Category: Tech news

Desktops aren’t dead. They’re evolving — primarily into all-in-ones with huge touchscreens and even bigger price tags.

This new backpack can simultaneously protect and charge USB-powered hardware, thanks to a built-in battery pack.

Lonely? Wish you had someone to geek out with about the weird stuff you’re into? Sodisco wants to find you a play date. It’s the soon-to-launch startup from Christian Taylor, ex-CEO of Facebook e-commerce platform Payvment that just got bought by Intuit. Taylor called me up to reveal what Sodisco’s all about: analyzing your interests and introducing you to your nearest clones.

“There are people three blocks away from me who like the same things as me, but there was no platform out there to connect us” Taylor tells me. Well, there are some others that try to connect you, but Sodisco wants to go all algorithmic on social discovery. Taylor explains, “I moved to San Francisco by myself. I ride a motorcycle and collect vintage lunch boxes.” He wanted people to share his hobbies with, and he thinks it’s a common problem.

The solution came to him while still at Payvment, which raised $7.75 million and served 200,000 merchants before selling. The company was analyzing people’s interests to see what e-commerce products it should recommend to them. Essentially, it would say “people with similar interests to you bought this.” Taylor realized, ‘hey, maybe we should just introduce these folks.’

So after priming Payvment for its acquisition by Intuit, and grabbing some vacation while the deal closed under new CEO Jim Stoneham, he began work on Sodisco. It’s named after comedian Eddie Izzard’s complement to people he thinks are cool, “You are so disco!”. Now the startup is raising a seed round and building out a team. Taylor has already roped in Ping.fm CEO and co-founder of LaunchRock Sean McCullough as CTO.

Together they’re building a mobile and web application that “provides localized discussion communities around the interests you’re passionate about and enables you to discover new people in your geographic area who share those same passions and interests.” Users will be able to join groups around interests, post related content, and message with other members.

Getting us to actually use the app will be the challenge. In a space cluttered with ways to connect with people, it may take a mini-miracle to convince users to frequent another site. Taylor admits “the world does not need one more friending app”. He doesn’t want his Facebook news feed any more cluttered than it is. Rather than a social network, though, Taylor likens Sodisco to Reddit.

But unlike normal online forums, the goal is to transcend the screen and get people to hang out in meatspace. And different from most offline meetups, Sodisco matches you with people you not only share a specific interest with, but that you’re generally compatible with too.

Taylor concludes, “When I bought a motorcycle, I wanted to find people to ride with. I’d go to meet-ups, but just because we both like motorcycles doesn’t mean I’m gonna be friends with some big burly dude or some twenty-year old. It became so apparent to me that this was something I had the tech to solve.”

Sodisco hasn’t launched yet, but you can Like its Facebook Page to get an early invite when it’s ready.

In an effort to show the rest of the corporate world how “cool” and “spontaneous” their jobs are, hipster office workers around the globe have been making “Harlem Shake” tribute videos this week. Perhaps because we spend the most time online, the startup community is the dryest kindle to viral video fire: In addition to Facebook, Google, Groupon, Path and Intel, yes Intel, have succumbed to the meme.

Fuck, even Huffington Post/Aol beat us to the chase. And, when the Harlem Shake randomly came on in the background of a three-way TechCrunch “performance review” yesterday, I realized that I was old that, lame to the game or not, we had to do one. Voila!

Writer Ryan Lawler reprised his star role the Crunchie Monkey and of course our developers got in on the mandatory fun. If you’re wondering where co-editor Eric Eldon is, he’s in the conference room behind us having a meeting with Aol. And this, in a nutshell, is why his performance review was better than mine.

*drops mic*

It was just a matter of time before Twitter shut the blogging platform Posterous down, after acquiring the company last March. The team had already been folded into the flock, but this means that nobody has to worry about pesky service interruptions of keeping the service’s diminishing number of users happy. The site will be shutting down on April 30th, but it’s not a completely sad story.

Have no fear, Posterous co-founder Garry Tan is coming to the rescue with a new site called Posthaven, which he promises will never shut down. Here’s what Tan had to say about the launch when we spoke to him:

I’m teaming up with another cofounder of Posterous, Brett Gibson, and we are taking a pledge to keeping the URLs online forever. It’s $5 a month and will have all of the ease of use and power of Posterous. It’s just the two of us and we’re coding it in our bedrooms right now.

Tan tells us that Posthaven will never accept funding and will be available to its users “forever.”

Here’s what the Posterous/Twitter team had to say about the shutdown, along with instructions on how to get your data:

Posterous launched in 2008. Our mission was to make it easier to share photos and connect with your social networks. Since joining Twitter almost one year ago, we’ve been able to continue that journey, building features to help you discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale.

On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.

Right now and over the next couple months until April 30th, you can download all of your Posterous Spaces including your photos, videos, and documents.

As Twitter delves into how to make discovery easier for its users, some of the findings learned by Posterous will most definitely come into play. On the other hand, it’s nice to know that there’s an easy way to move your information, with one of Posterous’ co-founders providing the service “from the heart.”

Posthaven is currently taking reservations for its service, so grab your name.

UPDATE: It looks like Posthaven is having difficulties managing all of the attention:

Please bear with us through the 503 errors — we're working to fix Posthaven asap. (We had no idea Posterous would announce today.)

—
Garry Tan (@garrytan) February 15, 2013

[Photo credit: Flickr]

This week’s Ask A VC show put Bain Capital Ventures’ managing director Ajay Agarwal in the hot seat. Agarwal heads the firm’s recently launched Palo Alto office.

We sat down with Agarwal to chat about how the firm is independent from Bain Capital, the asset management and financial services firm co-founded by Mitt Romney. Agarwal explained that Bain Capital Ventures is under the umbrella of Bain Capital, but has separate operations, management and oversight from Bain Capital. One advantage that Bain has with its relationship with the private equity giant is access to the massive network of companies that are part of the firm’s portfolio.

Agarwal also answered audience questions on how much capital startups should raise, how to divide equity, and whether founders should take money off the table.

Check out the video above for more!

One nifty feature of HTML5 is that web apps can store data locally on your computer and have it available even when you are offline. Google today introduced a new API for Chrome, the SyncFileSystem API, that offers an app-private sandboxed file storage system, similar to what’s already in the HTML5 specs. The interesting new feature here is that this data is also automatically synchronized across clients via a cloud back-up service linked to Google Drive.

The API is currently only available in the highly experimental Canary version of Chrome, but it will likely find its way into the release channel over the next few months.

As Google notes, this shouldn’t be confused with an API that allows developers to access arbitrary documents in the cloud. It is just meant for storing and syncing offline data across multiple machines.

In its documentation, Google notes that the standard use case for this API is to “store user-generated data (or any other binary data) locally for offline or caching usage when the app also wants to save/synchronize the data on a cloud storage so that the same data can be available across different clients.”

Currently, the API only supports Google Drive as a backend storage service, but in the future, it sounds like the team may give developers the option to target other services as well.

A number of Silicon Valley investors are starting the long weekend with a smile. That’s thanks to Xoom Corporation, the online money transfer technology and services company, which made a very successful debut today on the NASDAQ stock market.

The company’s stock zoomed (sorry, I had to do it) up a full 59 percent from its $16 per share initial public offering price to close out the trading day at $25.49. The IPO price itself, announced yesterday, was a boost from Xoom’s previously projected share price range of $13 to $15.

Xoom collected $101.2 million in proceeds from the offering, which it says it will use for the standard things — business growth and M&A. It’s a nice turnout for Xoom and its venture capital investors, who include Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Agilus Ventures, and DAG Ventures, among others. The company collected $80 million in annual revenue in 2012, according to its IPO filing.

Xoom, which was founded in 2001 and has raised a total of $78 million in outside investment, has never been the “sexiest” of companies and has flown under the radar a bit from a press perspective — perhaps that’s because its product is finance-based and not consumer facing. But it has amassed support from a some of the most prominent names in the tech industry and particularly the online payment space, counting two PayPal alums — Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha and former Square and Slide exec Keith Rabois — as board members. Also on the board is Xoom’s founding CEO Kevin Hartz, who handed over the reins of the company to current CEO John Kunze in October 2005 to serve as co-founder and CEO at Eventbrite.

It just goes to show once again that for all the buzz in recent years about consumer-facing startups, when it’s all said and done, some of the biggest success stories of the current tech boom may be lower profile companies with an enterprise bent.

As you might have noticed, TechCrunch went down entirely (thanks to WordPress VIP), sporting a fun “502″ error. If you’re not sure what that means, here’s the skinny on why you might see a 502 error:

The server, while acting as a gateway or proxy, received an invalid response from the upstream server it accessed in the attempt to fulfill the request.

If you know exactly what that means, then kudos to you. This is the second issue that WordPress has had in the past week, with this one being called a “performance issue” or “service disruption.” Our site was down, so I’ll call it a service outage. One can imagine that when you’re a technology blog and a site as big as WordPress.com goes down, the first thing that you want to do is write about it. We clearly could not.

Other sites like GigaOm and VentureBeat were affected as well, it seems.

Here’s what WordPress’ handy status site had to say:

Here’s the fun error that was shown on WordPress.com itself. Pretty professional, don’t you think?

Last week’s outage came with this explanation:

As we mentioned earlier this week, WordPress.com experienced a partial outage and service degradation when one of our three data centers was taken completely offline by a fiber cut. I wanted to provide some more information about how this occurred, what the impact was, and what we are doing to prevent this from happening in the future.

With all of the other issues that folks who use WordPress VIP are having, which I won’t bore you with right now, one must ask, why aren’t there rules and technology in place as a fail-safe when a platform as large as this just decides to stop working? This is the same feeling that we get when Twitter goes down, but something tells me that the world could live without our 140-character musings for a few hours.

The news? Not so much.

Good job, good effort WordPress. Try harder. We’ve reached out to them for comment and will let you know what they say.

To our readers and writers, we truly apologize. You are now free to move about the blogosphere.

UPDATE: Here’s a mass email sent out to WordPress VIP customers (they call it an outage now, and it was longer than 5 minutes):

At approximately 21:23 UTC (13:23 PT), WordPress.com had a site-wide outage that lasted about 5 minutes.

This outage was related to a code bug and is unrelated to the network situation earlier this week. All sites should be up and available. Please get in touch if you’re still experiencing problems.

Analytics company KISSMetrics has acquired SourceNinja, a startup offering to help companies manage security flaws in their open source libraries.

KISSmetrics co-founder and head of product Hiten Shah made it sound like a pretty standard talent acquisition. Shah’s company won’t be using the Source Ninja technology, but it’s bringing on the startup’s two founders (and only team members) on-board — Brett Hardin will become a senior web application engineer and Matt Stump will become an infrastructure engineer.

The SourceNinja team was incubated at AngelPad, and that’s where Shah said he and his co-founder Neil Patel met them.

“The SourceNinja team contacted us for a potential partnership and were exciting about utilizing their technology within the KISSmetrics product,” Shah said (via email). “After a few conversations we decided it would make more sense to acquire them instead of just licensing the technology. … That technology can’t directly plugin to KISSmetrics, but, the experience Matt and Brett have gained from building the technology directly helps our use cases.”

The financial terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. Shah said this is the company’s first acquisition.

With the looming threat of faceless drones buzzing around American cities, congress has proposed banning armed drones and regulating their use for law enforcement surveillance. The Preserving American Privacy Act introduced by U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (CrunchGov Grade: A) would require warrants for unmanned aircraft systems to collect personally identifiable information and a public notice to collect information in public areas.

At least one state, Virginia, has already proposed a two-year moratorium on drones, while lawmakers can craft sound policy regulating their use (i.e. so they can figure out what to do with this crazy new technology).

On the one hand, drones give law enforcement an important life-saving surveillance tool. They were reportedly used to catch elusive cop killer, Christopher Dorner. “the thermal imaging cameras the drones use may be our only hope of finding him. On the ground, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said one unnamed police source to The Express.

But, Trevor Timm of digital civil liberties watchdog group, The Electronic Freedom Foundation, tells TechCrunch in an email, “Drones provide law enforcement with many of the modern privacy-invasive tools, all in one place. They have high definition cameras that can also be fitted with infrared, heat sensing, or facial recognition technology. They can be equipped with fake cell phone towers that can potentially intercept your text messages, phone calls, and lock onto your GPS. And soon the small police drones will have the ability to stay in the air for hours or days at a time.”

Currently, he claims, there are no laws to prevent round-the-clock surveillance. At a Google+ Hangout yesterday, President Obama dodged questions about the use of drones on U.S. soil, only to say that no American has ever been targeted by one within the U.S.

Many of these types of bills die in congressional subcommittees before they even get a fighting chance, so its unknown how likely it is to pass. Click here for point-by-point sections of the bill [PDF].

GitHub has open-sourced “Boxen,” an automated way to automating and managing newly unboxed Macs for developers.

The one-command automation tool promises that a developer can be hacking on GitHub within 30 minutes.

The tool follows a trend to offer developer-ready laptops. Dell has developed a laptop built specifically for developers called Project Sputnik. The laptop is now commercially available.

GitHub posted on its blog today that Boxen started nearly a year ago as a project called “The Setup,” which they describe as a pipe dream to let anyone at GitHub run GitHub.com on their development machine with a single command. That pipe dream is now giving new developers an added treat when unboxing their Macs (oh the joy).

Boxen is a framework for managing a Mac. The GitHub team created a  standard library of Puppet modules. It manages everything from “running MySQL to installing Minecraft.” You can get started here.

I see this a lot. Startups need their own tools to do the work they do. So they create their own. Boxen is a great example of this trend. It is designed with the GitHub developer in mind. According to the blog, it automatically updates itself every run and opens and closes GitHub issues as problems arise and get fixed.

In a post on its blog, GitHub said:

With Boxen, we treat our development environments with the same care we give production: we test our code and rely on Continuous Integration to deploy changes.

Pretty cool trend unfolding as more Internet-scale businesses invent the software and increasingly the hardware to get work done that they can’t do with off the shelf products.

TV commercials that automatically play could soon hit Facebook’s news feed. This week Facebook CMO David Fischer admitted auto-play video ads might be distracting, but said “I believe there are ways we could do it.” Fischer said during his Stanford Future Of Media Conference keynote that he admired YouTube’s video ads. But auto-play video spots could be flashy and annoying in the quiet news feed.

At Wednesday’s Future Of Media Keynote with Fischer, Fortune magazine’s senior editor at large Adam Lashinsky opened the conversation about video ads saying Wall Street is clamoring for them. Fischer explained they already exist in one form. Businesses can post videos from their Page and then pay to show them to more people, though those have to be clicked to play. He noted that businesses constantly ask for more attention-grabbing video ad units closer to a home page takeover than a simple news feed story.

Lashinsky then pressed Fischer to cite another web company whose video ads he admired. Fischer squirmed a bit, and from my front row seat in the big Stanford auditorium, I could practically see his internal monologue mulling over whether he was going to complement Facebook’s biggest competitor.

And then he actually gave props to Google. “You know I think YouTube has moved in the right direction by putting more control in the user’s hands, with the five-second TrueView thing,” Fischer responded. He was referring to the YouTube pre-roll video ads that you have to watch for at least five seconds, but can then skip. They’re auto-play ads, but businesses only get charged if users view the whole commercial.

That got me wondering if Facebook could run a similarly aggressive ad unit on the news feed. So when the keynote got to question and answer time I asked “Right now the Facebook home page is pretty static. No auto-play videos, no animated GIFs. Could Facebook run auto-play video ads without overly distracting users from their friends’ content?”

Fischer admirably gave a straight answer (which I’ve verified with Facebook) when he easily could have dodged. “I believe there are ways we could do it. There are ways that could be destructive and distracting to the user experience. But there are ways that could potentially balance user experience with advertiser experience. We haven’t put a product out yet because we haven’t had one we’re comfortable with. But if we could, then we would do it.”

This basically confirms the gist of a report from December by AdAge that said Facebook plans to launch a new auto-play video ad format. AdAge detailed that industry sources briefed on Facebook’s plans say the web and mobile ad unit should launch by April 2013, and the social network is pushing for 15-second ads, opposed to standard 30-second spots. Facebook is apparently considering whether audio would auto-play alongside video, which would be more interruptive than if only video played without consent.

Facebook is searching for a way to make it easy for advertisers to translate the TV commercials they’re used to shooting into Facebook. Most people wouldn’t willingly click to watch a video ad, but if one automatically starts playing and looks cool, they might watch the whole thing. This meshes well with Facebook’s desire for ads to be more like content that actually helps or entertains people.

The only delay is that Facebook wants to create video ads that don’t make users so frustrated they leave the site. A TrueView-style option to skip an ad after a few seconds might help.

Considering Fischer’s comments and the fact that the TV ad market is worth somewhere around $70 billion, it seems inevitable that commercials are coming to the web’s top communication tool.

Think of it this way. On TV, the average American sits through about 16 minutes of commercials per hour, and the average U.S. user browses Facebook for six and a half hours per month. If Facebook ran as many commercials as TV networks did, it could show over 400 15-second video ads to users per month. People are a lot more impatient on the web, but I bet Facebook could get away with showing at least a tenth of that, or a little more than one video ad per day.

That might be the right balance to let Facebook steal TV ad dollars without making users wish they had TiVo for the news feed. Some will surely still complain. But Facebook costs money to operate and most things as useful as it is charge users. Like it or not, advertising is the life-blood that keeps the consumer Internet free.

[Image Credit: Emland]

Google+ experienced an outage this morning, and almost no one noticed. Gizmodo poked fun. Engadget wrote a few sentences. Someone posted it to Hacker News. Where it gained zero comments.

Google+, reportedly the fastest-growing social network in history (or fastest-growing “thingy” ever), and reportedly the second-biggest social network worldwide, experiences an outage, and nothing hits Techmeme. Google+, where the President of the United States just hungout, goes down, but Twitter users (and TechCrunch reporters) only have jokes, not frantic questions and concerns.

This is the problem with the perception surrounding Google+ in a nutshell; it’s two things: a website on the Internet which is perceived as an “anti-Facebook” no one cares about and also a deeply integrated piece to Google’s overall platform.

Google has rightly moved to implement a social layer across all its properties in its efforts to stave off on the increasing competition from Facebook. It’s taking on Facebook in social, as Facebook takes it on in search. To do so, Google needs social-data signals to feed into its massive digital brain. But while the site can boast metrics like “more than 500 million people upgraded!”, it’s disingenuous in terms of how many visit Google+ the way they would a destination site like Facebook.

And that’s the problem. Google+ is not even really a destination site. That’s a part of it, yes, but that’s the part of most questionable merit. It’s FriendFeed redux, with some extra clever features, like multi-person video chats and “Circles.” It mostly seems to be popular among those who like to aggressively post comments in its defense if you dare to question its lasting value.

But the real Google+ is everywhere. It can’t be avoided, remember? And some of its better parts aren’t some website on the Internet. After all, “hanging out in Gmail” feels like using Gmail, not heading over to a specific place and posting things you want to share with friends. Seeing friends’ faces appear in Google search results feels like an upgraded version of Google.com, not a Facebook alternative.

And yet, because this plus.google.com “alt Facebook” exists, Google opens itself up to ridicule and skepticism.

And Google makes it worse because it will never tell you how many visitors Google+, just the homepage, has. I mean, even when you specifically ask Google communications questions like a) define how you determine if a user is “active” or say, b) how many active users visit the Google+ website itself (that is, just the URL plus.google.com)?. The lines suddenly go quiet.

That’s why it doesn’t feel like the world is ending when Google+ goes down. Sure, today’s outage was temporary. It’s Friday, too. But the lack of chest-clutching horror that Facebook sees after five minutes in the dust, explains what position Google’s destination network holds in Internet users’ lives.

h/t: Yes, @TaylorLorenz, I totally stole that for my headline

Sage Software, facing competition from a host of cloud providers, has sold off $100 million of its “non-CRM” assets to focus on its core ERP and accounting practices.

According to IT Business in Canada, Sage has sold three products managed from Sage North America (Sage Act, Sage SalesLogix and the Sage Nonprofit Solutions product suite) and four product suites in Europe.

I rarely hear about Sage. It’s a company that has grown through acquisition over the past 20 years and profited handsomely. That is until about five years ago when, as Dennis Howlett analyzed last summer, the company became a bit too content to belly up to the table and dine on those fat maintenance fees it collected for the aging software.

At some point, and we are seeing it a lot lately, companies start hearing about new options such as SaaS offerings that make the old on-premise tools seem just ridiculously out of date.

And then there is management, who you silently hope will do something radical and show the new players that they will fight like dogs throwing ninja stars. But just as it’s impossible for a dog to throw a ninja star, so is it almost as unlikely that a company like Sage would take on the cloud players with deadly aim.

And so here we are. Sage is in sell-off mode and SaaS players like Xero are eating up the small business accounting market, once Sage’s place of power.

To its credit, Sage does have a cloud play called Sage One. Howlett writes that it is a key pillar of future growth but is only expected to yield some $47 million in incremental revenue over the next three or so years.

Here’s what Sage said about the sell off. They say they have a strong partner channel who can do consulting to integrate CRM, payments and all the other pieces that a customer might need to get “lifetime value.” In other words, it gives Sage the chance to get more maintenance fees.

I can’t see how a model like this will continue to be viable in face of new development practices that SaaS and Internet services have become so adept at using. Dennis Howlett goes through Sage’s numbers, showing that the company is working its balance sheet more than innovating.

Sage can keep rolling along with modest results, but companies like Xero are the ones that show the most potential as the new leaders in the small business market.