Category: Tech news

The Internet’s biggest organizations collectively rose up in outrage over a potential act of government censorship, yet have been conspicuously silent as Congress mulls sweeping new government surveillance authority. In 2012, most major websites staged a massive global blackout in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would have granted authority to shut down websites associated with piracy. Yet as congress considers broad new sensitive data-sharing rules under the eerily named, Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), there is not even a hint of outrage. The deafening silence reveals a culture within Silicon Valley that cares far more about information than civil liberties.

A Muted Meeting With Obama Over Surveillance 

According to those who attended a recent meeting between top tech CEOs and President Obama, the consensus was that the government should have a “light touch” over their data sharing practices. CISPA would grant immunity to top Internet sites for sharing personal information that aids authorities in combating malicious cyber threats. The bill’s original mandatory safety provisions have been slimmed down to voluntary guidelines after tech and business-friendly legislators blocked the requirements as overly-burdensome.

But, on the subject of civil liberties, there seems to be little concern.

Big Business Likes CISPA, But Why Other Big Orgs? 

The legal entitlements to big companies make it easy to see why they have a vested interest in supporting CISPA, but why no outrage from other web organizations that protested SOPA? Alexis Ohanian, founder of the widely popular aggregator, Reddit, explained to me why he hasn’t seen the same reaction from his community over privacy concerns,

“The big reason is the imminent threat of shutting down things we love (like reddit, all of social media etc) that sopa/pipa provided. Whereas the obliteration of 4th amendment rights to privacy online isn’t as blatant, sadly, so it’s harder to rally around,” he writes.

Information Over Individualism

However, Ohanian’s argument doesn’t fully explain the lack of outrage, given that the Internet community has risen up over other issues. When Washington D.C. tried to impose fees on beloved car-ride sharing service Uber, tech blogs and twitter lit were incensed. “Wow, a business (Uber) is prevented from lowering its prices.. wait.. what? We live in America, right?” tweeted Google Venture Partner, and Digg Co-Founder, Kevin Rose.

The same Internet flash lobby has spontaneously organized over free access to academic research, a Wikipedia slander law in Malaysia, and a sedition law in the Philippines.

The truth is, web culture is far more attached to the free flow of information than notions of individualism. The web is founded on interdependence, innovation, and discovery. These are the values that ignite the passions of those who create (and control) the World Wide Web. Civil liberties are a concern, but don’t trigger the same sense of urgency. Privacy, ownership, sovereignty, expression, and choice, will all be overshadowed by transparency, sharing, global citizenship, and wisdom.

Government watchdog groups can try to spark protest all they want, but the actions of the Internet community has already spoken: civil liberties are not a priority.

Read more of this argument at The Washington Post.

[Image: Lumin Consulting]

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” this week welcomes a Silicon Valley veteran with decades of operational and investing experience under his belt, an active board member to many successful companies, and who holds a wealth of experience around financial services and tools for both individuals and businesses.

Mark Goines, a Partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, brings a true wealth of experience in financial products and services to founders. After executive stints at places like Charles Schwab and Intuit, Goines began angel investing to help the next generation of entrepreneurs in the space identify and attack new opportunities as the web grew and, more recently, as mobile platforms explode. After some angel investing success, Goines followed in line with a recent trend of prominent individual investors and operators to become an institutional VC on Sand Hill Road.

In this conversation, Goines and I discuss a range of topics related to B2B applications and the climate for founders in Silicon Valley. Specifically, Goines shares a thesis he’s developed around what he calls “RSBs,” or “really small businesses,” typically those which employ less than five people. RSBs are not served well by existing business tools, which are either too primitive or too sophisticated. Marketers can now identify and target these RSBs for next to nothing, creating opportunities to build verticalized or broad solutions for them.

Behind this thesis, more interestingly, are deep insights around a long-term trend that combines many forces: A global economy whose center is shifting; more business formation during recessionary periods; a national economy where certain jobs may not come back; attitudinal shifts away from wanting to working for larger corporations; less job security in the workplace; and the fact that individuals tend to be happier running their own businesses once they’re able to get through the initial bumps of the startup stage. For founders interested in this space, Goines advices to build horizontal or platform solutions and to resist the urge to customize in order to reach the greatest set of potential users.

Additionally, Goines shares his thoughts on how he perceives the Valley has changed over the past five years. While he notes things are great for founders overall, he does share some well-reasoned notes of caution for us all. First, there is an oversupply of early-stage capital, much of it institutionalizing, which will lead to less true angel investors, a decline that’s hard not to notice. Second, incubators and accelerators which help drive the rate of company formation even higher could help artificially inflate valuations, which could have serious consequences on what founders may be able to take home in such an acquisitive environment. It’s hard to ignore the insights of an experienced angel investor like Goines on these subjects, and especially so given his focus on the financial world and its products.

Sean Parker’s video chat startup Airtime is still alive and kicking and has a new executive running it. According to sources, K2 Media Labs founder Daniel Klaus has joined the company, as it has moved its operations to New York City and is preparing for a relaunch after the original product failed to gain consumer traction.

Klaus joined Airtime after several years running New York City-based startup studio and incubator K2. During his time there, K2 launched several startups, including Sonar, Fingerprint Digital, and Tracks. Prior to that, Klaus served as served as Chief Executive Officer of the online media company Music Nation and Original Signal Recordings, which he had co-founded.

It’s not clear what Klaus’ actual title is: We’ve heard from one source that he has been named the company’s president, with founder Sean Parker retaining the CEO title; others have said that Klaus is taking over as CEO, with Parker sticking around as chairman. Either way, we’ve heard that he’s running day-to-day operations, with Parker handling more higher-level, strategic decisions. Update: We’re hearing the correct title is President after all, with Parker remaining as CEO. The more you know!

Klaus joined about six months after former CTO Eric Feng left Airtime, along another employee he brought along as part of Airtime’s acquisition of Erly last spring. The Erly team stuck around just long enough to get the Airtime product launched at a celebrity-filled party in New York.

Since then, Airtime has regrouped, moving its employee base to New York City — where Parker lives — with a reduced headcount. We’ve heard that Airtime now has about 10 employees, which is down from a high of about 40 more than a year ago. It’s also preparing to re-launch its product one more time, in an effort to get users on board and chatting with one another after the original product failed. Since being founded in 2011, Airtime had raised a total of $33.5 million, including $25 million that came around the time of its Erly acquisition.

We’ve got a request out to Airtime and will update this post as we learn more.

After nearly being eradicated when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the Brazilian startup community has been slow to come back. However, over the last two years, growth has been accelerating and Brazil’s startups seem poised to make a comeback. As Roi pointed out recently, the support ecosystem for young businesses in Brazil is still thin and plenty of friction remains (like high labor costs and inflexible legislation), but the potential is big and getting bigger — and venture capital is beginning to flow as a result.

The examples are becoming more numerous, as startups like the angel-backed Printi, which is trying to create a web-based Kinko’s for the local market, the Founders Fund and Social+Capital-backed online learning platform, Descomplica, Atomico-funded “Internet of Things” player Evrythng, the Redpoint-backed “TechCrunch of Brazil,” Startupi and Accel and Tiger Global-funded, baby-focused eCommerce startup Baby.com — to name a few.

As Internet-connectivity proliferates, along with its startup community, Brazil has seen an explosion in its eCommerce market. Forrester, for example, estimates that Brazilian eCommerce will increase 18 percent year-over-year, with total sales expected to hit $22 billion by 2016. While Baby.com.br has seen a lot of buzz since launching in 2011, it’s not the only startup looking to capitalize on Brazil’s exploding eCommerce market.

Founded in December 2009, Bebestore, one of the original baby and children-focused online marketplaces in Brazil, is today announcing a big raise of its own, having recently closed a $10.2 million round of series B financing, led by W7 Capital and Atomico. This adds to the $7.8 million Atomico invested in the startup’s series A round, bringing its total capital to $17.8 million.

Why the big interest from Atomico — the same firm that’s raising a $286 million fund and was just voted “The VC of the Year” at Europe’s tech startup awards?

Since receiving its first investment from Atomico in December 2011, the founders tell us, Bebestore has quadrupled its revenue and now offers over 45,000 items in its store. As of January, the company’s run rate was $21.4 million, with month-over-month revenue growth at 20 percent in January.

So, the business is continuing to grow, and it’s finding that Brazilian parents, especially among the younger generation are increasingly turning to the Web to find affordable products that can be shipped quickly, rather than the alternative. As one of the early movers, Bebestore opted for the broad approach, offering a range of parent-focused products — from strollers, shoes and diapers for toddlers to products for moms (beauty products, accessories, etc) and clothes, toys and games for kids.

Initially a port of the Diapers.com model, Bebestore has become more focused on value-add products like clothes, toys and accessories, the founders tell us, rather than lower-margin products like diapers. And, like Baby.com.br, the company has been determined to implement a social strategy by becoming a resource for parents on Facebook, beyond simply being an eCommerce marketplace.

But, with seemingly such similar models, how does Bebe Store see itself as different from Baby.com.br, its main competitor? The founders tell us that the company is more focused on higher-end products in major cities, particularly in the southeast part of Brazil, whereas it sees Baby.com using diapers as its anchor product, cross-selling other products, while focusing on the northern regions of Brazil, particularly more rural areas.

In turn, Baby.com.br also recently launched dinda.com.br, which is essentially a flash sales model for baby-related products, while the founders say that Bebe Store has no intention of pursuing the flash sales model.

While these are relatively small differences, Brazil is so big geographically with such a large (and increasingly connected) population, there’s plenty of room for more than kid-focused e-Commerce player. Who will own the most market share? That remains to be seen, but there’s definitely a land grab coming.

For more, find Bebe Store at home here.

Google Reader being shut down by its malevolent overlords leaves a gaping, Google Reader-sized hole in the market where it used to be. Many are stepping up today to announce that their products or services can act as a replacement, but one source is specifically saying it will build a functionally complete replacement – news aggregation service Digg.

Digg just announced on its official blog that it was previously planning on building a reader in the second half of 2013. But now the company (which was acquired by Betaworks last year) says it’s now moving up its plans to build a Reader replacement, which will include an API that mirrors Google’s own for Reader.

The company says it wants to take the best of Google Reader’s features and simply replicate them, while also modernizing the usage for the current climate. In order to help guide its product development strategy, Digg is asking for feedback for users, but Digg clearly wants to simple in order to make sure what it builds is very close to what users were mourning with the passing of Google Reader. Digg is also looking for new employees to help it with this undertaking.

Digg’s move is pretty clever: there’s a proven demand, as the last 24 hours or so have demonstrated, and there’s a model for how a successful product will work. Google’s killing of Reader only means it failed as a product according to Google’s own goals, so it could be a tremendous success for another company with different ends in mind.

Digg General Manager Jake Levine had the following to say about how what the company has seen with Reader’s success aligns with its own goals via email:

Digg is about helping people find, read and share the most interesting stories on the Internet. We help to distill the overwhelming volume of stories on the web into a manageable and digestible experience. Building a reader matches these goals perfectly. Plus, our team uses it every day and we need a good replacement!

Others, like Feedly, have explained that they, too will be providing an alternative to users currently on Google Reader. Their project Normandy will be a complete clone of the Reader API, which means a seamless transition for users. There will in fact probably be considerable competition in this space, which is why Digg is smart to note that it is also looking to improve upon the basic Google Reader design with additional features based on user input.

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Latest Coverage

• The Internet Will Be Just Fine Without Google Reader
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• The Google Reader Shutdown Is Yet Another Nail In Feedburner’s Coffin
• GoogleReaderpocalypse. For Real This Time.

Either you’ve been hacked or you haven’t — yet. Keep your money, data, and identity safe with these password organizers and generators.

It looks just like a conventional, inexpensive wired mouse, but it has a 400-dpi scanner in its belly.

Plug a light or an appliance into the WeMo, then pair it your smartphone and switch your electronics on and off without leaving the comfort of your bed.

Rally Software, a company that provides agile project management applications to for software development, has filed its initial S-1 for a public offering. According to this filing, the company will raises as much as $70 million in the offering (but often these numbers are just place holders).

Rally’s products and services helps businesses implement Agile software development and Lean practices with the right combination of tools, services and best practices. According to the filing, As of October 31, 2012, the company had had 154,982 paid users and more than 1,000 customers, including 36 of the Fortune 100 companies. Rally’s clients include Cisco, Microsoft, AOL, and Hewlett-Packard. Rally currently employees 285 staffers.

In terms of revenue, fiscal 2011 sales came in at $29.7 million. This grew to $41.3 million for revenue in 2012 up 29 percent. For the nine months ended October 31, 2011 and 2012, total revenue grew from $30.1 million to $41.4 million, up 38 percent.

For Fiscal 2012, Agile Software’s renewal rate among existing customers was 129%, taking into account paid seat nonrenewals, upgrades and downgrades.

The Boulder, Colorado-based company is not yet profitable, and recorded net losses of $9.9 million, $11.6 million and $6.7 million in fiscal 2011, 2012 and the nine months ended October 31, 2012, respectively. The company has been fairly acquisitive over the past few years, buying AgileZen and Flowdock among others.

The company, which competes with another fellow IPO hopeful Atlassian, has raised close to $70 million in funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Greylock, Boulder Ventures, and others.

AnyPerk, which aims to provide companies and startups with discounts on web services and employee perks, is announcing $1.4 million in new funding from Digital Garage, Ben Lewis (a founder of Tapjoy and Karma), Michael Liou, CyberAgentVenture and Shogo Kawada (founder of DeNA).

AnyPerk is an easy way for any company to provide perks for employees. By signing up for $5 an employee, companies can offer discounts on AMC and Regal movie tickets, money off on cable services like Dish Network, deals on Dell computers, 1800 Flowers and free coupons for Costco.

Companies like Pinterest, Klout, GetAround, BirchBox, Seamless and Pandora are all using AnyPerk to power employee perks.

The company, which also just redesigned its site, originally launched out of Y Combinator last year. AnyPerk’s founders, Taro Fukuyama, Atsu Takahashi, and Sunny Tsang, have a history of starting successful startups. Takahashi co-founded Nobot, a smartphone ad-network company acquired for $19 million by Japanese company KDDI.

At SXSW this afternoon, Google provided developers with a first glance at the Google Glass Mirror API, the main interface between Google Glass, Google’s servers and the apps that developers will write for them. In addition, Google showed off a first round of applications that work on Glass, including how Gmail works on the device, as well as integrations from companies like the New York Times, Evernote, Path and others.

The Mirror API is essentially a REST API, which should make developing for it very easy for most developers. The Glass device essentially talks to Google’s servers and the developers’ applications then get the data from there and also push it to Glass through Google’s APIs. All of this data is then presented on Glass through what Google calls “timeline cards.” These cards can include text, images, rich HTML and video. Besides single cards, Google also lets developers use what it calls bundles, which are basically sets of cards that users can navigate using their voice or the touchpad on the side of Glass.

Here is a brief video of the Glass demo at SXSW today (via @panzer):

It looks like sharing to Google+ is a built-in feature of the Mirror API, but as Google’s Timothy Jordan noted in today’s presentation, developers can always add their own sharing options, as well. Other built-in features seem to include voice recognition, access to the camera and a text-to-speech engine.

Glass Rules

Because Glass is a new and unique form factor, Jordan also noted, Google is setting a few rules for Glass apps. They shouldn’t, for example, show full news stories but only headlines, as everything else would be too distracting. For longer stories, developers can always just use Glass to read text to users.

Essentially, developers should make sure that they don’t annoy users with too many notifications, and the data they send to Glass should always be relevant. Developers should also make sure that everything that happens on Glass should be something the user expects, said Jordan. Glass isn’t the kind of device, he said, where a push notification about an update to your app makes sense.

Using Glass With Gmail, Evernote, Path and Others

As part of today’s presentation, Jordan also detailed some Glass apps Google has been working on itself, and apps that some of its partners have created. The New York Times app, for example, shows headlines and then lets you listen to the full article by telling Glass to “read aloud.” Google’s own Gmail app uses voice recognition to answer emails (and it obviously shows you incoming mail, as well). Evernote’s Skitch can be used to take and share photos, and Jordan also showed a demo of social network Path running on Glass to share your location.

So far, there is no additional information about the Mirror API on any of Google’s usual sites, but we expect the company to release more information shortly and will update this post once we hear more.

Tip of the hat to our friends at Engadget for their live blog of today’s event and to our own John Biggs for the photos.

CreativeLIVE, the startup looking to bring a live, online classroom to creative entrepreneurs, announced today that it has raised $8 million in series A financing from Creative Artists Agency, William Morris Endeavor, CrunchFund and Google Ventures. The new investors join Greylock in backing CreativeLIVE, which invested $7.5 million in the startup back in October of last year, bringing the startup’s total (series A) funding to just under $16 million.

Greylock’s investment saw James Slavet joined CreativeLIVE’s board of directors, and led to Mika Salmi, the former president of Viacom Digital, joining the startup as its new CEO. Today, as a result of its latest round, the startup announced that Flickr founder and Etsy chairwoman Caterina Fake would become the newest addition to CreativeLIVE’s board of directors.

Part of the excitement is due to the fact that CreativeLIVE is attacking a newly-hot space within education. Massively open online courses (a.k.a. MOOCs) were the most buzzed-about topics in EdTech last year. However, while the market for free, online education is potentially enormous, CreativeLIVE is hardly alone in its attempts to bring quality online classes and lectures to the masses.

Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, EdX, StraighterLine, 2U, Instructure, SkillShare, Lynda.com and many more recognize the market opportunity. In fact, Accel and Spectrum saw fit to put a whopping $103 million into Lynda.com in January for this very reason.

Taking a page out of Lynda.com’s book, Chase Jarvis and Craig Swanson launched CreativeLIVE in early 2010 to bring the same kind of quality video instruction one would find on Lynda.com for Adobe products or technical education to the more creatively-inclined (and entrepreneurial) students. Like Lynda, the startup takes video quality seriously and has become a production operation just as much as a virtual video (hosting) library, developing its own studios in Seattle and San Francisco.

CreativeLIVE then uses those studios to film (and offer) live, streaming classes in HD video, which students can access for no cost. If students want to watch the class again or missed the live airing, they can buy the video for between $29 and $149, as we wrote at the time. The founders believe that this combination of live instruction and the ability to re-watch at any time via a pay-as-you-go pricing model will give them a leg up on the competition.

The startup has also been going in a slightly different direction from companies like Udemy or ShowMe, which want to make it easy for any teacher to put their own lessons or classes online, instead curating both its content and instructors — through a high-touch process akin to Lynda.com.

In October, the startup told us that its learning platform had been used by over one million students from over 200 countries, which was impressive considering the pace of its growth, which was completely organic. With its strategic investment from Creative Artists and William Morris — two of the largest talent agencies in the world — CreativeLIVE will have access to a sizable pool of talent from which to draw its instructors.

With new talent and seeing as it’s all backed by its simple revenue model, the founders want to make CreativeLIVE into the largest online classroom on the Web. Since October, growth has been encouraging in that regard, they say, with revenue increasing 400 percent year-over-year and a 500 percent increase in course offerings in 2012. The average class size on CreativeLIVE is 60,000, the founder said, and one class saw over 150,000 students participate.

That traction has allowed them to pay “some teachers up to six figures for just three days of work,” they said. Not bad for three days work.

Find CreativeLIVE at home here.

[Disclosure: TechCrunch founder and current columnist Michael Arrington is a general partner at CrunchFund.]

Vostu, the onetime darling of the social gaming world in South America, appears to have just had a fresh round of layoffs over the last few weeks.

Multiple sources who have worked with the company said that Vostu laid off about 100 people and is now down to somewhere between 50 and 70 employees. Vostu has not replied to multiple requests for comment.

This is a huge decline for the company, which took at least $46 million in funding from investors including Accel Partners, Tiger Technology Global, Intel Capital and General Catalyst. At the end of 2011, the company had around 580 employees spread across Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and New York and claimed that 25 percent of Internet users in Brazil played Vostu games.

So the company’s headcount is now about one-tenth of what it was two years ago. The company had an earlier round of layoffs around the same time last year.

It looks like a perfect storm of factors created headwinds for the company. Orkut’s gradual decline to Facebook in Brazil meant that Vostu had to play on a more competitive field against established social gaming companies from the U.S. and Europe. The company apparently started spending in an ROI-negative way on marketing and user acquisition on the Facebook platform, according to one source. According to app tracking site AppData, Vostu has about 2.3 million monthly active users (or about 1/100th of what Zynga has on the platform).

The Facebook platform has also changed dramatically over the last two to three years, in curbing virality for certain kinds of games. Many developers like Kabam and Zynga have transitioned to focusing on mobile platforms to reduce their exposure to Facebook, although other companies like King.com and Wooga have thrived in this new environment.

At the same time, Zynga’s weak post-IPO performance has put a damper on valuations and large-scale acquisitions across the board for the gaming industry. That meant that any expectations for an exit had to be seriously downscaled. Two sources said that the company had been negotiating a sale for either the whole company or a fraction of it as of last month.

There were also internal management and political issues with the engineering and product teams unable to come to a consensus on specs that would work for various games. That left the company organizationally unable to add features or service games in a way that would keep players engaged.

“Essentially, Vostu was unable to take risks and that brought the company down,” says one source.

Two of Vostu’s co-founders Mario Schlosser and Daniel Kafie left their positions as chief scientist and CEO early last year, while Matias Recchia and Andres Bernasconi were left in charge. It looks like Bernasconi just left this month while Recchia departed last month, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

They may be room for hope, though. Brazilian news site Apertura, which first reported the layoffs, said that Kafie may be back in the ring as CEO. One of our sources said this was possible and if that’s the case, Vostu would be “in good hands.”

“I have lot of trust in Daniel Kafie,” they said. “They will reinvent the business of this company.”

Yammer CEO and Founder David Sacks said to me in an interview this past weekend that SXSW is showing that suddenly enterprise technology is sexy.

Sorry, I don’t buy it. The enterprise is as sexy as a humming rack of servers. That may be sexy to some, but it sure doesn’t match the allure of all the beautiful things on Zaarly or the penthouse apartment on Airbnb.

Instead, the story here at SXSW is more about the presence of people and companies who are building the new way we live and work. Social has lost its hot-air hype. More so, people are now thinking how apps can work for people to help them get their work done or see more complex data in a more accessible way.

Yesterday, I talked to Hank Laber, the founder and CEO of a company called gonna.be. The service visualizes your future plans. Add the events and it displays them on a map. Use the slider and the map changes according to what people are doing over the span of a few days or weeks ahead. It moves the idea of the calendar into a different space, beyond rows and columns and into a visual experience.

Laber showed up at our Office Hours with three forks in his pocket. I’m not sure why but it seemed to fit the character. Hungry startup CEO? He’s young and built an app that appeals most of all to his peer group. It shows your friends plans, concerts, events — you name it. But Laber wanted to ask me if gonna.be had the potential to be an enterprise app. There are potential applications, such as showing a group’s travel plans, meetings, etc. Instead of pulling up a calendar, why not look it up on a map?

Laber is the classic example of what SXSW offers the future of the enterprise. New thoughts about the way apps and data can change the way we view the world but also as tools to help get the work done.

There are lots of anecdotes about how SXSW has become a place for people to talk about the enterprise. But it is really irksome to use the term “enterprise” at all. The talk here is not about data centers, and thank goodness for that. Instead, as Pervasive CEO Mike Hoskins said to me today at lunch, the enterprise is more about data, with the apps serving as a lightweight cover. I think that nails it and sums up many of the conversations I’ve had in Austin these past few days.

As for Sacks, he has a tough job. Attaching Excel and Word files to an activity stream is not exactly sexy. But it does show how companies like Yammer have changed our perspectives about the monolithic world of the enterprise and the direction it will take as data begins to determine how well an app fares in the marketplace.

Whales are big spenders, the ones that prop up casinos and social games. In music, whales are bands’ rabid fans. BandPage‘s new “Experiences“ feature lets artists sell them seats on stage, unique merch, or even a trip to the bowling alley with the band. The shift from MP3s to streaming means monetizing the long tail that earns musicians cents not dollars, but BandPage Experiences could keep them afloat.

Whether you’re a chart-topping artist or a garage band, somebody loves you, and they’re willing to pay a ton to get closer to you. BandPage Experiences creates a marketplace and an embeddable e-commerce widget where artists can offer less-scalable VIP access, meet-ups with band, and limited-edition merchandise.

It’s a smart new experiment from BandPage. Once known as RootMusic, BandPage lets artists set up a profile app on Facebook full of streaming music, tour dates and media. At one point it had 500,000 bands and 32 million monthly Facebook users. It made money on a cheap subscription to extra customization and virality options, and raised a total of $18.3 million.

But Facebook’s Timeline redesign a year ago hit it hard. Without the ability to be a band’s default landing page for non-fans, traffic plummeted to around 1 million users. Since then it’s tried to unshackle from Facebook with BandPage Everywhere and Connect, which lets musicians create synced websites and widgets so they can publish once but update all their online presences.

BandPage CEO J Sider explains that most artists are missing out on huge revenue by restricting themselves to standard touring, merch and music sales. “It’s like a coffee shop that’s only open two or three times a year. We want to open it up year-round. If they gave you more experiences, you’d be willing to spend more on the [artists] you really love. It’s for well-known acts down to bands that are just starting out [for who] earning a couple hundred extra bucks per show can make a big difference.”

Along with helping artists get richer, Experiences turns BandPage into an e-commerce company that will earn a 15 percent cut of what bands earn by offering special treatment through Experiences. By definition, artists can’t sell too many of these unique opportunities. BandPage has to hope the idea of hyper-monetizing the short head rather than focusing on the long tail catches on.

Sider likens this new chapter in BandPage’s evolution to aggregating what fans waste time wishing and searching for. “There are fan clubs across the Internet, but as fans it can be hard to reach them. We can create a marketplace the way Airbnb and Kickstarter did. We see a huge potential for musicians to make a living off of it.”