Category: Tech news

Building hardware is hard and breaking into entrenched markets is even harder. However, the founders of 4Moms, Rob Daley and Henry Thorne, managed to do both. 4Moms is a baby products company that aims to change the way we think about traditional products like play yards, strollers, and sleepy-time swings. Their products are beautifully-engineered pieces of machinery and the company recently closed on $20 million in funding from Bain Capital.

I’ve tested most of the 4Moms products but I was lucky enough to sit down with Daley and Thorne to talk about the company and how they’ve managed to stay ahead of the baby products curve.

The Pittsburgh-based firm builds their products by figuring out the pain points for the average parent. While many of us would find the Origami to be a silly bit of overkill, it’s a godsend for harried parents. The Breeze play yard – which opens and closes with one pull – is just about the best thing ever and the Mamaroo baby nappy-time thing is equally cool. In short, this gear is changing the way we coddle our wee ones.

Daley and Thorne discuss the future of the company, their funding, and how to build cool hardware. The best comes near the end when we discuss future endeavors, but I won’t spoil it.

The U.S. government is continuing to lobby Brussels to water down plans to reform privacy legislation. The European Union’s executive and legislative bodies are in the process of reforming the region’s data protection rules — a long overdue wrangle since current legislation dates back to 1995, when Facebook was not even a gleam in 11-year-old Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

The Europe Commission proposed new rules last January — setting out its intention to harmonize data protection rules across EU member states, by establishing a single national data protection authority, and also give citizens more control over their data, including granting people the right to have data that companies and organisations hold on them deleted on request  (a so called ‘right to be forgotten’), and a right to have their data ported to another service. Data holders would also have to notify service users of serious data breaches — “if feasible within 24 hours”. Other proposals include requirements for companies to have a data protection officer to oversee compliance.

The new rules would apply to any companies and organisations processing EU citizens’ data — even if they are entirely based outside the EU. To enforce the new rules, the EC is proposing to strengthen independent national data protection authorities, including giving them the ability to fine companies up to €1 million ($1.27 million) or up to 2 percent of their global annual turnover.

The proposals have now reached the European Parliament committee debate stage, with draft reports produced by committee rapporteurs last week. There’s still a way to go before agreement is reached between all 27 EU member states enabling new legislation to be adopted — so there is still time for lobbyists to keep aggitating.

European digital and civil rights association, the EDRi, has obtained a copy of what is purported to be the latest U.S. government lobby document (online here) — a document which calls on Europe to be more “flexible” in its approach, and warns that the reforms risk stifling innovation and growth, and jeopardizing the free-flow of information needed to fight crime and terrorism.

The document warns:

It goes on to urge that the proposals be “revised to ensure that security and commerce are not adversely affected”.

The general thrust of the argument set out in the document is that the US does not want to be beholden to European policy decisions on privacy — favouring “interoperability” of respective privacy frameworks. There’s also an implied threat that trade and commerce between the US and Europe could suffer if the reforms themselves are not reformed.

“Interoperability of our respective privacy regimes is critical to maintaining our extraordinary economic relationship, fostering trade and preventing non-tariff barriers, and unlocking the full potential for our economic innovation and growth,” the document states. “We urge the EU to look more toward outcomes that provide meaningful protection for privacy and focus less on formalistic requirements.”

The document, which runs to five pages, goes on to address specific portions of the proposed EU legislation — arguing that standards developed through “voluntary consensus-based multi-stakeholder processes” are a better alternative to regulation where the internet is concerned, as they are more “flexible” and “adaptable to a quickly changing technological environment”. It also argues that user consent for use of personal data “need not always be express, affirmative consent” and that the scope of consent-based options that are offered to users should correlate with the “scale, scope, and sensitivity of the personal data that organizations collect, use, or disclose”.

On the ‘right to be forgotten’ and the ‘right to erasure’ the U.S. warns the EU to make modifications to “avoid hampering the ability to innovate, compete and participate in the global economy”. “For example, we suggest that the EU reconsider the feasibility of placing obligations on a data controller for publications made by others after consent is withdrawn,” it notes, going on to voice concerns that rights to freedom of expression might suffer under the current proposals.

The document also argues that the proposed 24 hours data breach notification law is not a long enough period for organizations to comply — and might also lead to over-notifications, causing consumers to ignore them or act unnecessarily on erroneous information.

A very large portion of the document is given over to concerns about the impact of the proposals on the global transfer of data and free flow of information — with the US lobbyists apparently arguing that EU proposals could have “disastrous ramifications” for regulators, law enforcement authorities and litigants in civil cases.

Assuming the document is genuine, it suggests the US government is continuing to lobby Brussels to dilute its proposals. Last October TechWeekEurope reported that the US Chamber of Commerce was lobbying European politicians to alter the proposed new rules on behalf of the U.S. government.  Adam Schlosser, senior manager for global regulatory cooperation at the Chamber of Commerce, told the publication it had been engaged in lobbying since March, with a taskforce of around 50 staff engaged on the issue.

“Some of the biggest concerns are providing flexibility for different business models, allowing for compliance with existing legal obligations (such as anti-fraud) both in the EU and in third countries, and actually creating a ‘one-stop shop’ that is predictable and consistent across member states,” Schlosser told TechWeekEurope in October. He described progress as “incremental”, adding: The business community will need sustained and continued efforts to develop a pragmatic approach that considers how a final regulation can actually work in the real world.”

At the time of writing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had not responded to a request for an update on its current position regarding the EU privacy reforms.

Facebook has also been lobbying Europe about the reforms — with its own (smaller) team of lobbyists based in Brussels — calling aspects of the proposals such as the right to be forgotten unreasonable and unrealistic. But it’s not just big tech companies that are voicing opposition. ACT, the Association for Competitive Technology — an international non-profit association/advocacy group for startup-sized small and medium sized businesses such as mobile software developers — has also been lobbying Brussels on aspects of the reform that it believes would have a negative impact on startup businesses in the region.

“The Commission views startups as lifeforms that don’t communicate with bigger businesses,” EU spokesman for ACT, Greg Polad, told TechCrunch.

A particular bone of contention for ACT is that the latest amendments to the proposals — in the European Parliament draft committee reports — removed prior exemptions for SMEs to employ a data protection officer, replacing it with an exemption for companies that deal with fewer than 500 data points/subjects, a limit Polad describes as “ridiculously small”.

Another admin and cost burden that SMEs could face as a result of the proposed legislation is a requirement for a business to pre-emptively conduct privacy impact assessments if it deals with certain types of data — an up front cost which Polad argues could disuade startups from trying to build their businesses in Europe.

“If you’re saying to startups you have X, Y and Z costs to think about before you start operating then you’re not helping them to enter the market, and you’re most definitely not helping them to innovate and try and test out and experiment on the market,” he argues.

Whether you’re polishing your magnetic death ray or powering up your Stargate, the effects of magnetic fields on your watch can be quite destructive. Back in the old days when scientists wore suits and nice watches to work, they would bring their timepieces too near certain pieces of equipment, rendering the movement useless. Rolex solved this by wrapping its movements in non-ferrous metal but their watch, the Milgauss, could only handle up to 1,000 Gauss.

That was then and this is now. Omega has decided to blow Rolex out of the water with their new Seamaster Aqua Terra. This watch movement is actually made of non-ferrous material that can stand up to 1.5 tesla or 15,000 gauss, about twice the magnetic output of a subwoofer, while an MRI can hit up to 70,000 at its peak. This, incidentally is what happens when you get metal near your MRI.

The watch is a fairly standard three-handed timepiece but the new movement, the 8508, is what makes it special. The watch will ship this spring with pricing to be determined (expect something in the $10,000 range if not lower). Sound a little pricey? Tell that to yourself when you accidentally fall through a magnetic space-time vortex and your Timex stops ticking.

via Hodinkee

Taboola had a banner year in 2012, serving nearly 1.5 billion video recommendations per day by year’s end. With all of its growth in video recommendations, the company also grew revenue by more than 750 percent in 2012. The startup now sees a huge opportunity to move on from recommending videos to tackling content of all types.

The new product might seem a little counter-intuitive, considering recommendations for text articles have been around for decades, and there are no shortage of companies trying to tackle that problem. The difference, according to Taboola CEO Adam Singolda, is that it’s gone beyond just providing contextual recommendations to now also bringing in technology that it used to improve its video product and applying it to text articles.

Video recommendations can be a tough nut to crack, especially compared to text. That’s due mainly to the lack of good metadata around video. Without it, Taboola was forced to use other information, like viewer demographics, social sharing, and user behavior, to determine which videos users are most likely to watch.

Now Taboola is applying those algorithms to article text and getting impressive results. Singolda estimates that the company’s technology can yield three times the clickthrough rates and higher CPMs than other article recommendation offerings out there, depending on the type of content that it’s looking at.

Taboola already has some clients using full-text recommendations, including Bloomberg, Businessweek, Meredith and Jerusalem Post. It signed up some as a result of already doing business with them on the video side, but it is also offering full-content recommendations as a standalone service. Like its video recommendations, it allows publishers to connect users with other content on their own sites, while also enabling them to have their content highlighted on related articles on other sites.

In addition to the launch of its new article recommendations, Taboola has also hired a new COO, as it doubled headcount in 2012, and is on pace to double again in 2013. Eldad Maniv, former SVP at Zend and board member at Kaltura, just joined the company to handle operations.

That’ll be necessary, especially as growth continues internationally. Taboola recently added an office in London, which is being run by former Groupon country manager Nadav Rosenberg. That office, which opened in the fall, already accounts for about 10-15 percent of all revenues.

Taboola has raised $25 million since being founded in 2007, including a $10 million Series C round last summer. The company currently has about 70 employees, but expects that to grow to about 150 by the end of the year.

Apparently I “like” OfficeMax, Folgers, JCPenney, Kraft and several other big-name brands. At least, according to Facebook I do. Except, it’s wrong. It’s not that I dislike these brands, really (well except maybe Folgers – I mean, yuck). But the truth is, I’m just indifferent to them. Why did I like them? I don’t recall. I probably saw a coupon. Maybe a freebie or contest. I was bored, and I had to click “like” to enter the drawing. This is a common situation among Facebook users, but not really a huge problem. For Facebook, however, it is.

With Facebook now launching a search engine on top of its own structured data – conveniently after turning off the ability for users to opt out of search – there’s now a greater need to think about the implications of Facebook’s “over one trillion connections,” and how representative they are of the people who created them.

As a whole, Facebook’s “like” data may paint a relatively accurate picture of my public self – I like technology, apps, Star Wars, TV, family activities, and jokes about how much wine working mothers have to drink to stay sane (hint: it’s a lot). But when examined one-by-one, there’s a lot of junk data in there.

Initially, when and if people begin to transition to Facebook search over Google, they will be searching for things of personal interest, like old photos, places to travel, new bars or restaurants to try, local singles with shared interests, and more. But further down the road, you can imagine Facebook graph search becoming a part of the consumer shopping experience, too.

Say I’m looking for a new dryer, an HDTV, a new credit card, or maybe even a good sushi restaurant, and I want to know what my Facebook graph can recommend. The problem, as it stands today, is that Facebook would do a poor job of extracting that information accurately. “Friends who liked X” is not a recommendation. “Friends who checked in at Y venue” isn’t either.

With check-ins, at least, Facebook is addressing that latter issue somewhat via its Nearby feature, which has recently been prompting users to recommend or rate the restaurant, bar or other venue on a five-star scale. This data isn’t perfect either, because some friends’ ratings are more valuable than others’ ratings due to a variety of factors – their palates, biases, whether they’re wine-savvy, or similarities with a user’s own tastes, for example. But it’s a start.

On the “like” front, though, the data is murkier.

Steve Cheney, GroupMe’s Head of Biz Dev, explained this problem in more detail in a thoughtful, if pessimistic, post: “Graph Search’s Dirty Promise and the Con of the Facebook ‘Like’.” It’s well worth reading in its entirety. In it, Cheney says:

The truth however is that the link between query intent and your social interactions for interests and places is much weaker than FB wants you to believe.

In computer architecture they call an out of date piece of data “dirty”. Accessing dirty data is bad, wasting time and causing more harm than good. And in this context, much of the structured data that makes up Graph Search is just that: totally irrelevant and dirty.

It turns out as much as half of the links between objects and interests contained in FB are dirty—i.e. there is no true affinity between the like and the object or it’s stale. Never mind does the data not really represent user intent… but the user did not even ‘like’ what she was liking.

He goes on to explain that the problem was created by the way the Facebook “like” system worked. The company told brands that users would see their posts in their news feeds if the users liked the brand’s page on Facebook. So the brands paid big money in terms of advertising dollars to acquire fans. “Across the board big advertisers were told to spend 50% of their ad buy solely on fan acquisition,” Cheney writes. He calls it a “dirty little secret in ad agency land.”

This is why, today, Facebook users can’t just request a coupon, get a free sample, enter a contest, hear about a limited-time sale, etc. via a brand’s page – they are forced to like the page first. This then establishes a connection between the brand and the user. And now Facebook is mining that connection to build its own search engine. Google has PageRank. Facebook has “like” data, check-ins, posts, comments and photos. Here are some of the queries you can perform with Facebook Graph Search, to get an idea of how it will work.

A  ”Like” Is But One Signal, Facebook Has More

But that being said, while Cheney has a point about Facebook’s “dirty data,” I think that point of view also discounts Facebook’s capacity to innovate. Yes, some data is bad. But not all of it.

And most importantly, it seems clear that a Facebook like, in the context of businesses and brands, will eventually have to become one signal among many in Facebook’s search results ranking algorithm. Just as engines such as Google rely on thousands of signals to determine where a link appears in search results, Facebook too could turn to other means to determine how much value any particular “like” has. For example, with a restaurant, it could also know not just whether you liked it, but when you checked in, how often you returned, who you were with, how often they return, how you rated it, what friends and friends of your friends rated it, and more.

As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine also recently pointed out, even users’ photo uploads could translate into recommendations, thanks to the photos’ geotags (location where the photo was taken). A photo says “I was there,” and it often implicitly implies an element of fun, too. As Josh noted, “I don’t see many people posting pics from the DMV.”

With brands, determining a like’s value is more difficult, though. However, with Facebook’s advertising network, Facebook Exchange, which brought the first cookie-based retargeted ads to Facebook, Facebook can gain access to other signals about user behavior in order to better examine what a “like” means. For example, Facebook could learn whether a user visited a brand’s website, when their visit(s) occurred, whether or not those visits later led them to the advertiser’s Facebook page (after seeing a Facebook ad, for instance), and then provoked the user’s “like.”

Facebook could port the Facebook Exchange to mobile as well, which could bring in even more data, including perhaps one day, geolocation. That would solve the messy “check-in” problem. (Check-ins are a decidedly manual, privacy-sensitive way of getting location data an app could just know, if users gave it permission to run in the background.)

The trick will be in finding the proper way to massage all these various signals into an algorithm that makes sense and determines the proper relevancy. And Facebook is still critically missing information related to users’ financial transactions, which is the end result of clicking “like,” at least in brands’ eyes. It currently has some access to purchase data, through its relationship with Datalogix, but that may be limited to things such as grocery store purchases – data Facebook receives via Datalogix loyalty card data sets. Facebook clearly needs more of this kind of information.

Facebook also doesn’t necessarily know if you ever ate at that restaurant you liked, unlike when you checked in, posted geotagged photos, or reviewed it. And it doesn’t know how much you spent there, either. That’s why if Google ever gets its Google Wallet mobile payments service into the mainstream, it could best Facebook on at least this portion: closing the loop.

Still, Facebook does have access to a relatively powerful data set through Open Graph, which tells it not just what people like, but what they do. Open Graph data comes in through any third-party app that auto-shares with Facebook, providing information on things like your media consumption behavior (e.g. bands, TV shows, movies, books), as well as info gleaned from things like food or travel apps, and it may also have a decent amount of information from local businesses, too.

At the end of the day, the way I see Facebook’s graph search now is like looking at the bare bones of an idea, really the raw skeleton of what could one day become a more fully-fledged search offering. Today, dirty data will abound, perhaps. But when there are one trillion connections to examine (and growing), there’s also the possibility to find the golden nuggets of quality from among the junk.

Image credit: sofiabudapest/flickr

Additional reporting by: Josh Constine

Axcient, the hybrid cloud-based data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity startup, has raised $20 million in Series D funding led by Scale Venture Partners and Thomvest Ventures with Peninsula Ventures and Allegis Capital participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $53.5 million.

Founded in 2006, Axcient wants to bring core data protection and recovery solutions to SMBs and large corporations for a reasonable price. Using Axcient, companies can combine storage, backup and disaster-recovery into a single solution. To do so, Axcient sends businesses a small device (typically about the size of a desktop hard drive), which they can set up in as little as 5 minutes and self-connects to Axcient’s cloud as well as the company’s network.

With local, on-site hardware that use local network speeds with the added benefit of the creation of a secure tunnel to Axcient’s cloud, the startup has basically enabled organizations to take advantage of a SaaS-based hybrid cloud model which works for companies with 250GB of data or up to hundreds of terabytes. And the cost to the end-user scales from $100 a month to tens of thousands of dollars per month for enterprises with larger data needs.

The company says the key differentiator for its service is its platform approach, which eliminates a multitude of antiquated technologies such as backup, business continuity, archiving and disaster recovery in favor of a single, unified platform that eliminates downtime and data loss

And thanks to this approach, Axcient is growing fast. The company’s sales were up 100% in 2012, and Axcient protects close to 10 billion files and apps across thousands of organizations. Axcient’s client list includes the Make-a-Wish Foundation, Budget Rent a Car, Union Bank and Cellular One

The new funding is going to be used to hire 50+ people in engineering, sales and marketing in 2013.

Palo Alto-based Fanplayr, a startup focused on driving conversions on any website that offers an eCommerce component, today announced a new $2 million seed investment round, led by Denali Venture Partners. The two-year-old startup wants to help websites of all stripes offer up an Amazon-style recommendation, upsell and sales conversion mechanism, without a minimum of hassle and with more guidance than you’d get from a standard website data tracking product like Google Analytics, and will use the new funds to help it expand its sales and marketing efforts to get the word out to a wider audience.

Fanplayr works by monitoring your website visitors and keeping track of their behavior, typically checking out at least a month’s worth of data before taking any action. Then, once it has a profile of a visitor and a decent database of information to compare that to, it can do things like identify shoppers who are similar in profile to actual purchasers on your site, but who just aren’t buying anything. It can then recommend actions that you can take to get those visitors to become customers, and even implement steps you assign when visitors match specific profiles you set up based on your converting traffic.

“We deliver an automated report to the eCommerce site showing what we found about visitor behavior on the site, and recommending some strategies for how they can get increased conversion,” Fanplayr CEO Simon Yencken explained in an interview.

Fanplayr’s pricing structure is performance-based, so it only works if it delivers actual conversions. That’s a pricing strategy in keeping with the market the company is after, which includes smaller and medium-sized eCommerce companies who want to be able to match the kind of on-site shopping features offered up by an online retail heavyweight like Amazon, but don’t have the in-house engineering resources to do so. There’s an entire industry being built up around helping smaller guys go toe-to-toe with Amazon and its ilk, including AfterShip, the package tracking startup out of Hong Kong I wrote about earlier this week, and Fanplayr is hoping to be yet another key ingredient in that mix.

Retargeting and personalized offers are a core component of what Fanplayr offers, and it seems well-positioned to take advantage of the growing concerns online merchants have not to be left behind as the big guys go after these same opportunities.

AT&T announced on its consumer blog today that it will finally allow FaceTime over cellular available to all customers on a tiered data plan, after previously offering it first only to those with a Mobile Share plan and then later to those with both LTE devices and tiered plans. Took them long enough.

Apple opened up FaceTime to cellular network use back in September with the launch of iOS 6, but left it up to carrier discretion whether or not to allow those kinds of connections on their network. In the U.S., while Sprint and Verizon allowed the service for everyone from the get-go, AT&T hung back and played it cool, rolling out access to select groups of customers.

Nor did AT&T provide access to Apple’s video chat service on its mobile network all that willingly. It was pushed at least in part by net neutrality complaints from Public Knowledge, Free Press, New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute and others. AT&T says it should percolate to customers automatically via an update throughout the next few months, and users don’t have to do anything to get it. That’s pretty good, but guess what would have been better? If the carrier had done the same exact thing four months ago.

Facebook announced today at the Open Compute Summit that it is open-sourcing more of its data center designs for storing pictures, high availability and power consumption in data centers.

The news couples with a series of announcements at the event here today:

• Silicon photonics: Intel is contributing designs for its forthcoming silicon photonics technology, enabling 100 Gbps interconnects (enough to last multiple processor generations).
• “Group Hug” board: Facebook is contributing a new common slot architecture specification for motherboards (nicknamed “Group Hug”); this can produce boards that are completely vendor-neutral and can accommodate up to 10 SOCs.
• New SOCS: AMD, Applied Micro, Calxeda and Intel have all announced support for the Group Hug board; Applied Micro has built a mechanical demo of the new design.
• New members: More than a dozen organizations have joined, including storage-oriented companies like EMC, Fusion-io, Hitachi, Applied Micro, ARM and Sandisk.

Facebook  stores 300 million pictures per day. They needed ways to store the pictures but not archive them so people could access them if needed.

Facebook used the OpenCompute “Open Rack” to create a cold storage rack for photos. The specs are now available for anyone to use.

The company is also contributing DragonStone — a design spec for a low-power database server, one CPU board and redundant power, for “cold data” storage. DragonStone has been integrated into Facebook’s data center in Lulea, Sweden, and is seeing 40 percent more efficiency.

Finally, Facebook is contributing Winterfell, a new web server design for fitting more servers on a rack.

Facebook needs the innovation that comes with opening data center designs, not only from the social network but also from traditional providers, as well. Intel, for example, collaborated with the community to make its specs available for the silicon photonics technology with 100-gigabyte-per-second connectivity with unprecedented latency characteristics.

Advertisers favor showing up on iPads over any other device, and they’re willing to pay for it. Sky-high click through rates on iPad have helped it surpass the iPhone in popularity amongst advertisers despite competition making iPad placements the most pricey. The data from mobile ad platform MoPub’s Q4 2013 study of 90 billion ad views shows advertisers are betting on the biggest little screen.

Elain Szu, Director of Product Marketing for MoPub explains why the ad industry is warming up to the iPad. “Advertisers see the tablet and its [larger screen size] as nearly the same as the desktop.” Essentially, advertisers can easily translate their strategies to tablets. They don’t have to completely rethink their creative designs because the space they have isn’t all that different than on a laptop. Much smaller smartphone screens are much more different and require a new game plan.

MoPub’s data shows how iPad is the darling advertisers. First and foremost, iPad ads seesthe highest CTR (click through rates). Over the holidays, the iPad saw a 1.7% CTR from December 1-15, and a 2.2% CTR from January 1-7. Meanwhile, the iPhone had just 1.2% CTR at the beginning of CTR moving up to only 1.5% at the start of the news year, and Android smartphones saw just 1.0% and 1.1% CTRs in those time periods.

The MoPub’s popularity index measures how many bids it sees per ad slot, and it shows advertisers are chasing those high iPad CTRs. Apple’s tablet was at the top of the pile for the first time in Q4 with a score of 5.3, up from 2.8 at the end of Q3, blowing past the iPhone which only increased to 5.0 from 3.5 in Q3.

The rush to win bids for limited iPad inventory due to its lower install base than smartphones has driven up the cost of ads there, though that hasn’t deterred advertisers. iPad eCPMs (effective cost per thousand impressions) increased 48% over Q4 from $0.94 to $1.40. For comparison, iPhone eCPMs went from $0.62 to $1.04 in that time period, followed by Android tablet eCPMs increasing from $0.59 to $0.99 over the holidays. Android smartphones are in last place, starting at a lowly $0.52 eCPM and growing to $0.80 by the start of January. Obviously these were impacted by the holidays, but their relative sizes shows the strength of the iPad.

Apple is winning the overall mobile OS popularity contest amongst both advertisers and users. iOS has both higher click through rates and eCPMs than Android overall.

MoPub CEO Jim Payne tells me that’s because Android users don’t have as high of a life-time value to advertisers who capture them. Payne tells me “It’s because the Android user is much less monetizable in terms of virtual goods, so the advertisers aren’t willing to pay nearly as much for them.”

As for my take on why advertisers want to move into iPad real-estate? I think it comes down to the tablet behavior pattern. While we surely use our phones while laying in bed or stuck in transit, most of the time we’re bustling through the real world trying to get information to accomplish the task at hand. We’re focused, and less likely to take a detour to click on an ad.

While using an iPad, we’re more often relaxed, at rest, or in a mood to discover something. That means we’re more likely to chase an appealing discount, new product, or fun game down the ad click rabbit hole. Advertisers want to court us when we’re receptive to their advances. When we pick up the iPad, we let down our guard.

According to new figures released today from mobile commerce startup Branding Brand, mobile commerce over the 2012 holiday season saw major gains, with visits to m-commerce websites up 109 percent year-over-year, page views up by 116 percent, conversions up 30 percent, and sales up by a whopping 171 percent.

The company pulled the data from 84 mobile websites across a number of verticals, including apparel, health and beauty, and home goods. As usual, its report offers an interesting slice of the overall e-commerce industry and associated trends, as Branding Brand works exclusively with retailers to build smartphone-optimized mobile sites and mobile apps. That means the data it collects reflects the behavior taking place on mobile-friendly websites, as opposed to non-optimized desktop sites that users happen to visit on their mobile phones.

Branding Brand’s clients also include many big-name brands. Although the company is not permitted to reveal its full client list, those it works with include American Eagle Outfitters, Anthropologie, Brookstone, The Children’s Place, Costco, Crate & Barrel, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Drugstore.com, Eastern Mountain Sports, GNC, Nautica, Ralph Lauren, Sephora, Spanx, Steve Madden, Timberland, Tumi, and West Marine.

For the purposes of this latest report, the company examined sales starting the day before Thanksgiving through (and including) Christmas Day. This index of websites, in aggregate, saw 77 million visitors, 413 million page views (63 percent iOS and 33 percent Android), 620,000 orders (69 percent iOS and 28 percent Android), and average order values of $84.66 ($85.21 iOS and $81.54 Android). When charting the sales growth, it should be noted that Branding Brand’s index included smartphone websites that were live in both Holiday 2011 and 2012.

Despite the increase in sales and conversions, the average order values decreased 5 percent, year-over-year, the report found. Company co-founder Christina Koshzow tells TechCrunch that this decrease might be attributable to more retailers offering free shipping this holiday season. That’s a good bet, as comScore had also previously reported free shipping offers had been a popular promotion this year, with the so-called “Free Shipping Day” of Dec. 17 bringing in $1.01 billion in total online spending.

Chris Mason, Branding Brand co-founder and CEO, also mentioned that during the holiday period on average, there were 137 page views per second, and 12 orders per minute on Branding Brand’s mobile websites. The biggest day in visits was Black Friday and the biggest day in revenue was Cyber Monday. The biggest hour, in terms of smartphone visits, was 9 PM on Thanksgiving; in terms of revenue, it was 11 PM on Cyber Monday. Overall, the biggest growth day for revenue was Sunday, November 25th, which saw a 367 percent increase.

The top performing states by smartphone revenue were NY (11.5 percent) and CA (10.9 percent), followed by Texas (3.7 percent), Illinois (3.6 percent) and Michigan (3.2 percent).

These numbers are interesting to look at in comparison with larger e-commerce trends, such as those above-mentioned online holiday shopping figures comScore puts out every year. Earlier this month, comScore released its final holiday spending figures, finding that online shopping again increased year-over-year, up 14 percent from the $37.2 billion comScore reported last year to reach $42.3 billion. The firm noted that shoppers slowed down around mid-December and again towards the end, as concerns about the then-looming “fiscal cliff” grew.

Still, by the end of the season, comScore’s report of a 14 percent jump was basically par for the course, if just a bit lower than before. (Sales grew 15 percent in 2011, and 16 percent in 2010). But comScore’s numbers look at e-commerce in general – they don’t drill down into m-commerce like Branding Brand’s data does.

In terms of the big picture, Branding Brand found that smartphones’ share of total e-commerce traffic was 21 percent in 2012, tablet traffic was 12 percent and desktop traffic was 67 percent. Or put another, more remarkable, way, a third of this year’s holiday e-commerce traffic was on mobile.

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures has raised $400 million for Redpoint V, its fifth venture capital fund. The firm says that Redpoint V will be used to invest in early-stage entrepreneurs and startups.

While some other venture capital firms have dramatically increased fund sizes with time, Redpoint has shown an even hand throughout the years. Redpoint’s fifth fund is equal in size to its previous early-stage startup fund, Redpoint IV, which the firm closed back in February 2010. Redpoint III, which closed in 2006, also had $400 million in funds.

Redpoint, which was founded back in 1999, says it has invested in a total of 354 companies over the years, 116 of which have ended in either an IPO or M&A exit. Some of its recent bets on the early-stage side include mobile-focused social network Path, Internet-of-Things chip startup Electric Imp, flash storage company Pure Storage, “sexy” payments startup Stripe, and others.

Looking ahead, Redpoint says it will look to invest its newest fund on startups in these spaces: “new platforms being developed in mobile, cloud and social; next generation entertainment technologies and delivery systems; big data infrastructure and applications, and enterprise class cloud, and mobile infrastructure companies and applications.”

Meanwhile, Redpoint is also looking beyond the early-stage Silicon Valley sector. The firm has expanded its focus in recent years through a partnership with San Francisco venture capital firm e.ventures to invest in Brazilian startups. This past summer, a joint venture established by the two firms called Redpoint e.ventures closed on $130 million for a new fund dedicated to startups based in the burgeoning tech hub of Brazil.

Smartphones with very large displays are set to take a much bigger chunk of the market this year, according to analyst IHS iSuppli which is predicting so-called phablets will more than double their share this year. iSuppli is forecasting that 60.4 million units will ship in 2013, up “a notable” 136 per cent from 2012′s 25.6 million. The prediction comes from the latest IHS iSuppli Mobile Handset Displays market tracker report.

iSuppli defines a phablet as a smartphone with a display of 5 inches or more. Recent additions to the phablet family include a 6.1 inch whopper made by Huawei and a 5-incher unboxed by Sony – both of which broke cover at CES. iSuppli notes that Chinese mobile makers are taking a lead in launching phablets, with Lenovo and ZTE also showing off huge phones at the tradeshow.

The analyst believes the phablet market will continue to swell after 2013 — with “vigorous double-digit-rate expansion” predicted for the next few years, as availability of large LCD displays ramps up and helps to bring screen prices down. By 2016 the analyst’s forecast indicates annual phablet shipments could exceed 140 million.

 

As I argued in a recent opinion piece, the phablet form factor may be a bit awkward in the hand but it’s easier on the eye when it comes to reading text, watching video and interacting with rich multimedia content — and iSuppli also flags up the increase in rich smartphone content as a factor fuelling phablets’ growth. Device makers seeking to differentiate their handsets by standing out from the average-sized smartphone crowd is another.

“The move to offer larger-display smartphones reflects the efforts of both device and panel makers to differentiate their products,” said Vinita Jakhanwal, director of small and medium displays at IHS iSuppli, in a statement. “With consumers demanding more lifelike viewing experiences, the trend to offer such devices makes perfect sense, especially considering the increase in rich content that is being made available on smartphones.”

Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, just announced that it is rolling out a vertical for portfolio sites. This, the company says, is meant to allow photographers, videographers, illustrators, painters, designers and others who want to showcase their creations on WordPress.com.

WordPress.com users, of course, were always able to choose some portfolio-like themes for their sites, but this is the first time Automattic is making this a priority. Last year, the company also rolled out verticals for wedding sites, band pages, cities and restaurants.

Overall, WordPress users can now choose from over 30 different portfolio themes. These, of course, come with all the usual WordPress trappings, including the ability to customize colors, fonts and – for a fee of $30/year – dig into the CSS for full control over how the site looks. Users can embed images and audio on their sites, though users who want to embed their own HD videos will have to pay $60/year for the VideoPress service. Custom domains on WordPress.com cost about $30/year.

Chances are these vertical sites are the ones that make WordPress.com a good amount of money, given that its users are more likely to buy add-on services like custom domains, custom CSS access and space upgrades. A focus on portfolios makes sense in this context, given that you probably want your portfolio to look unique and not have a wordpress.com address.

After nabbing Accel partner Adam Valkin for its Boston office, General Catalyst is announcing another new investment partner–Steve Herrod.

Herrod was previously the CTO of enterprise and virtualization giant VMware. Herrod is joining the firm’s Palo Alto office as a managing director investing and supporting early-stage enterprise companies.

During Herrod’s 11-year tenure at VMware, he helped build and scale a 3,000-person engineering organization, whose products have produced $4 billion in annual revenue. Prior to VMware, Herrod co-led the development of a virtual CPU with “Code Morphing” technology at Transmeta Corporation, and also held roles at Silicon Graphics and MIPS Technologies.

Herrod, who will continue to serve in an advisory role to VMware, was actually employee 90 at VMware. He explains that he feels enterprise infrastructure is ripe for innovation. He’s particularly excited about the transformation in where businesses run applications, how people are consuming applications (i.e. on mobile), and how the consumer world is entering into the enterprise.

As enterprise investing ramps up in 2013, General Catalyst is clearly bringing on more talent to pursue additional opportunities in this market. And Herrod will have plenty of cash to work with. The firm just raised a $500 million new fund in 2011.