Category: Tech news

Take a 7-inch Android tablet, slap on PSP-style game controls, and price the thing at $170. What could possibly go wrong? Less than you might think.

It’s your world, only better. And by “better” we mean viewed through a mobile device screen and filled with robots.

Spotify today confirmed to TechCrunch that it has finally completed the rollout of its new social following features that model music discovery after offline behavior — where you find songs through tuned-in friends and influencers. Here’s our hands-on demo and review of Spotify’s move to discovery through actual humans instead of algorithms.

Back in November, I wrote that sources told me Spotify planned to launch a Twitter-esque following feature for music discovery. Then at a flashy event in New York featuring performers like Frank Ocean and an after-party with Vampire Weekend, Spotify officially unveiled its “music graph.” But the rollout has been slow, and the redesigned Discover tab and instant previews features aren’t yet available to everyone. But influencer following is, and it’s a big step up for the on-demand music service.

A Cure For Paralyzed Ears

Discovery is Spotify’s biggest problem. Its search box can be paralyzing. When you can listen to all the world’s music, where do you start? Spotify’s answer is “with what your favorite artists and most music-savvy friends are listening to” through the new Follow tab plus revamped profiles and an activity feed.

By now you should have received a prompt to update to Spotify version 0.8.8. When you fire it up the first time, you’ll get walked through the Spotify Social on-boarding. Congratulations, you’re now automatically following the artists you listen to most and people whose playlists you’ve subscribed to (though you can ditch them if you want).

Next, Spotify recommends you follow some Facebook friends, in contrast to the old version where your feed was clogged with listening activity from all your friends. This update makes a lot of sense, since just because you’re friends with someone doesn’t mean you respect their musical tastes. If you dig pop, don’t follow your hipster friends. If you aspire to be the first on your block who knows about the new buzz band, follow music blogs or buddies who live in London.

Finally, you’ll see suggestions of artists and influencers to get updates from, including bands like Pearl Jam, news outlets like Pitchfork, and celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg or Barack Obama. The process is breezy and doesn’t default you into too many connections. If you’re ever looking for new people to get recommendations from, you can click on the Follow tab in Spotify’s left navigation side.

Intimacy With Influencers

Woo! Alright, now let’s listen to music — socially. These subscriptions populate the redesigned social feed in the Spotify right sidebar. It shows songs listened to, tracks shared, playlists updated, and more from the people you follow. At the top is a recommendation of a featured influencer to follow. The bar is a bit narrow so it cuts off track names but at least it wraps text to show you the full message when people purposefully share.

A single click of the play button in any story instantly plays that song or playlist without changing the page you’re viewing so you can quickly sample what people are bopping their heads to. There’s this oddly intimate feeling when you see that a rock legend like Lou Reed is listening to a song and you can join him. You feel immediately closer to them, like you’re getting a personal tour of their tastes.

If you want to dive deeper into someone’s style, you can visit their redesigned Spotify Social profile. For verified artists, this will show their standard discography and their most popular songs according to the Spotify user base. It’s a bit too subtle (I missed it at first), but you can click the “Spotify Profile” button below their name to switch to see their recent Spotify listening activity and playlists. The latter is all you’ll see for non-musicians.

DJs By Default

In days of old, you’d discover music from professional DJs broadcasting their picks on the radio and at clubs, or through one-to-one interactions. Though modeled after this behavior, Spotify evolves it by turning everyone into DJs without the need to do anything different. You, your friends, journalists, and celebrities simply continue the one-player Spotify experience by listening to songs and building playlists. But similar to the Facebook news feed, Spotify’s new social features create of sense of ambient intimacy around music. It’s like a town square, except filled with your personal music influencers, and they’re all holding boom boxes above their heads.

There’s plenty of room for improvement, though. Spotify used to let you “favorite” non-friends to add them to your feed, but there was no way to find these people. The social on-boarding and Follow tab are a step forward, but they don’t offer much context. I’d be a lot more likely to trust recommendations  if Spotify told me we love the same artists, or their playlist contains the song I have on repeat.

Considering their latest listens are in the feed, its strange and dysfunctional not to have someone’s listening history on their profile. The subscription recommendations atop the feed seem ill-targeted. I rarely listen to pop music, but I get suggested Katy Perry and Bruno Mars. When I was recommended a band I hadn’t heard of called The Script, I gave it a shot. What I heard was FM dial slime I imagine was concocted by removing anything edgy from Coldplay and replacing it with album filler by American Idol semi-finalists.

Social is relegated to the sidebar and feels disconnected from the What’s New homepage. Luckily, Spotify will eventually roll out its redesigned Discover tab, which combines tips from those you follow with hits and new releases from artists you don’t. Until then, discovery still feels a bit marginalized on Spotify. That’s a big contrast to competitor Rdio, which features multiple tabs of charts and personalized recommendations.

Despite these shortcomings, I’m already discovering new music through Spotify’s new social feed. Subscribing to Los Angeles indie radio station KCRW and British music blogger Stuart Dredge has helped me expand my taste. If an algorithm had recommended a sleepy crooner like Escondido’s “Black Roses”, I’d have probably skipped it 15 seconds in. But since the recommendation comes from someone I trust, I gave it an honest chance and fell in love with the lullaby. That’s how social music discovery should work, and it’s making Spotify sound sweeter than ever.

When Y Combinator-incubated Perfect Audience launched last year, its stated goal was to make it easy for small advertisers (startups, small agencies, and others) to run retargeted ads on Facebook. Turns out, however, that there’s been much broader interest in the startup’s tools, with customers including enterprise companies and larger agencies. According to CEO and co-founder Brad Flora, it’s part of the broader “consumerization of enterprise” trend, where companies want simple tools that they can “operate themselves” without technical assistance.

However, some of those customers want something more customized than what Perfect Audience already offers. That’s why the company is launching a new reporting API today. Flora said that customers can now get their data out of Perfect Audience into their own apps and campaign reporting tools. That means developers can build their own tools that incorporate Perfect Audience data, and that ad agencies can import the data into their existing dashboards.

This is actually the company’s second API; it quietly launched a JavaScript Tracking API last fall that allowed companies to drop cookies and target ads based on actions rather pages. Flora said that between the APIs, the company has now covered the main use cases: “They can get data out and get data in.”

Overall, Perfect Audience has now signed up 2,500 advertisers and is serving 4 billion ad impressions per month. Flora said the company is cash-flow positive; with its current run rate, it would bring in several millions of dollars in revenue per year. And it’s also expanding into other types of ad retargeting, including web banners and email.

You can read more about the reporting API here and the JavaScript API here.

Concurrent has raised $4 million in a Series A round for its big data application development platform. The investment was led by True Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners. Concurrent received a $900,000 seed round in 2011.

The company has also announced Gary Nakamura as its new CEO. Nakamura previously worked as a senior vice president at Terracotta, which was sold to Software AG. At Terracotta, Nakumura led strategy, oversaw operating profit and loss, and ran business operations, including sales, marketing and product management.

Normalizing data is a big challenge for developers. Concurrent addresses the complexity of developing applications on Apache Hadoop. It fits right between the app layer and the database and uses a Yahoo Pipes-type metaphor of “pipes-sinks-pipes” for moving data, cleansing it and preparing for app developers or data scientists.

Its customers include eBay, Etsy, FlightCaster and Twitter, which are all using the Cascading Java framework to streamline data processing, data filtering and workflow optimization for large volumes of data.

Airbnb has used Cascading to normalize data and gain control over its Map Reduce runs. According to an Airbnb case study:

With these tools, analysts are able to study data important to their business such as click-through rates, page statistics, drop-off rates and number of bookings. The analysts create queries for other interesting indicators, such as comparing regional performance and identifying potential problems with the site.

As data scales, app frameworks will play an increasingly important role for developers. With advances in automation and simpler deployment on Hadoop clusters, developers will increasingly pool data resources so they can create apps that provide a differentiated advantage.

As we mentioned yesterday, we took an in-depth look at Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead with a number of Generation Y women who are part of the Silicon Valley’s rising new guard.

“You start to have friends who drop off, and your family starts to say you never call anymore.”

You can watch the first segment of the conversation, where we addressed fear and its effect on our careers here. It was a four-part discussion in all, and we’ll be posting a new segment each afternoon until Friday.

Those who participated in the discussion around Lean In: Leah Busque, the former IBM engineer who is now the founder and CEO of TaskRabbit, the startup that has built a platform for outsourcing errands, tasks, and deliveries; Ashley Mayer, the senior director of communications for cloud-based enterprise storage technology firm Box; Megan Quinn, the Google and Square alum who last year made the leap into the venture capital world as a partner at Kleiner Perkins; and Pooja Sankar, the Stanford MBA and former Facebook engineer who is now the founder and CEO of educational Q&A platform Piazza.

In this segment we tackled Sandberg’s statement on “The Myth Of Doing It All,” and the guilt many women feel as they sacrifice time with their families for their careers. As Sandberg writes, “guilt management is as important as time management for mothers.”

As our panelists discuss, though, it is not just mothers who feel that guilty pull. Megan Quinn shared an interesting point about guilt and how she has adjusted her attitude towards it. She said:

“If you are with your family or your friends, and you’re having a life, there’s always that nagging question of, ‘Is there more I could be doing at the office?’ And if you are at the office and you’re there late, especially in startup culture, and it becomes your life because it is your life, you start to have friends who drop off, and your family starts to say, ‘You never call anymore.’ So the guilt actually goes both ways.

For me personally, I’ve never been a big believer in ‘work life balance’ — the phrase, not the concept, to be clear. I believe that if you really enjoy your work, and you work really hard, it becomes your life. And if you enjoy your family, and you love your family, and hopefully you do, that becomes your life. And so, it’s more about weaving the two things together than having a clock that you clock in and out of.

Especially with mobile devices, it feels like you’re always on now. But you’re always on as both a friend, a sister, a parent, and a partner, and you’re also always on as an employee, a manager and a boss. So I actually think it’s not so much the guilt of one or the other, but sort of the [feeling of], ‘I wish I could be in many many places at once.’ And in some ways, we’re lucky that with phones, we can be.”

Check out the video above for much more.

ImageBrief, a request-based stock photo marketplace that aims to give Getty a run for its money, has raised a $700,000 round from Square Peg’s Paul Bassat and Justin Liberman as well as other Australian investors. The company, originally based down under, has thus far raised $2.2 million.

Imagebrief uses a real-language search and request system to find or commission photos. Users can request pictures (“A goat riding a motorcycle” or “a woman dressed in traditional Ewok battle gear”) and photographers can respond with photos they believe match the request. Photographers can also take and submit new photos if they don’t have anything in their library.

Most photography sites current offer basic keyword searches which are problematic. For example, one user may label something as a “video game system” when photo buyers are actually looking for an NES.

ImageBrief was founded in Australia in 2011 but moved its commercial headquarters to New York towards the end of last year. The Company announced that in this most recent investment round, just over $700,000 had been raised from some of Australia’s most highly regarded internet entrepreneurs and investors including Square Peg’s Paul Bassat and Justin Liberman (who were already backers of the Company), Adrian MacKenzie and Anthony Klok. Total investment capital raised to date is now over $2.2 million.

The company launched in February 2013 and offered a Pinterest-like experience that many stock photo services are missing. Users can also follow photographers they like. The company has already sourced photos to Conde Nast, DDB, and BBDO.

Word travels fast on the Internet. Especially when you don’t want it to.

Early this morning, DigitalRev (a hybrid blog/photography store/photo sharing social network) replaced a review of GoPro’s Hero 3 with the text of a DMCA takedown they’d received. “@GoPro is bullying us with DMCA. We’ll have to remove this article soon”, they tweeted.

According to DigitalRev, GoPro was claiming foul on the site’s use of the “GoPro” and “Hero” trademarks. (That’s ignoring that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act only applies to copyright infringement. Hence, uh, the name.)

Within a few minutes, the sharpening of pitchforks could be heard from all around. Tweets started pouring in pledging to never buy another GoPro product. Word of the notice shot to the top of r/photography, r/gopro, and a few other relevant sub-Reddits. People were angry.

I reached out to GoPro’s head of communications for confirmation and comment, who responded “Hey Greg, We are posting to Reddit.”

Er, weird. But okay. A few minutes later, this went up:

Hey all- I’m out at X Games Tignes right now with the Director of PR for GoPro. I showed this to him as soon as I saw it (it had 3 comments). He dropped everything to address this issue, and it’s an unfortunate miscommunication. Below is the blurb he just wrote out for my favorite GoPro community.

Thanks for the heads up on this issue. The letter that was posted next to the review on DigitalRev was not sent in response to the review. Obviously, we welcome editorial reviews of our products. This letter was sent because DigitalRev is not an authorized reseller of GoPro products and they were using images and had incorrect branding and representation of our product in their online commerce store. As part of our program – we ask merchants who are selling our product to use authorized images. That is why DigitalRev was contacted. But – our letter did not clearly communicate this and that is something we will correct.

tl;dr: Whoops — we weren’t trying to have the review taken down. We just didn’t want them using the images they were using.

GoPro quickly went into damage control mode, firing off links to their reddit comment to just about anyone who’d mentioned the matter. Expanding on their comment further, GoPro later tweeted that they only meant for them to take down the images being used in the sidebar:

@difficultnerd it's actually a positive review. The notice wasn't about the review: bit.ly/YrzFHN—
GoPro® (@GoPro) March 20, 2013

@ceejayoz Not the review, the product on the sidebar. Please read this, there's a lot of confusion out there: bit.ly/YrzFHN—
GoPro® (@GoPro) March 20, 2013

“But wait!” yelled the crowd. If GoPro only wanted a few images to be taken down, why did they seemingly target just the review? According to GoPro, they didn’t:

@ceejayoz We also included 5 other urls, which they scrubbed from the email they posted. We are pro free speech and fair use.—
GoPro® (@GoPro) March 20, 2013

What a mess.

If someone chopped up the DMCA in a way that changes the implications, that person screwed up.

Whatever GoPro’s actual initial intent was, however, someone seriously screwed up there too. Wanting to protect your brand is great, but DMCA notices aren’t meant to be thrown around like friggin’ parade candy. If you’re tossing them out to the point that it’s not even clear why they’re being sent, you might want to tighten the lawyer leash a bit.

How easily could this have been avoided by just calling the guy?

It’s time for another episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that takes you inside the hallowed gates of the tech industry’s hottest companies to get a first-hand look at what they’re really like.

This time, we headed to the shiny new San Francisco headquarters of HotelTonight, the company that makes the popular mobile apps for booking same-day hotel rooms at discounted prices. HotelTonight is very choosy about the hotels it offers on its platform, showing deals only from higher-end places with strong reviews and good design. Being that the company’s staff is on a first-name basis with some of the most gorgeous hotels in the world, HotelTonight had a pretty high bar to meet when it came to designing its own digs.

As you’ll see in the video embedded above, HotelTonight’s new office does not disappoint. Taking cues from some of the top properties available on its app, such as the hipster hotspot Ace Hotels, HotelTonight has created a very cool space that’s a cut above the typical startup scene, with sophisticated furniture and amazing art. They’ve also kept it funky, with some very eclectic elements — I never thought I’d bang a real gong and play a round of cornhole within the same ten minute period, but somehow it all works out at HT HQ.

And a real perk is the company’s fully-stocked bar with a view of the iconic Powell Street cable car turnaround, which would give many real hotel bars a run for its money. Pro tip: If you ever find yourself at HotelTonight, don’t turn down an offer to have a drink mixed by CEO Sam Shank. That man can make a mean martini.

Google finally released its personal note-taking app Keep today, after it “accidentally” saw the light of day last week. The product is as expected, a place to save notes, lists or photos on the fly, for safe…keeping.

One of the things that jumped out at me after giving it a quick try is that you can switch to a layout that’s very similar to Pinterest, another app that wants you to hoard a bunch of things. The only difference between Keep and Pinterest is that Pinterest is social. While Pinterest isn’t the only social bookmarking site in the world, it’s the one that has the most consumer appeal. That can’t be lost on Google.

Social is something Google could turn on with a flick of the wrist, thanks to the plumbing it has built with Google+. Imagine being able to bookmark and share things you find on the web, specifically things you find within Google searches, then throw them on a “board” and share them with all of your friends. Sounds like Pinterest.

Most of the chatter about Keep is that it’s a threat to Evernote, which it is in a way, but I think that Keep could be the groundwork for something much larger.

Here’s a look at Keep’s simplistic design:

And now Pinterest:

Sure, the items that you can “keep” are limited to photos, notes and lists right now, but whenever you spend time pumping content into any service, users are going to get the itch to share them, even with a family member or close friend. That’s what’s lacking from Keep, other than being stable, right now. It’s not a stretch to invision all of Google’s social backbone being woven into Keep, much like it has in Drive and YouTube.

The social guts that make up Google+ are very applicable to a bookmarking and note-taking service like Keep. If you are to assume that Google is only launching things it has a grander plan for, something that has become very apparent during Larry Page’s reign as CEO, then it’s safe to say that the service won’t stay this vanilla. Another thought that comes to mind is that Google Reader just wasn’t the service for the masses, as far as collecting things. Perhaps we could see some of the Reader functionality in Keep one day.

Of course, it’s early days and Google isn’t keen to speak about Keep just yet, other than what it posted on its blog today, but this is a space to watch for many reasons. There’s always more than meets the eye with Google.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Vine has steadily made waves ever since its launch in January. First it was a porn scare, and then it was widening growth against competitors like SocialCam and Viddy.

And throughout it all, we’ve watched stars like Adam Goldberg vine their hearts out. But with today’s announcement that Vine is powering a new 6-second film contest for the Tribeca Film Festival, the app has most certainly graduated into a new tier of awesomeness.

The contest is called #6SecFilms Vine Competition, and it’s a “mini festival just for Vines.”

Just in case you’ve missed the past two months, Vine is a new app from Twitter that lets you record six-second looping videos (like Gifs) which you can then share with friends on Twitter, Vine and Facebook. Contestants can shoot and enter as many vines as they want in the competition, as long as they’re within the following topics: #Genre, #Auteur, #Animate, and #Series.

The panel of judges hasn’t quite been solidified, but director Penny Marshall and “King of Vine” actor Adam Goldberg, whose made quite a name for himself on the video-sharing network, have both confirmed.

When you’ve finished shooting your submission(s), share them on Twitter with the hashtags #6SecFilms and your topic (#Genre, #Auteur, #Animate, or #Series), and be sure to follow @TribecaFilmFest on Twitter.

Vine’s growth has been solid, according to recent reports, but we can’t forget that most people are hesitant to be creative in new forums. In a recent conversation with 4chan and DrawQuest founder Chris Poole, he explained that many people feel very nervous when creatively approaching a blank slate.

The same may be true for Vine, but with promotion from other creative outlets such as the Tribeca Film Festival, Vine and it’s easy-to-use UI should squash those fears.

After a brief early appearance, Google Keep, the note-taking app from the search giant, is now live. Google has officially unveiled Keep via a blog post, complete with a video detailing how it works, and there’s an Android app too, available through Google Play for devices running Android 4.0 and up.

Keep was created by Google to satisfy the need of having to take down info quickly without a pen or paper handy, software engineer Katherine Kuan explains in the official blog post. The app is simple, allowing you to either type or quickly record and transcribe voice memos and lists, as well as take and pin photos, which are synced to the web-based dashboard for easy retrieval later.

The Android app has a widget to let you easily create and access notes from your home screen, and there’s also a lock screen widget for handsets with Android 4.2 or higher. The interface in the app itself is simple enough, presenting notes created with Keep in a mosaic layout, complete with color customization entries for individual entries, and drag-and-drop rearrangement for prioritization.

If anyone will be looking closely at Keep and how it succeeds with users, it’s Evernote. The note-taking company has built its entire brand on letting users quickly and easily create cloud-stored memos and notebooks. Evernote’s product is much more full-featured than what Google offers today with Keep, and available on a lot more platforms. But Google is at least staking out its claim in this territory, which is a bit ironic given that Evernote grew quickly on the back of Google’s decision to shutter Notebook once upon a time.

Eventually, Google says that it will add support for creating and viewing Keep notes directly from Google Drive, which could help spur adoption among users already on Drive for its document creation capabilities and cloud file storage. The app also has a search function, as well as the ability to switch between multi-and single-column view, and note archiving. It’s a small but flexible addition to the Android toolbox, and the lock and home screen widgets make it particularly useful in that context.

Sarah made vocal her doubts about trusting such a service in the wake of Google’s “spring cleaning” track record on Monday, however. And as mentioned, Google has explored similar territory before. Will that keep (pun definitely not intended) users away? It seems unlikely to have a strong impact either way, given the apparently casual aim of this service, but it’ll be interesting to see if there are trust issues with Keep’s launch.

A few years ago, E.ventures co-founder Tom Gieselmann decided to try to use data to give his firm a competitive advantage. And so he built a tracking tool to keep tabs on how different web properties were growing over time. The Daily Gieselmann, named after its founder, has been used by the company internally over that time. But it’s now being opened up for anyone to use.

Rather than rely strictly on metrics provided by the companies that E.ventures was looking to invest in, the Daily Gieselmann gave the firm a more objective look at how potential and existing investments were doing. The platform also keeps screenshots of every new site indexed, so that users can quickly see what they are.

Using third-party data from Alexa and other providers, the internal dashboard helped the firm determine which companies were adding users and increasing engagement, which were stalled, and which were actually declining. It’s also a great way to discover under-the-radar companies to put money into.

The platform enables folks at E.ventures to get updates on these companies daily. But more importantly, it sees the effects of user growth over time. Gieselmann sends out a weekly newsletter with new entrants to the growth index, and also makes note of companies and websites that are already on it, but have hit record highs.

While Alexa is generally an imperfect tool for absolute traffic or page rank, E.ventures has found that it does a pretty good job of measuring growth over time. That said, rather than rely solely on the company’s trending data, E.ventures actually captures the rankings daily and does its own trend analysis based on the data over time.

Also, it’s not just Alexa — the Daily Gieselmann also takes into account data from iTunes: the App Store, eBooks, Movies and TV purchases. (Gieselmann says he’s not that interested in music, which is why the dashboard doesn’t also track music sales.) Using the CrunchBase API, the Daily Geiselmann also lets users cross-reference ranking and trend data across company and investor info that has been collected over the years.

While the internal E.ventures dashboard was useful to people like Gieselmann, who knew the right tags to tease data out of it, it wouldn’t be very useful to the average user. That is, until recently, when the team threw a more useful user interface on it. Now, other data junkies can mine the data that E.ventures has collected over the years.

Oracle this afternoon announced the financial results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2013, a report that seems to have disappointed stock market investors who were projecting a stronger performance from the company.

The enterprise-focused software and hardware technology giant said it earned $9 billion in revenue during the quarter, reflecting a sequential decrease from the second quarter of 2013, when it earned revenues of $9.1 billion, and a year-over-year decrease from Q3 2012 when it made revenues of $9.04 billion.

In regards to profit, Oracle reported GAAP net income of $2.5 billion for the third quarter, and non-GAAP net income of $4.2 billion. That reflects GAAP earnings per share for the quarter of 52 cents and non-GAAP EPS of 65 cents.

Both at the top and bottom lines, those results did not meet the expectations of Wall Street analysts. According to FactSet, the analyst consensus was that Oracle would post Q3 revenue of $9.37 billion and non-GAAP EPS of 66 cents.

Oracle’s stock took a quick and steep fall just after the Q3 earnings report was released. Within the first minutes that the earnings results hit the newswire, Oracle’s stock was down 6.8 percent in after-hours trading.

For its part, Oracle is looking at the silver lining, emphasizing the quarter’s strong points in its prepared earnings release. Oracle’s president and CFO Safra Katz is quoted in the press release accompanying the Q3 results as saying: “Our non-GAAP operating margin increased to a Q3 record of 47 percent, and we expect it to reach an all-time high for the fiscal year. Both operating cash flow and free cash flow were at record levels for a Q3, with operating cash flow of $13.7 billion over the last 12 months.”

Here is Oracle’s Q3 report compared to its recent past performances in visual form, courtesy of TechCrunch illustrator and graphic designer Bryce Durbin:

Updating.

Joining the dozens or hundreds of photo-sharing apps out there, a new app called Throwback is aiming to put the nostalgia back in photos.

Throwback is an app that lets you take a picture, and send it to yourself or a group of friends at some point in the future. In fact, the app won’t let you even see the picture you’ve taken any sooner than a month. When you receive the picture, you’ll be able to save it to your camera roll or anywhere else for that matter, since it arrives in the form of an attachment to your email.

The idea comes from founder Calli Higgins. In her own words, “it’s out of an exploration between photography and nostalgia.”

“After researching why certain images pang us while others don’t, I realized nostalgia is conjured by revisiting something you haven’t seen in a while,” she told TechCrunch. “ThrowBack is an alternative to the current overexposure of our images and the numbness this can create.”

The app is super simple and straightforward. Once you’ve registered an email address, you are given the option to take a new picture or choose on from your photo album. You then select a date, a general range of time (from six months to five years) or click “Surprise.” The soonest you can receive a picture is one month from the current date.

You can also choose to send it just to yourself, or to a group of friends.

Unfortunately, the app doesn’t integrate with any existing social networks, which seems to be purposeful. The motivation behind the app is to keep these photos “safe” from environments where we tend to blast through hundreds of photos at once, perhaps cherishing them (and the moments they represent) less.

The app is still in its infancy, and may have some interesting features in the works to auto-tweet a photo months later or post a Facebook Timeline photo years in the future, but for now Higgins is keeping mum about it.

Just like Facebook opened us up to social networking of all kinds and genres (LinkedIn for professionals, Path for privacy, Twitter for brevity and immediacy, etc.), Instagram has paved the way for photo and media sharing of all shapes and sizes.

Snapchat broke out as an ephemeral “selfie” messaging phenomenon, followed shortly by Facebook’s Poke clone.

Vine, owned by Twitter, seems to be leading a growing pack of gif-creating apps like Viddy, SocialCam and Cinemagraph, as well as OEM-built video/picture sharing apps like HTC’s Zoe and Samsung’s new Cinema Shot mode.

And we can’t forget apps like Albumatic, PhotoSocial, and the long-lost Color that try and aggregate photos based on locations and real-time voyeurism.

What sets these big-name photo-sharing apps apart from a herd of hundreds of Instagram clones is that they do something unique with a photo, and Throwback quite possibly fits that criteria.

The app is available now on iOS for free.