flagged as unsafe in the context of a Windows Store application. AppendTo reviewed and re-authored portions of jQuery core to bring it into alignment with the Windows security model, as well as identified key areas where alternative patterns would need to be substituted for actually-used conventions.”

Even though Microsoft has always stressed this in the run-up to the Windows 8 launch, quite a few developers are still unaware that they can use their web development skills to write desktop apps for Windows 8 and Windows RT. Developers, by the way, can already use a number of other open-source JavaScript frameworks, including backbone.js, Knockout.JS and YUI.

As Deve Methvin, the president of the jQuery Foundation noted in a prepared statement today, that’s also something his organization is interested in. “The jQuery team is excited about the new environments where jQuery 2.0 can be used. HTML and JavaScript developers want to take their jQuery knowledge with them to streamline the development process wherever they work. jQuery 2.0 gives them the ability to do that in Windows 8 Store applications. We appreciate the help from appendTo for both its patches and testing of jQuery 2.0 and MS Open Tech for its technical support.”

Gillmor Gang – Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recording for today has concluded.

It’s only been six months since cloud data warehousing company Treasure Data launched its services, but they’re already reporting some impressive growth figures.

Treasure Data achieved month-to-month profitability last year, and they’re well on track to achieve a 500 percent increase in revenue this year. They’ve also amassed 50 high-profile clients, which include a leading social gaming company, a mobile advertising platform based in France, and some other Fortune 500 companies – unsurprisingly, Treasure declined to name names.

Treasure Data is basically a massive warehouse in the cloud for companies to store their data. Big companies like IBM, Oracle, and Teradata offer data services as well, but with their rates going as high as $5 million, that’s not something every business can afford.

Treasure Data, on the other hand, costs $1,500 to $2,500 a month with a year-long commitment. That’s a low enough price point for companies that can’t afford or do not have the resources to roll out services of their own.

They’re also launching a new distributed database called Plazma, which offers significant improvements over HDFS (Hadoop Distributed Files System). Plazma is significantly better than HDFS precisely because it’s more efficient and is able to compile and parse data at a much faster rate.

“The reason we did this was for robustness, reliability, and performance,” says Kiyoto Tamura, VP of Product at Treasure Data. “Hadoop distributed several problems around reliability, and we knew we could do better.”

With Plazma, Treasure Data boasts that their systems are processing more than 300 billion data points every day.

Happy Friday, everyone. As you know, we love giving things away here at TechCrunch, and this week, we have a Fitbit One Wireless Activity + Sleep Tracker and an Aria Wi-Fi Smart Scale to give away. But that’s not all!

TechCrunch Disrupt NY is right around the corner and tickets are going super fast, so we want to give away another ticket to a deserving person who would like to attend (and then party with us). The winner of this giveaway will win all three — the Fitbit One ($99.95), the Smart Scale ($129.95) and a free ticket to Disrupt NY (valued at $1,995 right now).

Want a shot to win all three? Follow the steps below.

1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

• Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TCDisrupt hashtag), or
• Leave us a comment below telling us something fun – anything!

The contest will start now and end April 5th at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet or comment once, or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner once the giveaway is over. Please note the winner will only receive one (1) free Disrupt ticket, and it does not include airfare or hotel.

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

Video question-and-answer site VYou launched with a unique premise, allowing users to create video responses to questions posed to them by other community members. But now, about two-and-a-half years later, the company is sending an email to its community members informing them that its site will be shut down next week.

In a message being emailed to users, VYou says that it’s “no longer possible” to keep the consumer-facing side of the business running. And so, next Wednesday, April 3 the company will cut off the ability of community members to record new videos. On April 5, the site will be taken down entirely.

After April 5, users who wish to receive an archive of the videos that they’ve recorded over the last few years need just email [email protected] from the address that they created their account with, requesting a copy of their videos. The company says that it will send an zip file with all their content in MP4 format, with videos titled after the question that users were answering.

The shutdown is happening after the consumer-facing side of VYou failed to take off, and also as the team is pursuing opportunities with publishers and brands as a white-label platform. VYou launched in October 2010 to allow users to answer questions from their friends and other community members. But what made VYou different was that all of its responses were done by video, creating a whole new interaction model for community members.

Over the past few years, the company has tried a bunch of things to increase user engagement on the site, from allowing users to follow one another and to pose broad questions to the community, to enable users to take questions posed to them on Twitter and to answer them in video format. Even so, the company never really got the traction it was hoping for, particularly after raising $3 million in funding.

While VYou never got huge, it did have a loyal community of users who would post videos all the time. But like Daily Booth, Formspring, and other startups who had a small number of very active users, it was enough to keep things going over the long term. And that’s a bit disappointing to VYou founder Steve Spurgat, who thinks the VYou model might have just a little bit too ahead of its time to hit mainstream America.

“Video hasn’t been adopted the same way we thought it would be two years ago,” Spurgat told me by phone. And so, keeping up a consumer-facing site just didn’t seem worthwhile. But the company has built some cool technology and is working with partners to keep that alive through embeds on third-party sites and other integrations. The team of five will continue working on the technology for clients who wish to use it to engage with their fans. While Spurgat says that’s not as fun as the consumer site, it makes more sense now for the company to focus on an enterprise model.

Full text of the email to the VYou community is below:

Dearest VYou Community,

Video answers to life’s questions, spread all over the web. VYou was founded on that simple idea and generated millions of videos, from YouTubers falling off of chairs to Martin Luther King III sharing stories about his father.

Now, sadly, this email comes with unfortunate news. VYou is shutting down. Keeping the website running is no longer possible.

Next Wednesday, April 3rd, the website will no longer allow you to record videos. On Friday, the website will come down entirely. You will be able to receive all of your videos at that time (more info here).

Through all the peaks and even the outages, the tight knit VYou community has meant so much to us. The VYou team is still together and working on awesome stuff – this won’t be the last you hear from us.

We’ll still be around, always. Feel free to email us at [email protected]

I’ve long believed that touchscreens leave a certain something to be desired when it comes to playing games, and if a new (and very curious) report holds true, Apple may feel the same way. According to PocketGamer.biz’s Jon Jordan, Apple has been meeting with developers on-site at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to talk about a forthcoming Apple game controller.

Jordan’s multiple developer sources claim that the Cupertino company has booked a meeting room under an assumed name to talk about the game-centric device, though they weren’t able to shed any light on what the thing will look like or when it will actually see the light of day. That said, Apple is expected to hold an iPad-centric event in April so it’s possible that this controller may be officially unveiled in just a few weeks.

At first glance, the prospect of Apple churning out a game controller of all things seems downright silly, but after chewing on it for a while the notion doesn’t seem quite as outlandish. You’d be hard-pressed to think of OS X as prominent a platform for gaming as Windows is (though some big-league developers are working to change that), but iOS plays home to a staggering number of games and it’s not inconceivable to think that Apple would want to enhance the sorts of gaming experiences available to iPhone, iPod and iPad users. As such, a game controller seems like the sort of thing that Apple would agonize over getting right, and it appears that Apple may have been doing just that.

In the site’s 2012 review of the 3rd generation iPad, AnandTech’s Anand Lal Shimpi and Vivek Gowri let slip a tantalizing tidbit when discussing the iPad’s faculty as a gaming machine: ”I know of an internal Apple project to bring a physical controller to market, but whether or not it will ever see the light of day remains to be seen,” the review reads.

What’s more Apple has been seen bulking itself up with patents that relate to a potential gaming push for at least a few years now. This patent from 2008 describes an accessory that wraps around a portable electronic device with touchscreen (sound familiar?) and includes a standard D-Pad and button, while this one spotted in 2012 takes a slightly different approach. Either way, these patents plus the AnandTech comments make it rather clear that Apple has been mulling over a physical game controller (or something like it) and it may be time for those ambitions to come to fruition.

I’ve reached out to Apple, but the company has declined to comment.

(Also, here’s hoping it looks nothing like the Pippin controller pictured above.)

This week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we celebrate episode number two of everyone’s favorite audio file! We also talk about 3D printing, the Ouya console, and the Facebook Fone AKA the FF.

This week we are joined by our quiet intern, Michael Seo.

We are slowly by surely working the kinks out of this process, so bear with us. However, we invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and appreciate all those who listened to our inaugural effort last week. 17,000 listens is nothing to sneeze at and we sincerely love you for putting up with us.

Click here to download an MP3 of this show.
You can subscribe to the show via RSS.
Subscribe in iTunes

Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Video ad distribution company Jun Group has launched a new, wholly-owned subsidiary called HyprMX, offering mediation tools for mobile publishers and developers manage video ads from multiple sources.

HyprMX CEO Corey Weiner said that Jun Group runs its ads through hundreds of publishers, and it found that some of those publishers needed more help managing their inventory: “They’re just not in the ad business — they’re in the content business, they’re in the games business.” So HyprMX helps those publishers run ads from multiple sources, including Jun Group.

There are a number of mediation options when it comes to standard display advertising, but Weiner said it’s an unmet need in video. The other challenge on mobile is delivering video ads in a way that doesn’t annoy users. For example, preroll ads are even more annoying on mobile, because you can’t just ignore them — they take over your phone for the duration of the ad. That’s why HyprMX focuses on incentivized ads, namely videos that users are rewarded for watching.

Of course, there’s a potential conflict of interest there. In some situations, HyprMX will be determining whether to run an ad from Jun Group or from one of its competitors. But Weiner said, “We’ve formed a Chinese Wall between the two companies.” The only thing the HyprMX platform cares about is maximizing the amount of money that the publisher makes on each ad view, and if an ad from another source will be more lucrative than an ad from Jun Group, HyprMX will choose the competitor.

At the same time, Weiner said the new company has an advantage in signing up publishers, since they’ve usually heard of or have a relationship with Jun Group already.

Twitter’s Vine app received a small, but notable, update today which allows the videos you create to be embedded across the web. The embedded posts are available in two styles (simple and postcard), and can be created directly within the mobile app itself or from a post’s page on Vine.co.

In order to access the new functionality, users will have to update their iOS application from the iTunes App Store. An Android version of Vine, unfortunately, is still not available. Once installed, you just tap the more button (the one with the dots “…”) at the bottom right of your Vine post, and choose the “Share Post” button from the menu that appears. Then choose the “Embed” option to grab the code, which is available from a link you can copy or email.

As for the embedding options, the “Simple” view shows just the Vine video itself, while the “Postcard” view is branded, and includes your name and date of the post at the top, as well as your post description below. The embeds are available in 320px, 480px, and 600px sizes.

The updated app also introduces expanded Facebook and Twitter sharing options. You’ll find options to post to these services from this “Share” screen both here on your own Vine posts, as well as on posts from others, provided they’ve first shared their post outside of Vine.

“When we launched Vine, we described posts as ‘little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life,’” writes Vine GM Dom Hofmann on the company blog. “With today’s update, you can display them almost anywhere,” he says.

Vine’s app already has interest from major brands, which Twitter casually highlighted today in the blog post announcing the features by pointing to Vines from MLB, CBS, and USA Today. This follows on news of Vine’s big win earlier this week, when the first Wolverine movie footage was released via a Vine “Tweaser” instead of a movie trailer. The company has also attracted attention from brands like GE, Urban Outfitters, Lucky Mag, Neiman Marcus, Walgreen, and several others, according to recent reports.

The updated app is here in App Store now.

The spring tech tour continues next week in Santa Clara with Deploycon, and I will be there to discuss the spectrum of PaaS providers and how they play across this broad, malleable and often manipulated sector of the market.

It has become apparent that the platform as a service (PaaS) market has reached a pivot point. I have written about two companies that have pivoted in recent weeks, and we should expect the transformation to continue as the forces build apps faster with ever more data.

It’s also evidence of a greater shift in the market to more standard ways to build apps and APIs. Developers often build out apps that require multiple APIs to connect. Data has to be accessed, signaling a greater need to develop a linking structure and visual way to see updates and interactions in the lifecycle process.

For context, I thought it would make sense to look at Krishnan Subramanian’s spectrum of the PaaS market and where the market players fit.

At every space on the spectrum is some level of abstraction. On the far left, business users get a high degree of abstraction but primarily so they can focus on creating apps out of custom processes, tasks and other business functions. Coding is not a requirement. Everything except making the connectors is done on the backend. Force.com and OrangeScape are the two most noticeable players while companies such as workXpress also compete in this market.

The further you get to the center, the abstraction comes with creating more sophisticated apps by having some control over the infrastructure. For example, Subramanian said use cases could be some big data applications or some real-time processing based on various performance parameters. It is about offering different choices. Cloudbees, Heroku, Appfog, and Google App Engine play in this space.

With private PaaS, the difference is choice. The developer can have a granular level of control but not necessarily have to worry about middleware or finely tuning the infrastructure. Extensible architectures give developers a way to scale if need be. Cloudfoundry.com, Cumulogic, Apprenda, OpenShift, Uhuru, ActiveState and Iron Foundry (Tier 3) are companies in this space.

PaaS players further to the right give developers the capability to do continuous development and provide access to the infrastructure but not worry about backend operations. These platforms also offer open-source plugins and other advanced features.

DevOps PaaS simplifies the “assembly” of services, providing capsules of sorts that allow the developer to custom build apps and push them into different types of infrastructure. Cloudify and Cloudsoft are the primary players at this place in the spectrum.

DevOps tools don’t offer much compared to Cloudify or Cloudsoft but do allow for more abstraction than IaaS providers at the extreme right of the spectrum. Are they even PaaS at all? That’s up for debate. DevOps providers include: Rightscale, Puppet Labs, Opscode, Enstratius and Scalr can all be considered DevOps PaaS providers.

Evident is the deep, cross-use of these different services. They overlap but also have any imaginable use case. But where is the market for these different services? That’s the big question to discuss when in Santa Clara next week. Here’s a link to register for the event. Use the code DCCOMP16 to get in free.

Sprightly, a newly launching startup whose founding team has an extensive history working in female-focused businesses, including Refinery29, Etsy, Chloe+Isabel, and others, is debuting its content aggregation platform on Monday, with a focus on verticals like fashion, beauty, design, decor, and more. TechCrunch has early invites (see below).

According to company co-founder Jorge Lopez, an early Etsy developer and until just recently, VP of Innovation at Refinery29, the original inspiration for the service was to build something that he describes as “a Reddit for women.” What he means by that is a system that aggregates content from around the web, which is then ranked in order to give you a real-time view into what’s currently popular.

“I love Reddit. It’s my favorite thing in the entire world,” Lopez explains. “You land on Reddit and you get the front page of the Internet. You get everything that’s important to you right then. It’s a snapshot of the world, and it’s very focused on recency.”

He then thought about the fact that there wasn’t a similar service designed just for women. (I’d argue that lots of women like Reddit, in fact, but Lopez is referring to those “traditional” female-friendly interests – fashion, beauty, home decor, etc. – the kind of categories that have led to Pinterest’s rapid growth.)

Working with Sprightly co-founder Pamela Castillo, previously of Chloe + Isabel, Fashism, Plum Alley, and Market Publique, they’ve spent a couple of months building Sprightly, which aggregates website and blog content in real-time, ranks what’s trending based on social media scores (as opposed to voting, like on Reddit), then presents users with a one-stop destination showing everything that’s popular today, as well as ways to drill down into other sections to explore even further.

If anything, the resulting product has more in common with Pinterest or Flipboard than it does with Reddit, as it turns out. Instead of user-submitted links and votes, Sprightly’s content comes from nearly 900 websites across the verticals it targets, as well as anything else a user wants to add on their own.

“We do the work for you, to some extent,” says Lopez. “We say, these are the cool blogs that we put together, but you still have the power to add whatever you think is really cool.” In the future, the plan is to allow users to follow each others lists of blogs, which is somewhat similar to Flipboard’s newly launched custom magazines, except the lists would contain the blogs themselves, not individual pieces of content.

As opposed to user voting, Sprightly determines what’s trending based on social media signals, including Facebook Likes, tweets, the blog’s overall popularity, Pinterest pins, and more. And in addition to populating its own front page of what to read, Sprightly will also send users an email of the top ten things they should read today. A mobile app (pictured, right), now being built by Chamera Paul, is planned for a May debut.

The other big difference between Sprightly and its original source of inspiration in Reddit, is that the site is also heavily focused on visual imagery, giving it a Pinterest-like feel. There are some 200,000 images now indexed across its service (including animated gifs, natch). But Pinterest, Lopez explains, doesn’t focus on currently trending content, but rather popularity over time.

“We saw Pinterest the morning after the Oscars, and it mentioned nothing of the Oscars,” says Lopez. “Meanwhile, Sprightly had Oscar content through every single vertical, be it beauty, be it fashion – everything is completely based on recency. It’s like, ‘this is what’s hot right now,’” he says.

Given its overlap with Pinterest, Flipboard, Tumblr, and the like, it’s hard to say if this female-friendly aggregator will take off independently. But the founders have a history of working for startups targeting the female demographic, and it’s already very easy to lose yourself on the site for good chunks of time, which is promising. The product launching next week is a very early MVP, meant only to determine if such a thing has legs.

Users will be invited in batches, but TechCrunch readers who want to be at the head of that line can use this link to sign up: https://spright.ly/i/techcrunch. The first 100 who register will be the first to receive invites when Sprightly opens up on Monday.

Adobe today launched Adobe Blank, a new open-source OpenType font that, at first glance, does absolutely nothing. Indeed, the whole point of the font, as its creator Ken Lunde writes today, is to render every Unicode character as a “non-spacing and non-marking glyph.”

This may sound like a lame and early April Fool’s joke and even managed to inspire the only pun-thread on HackerNews in recent memory that wasn’t immediately downvoted into oblivion, but this is actually a pretty useful tool for web developers.

Lunde says there are two good reasons to use a font that nobody will ever see:

• Invoking this font, as a temporary measure, prevents OS- or application-level font-fallback from kicking in before the intended font can be rendered.
• Related to the above, using the font allows one to detect when a web font is actually loaded, which is arguably a hack to overcome a limitation in CSS.

The idea here is to use Blank to avoid seeing your operating system’s or browser’s default font before the actual web-font has rendered. As more designers now use non-standard fonts on their sites to differentiate them from all the other sites that also use Helvetica, it’s become increasingly common for users to see this rather jarring switch between different fonts. As the Blank font is extremely small, it loads instantly and the user never sees the default font.

Lunde’s second use case – allowing developers to detect when a web font is loaded – is definitely a bit of a hack, but Adobe itself is using this trick in its Edge Web Fonts extension for its Brackets code editor and other developers will surely find more uses for it.

The font is now available on SourceForge and will soon be on GitHub, too.

Bespoke Post, a subscription-based e-commerce startup offering a hilariously titled “Box of Awesome” (no, not that one – Bespoke Post is for grown-ups), is today announcing having closed on $850,000 in seed funding, led by Warby Parker and Bonobos investor, Great Oaks VC. Also participating in the round, which actually closed last fall, were 500 Startups, Brad Harrison Ventures, 1-800 Flowers’ strategic investing arm, and several angel investors. And, as of Monday, the company is expanding into Canada.

Launched in summer 2012, following participation in NYC’s Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, Bespoke Post is targeting the men’s shopping space by offering themed boxes that cost around the same price as a gym membership ($45/month, shipping included). When the service arrives in Canada next week, that price will increase by $15 to $25, depending on location, to cover shipping, duties, and taxes. Boxes typically retail at over $70, however, so it’s generally still a savings over directly buying each individual item they contain.

Past boxes have included a shave kit, a travel theme, a high-end cocktail set, a shoeshine kit, a “weekender” box, and others. What makes Bespoke Post’s model different, is that though it’s offered only on a “subscription” basis, customers can opt-out of receiving the box as often as they want after receiving the email that details the current box’s theme.

“We kind of bastardized the subscription model to better cater to our customer,” explains company co-founder Rishi Prabhu. Men aren’t typically big online shoppers, which is why companies like Bespoke Post, Manpacks, Dollar Shave Club, Meundies, and others are trying to entice men with more passive subscription-based commerce options, as of late.

“We want to deliver an experience to men from interesting brands – we don’t want to just deliver products,” Prabhu explains. Still, despite its focus on men only, he notes that 10 to 15 percent of the company’s current subscribers are women.

Bespoke Post has targeted its customer base by cultivating relationships with media companies and brands, beginning with a Details Magazine partnership last year. Last week, it partnered with AskMen, which will syndicate Bespoke Post’s boxes through its network. And the startup has a long-standing relationship with Diageo, which owns 17 of the top 100 distilled spirits (e.g., Johnnie Walker, Tanqueray, Baileys, etc.), beers (Guinness, Red Stripe, etc.) and wines.

The company works with these bigger brands on content, but also with smaller brands for the products in the box. “The cool thing is that we’re not sending overstock to people, we’re often custom-making these products with designers,” Prabhu notes.

Up until the close of the funding, the company was just a team of two, and was lacking the necessary infrastructure. Now, Bespoke Post is a team of seven and hiring. Prabhu declined to provide subscriber numbers, but had hinted last June that it was approaching a $1 million annualized run rate. He says the subscriber count has more than doubled since that time, and the company is seeing consistent double-digit growth.

However, Prabhu says that subscription-based commerce is only the beginning of where the company wants to go. Though the team is discussing the introduction of a higher-price point box as another option for customers, its long-term vision may see it moving towards a more traditional e-commerce model where customers buy the products/”experiences” from the site itself.

“Subscription is a great way for us to start because it gives us scale and an interesting value proposition to customers,” Prabhu says, “but we see a lot of opportunity in expanding generally into commerce, and introducing a really innovative way for men to buy products.”

Fanbase Media, a new social media marketing startup which has been flying under the radar for over half a year, helps companies use Instagram for connecting with their customers. Despite the company’s low profile – its turnkey, self-serve solution won’t launch until next week, in fact – it has already attracted the interest of some bigger-name brands, including Michael Kors, Shape Magazine, and others which the company isn’t allowed to publicly name.

Currently a bootstrapped team of three, the startup helps businesses create, manage and promote campaigns involving user-generated photos posted on Instagram. For example, a company might want to run a photo contest on Instagram, specifying that entrants tag their photos with a particular hashtag to qualify.

Fanbase Media then helps to aggregate those photos, which can be pulled into a business’s Facebook Tab page, mobile microsite, or another page on the company’s own domain. For example, you can see this page on a Michael Kors website, which shows a Fanbase-managed photo contest which the fashion brand ran in February for Valentine’s Day. The company had asked users to tag their favorite things, using the hashtag #fallinginlovewith.

Explains Fanbase founder Michael Zsigmond, “a lot of brands are starting to tap into user-generated content for marketing, and we realized that there’s really no platform that made it really simple for a brand to tap into user-generated content on Instagram.”

That’s not entirely true, of course. Fanbase will compete with a growing handful of companies offering “Instagram marketing solutions,” including but not limited to, recently funded Nitrogram, as well as Olapic, Statigram, Chute, Curalate, and others. But Fanbase Media’s focus on photo campaigns specifically may appeal to those looking for an end-to-end, targeted solution.

The company offers three pricing tiers, starting at $299/month for 100 approved photos, then $499/month for 500 photos, and custom pricing beyond that. In an online dashboard, businesses can view the photo entries, approve or deny them, comment, and share them back to social networks, or mobile or desktop websites. The campaigns also support features like user voting mechanisms, Facebook “Like” gating, embeddable widgets, and more. And tools to design the photo websites and contest pages are provided, too.

The company has been working on the platform over the past eight months, Zsigmond says, and they believe this is the direction social media marketing is headed. “The first generation of social marketing platforms was really about helping brands manage the content they push out, and we think the next generation of social marketing platforms is helping brands tap into their audience for content, and then use that content for marketing results,” he explains.

He says that the long-term goal is not to stop with Instagram, however. The company is already considering plans for Vine, Twitter’s new and increasingly popular mini video sharing app. Vine doesn’t have an open API yet, but it’s already getting traction with brands, Zsigmond notes.

“We’re really focused on integrating with purely mobile apps,” Zsigmond explains, “places where people are creating content on their phone. That allows us to focus on a feature set that’s built specifically for mobile,” he adds.

The company’s self-serve solution will be available early next week, but interested businesses can sign up here as of now.