Category: Tech news

We’ve moved way beyond checkbook ledgers. Now you can manage budgets, pay down debts, and track investments from the comfort of … anywhere.

[Note: This is a weekly series. If your company is doing something amazing to help a charitable cause or doing some good in your community, please reach out.]

If you’re looking for a great story to end your week, here’s one. Below is a mission statement that’s brief, to the point and something that is easy to get behind:

StudentRND inspires students to work on tech projects in their spare time.

For younger folks who really love technology and the idea of hacking things with others, there is a place for them. Just a few years ago, you probably wouldn’t be able to say that. These days, a Seattle-based company called StudentRND has a program that gives high school kids a place to be as creative as they want to be, with others that want the same thing. It’s like space camp, but it’s not a one-time thing by any stretch of the imagination.

When you foster an environment of innovation for younger minds, you’re setting up everyone’s future for really amazing things. While we’re stuck in the world of social networking via Twitter and Facebook, the developers that will end up making their mark on the world over the next ten years are thinking way bigger, and deeper, about the problems that affect all of us.

Someone who is fifteen years old right now could end up building the next huge evolution in transportation, cure a serious illness or just bring a smile to people’s faces in a new way. This is a great thing, and StudentRND is helping it happen.

I spoke with its CEO and Founder, Edward Jiang, about StudentRND’s mission and what’s next for them.

———

TechCrunch: Why did you start StudentRND?

Jiang: I believe that students have incredible amounts of potential. However, not many realize that they can do amazing things.

Some high school students start to tinker around with technology in their spare time — learn how to code, mess around with electronics, but never do anything substantial because they never really get around to it. There’s always a homework assignment due tomorrow, and a test next week to distract them from doing something they want to do.

Others want to learn how to do things with technology, but don’t even know where to start. None of their friends, teachers, or parents are involved with technology, so they assume that it’s some sort of rocket science that isn’t easily accessible.

I believe that the best way to learn about technology is to do things with technology. When I was in high school, I learned a lot about technology because I started building a flash games website so that my friends & I could play games in the computer lab. Friends requested more and more features in the site, and I went out to learn how to do it. As time went on, I got pretty adept at solving problems with technology!

Later on in my high school career, I stopped working on websites, and started competing in tech competitions. I loved the communities surround the competitions, but didn’t like how most competitions encouraged students to win awards for their resume, instead of doing something meaningful. So — right as I was about to graduate, I recruited several of my friends, and asked them to hang out at my house and focus on building cool tech projects over the summer, instead of getting a job! And that was the start of StudentRND.

Right now, StudentRND has a really cool ecosystem in Seattle consisting of StudentRND Labs (formerly known as the StudentRND Incubator), and CodeDay.

TC: What are some of your favorite moments since starting the group?

Jiang: We have too many interesting stories to tell! However, here are a few:

Most Exciting: We actually raised our initial $25,000 seed funding from Chase Community Giving, in a Facebook competition. Right after we got our 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in 2009, Chase had a competition on Facebook, asking people to vote for their favorite small, local (under $1M in annual revenues) nonprofit organization (the top 200 would get $25k each)! Many of the smaller nonprofits in 2009 were either not very adept at social media, didn’t know about, or chose not to participate in the competition. We ended up with ~3,000 votes from our friends, and won Chase’s grant!

Proudest: Tapin.tv (Tyler’s company) actually first met at StudentRND. More info here:

Coolest: Issaquah High School student Marshall Meng builds a Plasma Speaker, a taser-like device that uses the electricity to actually play music. They put it on Kickstarter and raised $18,500 — over 9x their original goal!

Most Caffeinated: For several CodeDays, this one group of students would come to the event and have a soda drinking competition. Each one of them would drink 20+ sodas within the course of 24 hours! At one event, I was making cup noodles to serve as a midnight snack, and realized that a carton of cup noodles had less carbohydrates than a can of soda! I told the group, and they immediately stopped drinking quite so much soda =D

Most Caffeinated 2: Clearing out an entire Safeway’s worth of Safeway soda:

Silliest: There’s a bunch of high school students involved in StudentRND — we goof around a lot! After this one event, we ended up with some extra styrafoam, so Vu made the most rediculous paper airplane:

TC: What can be done in schools to further technological innovation, specifically in high school?

Jiang: Via curriculum? There are already science/tech magnets schools out there for students interested in technology. They’re just not focused on the Silicon Valley ideal of developer/entrepreneurs. That’s fine, because education doesn’t have to be about the flavor of the week. There are many constraints around national standardized tests, college application processes and requirements, etc, that make it almost impossible for you to have a substantially different curriculum.

Via culture? This might be a bit harder. Attendance at magnet schools seems to be determined by parents lately (especially the competitive ones that want their kids to get into a good public school). You can have subcultures focused on technology/entrepreneurship in schools though. I think that having a balanced culture and meeting more than a specific group of people is a good thing though. There’s a lot of hubris in the tech entrepreneurship world. (Software is eating the world, etc. Yes, software is eating the world, but not everything just yet!)

These things I’d like to change about HS though –

* Treat students with respect, like adults.
* Computer Science courses in every school.
* Fewer classes per quarter, but more in-depth (we had 7 classes per day at my high school)!
* Let the higher performing students do more, instead of slowing them down via busy work! (Related: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/09/24/the-scary-smart-have-become-the-scary-rich-examining-techs-richest-on-the-forbes-400/)

For the most part, it’s very difficult to be running a high school. I don’t envy the administrators. StudentRND’s strategy is to get a group of passionate, motivated students, and spread the community from there — inspiring and energizing more and more students. Schools have to deal with every single student, no matter how slow / fast they are.

TC: Tell us about the organizers and sponsors, what do they get excited about the most?

Jiang: Many organizers and sponsors tell me that StudentRND is something they wish they had when they were younger — relating directly to some of the problems I outlined above — and they’re involved because they want to provide this opportunity to others.

TC: What do the kids who are in the program tell you that they get out of it?

Jiang: Several things:

* They get to do things that they wouldn’t have in a regular summer internship, or in their own house.
* They have lots of fun! Truly.
* They’re doing something they find meaningful
* They make lots of new friends and love the passionate community!
* They learn

TC: What’s Next?

Jiang: We’re currently scaling our CodeDay events across the country — in a similar fashion to Startup Weekend and TEDx — where volunteers across the country organize CodeDay events according to our model.

We’re also aiming to double the number of students participating in StudentRND Labs each summer for the next three years — last summer was 30, this summer we plan to have 60. Within 3 years, we’ll be taking more passionate, motivated students through StudentRND Labs than University of Washington (Seattle)’s Computer Science Department (they graduate 160 per year). As we start to reach capacity in the Seattle area, we will start looking at building out StudentRND Labs in other cities across the country.

As we do this, we’re developing relationships and funding partnerships to make this happen.

TC: How can we help?

Jiang: Two ways:

1. Help us organize a CodeDay! We’re looking for passionate, motivated students in different schools across the US to help us organize CodeDay in their city. If you or a student you know is interested — let us know!

2. Donate! Whether that be $25/mo, a larger donation (feel free to contact us), or getting your company/foundation involved, we could really use the financial support to fund our growth!

———

Would you have attended meetups and participated in groups like this when you were younger? You can help make a difference by spreading the good word about StudentRND and its CodeDay initiative. You could even start your own program or help out with something that’s already happening in your area. Technology is a global thing, and its accessible for all ages and skill-sets.

Pretty awesome, huh?

In case you’ve missed our previous Weekly Good pieces, have a look here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

If you attended a university, you likely took at least one class where you sat in a lecture hall with at least fifty other bedraggled, hungover students. In that case, you may be familiar with those hand-held clickers distributed by professors to allow students to “click” their responses to questions they ask during class. Well, in the event you’re unfamiliar, Toronto-based startup Top Hat Monocle is taking ye olde clicker model and attempting to reinvent it for the mobile era, with some help from the cloud.

Essentially, the startup has built a classroom response solution that, by being both mobile and cloud-based, allows students to respond to questions regardless of the device they’re using, even if it’s a feature phone. In turn, by offering professors a range of tools to visualize student response data, create quizzes and interactive demos, the idea is to create a more engaging classroom experience.

Classroom response systems and modern clickers may not sound particularly exciting (and it’s not) but higher education is looking for its teacher and students OS (operating system) and there’s big potential in owning a share of the student/teacher interface. Top Hat has grown quickly since raising $8 million last July from Emergence Capital Partners, iNovia Capital, SoftTech and a few others.

In the last year, it’s gone from 20 to 70 employees, particularly beefing up its sales staff, using a direct sales force to “sell” to educators — that is, spinning the traditional SaaS education sales model, offering the product for free to professors, while charging students per semester. To help them to do that, they’ve been successful in stealing a bunch of former Groupon-ers (as Owen Thomas originally reported), with the total now at about 15, including two executives.

Today, the company announced that it has added an additional $1.1 million to its coffers with a new follow-on investment courtesy of Felicis Ventures. Now in 285 schools, COO Andrew D’Souza says that the company has been generating solid revenue and doesn’t need the money, but have wanted to work with the Palo Alto-based investment firm, which has made some great investments, and has begun to turn to education, having added companies like MindSnacks, Piazza and Inkling to its portfolio.

Felicis Founder Aydin Senkut explains: “We discovered Top Hat around the time they closed their Series A. They liked our expertise and passion but didn’t need the money and we didn’t want to wait until the next round, especially when they were growing so quickly so we figured out a way to make it work.” Another way of saying that the terms were favorable for the startup, methinks.

The company also recently opened a sales office in Sydney and partnered with cloud-based learning software maker, Desire2Learn, as it looks to accelerate growth through integrations and by following the lead of other edtech startups and elbowing into international markets.

But content is king. The real key for the company is interactive content. Control the relationship between the teacher and student and you can have real influence (and can be a billion-dollar company), but to do that, the startup will have to be able to supplement the user experience (on both ends of the funnel) with kick-ass content from textbook publishers and digital media and other content providers. The more meaningful and interactive the presentation of the material becomes, the higher the engagement and the better the outcomes.

And that’s money in the bank.

[Disclosure: My significant other works at Top Hat, so please keep that in mind when reading my perspective, i.e. take it with a big ‘ol grain of salt, as always.]

Editor’s note: Jesse Stay is Author of Google+ Marketing For Dummies and the upcoming book, I’m on Facebook — Now What??? 2nd Edition. He currently serves as Director of Social Media for Deseret Digital Media. Follow him on Twitter @jesse.

They call themselves “Utubers.” As budding filmmakers descend on Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, many other Utah-based filmmakers have already made a name for themselves, boasting millions and millions of views of their products. But why are there so many that have made a name for themselves, and why in Utah? There’s indeed something in the water out here. Something very strange.

Utah, known for its beautiful mountains, skiing, and, well, Mormons, is often last on Silicon Valley’s mind when it comes to technology. As a Utahn that almost seems a bit offensive to me, with all the tech companies like Adobe and Oracle and Xi3 and Fusion IO and many others here. But it’s true. As someone whose best friends and audience are in Silicon Valley, I have to admit that we’re just not quite seen as a tech hub.

However, there is a group of people networking and collaborating with each other in Utah, the likes of which are found in Silicon Valley. I’m beginning to notice the emergence of an incredibly popular and growing YouTube presence out of the state.

It all started several months ago, when I originally approached TechCrunch about this article. I noticed that in Billboard’s “Social 50″ music chart that two of the top 50 music stars on YouTube were from Utah: Lindsey Stirling and The Piano Guys. Even stranger? They were among the few on that list who weren’t already celebrities or famous musicians. That got my attention.

Pretty soon I began to investigate this weird fact here in my home state. It turns out there are many more. Just to name some of the top stars you may be familiar with:

• Lindsey Stirling – Known for her videos (originally produced by Devin Graham) in the beautiful scenery of Utah dancing around while playing violin, she reached No. 13 on the iTunes charts with no record label and only a YouTube channel to propel her presence there. See her video below.
• Devin Graham – You may have seen his videos with rope swings off Utah arches or ziplining on waterskis into the water. Everything he touches turns to YouTube gold.
• Teddie Films – My favorite is their Star Wars-themed “Somebody that I Used to Know”. They make hilarious music parodies.
• Orabrush – Also originally produced by Devin Graham and starring the infamous Austin Craig (you might also know him from the Teddie Films-produced “NBC Olympic Style“), Orabrush is well known for their tongue-brush cleaner commercials, and taking a brand to success solely through YouTube.
• Blendtec – Indeed, they do blend. Check out the video Robert Scoble did with their founder (and me at his side) here.
  
• Cute Girls Hairstyles – I just discovered and met these guys recently, but their audience is huge. Each episode is a new cute kids hair style you can try for yourself. They started as a husband and wife just sharing videos of their kids getting new hair styles.
• The Piano Guys – You may have seen their crazy videos of the piano on top of a cliff, or maybe their Cello Wars videos. We clearly love Star Wars here in Utah.
• Kid History – Adults acting out what their kids are explaining – totally hilarious.
• Stuart Edge – Known originally for his “Mistletoe Prank” video, he makes hilarious pranks, and his subscriber numbers have recently exploded.
• ScottDW – An aspiring filmmaker and producer of some of Lindsey Stirling’s videos, you may know him from his “Fruit Ninja in Real Life Dub to Dubstep” and many of the rap songs you hear in Devin Graham and other popular YouTube videos (he is also an aspiring rap artist).

And the list goes on. So where did these guys come from? Why is Utah suddenly becoming the new Hollywood or Broadway for YouTube videos?

After a little research I came down to a few reasons. I asked Austin Craig, the guy you see in the Orabrush videos, how all this happened:

George Wright studied at BYU (I think he did Marketing). He started the Blendtec Will It Blend campaign. Jeffrey Harmon came out of Marketing at BYU. He did Orabrush. Devin Graham studied Film at BYU and was the first video guy at Orabrush. Devin launched his own channel and became a star.

Lindsey Stirling studied at BYU, and after repeatedly being told she should start a YouTube channel, met Devin. Devin shot, produced, and edited many of her early videos, launching her to stardom. The Piano Guys also consulted Devin and some members of the Orabrush team on how to grow their channel. They are now signed with Sony.

ScottDW (makers of the Fruit Ninja video) studied film at BYU with Devin, and his collaborations with Devin have taught him a lot. Stuart Edge is studying at [Utah Valley University], and started making his own videos when he started working at Orabrush just a few months ago.

Teddie Films sought advice from Ricky Ray Butler of Plaid Social (another common thread of many of these stars), who studied marketing at BYU and worked on some Orabrush projects. Their parody hits have launched them to millions of views.

Kid History did it all on their own, so far as I can tell. They just had really funny videos. Cute Kids Hair Styles is the same way. Built up their own audience.

So I guess you could trace it down to a number of factors: the first being that many of them were employees of Orabrush or Blendtec and were able to start networking while there. Others met Devin Graham (who came out of Orabrush) and grew to become stars as a result of his influence. Others just built really cool stuff, maybe from drinking the water?

The final common thread, at least among many of them, seems to be the attendance at BYU. Provo, Utah, is a college town after all. In the course of their growth, it turns out that many of these YouTube stars attended BYU. Shortly after, many of them took off on their own careers with Orabrush, Arches rope swing videos, blended iPads, and Dancing Violin Zelda Dubstep videos (well, maybe not quite that extravagant). Could some of that success be attributed to BYU itself?

BYU, owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons – yes, Mitt Romney and Harry Reid’s faith), is home to perhaps the most concentrated group of young, educated Mormons on the planet. Unlike most schools, BYU prohibits the use of drugs or alcohol by its students as part of the Mormon faith. Without drugs or alcohol to entertain, it seems students there are finding other creative ways to entertain themselves – like with YouTube videos. And entertain they do. In fact, a few well known videos you may have seen have come from the school itself.

Even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has built up quite a YouTube presence of its own, with millions of views and ranking in the top spots under religion for Youtube consistently. Also just recently The Mormon Tabernacle Choir launched its own Youtube channel. Maybe the culture in Utah just breeds a culture of sharing, joy, and fun that comes from all of these YouTube stars. That’s not to say that all of those stars are even Mormon, however.

Whatever it is, it’s just weird. It’s almost as if the same way Times Square is the hub for all things Broadway, Provo, Utah, in the heart of what locals call “Happy Valley,” has become that for YouTube. It seems more and more YouTube successes are coming out of this area in a manner Utah has never seen before. Watch out Silicon Valley nerds! There is indeed something in “the stream” out here, and it’s not just the great trout fishing.

Yammer competitor Jostle.me has raised $3.1 million from a group of angel investors. The company has raised $4.6 million to date, all from private individuals. It has 52 shareholders, including most employees who work for the company and its directors.

Jostle sells a cloud-based enterprise platform that uses photos of the people in the organization as the foundation for the service. Immediately its differentiation is apparent to a service like Yammer, which uses the standard river of news for collaboration. With Yammer, updates flow down the page.

Jostle is a new kind of social platform for the enterprise that forgoes long rivers of text for a landscape of pictures that frame the company in the context of the relationships that people have.

The images can be filtered in a variety of ways: by name, role, skill and other criteria. Click on a photo and the profile comes into view, displaying tags that tell something about the person. Tabs provide a bio, how to get in touch with the person and contributions they’ve made to different projects.

Visualization is what binds Jostle.me. You can view activities that are popular across the organization and how people relate to each other.

Jostle prides itself on its unconventional fundraising practices, opting for attracting a large group of individuals who come from the business profession. The company points out that 84 percent of its investors come from a risk profession, such as property development, medicine or oil and gas.

That’s an unconventional approach for a company that has an unconventional way of growing its business.

Rumor Friday-Before-A-Holiday-Weekend®? Today, TechCrunch received a tip that San Francisco-based social TV startups Dijit and Miso could be close to combining forces in what would be the latest round of consolidation in that segment.

The deal would likely involve NextGuide app maker Dijit acquiring patents, IP and other assets from Miso in exchange for some amount of cash or equity in the combined entity, we’ve heard. It’s not clear how many of Miso’s employees would join Dijit, or how the two would combine product or technology that they’ve been working on independently. That said, while there are still a number of details to work out, the deal could be done as soon as next week.

We’ve reached out to both companies for comment. Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman declined to say anything. Meanwhile, I’ve yet to reach Miso CEO Somrat Niyogi. (If you’re reading this, Somrat, please call me.)

The merger would combine two startups who have both spent the last few years pivoting while searching for market traction. Miso, launched in 2010, came to market as a TV check-in app along the lines of GetGlue and others. But it eventually transformed itself — a couple of times — most recently launching a product called “Quips,” which is aimed at letting people share moments from their favorite TV shows. Along the way, it’s raised about $6 million from investors that include Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures and Hearst Interactive Media.

Dijit, too, had done the social check-in thing and has also pivoted a couple of times. At one point it positioned itself as a universal remote control, connecting to multiple devices through the Griffin Beacon accessory. More recently, however, the company has been working on a TV discovery app called NextGuide, which it hopes to connect directly to set-top boxes from your existing cable provider. Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman has told me in the past that the startup had raised some seed capital last year, but the company hasn’t disclosed exactly how much.

If the deal happens, Dijit and Miso won’t be the first (or the last) “second-screen” or “social TV” companies to explore hooking up with each other, or with others in the space. Not too long ago, Viggle announced that it was acquiring social TV competitor GetGlue. But that deal hinged on Viggle getting new financing — which never came through — and the deal didn’t actually come to pass.

That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or the other try to find another partner to tie up with. After all, Viggle had previously swallowed up second-screen startup Loyalize, among others.

We’ll keep you posted on what comes next.

Uber is lowering its prices in San Francsico, as the company seeks to remain competitive with an influx of low-cost, on-demand transportation offerings in the city. The startup is also expanding availability of its lower-priced UberX service to all San Francisco users.

In a blog post today, Uber announced that the price of an Uber Black ride will decrease by 10 percent compared to the cost in 2012. That includes both lower time and distance charges, as well as a lower base fare, all of which goes into effect Monday, January 21.

The company is also making traveling outside of the city more appealing, as users will have the same basic rate whether they’re in San Francisco or in the surrounding Bay Area. And since users are now responsible for all bridge and other tolls incurred on a trip, drivers are more likely to go outside the city.

But a cheaper, more simplified price structure wasn’t the only big announcement today. Uber is also making its UberX hybrid fleet available to all San Francisco users. UberX was launched in beta last fall but was only available to select users. The news will make those cars more widely available, but the spike in demand could mean longer waits for rides using the cheaper service.

When Uber first launched in San Francisco, it was nothing short of a revelation. Back then, cabs rarely came when called, and there was no way to know whether they would or not. Finally, for the first time, mobile users here were able to find reliable, on-demand transportation in the city.

But a lot has changed since then, as there is suddenly an influx of alternative on-demand transportation options in San Francisco. Ride-sharing services like Lyft and SideCar now mean that users have the convenience and reliability of Uber at a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, even cabbies today can be e-hailed through apps like Flywheel.

The end result is that Uber is no longer the only ride in town. Anecdotally, I’ve known some previously hardcore Uber users who now check Lyft or SideCar (or both) for rides before moving on to Uber. (Although Anthony Ha foolishly still gives MORE THAN half his salary to Uber every month.) And with the marketing push behind Flywheel, Uber could soon be faced with being the third or fourth option checked for the tech-savvy in its home market.

So it’s not surprising to see Uber reduce its prices as lower-cost options begin to gain traction in SF. The only question is if it will start doing the same in other markets where it operates, or if it will wait until the competition moves into other cities. Lyft and SideCar are both expected to begin rolling out into new markets aggressively in 2013, and Flywheel has already partnered with cab companies in most major markets.

The hardest thing about watching TV is finding the remote after a long, slovenly lounge on the couch. Cube26 aims to improve on that situation by turning your TV, phone, or tablet into a face-detecting powerhouse. What does that mean? Basically, your TV or other device will know when you’re looking at it, who is in the room with you, and, more importantly, it will pause the program, call, or game when you leave the room.

Founded by Cornell grads Saurav Kumar and Aakash Jain, Cube26 is still in beta, but from what I saw it works quite well on multiple platforms. For example, in addition to the aforementioned “bathroom pause,” the system can tell when you’re talking on the phone and put other devices on hold. You can also use the system for parental control as it can recognize people in the room and plan content accordingly.

“Other players in vision control are generally focused on one specific area, for example concentrating on hand-gesture detection for TV control or face recognition or body control,” said Kumar. “We believe in making the interaction with devices as natural as possible. For example, when you want to mute the volume for a device, instead of using hand gestures to do some pre-defined pattern, how about you say ‘ssshhh!’ to make a ‘keep quiet’ gesture?”

The company is bootstrapping now and expects to have some traction in OEM hardware over the next few months. They haven’t named any hardware partners, but they were at CES to look for distributors for the technology.

The project aims to take a holistic approach to system interaction.

“For vision control to be natural we believe that the solution is to leverage a wide range of vision signals from the user – both implicit and explicit. Signals include presence detection, gesture, age and gender detection, face recognition and eye tracking, and hand gestures.”

In other words, the system works best with passive, instinctual commands. Unlike the Kinect and similar motion controllers, the system is always watching the room for changes, allowing for a more integrated experience.

The founders came together at a startup weekend organized by Microsoft. They got together for six months of development and focused from making eye-tracking systems for marketers onto “natural control” of devices.

Again, much of this tech is fairly pie-in-the-sky right now, but as the speed of embedded systems improves I don’t see why this couldn’t be embedded right into a TV or phone, thereby adding real smart features to otherwise dumb devices.

App search startup Quixey is bringing in some senior management help to grow its business. The company has hired former Zynga executive Guru Gowrappan as its new executive vice president of products.

Gowrappan held several roles at Zynga during his time there. Nicknamed “The Fixer,” he led M&A integration during purchases that included Newtoy, which brought Words With Friends to Zynga, as well as last spring’s acquisition of OMGPOP.

Gowrappan was also instrumental in Zynga’s Japan operations, where he held the title of COO for that international division and helped launch three new games in the market. He also worked with the CEO and CFO during Zynga’s IPO process in 2011.

Prior to Zynga, Gowrappan had worked on several monetization and global initiatives at Yahoo. He joined the web giant as part of its acquisition of Overture and worked on more than 500 projects and launches through Yahoo Media, Listings, and various regional products. At Yahoo he held various roles in operations, M&A, strategy and product execution.

With all that experience at firms like Zynga and Yahoo, what attracted him to becoming a part of Quixey?

Gowrappan compared today’s app search world to where web search was before Google took over. That is, most app search and discovery is done through directory structures by navigating through various categories on Google Play and the Apple App Store to find what you want. This is akin to the directory structure of the web that Yahoo and others envisioned before Google made full web search better. According to Gowrappan, Quixey wants to be the Google of app search, as that becomes ever more important.

Quixey CEO Tomer Kagan says the company is nearing 100 million queries a month. It also has a number of partners that are providing valuable data points to improve its algorithm. Those include Ask.com, Singapore-based carrier Starhub, Chinese mobile browsers Maxthon and Boat Browser, Applorer, and the Skyfire Horizon browser toolbar that is preloaded on AT&T phones. The result is that Quixey has a lot more data to go on, according to Gowrappan.

With him on board, look for Quixey to boost monetization over the next few months. We’ll keep you posted on new developments.

Today, a Cox Media-owned radio station in Florida’s Tampa Bay is shifting its entire format to listener-controlled radio, now putting its audience in control of the songs that play 24 hours a day. It’s the first station among Cox Media’s 86 U.S.-based properties to do so on both web and mobile, if not the first in the U.S. to experiment with the format. Is this what the future of terrestrial radio looks like? It just might be.

What the future of radio looks like is a question that radio stations everywhere – and not just here in the U.S. – are struggling with. After all, what hope does radio have when anyone can play any music, on-demand, any time they want?

The answer, as it turns out, may be to mimic those services their listeners are abandoning them for, and then attempt to add value.

That’s certainly the case with Cox Media Group’s 97x, which today at 5 PM ET, is making an extreme shift to user-controlled programming for the first time. The station had been building its new platform in stealth, in partnership with LDR Interactive (aka “Listener Driven Radio”) which today offers “crowdcasting” solutions for 160 stations worldwide. Its services range from simple music research (users voting for favorite songs) to full-on listener takeover of the radio station’s queue.

Most of these crowd-controlled stations are experimenting with the technology, however, offering users the ability to vote on a song or control a short block of programming. They aren’t turning the entire station over to the listener base. But perhaps they should.

In the first four hours of teasing its launch, 97x received 31,000 song votes. To give you an idea, the station, in a typical week, usually has around 300,000 people tuning in. Assuming traction continues at this pace, it could translate into a massive leap in listeners.

The Tampa station is only the second among LDR’s partners to try such a thing. The first, an urban radio station in Ft. Wayne, Ind., went to 24/7 user-controlled programming, and then rocketed itself up from No. 20 in its market to No. 1 over the course of a year. But in that instance, the listeners had to go to a website to make their selections. Tampa’s 97x rollout includes both an iOS and Android applications, and several innovative features which make it unique.

I spoke with Keith Lawless, VP and Market Manager for Cox Media, about what makes this particular station’s approach so different. “Listeners don’t just control the music,” he told me, “they’re actually on the air.” The apps, he explains, include an “Open Mic” feature, which lets users record a 10-second introduction, dedication, song request, or whatever else they want to say, using their smartphone. The audio clip is then sent to the studio, where the DJs (who are now rebranded as “music guides”) play it in conjunction with whatever song clip it’s referencing or in another timeslot that makes sense.

These DJs, or guides if you will, aren’t completely out of a job with the listener takeover, you’ll be glad to know. They’ll still vet those audio clips, of course, fill the queue with new music, and they still have some say over what goes on the air. That is, it has to match the station’s format. “You may suggest ‘Justin Bieber’ and I’m not going to put it in there because it’s not that kind of station,” Lawless jokes. But, he also says that the station is no longer limited to its playlist in terms of what’s going on the air.

In the case of 97x, it already had a larger selection (250 songs) on its playlist, compared to the 100 songs that a contemporary-hits station generally plays, but with the user-control takeover, that playlist expands to 1,800. And users can even request songs outside the list if they want. “You may come up with a deep cut from an artist like Red Hot Chili Peppers, and we go ‘wow, we’ve had a couple of requests for that, let’s put that in the queue and see if people start voting for it,’” says Lawless.

Not only does the new platform introduce the user audio recordings feature, it’s also now meeting with local businesses to sponsor its “rewards” platform. To encourage user engagement, the station doles out its own badges for participation. For example, the “Early Bird and the Worm” badge (referencing a song by The Used), might offer those who voted between 4 AM and 6 AM a free coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts.

To some extent, this type of carrot-and-stick system might be needed in order to keep users engaged. No other LDR partner station has attempted this on mobile, and only one has tried the 24/7 format. “It’s important that the votes continue along the way…we have to keep it fresh,” Lawless says. “We can’t have app fatigue. Everyone’s had that app they loved so much, and then two months later they delete it out,” he worries.

To keep things interesting, the apps also use notifications to alert users when their audio recordings will play on-air, or when their favorite track or artist is about to play. Users can request to be alerted through SMS, email or even Twitter. And they can share their recordings, badges, votes and favorites songs on Facebook and Twitter, too.

Lawless says that Tampa’s 12-year old station 97x was a candidate for this radical change because its Arbitron ratings weren’t doing that well, despite the fact that other efforts, such as its popular concert series “The Next Big Thing,” have drawn large crowds. Last year’s event was even the biggest one to date, he noted.

Given the target audience here – young alt rock listeners – a station like 97x could almost be the canary in the coal mine, in terms of what’s happening to radio. The younger users just aren’t listening like they used to. Maybe putting them in charge will bring them back.

Radio Struggles To Adapt 

The radio industry, like so many others, has been slow to adapt to the disruption of the always-on broadband age and the widespread adoption of mobile devices that allow users to download an app that plays whatever music they want and, for a small fee, hear that music without any ads – Spotify (Premium), for example. To combat this trend, Clear Channel, which operates over 1,200 radio stations across the U.S., has copied – sometimes, almost shamelessly – the  innovations from streaming music startups, which it offers in its iHeartRadio mobile application.

But while Clear Channel is trying to blend the modern music streaming experience with traditional “live radio” on mobile, other companies have attacked the problem differently. For example, Jelli, a crowdsourced social radio platform, which this fall received an additional $9 million in venture funding, has been trying a similar model to LDR’s in that it, too, brings crowd control to terrestrial radio.

Today, Jelli has expanded its user-control platform to 70 radio stations across the U.S. Some of its stations, too, have launched a 24-hour user-controlled format, says Jelli CEO Michael Dougherty. “Imitation is the best form of flattery,” he says of the Cox Media-owned 97x’s recent shift. “[I] would love more stations to do this,” he tells me. “I think it is very important for radio to leverage its strengths, including local community, group listening and a ‘social DNA’ which can be amplified by platforms like Jelli.”

Initially, LDR’s platform and Jelli seem a lot alike, but Victor Caballero, VP of Operations at LDR, says the two models are actually quite different.

“We both entered the space around the same time,” he says. “Jelli is more concerned about getting their brand out in the marketplace, and we’re not…we’re designed to help our affiliates own their interactive platform, and brand it however they want to,” Caballero adds. That is, unlike Jelli, where users download a Jelli-branded mobile app and then pick their local station, LDR’s customers use the technology in their own self-branded apps and websites.

And so while there have been a few 24/7 stations out there, such as those on Jelli, there hasn’t yet been one that has done it exactly like this. Not only is 97x doing this under its own branding, it’s doing it on mobile, with social media integration, “open mic” recordings, notifications, badges and rewards.

“I haven’t seen any station launch it on this level, with the app, with the marketing, in a market this size, with a station this big,” says Caballero. “When you gather everything that comes together with this particular launch, it’s one of a kind in the world.”

Venrock’s David Pakman joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio this week for Ask A VC, where we chatted about a number of things, including why he hasn’t made an investment in a digital music startup. This is surprising considering Pakman’s extensive experience in the music industry. Pakman was the co-creator of Apple Computer’s Music Group and the CEO of music retailer eMusic, and he also co-founded myPlay, which was sold to Bertelsmann’s e-commerce group. He also delved into the New York tech scene and discusses what the region will need to become a powerhouse.

Check out the video above for more!

Line, a messaging app made by South Korea’s Naver Corp. that took off in Japan, just crossed 100 million users globally 19 months after it originally launched.

The app is one of the leading contenders in smartphone messaging in Asia and faces off against Tencent’s WeChat and KakaoTalk. As I’ve written before, when rumors emerged that Facebook was in acquisition talks with WhatsApp, global messaging is very fragmented with many players that do well in specific territories in Asia and Europe.

While Naver didn’t share details on daily or monthly actives, Line’s numbers put it up there among the top smartphone messaging players to watch.

Line gives you free voice calls (like Skype or Facebook’s new overhauled app). Then there’s basic messaging, but Line is a bit goofier with sillier emojis and stickers. There are teddy bears juggling eggplants, bunnies with flames of anger in their eyes, and a shy balding man surrounded by little sparkles and flowers. (Yes.)

Many are free, but some are paid — which is the secret to the app’s financial success. Naver last said Line was pulling in $3.75 million a month in sticker sales in July. But that figure is “a lot higher now,” according to Naver USA’s CEO Jeanie Han. She wouldn’t share figures though.

On top of sticker sales, there are a bunch of brand advertising revenue streams. Like Twitter, Line also has sponsored brand accounts where Coca-Cola can sign up for accounts that users can befriend or follow. Brands can also sponsor packs of stickers.

Like many other consumer mobile companies that have done well in Japan like GREE and DeNA, Naver wants to take Line global. It’s bringing the app to the U.S. and is signing up celebrities like Snoop Dogg to attract teens and twenty-somethings.

They just hired Han, who spent 10 years at Paramount Pictures, to run Naver’s U.S. office and expand Line’s reach in the U.S. They’re planning to attract new users through typical app marketing channels, but also through high-profile partnerships with celebrities and other brands.

Can it be successful, though? Facebook Messenger appears to be the leading standalone app in the U.S. by market share and active usage, according to some data I pulled from a mobile data compression company called Onavo late last year. That app appeared to be actively used by 11 percent of iPhones in the U.S. on Onavo’s network. On the other hand, a smaller percentage of smartphone owners in the U.S. regularly use messaging apps compared to people in other countries, the data showed. So perhaps there’s room for everyone to grow.

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

Google Handwrite, a small but helpful tool that the search team introduced last year, has gotten a bit of an upgrade today. The tool allows you to turn on a mode when you’re on your mobile device to “write” your search.

A part of the update is the ability for Google Handwrite to understand overlapping characters and write more than one Chinese character at a time if that’s your search language of choice. From Google’s mobile search page on your device, just go into settings and enable “Handwrite” mode to give it a try. If you have sloppy handwriting, then you will be extremely happy to learn more about the update.

Here’s what Google Product Manager, Lawrence Chang, had to say about the changes today:

If you’ve tried Handwrite before, you may have had some trouble entering a lowercase “L”, the number “1”, or a capital “I”. Now, we provide alternate interpretations of your characters that you can select above the space bar. Similarly, in Japanese the characters “?” and “?” look nearly identical but are different characters and produce different search results. If Google interprets your handwriting one way and you meant the other, you can now more easily make a correction.

While this tool might seem like no big deal, the technology behind it is quite complex, especially the above-mentioned understanding of handwriting from millions of potential users. We don’t all write things the same way, and some of us have worse handwriting than others. Ahem. As far as overlapping letters, Chang explains a bit more on how in-depth Google goes to solve these issues:

Compared with tablets, mobile phone screens are smaller and are a little more difficult to write on. Now, instead of squeezing in your letters across the width of the small screen or writing one letter at a time, you can write letters on top of one another. Say you’re in the grocery store and you want to look up a recipe for quiche on your phone. When you write the letters “q”, “u”, “i”, “c”, “h”, and “e”, it’s okay if they overlap and are garbled a bit.

If Google wants to try and learn how to read your handwriting when nobody else in the world, including you, can, then more power to them. By learning how to read a multitude of handwriting samples, the company can then release functionality to scan documents of any type in, making it easier to convert them to digital format. This type of approach is how Google has tuned its Voice product, by allowing you to call GOOG411 to get restaurant information and phone numbers. You talk, Google learns. Now when you write, Google learns that, too.

It’s actually quite handy and easier than “tapping” on the go.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Facebook is getting stingier about giving data to startups that don’t share content back to it. At least, that’s how it’s describing its decision to cut off a voice messaging app that it has recently begun competing against.

Yesterday, Facebook told voice messaging startup Voxer it will cut off the app’s access to Facebook’s “Find Friends” data citing its policy on competing social networks. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed with me that it will enforce this on apps that use its data to bootstrap growth but don’t contribute anything.

Voxer CEO Tom Katis tells us that it was contacted by Facebook on January 17th to say its Find Friends data access would be turned off 48 hours later. That will prevent Voxer from helping you auto-follow your Facebook friends when you join the service, which makes sure you have someone to chat with right away. Katis says Facebook stated that it views Voxer, whose walkie-talkie app has a couple tens of millions of users, as a “competitive social network.”

Voxer disagrees. It doesn’t view its product as a direct competitor of Facebook’s social network or Facebook Messenger — it’s been live with Facebook more than a year without any issue, after all. Instead, Voxer tells us its “unique, patent-protected technology enables live, push-to-talk functionality combined with the benefits of a messaging application” but isn’t trying to be a wider social network.

That may be why Voxer thought it was safe from Facebook’s Platform Policy, which states:

“Competing social networks: (a) You may not use Facebook Platform to export user data into a competing social network without our permission; (b) Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social network.”

But late last month, Facebook added voice messaging to its standalone Messenger app. Then this week it rolled out VoIP calling to Messenger for iOS. Facebook seems to be getting very serious about voice messaging and taking on your telephone. Voxer similarly reduces your need for a home phone, or apps like Skype. This means Voxer qualifies as a competitor. But why single out Voxer when there are plenty of apps that vaguely compete with Facebook?

Facebook Wants To Trade Its Data, Not Give It Away

Facebook has its own explanation of the Voxer block.

Users do have the option to post an audio message they’ve Voxed over to Facebook, but since Voxer conversations are private, people rarely do. Also, the option is mostly buried. I couldn’t find it until I looked through Voxer’s help documents. If you slide left a previously sent message, it reveals a share button that lets you post your message to Facebook, Twitter, SMS, or email. That means Voxer is pulling way more data from Facebook than it’s giving back.

If a startup shares back content such as photos or Open Graph stories, Facebook says they’ll be free to use its Find Friends Data. I believe that’s because Facebook can monetize that content with news feed ads.

If an app doesn’t share anything back, a spokesperson tells me it will only be able to use Facebook’s login system. They said Facebook won’t be asserting its vague “competing social network” policy more broadly than that, and it considers non-contributors to be a small class of apps – including Voxer.

Voxer’s Katis responded to Facebook’s explanation by saying the policy is hypocritical. He believes Facebook either wants Voxer to share more, which would make it more of a competing social network but more of a contributor, or Facebook wants Voxer to use its data less. (In which case, why was Voxer in the clear for a year, and why have a developer platform in the first place?)

Getting cut off from Facebook’s social graph could spell trouble for Voxer, which raised a massive $30 million funding round in April 2012 at a rumored $180 million pre-money valuation. That value could be hard to justify if it becomes much more difficult to retain users because they don’t start off connected to their friends. It depends on what percentage of users employ the Find Friends feature. We’ve heard it may be around 30%.

Facebook’s Platform War

This new policy is hugely problematic for startups in the messaging space, though, as they primarily deal with private conversations. What would they share back to Facebook that wouldn’t violate that privacy? Obviously who you message with and what you say shouldn’t become news feed stories.

If you look at Facebook’s wide breadth of features, there’s likely tons of startups that could be considered “competitors” and don’t have anything to share. If they get hit with similar Find Friends cut-offs, it will be much harder for them to gain traction. Recreating your social graph manually via email addresses on every new app you use is a huge pain and could deter people from finishing on-boarding or ever discovering the value of a non-Facebook social app.

There’s similarities here to Twitter’s recent policy changes. It ceased giving open access to tweets and required those that use them to reproduce them faithfully. It too was sick of others coining off its hard work; like Facebook, it also promised one thing to developers then did something different.

Facebook is a public company, and it’s not going to act like a charity anymore. You could say Facebook had no obligation to be so generous in the first place. Unfortunately, though, in Facebook’s push to be the way the world connects, it’s about to make other apps less social.

Eric Eldon contributed to this article.