Category: Tech news

The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards are coming up fast and today is the absolute last day to nominate your favorites in technology. Nominations close tonight at 11:59pm PT and will not be open again, so think about who you would like to nominate, and go do it!

The Crunchies Awards are going to be held on Thursday, January 31st, 2013 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. The ceremony begins at 7:30 p.m., with our after party to follow. As with all of our after parties, there will be a hosted bar, hors d’oeuvres, interactive entertainment, and other fun surprises.

We have 20 categories for this year’s Crunchies. Some we’ve had before and some are brand new.

Best Technology Achievement: To recognize the most significant new technology achievement of 2012
Best Collaborative Consumption Service: To recognize the best service built on social relationships
Best E-Commerce Application: To recognize the best transaction-based application
Best Mobile Application: To recognize the best mobile application
Fastest Rising Startup: Up and to the right in 2012
Best Content Discovery Application: To recognize the best application to find entertainment, news, inspiration, etc.
Best Design: To recognize the best user interface or product design, including special consideration for cross-platform design
Best Bootstrapped Startup: To recognize a startup’s impact that has raised less than $100K from individuals, angels or others
Sexiest Enterprise Startup: To recognize the best enterprise startup making an impact in 2012
Best International Startup: To recognize startup achievement outside the United States (company must be founded, headquartered and operated primarily outside the U.S.)
Best Education Startup: To recognize the best startup focused on education technology applications in 2012
Best Hardware Startup: To recognize the best hardware startup for their achievements in 2012
Best Time Sink: To recognize a favorite application to use when you’re not working or to avoid thinking about work
Biggest Social Impact: To recognize a service aimed at improving our world (does not need to be a charity)
Angel of the Year: To recognize the most significant impact by an angel (individual) investor in 2012
VC of the Year: To recognize the most significant impact by a venture individual in 2012
Founder of the Year: To recognize an exemplary startup founder or founding team for outstanding accomplishments in 2012
CEO of the Year: To recognize an exemplary CEO for outstanding leadership in 2012
Best New Startup of 2012: To recognize the best new startup that launched to the public in 2012
Best Overall Startup of 2012: To recognize the best startup for its overall accomplishments in 2012

Click to view slideshow.

Nominate who you would like to win HERE. Past winners have included Pinterest as Best New Startup of 2011, Dropbox as Best Overall Startup of 2011, Jack Dorsey as Founder of the Year, Twitter for Biggest Social Impact, Evernote for Best Mobile Application, Path 2.0 for Best Design, Siri for Best Technology Achievement, and many more. You can view the entire list of last year’s nominees and winners here.

This year’s Crunchies Awards show is going to be an eventful and elegant night, filled with special guests, performances, and other surprises. Be sure to stay tuned for special announcements.

Don’t forget to nominate for your favorites, they may just win! Go nominate here now.

And as always, if you want to sponsor the Crunchies, contact our amazing sponsorship team here.

As the Internet begins its Kremlinological reading of Tim Cook’s recent interviews (and make no mistake that these interviews are a calculated effort to brush away multiple company missteps), let’s explore what his point, the dream of Macs Made In America, means for the company and, more importantly, the renaissance of manufacturing in the U.S.

Building stuff in America isn’t hard, and it’s happening right now. I’d recommend listening to this Planet Money story about manufacturing in South Carolina and the growth of smaller factories across the country. We are building stuff, to be sure, and Apple is right to hitch its wagon to the Made in America slogan. They have, in the past, taken many lumps for real or perceived problems in Asian factories. By placing their factories in America, however, we deal with a set of problems that could overwhelm the benefits.

First, for Apple to say they are building in the U.S., there is a parallel requirement that their biggest supplier, Foxconn, also follow suit. This is apparently happening as we speak and Louis Woo told Bloomberg that the company is happy to do more in America because customers ask for it.

However, Apple said they will spend $100 million next year to build Macs here. I don’t think I would be exaggerating if I said that $100 million is probably Foxconn’s quarterly budget for employee lunches in Shenzhen. That kind of money can outfit, potentially, one factory outside of a major transportation hub which would allow components to flow freely onto the assembly lines from sources overseas and local.

This, then, is the second problem with building in America. When building at scale, manufacturers need plenty of parts on hand. To make a million iPads over a few months requires an immense capital investment as well plenty of employees. Foxconn does this by hiring inexpensive but increasingly restive labor and having suppliers close at hand. The chain of suppliers is difficult to track but rest assured the mess they’re making of the environment in Shenzhen will be a major problem for China down the line. What happens if, say, Apple builds a factory in Oakland or Brooklyn or Detroit (or, more likely, some rural community where the company can build a new facility) and hundreds of small suppliers pop up. The halo effect of this big “get” for that city will cause suppliers to line up for warehouse space and manufacturers to attempt to do the same. An Apple factory in the U.S., a visible one that is branded and discussed in the press, can change many ecosystems overnight.

The third problem is cost. My grandfather worked at Wheeling Steel and my grandmother sewed gloves in Martins Ferry, Ohio. These jobs won’t be like those. As Woo notes:

To build out manufacturing here requires a different type of worker, one trained with a solid STEM education and with an understanding of complex systems. There are a plethora of those workers in Foxconn’s Chinese factories, but the vast majority of the workers are just assembling, a job that will soon go to robots. But a Mac made in America is not a boon to the unskilled laborer. It is a boon to the college graduate.

There are still computers being made in the U.S. Dell has factories in Austin, where they build profitable servers and Apple builds some of its chips here. If Apple did anything in the U.S., it would probably be the manufacture of high-margin, high-cost desktops that require a great deal of specific, customer-driven tweaks. Rob Beschizza is betting on products like the Mac Pro – premium products for a smaller group of discerning consumers. Building a million iPods a month in Scranton, Penn. doesn’t make sense. Building 100,000 Mac Pros a month there, though, makes perfect sense.

In the end we’ll have to see whether Cook is really blowing smoke or serious about Made in America. I’m not jingoistic about where my hardware comes from, I just want it to be solid, fairly priced, and the workers should, at the very least, be given a living wage. But Apple could breathe new life into the mouldering industrial parks that dot our landscape where companies with less imagination thrived once and then died.

[Image: Flickr]

Cobook, a contact management app alternative to Mac OS X’s default address book, today released its iOS version, which creates a unified address book by syncing your iPhone contacts with data from social networks. But the game just got more competitive, as Sync.ME, a social contact synchronization service which can display on the screen the latest Facebook statuses or photos from the person calling, today launched an Android version of the app, which you can download from the Google Play store here.

Sync.ME syncs your phone contacts with their Facebook info, including emails, photos, and birthdays, by using a proprietary algorithm that they say can identify and match contacts in spite of potential misspellings and slight text variations between the user’s phonebook and the way it appears on Facebook.

The new Android app also updates the native address book on a user’s phone, which means other third-party apps can use the right information, as well. For example, if a user has WhatsApp on their phone, it will be able to access and use the updated and accurate contact info. The app runs automatically in the background on Android phones and checks for updates every day.

As a result it claims to be syncing a billion contacts a week now. So its move into Android should boost its numbers even further. Sync.ME founder and CTO Ken Vinner says the company wants to become a standard for contact syncing across mobile and social platforms, and they are well-funded to achieve this, recently closing a $4 million funding round with undisclosed private investors.

SyncME competes with other iOS address book replacement apps, including Cobook, a bootstrapped startup from Latvia which has seen 300,000 downloads of its Mac app, Addappt, Plaxo, Brewster and Xobni’s Smartr, among others.

Last week, the entire country of Syria experienced an Internet blackout. The country’s repressive regime claimed that a terrorist attack had taken out the physical cables that connect it to the rest of the world, but Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of web security firm Cloudflare, says that claim is unfounded.

Syria, she explains, has four physical cables connecting the country to the rest of the net, and the outage happened within a span of only two minutes. Cutting all of the cables “would have to be a very orchestrated sort of event.”

More likely, she says, was that the government simply programmed the servers in charge of routing traffic to stop transmitting data in and out of the country. Syria was brought back online after roughly two days. Watch the full explanation in the video above.

Sometimes a photo is an end in itself. But sometimes, with apps like these, it’s a starting point for creative experimentation. We’re all carrying cameras in our pockets these days, making it easier than ever to capture the moments that matter. But that’s just the beginning. A dizzying array of apps lets you tweak and […]

Wahoo, a long-time favorite among plugged-in fitness freaks, has recently introduced a few new activity-monitoring gadgets.

Opt out of the hospital gown and monitor your blood pressure from home using this table-top contraption.

Re-designed and re-launched, the Jawbone Up is a rubbery thing you wear on your wrist that works in concert with a smartphone app to track your activity, sleeping habits and meals.

It’s been a while since we heard new user numbers from the “YouTube of audio” startup Soundcloud (though not much of a startup these days), so Le Web in Paris was as good a time as any to announce new user numbers. They’ve hit hit 180 million users a month and re-vamped the site with the ‘Next’ version after testing out their open Beta for several months.

Coming with the revamp is improved search search, recommendation and sharing. Co-founder Alex Ljung announced on stage that the future of Soundcloud would be mobile – and that makes sense given how much we are able to record now with mobile devices.

Over 10 hrs are uploaded every minute, said Ljung on stage.

He went on to announce that its tracks are shared, listened to or uploaded by 180 million users every month – or around 8% of the internet population.

New features include the ability to “follow” for bands and artists, while sounds can be shared more easily, comments are real-time and there are more notifications.

The news will be a blow for rivals such as Audioboo, which have doggedly mined speech as a niche, while Soundcloud mined first music and then all forms of audio, and iterated with semi-pro features.

The question is will these numbers be enough for Souncloud’s investors? So far Soundcloud has taken funding from Doughty Hanson, Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and GGV Capital to the tune of $63.3 million.

Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel, the co-founders of the music discovery and streaming site Last.fm, went into a kind of startup hibernation after selling their early-moving, prescient startup to CBS in 2007 for $280 million. Today, on a cold December day in London, they are re-emerging with Lumi, a site that wants to tackle the discovery conundrum yet again, but this time on the wider web. And they want you to help them build it, with the launch of a “prototype” of the service out today.

Think of Lumi as Last.fm 2.0. Just as Last.fm used your own music listening history as a way of building and recommending music to you — and boy was I surprised at how well it did that when I first used it years ago — Lumi does the same but for a much bigger range of content. Taking your browsing history, and then pushing it through its algorithms, it suggests other content and other sites that will be relevant to you.

In fact, it’s an idea the two had always wanted to tackle — taking the principle behind Last.fm and widening it out. “When we started Last.fm in 2002, we tried to show that with the right kind of technology it’s possible and easy for people to discover new music they like,” the two write in a blog post. “We always thought that by taking a similar approach for the Web as a whole, it should be easy for people to discover all sorts of content.”

While a lot of businesses are trying to hook into your “social graph” to make content suggestions, in the name of personalization and in defense of privacy, Lumi is taking the exact opposite approach. Lumi never knows what you’ve browsed, and neither do your friends, Stiksel tells me.

“Lumi allows you to anonymously and securely record the pages you visit to let Lumi know what you’re interested in. It finds popular webpages among all users and makes suggestions of pages that will interest you,” the two write in their blog post. On top of that, your own history gets combined with that of others to create a wider, anonymized pool of suggestions in — yes — a big data play.

What’s interesting is that while we have seen a number of content discovery services that “learn” what you like emerge as apps — Flipboard and Zite being two of the better-known of these — there isn’t anything on the web that is exactly comparable. Miller says that was one reason why they decided to tackle this problem. It does this by way of a browser extension you install to use the service.

So can we think of this as “scrobbling” for the wider web? Miller and Stiksel say they don’t know if that word was trademarked and part of the CBS acquisition, so they refrain from using it. Plus, proprietary or not, scrobbling has such a strong association with music, and with Last.fm.

For now Lumi is entirely self-funded by the two, and it’s opening up slowly, seeing how people use it before developing further. One suggestion or goal seems to be that Lumi could potentially become your default home page for all internet browsing, the one you see when you “fire up” your browser.

Still, the two are couching this launch with a fair amount of disclaimers. Signups today are for “early bird” users, and “it’s going to be far from perfect at the start and might be a bit bumpy for quite some time,” the two write in their blog post.

But, in a world where Google and Facebook/Twitter are the two bookends for how many of us have come to interface with the Internet, it’s perhaps not a bad time to try out something else. If you go to have a look, let us know what you think in the comments below.

A little over a year after Urban Airship’s acquisition of location startup SimpleGeo, the company has moved to once again expand its feature set by acquiring venture-backed Tello in an all-stock deal. The startup, which debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010, had initially been focused on building real-time feedback tools for business customers, but had more recently refocused its efforts on PassTools, a visual pass builder for Apple’s Passbook. And it was this latter product that attracted Urban Airship’s attention.

According to Tello founder and CEO Joe Beninato, his company’s business feedback tool had less than a hundred customers to date, which is why they chose to move into a different area. “The other product was doing okay, but we saw this opportunity, and said ‘we think this could be much bigger,’” he explains. That assumption proved to be correct. Tello launched PassTools in September 2012, and now, just a few months later, it has thousands of customers who have created tens of thousands of passes using its platform, Beninato says.

Although there are now dozens of startups working in this space, PassTools was one of the first to introduce a WYSIWYG editor for building passes. To use the service, business customers upload a logo, pick a template and add some text – they basically will have created a pass created in five to ten minutes. This process works well for small-to-medium sized businesses without their own in-house development teams.

However, to serve the needs of larger enterprise customers, the company began quietly offering access to an API a few weeks ago. With the API, businesses could build the template using the same process as above and then programmatically plug in data into various fields on the fly. There are only a handful of customers now using that API, none of which the company can reveal at this time. These include customers in the retail space, a major telecom, and various ad agencies working with coupons. More details on these efforts will be announced in Q1 2013.

The two companies, Urban Airship and Tello, shared a common investor with True Ventures, which is how Tello founder and CEO Joe Beninato was first introduced to the team at Urban Airship. This was also one of the reasons why Urban Airship went with Tello over the other competitors in the space, as the investor had already performed a certain amount of due diligence on their end. But as Urban Airship CMO Brent Hieggelke explains, there were other reasons why the deal with Tello made sense, too. “We were just really impressed with Joe and the team, we liked the approach they were taking, and felt very comfortable that they were the right guys, with the right level of maturity and experience. Culturally, they fit in well, and there were just a lot of those intangibles,” he adds.

Additionally, while a number of the DIY Pass builders are new, early stage startups, Tello also had the benefit of being venture-backed to the tune of $3.7 million in total outside funding, following its seed round in February. Investors in the company included not only True Ventures, but also 500 Startups, Bullpen Capital, Founder Collective, Chris Sacca, Aydin Senkut, Russ Siegelman, Marc Goines, Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, and Shervin Pishevar. (Incidentally, it’s good that Tello will now no longer need to raise capital, as Beninato recently burned bridges with one of Tello’s early backers, 500 Startups. He resigned this fall as 500 Startups mentor after feeling betrayed over Dave McClure’s investment in WalletKit. This, despite the fact that competitive investments from VCs are fairly common at the seed stage.)

Integration Will Bring Urban Airship An Entirely New Set Of Customers

As for the PassTools integration with Urban Airship’s core product, that’s still a ways out. Although Hieggelke says he would “love it” to be early next year, there’s no way to put a time stamp on that at this point because the deal is just now wrapping, and the two teams haven’t even begun to discuss integration plans. What he does know, though, is that there’s growing demand among Urban Airship’s customers for such a service. “We were in the phase of really listening to customers [about Passbook] and we started hearing the groundswell for Passbook,” he says. “I wouldn’t say it’s been a raging forest fire, but it’s been a slow, methodical pick up in terms of people – as they start internalizing what Passbook can do, they start to get really excited.”

He also explains that Urban Airship’s expertise in push notifications and location will benefit customers looking for a Passbook solution. More importantly, perhaps, is that Passbook support opens up the doors for an entirely new set of potential customers for the company.

“This gives a lot of companies that have not developed an app an ability to go into mobile by developing passes and dipping their toes in the water,” says Hieggelke. “There’s well over a million apps in the App Store,” he continues, (note: he’s referring to this report, which referenced apps submitted and approved, not live apps, to be clear), “so we don’t need a lot of apps put out there just for the sake of having an app. There may be some brands and customers that just really don’t have a use case for a fully featured app.” An obvious example which comes to mind here is with Consumer Packaged Goods companies. “I may not need a potato chip app,” laughs Hieggelke, saying that it would make more sense for those companies to launch incentives and specials via Passbook instead of standalone apps.

“There’s a whole wave of things coming,” agrees Beninato. “It’s just going to take a little time for agencies to figure things out, and for the brands behind that to see why this could be so powerful.”

The PassTools website in its present form will remain running until the Urban Airship integration is complete. No decision has been made on Tello’s previous product yet. Meanwhile, Tello’s five-person team will establish itself as the new Urban Airship office in Palo Alto, which is in addition to UA’s headquarters in Portland and its San Francisco location. Urban Airship currently has 65,000 accounts, and sees a few billion notifications on its platform per month.

There are a whole host of second screen apps catering to sports fans (the UK’s Fanatix springs to mind), so it’s curious that Bantr, which sees its full global launch today, is billing itself as primarily a first screen experience for soccer fans. That’s because, along with powering real-time discussions and opinion before, after and during games, the web-based app pipes in live in-game data, such as text commentary and stats, meaning that it’s possible to use Bantr even if the match isn’t on television or you aren’t at the game. It’s also been designed to let fans follow multiple teams, games and leagues at the same time, which is of course how the more hardcore footy fans follow the beautiful game anyway.

Along with today’s international push, which also sees a newly designed version 2.0 of the app debut, Bantr has announced that it recently secured $320k in a second round of angel funding, bringing the total raised by the UK company to $600k.

After spending a year in beta, where it amassed around 15,000 users, Bantr now includes all 4 English leagues, the SPL, FA Cup, League Cup, Champions League, Europa Cup, Internationals and the top 10 European leagues from the German Bundesliga to the Russian Premier League. Users choose what teams and leagues they want to follow, or even individual matches and other Bantr users, after which any related activity shows up in their feed. This includes official match updates and stats, a real-time view of which players are on the pitch, along with what other Bantr users who are following the same games or teams have to say. The discussion feature very much resembles Facebook’s wall — users can reply, as well as Like each other’s updates — and there are also on-going polls so that Bantr can give a sense of fan sentiment towards a club’s management and Board, which is a really nice feature.

I took the app for a proper spin during the recent Tottenham Hotspur vs Liverpool game (I’m an avid Spurs fan, in case you didn’t know already) and found the new UI worked really well, feeling familiar enough for less tech-savvy users but also adapted sensibly for the intended experience. (It also helped that Tottenham won!). Community-wise, there were enough people using Bantr for it to be lively, though it still feels like early days in terms of traction.

As for first screen claims, unless Bantr can pipe in live video (impossible due to rights) or audio, it seems as much a second screen experience as its many competitors. That said, lacking is a dedicated mobile app, although I’m told this should arrive by the end of the year.

If you want a more stats-driven and dedicated second screen soccer experience, it may be worth checking out competitor Squawka, which is also based in the UK. The web app allows users to compare teams and players and actions in real-time, generating a live Player Performance Score which can be used to compare the performance of teams and players, along with a social element not dissimilar to Bantr.

QuBit, a big-data startup whose analytics platform helps e-commerce sites with customer personalization, is today announcing that it has raised a Series A round of funding — $7.5 million led by Balderton Capital with participation from existing angel investors.

As part of the deal, general partner Bernard Liatuad — who founded and sold Business Objects to SAP for $6.8 billion — will join QuBit’s board.

The London-based company, which was founded by four ex-Googlers in 2010, may be best known for OpenTag, a cloud-based product that lets sites manage tags from multiple analytics, marketing and ad services from one place. The funding will be used to continue to develop that, as well as a new larger SaaS analytics platform, launched just this week, and to make a stronger push into the U.S. market and the rest of Europe.

Graham Cooke, QuBit’s America CEO and one of the co-founders, says that the four ex-Googlers chose London as its initial base because — from their experience at Google in product, marketing and engineering — they saw that the UK was one of the most acute markets when it came to e-commerce. Proportionately, people spend more money and time online here than in other countries, but sites here also grapple with some of the worst conversion problems, too — meaning they get a lot of visits that aren’t converting to sales.

“We decided that if we could crack the problem here in the UK, we could crack it anywhere,” he said.

So far, it’s delivered on the UK part of this. This year, company says that it has seen revenues grow by 300%, and they have added 1,000 customers to its analytics platform, which processes data from tens of millions of visitors every month. Some of the biggest are the Arcadia Group (owners of high-street juggernaut TopShop, among others); John Lewis; the BBC and Staples. Meanwhile, there are over 1,200 enterprises using OpenTag.

And with not one but four Google alumni on the founding team, QuBit also has continued to keep some connections to the search giant. OpenTag integrates with Google’s analytics services and Google’s own, free tag-management product, Tag Manager, which we covered in more detail when it launched here.

The funding in QuBit also underscores a couple of wider trends. First, there is the emphasis on big data, and the need for companies to start to get smarter about how they (responsibly and non-abusively) use all the information that they amass about their customers. And second, on the VC side, it looks like big data may be one of the islands is not getting submerged in what looks like a wider capital crunch in startup world.

Cooke says that when QuBit went out to raise money, the company got “a lot of interest.” He attributes part of that to the fact that e-commerce is still growing strong — 15% annually with increases of around 17% around times like the holiday season — and so data that is tied to it will continue to be in demand.

“For us, we didn’t really see the crunch,” he says. “I think we’re different from other categories like gaming where there are questions about longer-term revenue models.”

Liataud agrees. “They’re in a great space. How to optimize customer insights and personalization on websites is something all retailers and online merchants want to do. Right now, they’re doing it with a variety of technologies, some less easy to use, and some quite old. QuBit optimizes conversion and gives great insight on customer traffic, and helps use the data you already have to improve the journey on a website. That’s the holy grail and QuBit has created an interesting approach to get it.”

He also points to the momenum that QuBit has picked up. “Lots of customers are already using the OpenTag technology. They way they acquire customers with their software is quite remarkable.”

Balderton will help with QuBit’s global expansion in part by cross-polinating with other portfolio companies, several of which, like KupiVIP and The Hut, are in the e-commerce space. “For sure, we are going to introduce to our companies to QuBit,” he says. “We already have some that are looking at it and implementing it.”

Last but not least, the other area where QuBit will develop more services is in the area of mobile.

“We think of mobile phones and tablets as just two more screen sizes that you need to include in your customer experience,” says Cooke.

Interestingly, QuBit doesn’t count apps as a significant enough area for now. “E-commerce businesses generate about 95% of their mobile-based revenues from websites, not apps,” he said. “That’s because ultimately e-commerce is about search, not a product.” You can take the guy out of Google, but you can’t the the Google out of the guy.

At LeWeb Paris this morning, Nest Labs‘ Founder and CEO Tony Fadell took the stage with the Iliad Group’s founder Xavier Niel to talk about his advanced thermostat and the Internet of Things.

Fadell noted that, in the U.S., more than 10 million thermostats are sold every year. When he built his own home, Fadell noticed that nobody had innovated on thermostat for years, despite the fact that they control almost half of the energy used every year.

Asked about how he went from designing the iPad to a thermostat, he argued that what he learned in the process at Apple. Steve Jobs, he said, tough him that “every consumer touch point is extremely powerful,” including the boxing, the retail experience and the customer support. The product experience, that was such a focus for Apple, is something he also wanted to bring to Nest.

Talking about startups, Fadell noted that it’s about being fast, stealthy and being ready when people are ready to buy it. “Keep it special, keep it in-house,” he said. “Secrecy keeps people more exited when it comes out, especially when it comes to thermostats.”

Fadell also talked a bit about his experience at Phillips before joining Apple. At Phillips, he said, the depressing thing for many engineers was that many products never made it to market. At Apple (or at a startup), on the other hand, engineers know that things will ship.

Nest And The Internet Of Things

As for Nest and the Internet of Things, the topic of this year’s LeWeb, Fadell said that “we will have an Internet of things, but if you think about it, we had computers in the 40s, 50s and 60s, and it took many years before they could interconnect. For machines to connect and for that to really work, it will take a few years. Give it five to eight years – maybe ten, and things will have improved quite a bit by then.”

All the sensors – the Nest has five – allow startups to gather large amounts of data today. Nest uses some of this data to automatically cool your home down when you are not at home, for example. By gathering all of this data, Nest managed to improve its algorithms because it learned more about the people who used the units. “Each day,” he said, “is kind of like running a field test.” You can go to this whole new level of learning thanks to the Internet of Things.

Coming Next For Nest: France And U.K.

As for growth opportunities, Fadell noted that the company just started selling in Canada, but the company is already seeing users all around the world. He also said that the company plans to come to France and the U.K. as soon as possible, though he didn’t announce any launch plans at this time.

He also talked a bit about international expansion for startups in general. In his view, startups have to be “very methodical and think about their steps and true differentiation” when they move to a new market like Europe. To really go into retail and marketing, you need to have good partnerships and relations.

Making Apple-Class Products Means Going Beyond Kickstarter

Fadell also had a word of warning for small hardware startups: in his view, it’s not as easy as it looks. Founders who want to get into this business should spend a few years working with their idols. There is a reason why hardware is called “hardware,” he said. It’s hard to do. Kickstarter allows entrepreneurs to find an audience for crazy ideas, but it took a team of over 70 engineers to make the Nest. Kickstarter lets you figure out that you can find an audience, but after that, you need to go to work with professionals to get the product out.

To make an Apple-class product, it takes really big backing in his view. If you want to fund somebody’s hobby, Kickstarter is great, but if you want to develop a mass product, you need more backing and experience.

You know times are tough when you have to sell the HQ and rent it back to raise a little capital. Well that’s exactly what the once mighty mobile maker, Nokia, is doing. The company has just announced that it intends to sell its Espoo, Finland, headquarters to Finland-based Exilion, and rent it back on a long term lease. The selling price is €170 million.

Nokia said it expects the sale to be completed by the end of the year.

“We had a comprehensive sales process with both Finnish and foreign investors and we are very pleased with this outcome. As we have said before, owning real estate is not part of Nokia’s core business and when good opportunities arise we are willing to exit these types of non-core assets. We are naturally continuing to operate in our head office building on a long-term basis,” said Timo Ihamuotila, CFO, Nokia in a statement.