Category: Tech news

As Facebook polls its users on site governance and privacy policy – a poll that looks very likely to result in Facebook withdrawing users’ ability to vote on site governance changes – the European activists behind the Europe v Facebook campaign group, which accuses Facebook of violating Europe’s Data Protection Laws, have stepped up their long running battle against the social network. The group has indicated it is preparing to “fight” Facebook in Ireland — the location of Facebook’s international headquarters — by challenging the Irish Data Protection Authority’s (DPA) finding on its privacy complaints against Facebook in court.

“We now hope for a soon settlement of our complaints. Simultaneously we have to assume that the authority in many cases won’t decide in the favor of users but in the favor of Facebook. Such a decision can be contested by us at court,” the group notes.

It has set up a crowdfunding platform to raise the €100,000 to €300,000 needed to fund legal action.

The group is unhappy with the Irish DPA’s report into privacy and data protection on Facebook — and wants legally binding decisions to resolve all its 22 complaints against Facebook (listed in full in Europe v Facebook’s counter report, with current status of the complaints shown at the end of this article). Back in September the DPA report said Facebook had implemented to its satisfaction “the great majority” of its recommendations — including turning off a facial recognition feature in Europe. However Europe v Facebook believe the audit was not rigorous enough — noting that

The Irish authority has taken many important steps which moved privacy on Facebook forward, but when looked at it in more detail, has not always delivered solid and fact based results. Facebook’s statements were simply adopted, even though many of them can be disproven with a few screenshots. It seems like Facebook has also fooled the authority in some cases or did at least not stick to their promises.
None of our complaints are currently resolved, since many were just worked on superficially. We also had to find out that the Irish authority is not in line with the common legal understanding within the EU, expressed in the Article 29 Working Party’s opinions.

The group has now published a ‘counter report‘, responding to the DPA’s report. The counter report summarises the group’s position that while the DPA’s audit of Facebook has led to “many achievements” — such as Facebook having to disclose more data it holds per user, limit data retention periods for certain data and switching off facial recognition in the EU — it has not satisfactorily resolved all complaints. “After a detailed analysis of the ‘audit’ documents it became clear that the authority has taken very important first steps, but that it has not always delivered accurate and correct results,” the group notes.

“A non-binding audit might not need such accuracy, but we expect that the authority goes into every detail when deciding about our complaints. In some cases we also had to wonder if the authority has really checked Facebook’s claims, or if they have blindly trusted Facebook,” said Max Schrems, spokesman for europe-v-facebook.org, in a statement. “We have strictly followed the opinions of the comity of the EU data protection authorities (“Article 29 Working Party”). The Irish authority’s interpretation is often contrary to the rest of the EU.”

“We have to understand the position of the Irish authority: They had to deal with a whole armada of lawyers from Facebook,” Schrems added. ”On the other hand we have a fundamental right to privacy and data protection in the EU. When it comes to basic freedoms and fundamental rights our understanding for the situation of the authority comes to an end.”

Europe v Facebook claims that more than 40,000 Facebook users who have requested a copy of their data from Facebook have yet to receive it — its counter report notes: “The legal deadline of 40 days to deliver all data has passed 13 times.” The group also wants answers on why Facebook has only deactivated facial recognition in Europe, noting: “it is unclear why this was only deactivated for EU citizens, because Ireland is responsible for all users outside of the US and Canada. In addition, the technical implementation of this ban is unclear”.

Europe v Facebook says its next steps will be to again ask the DPA to “deliver all necessary files and evidence” — noting that: “So far we were not allowed to even see the counterarguments by Facebook”, adding: “After this we will ask for a formal, legally binding decision on all 22 complaints.”

We’ve reached out to Facebook for a comment on Europe v Facebook’s latest steps and will update this story with any response  Facebook has now provided the following statement

We are committed to providing a service which enables millions of European citizens to connect and share with their friends here and around the world. The way Facebook Ireland handles European users data has been subject to thorough review by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner over the past year. The latest DPC report demonstrates not only how Facebook adheres to European data protection law (http://dataprotection.ie/viewdoc.asp?DocID=1232&m=f) but also how we go beyond it, in achieving best practice.  Nonetheless we have some vocal critics who will never be happy whatever we do and whatever the DPC concludes.

Below is a screengrab of the current status of Europe v Facebook’s complaints against the site — as noted in its counter report

Wherever there is data, there shall be analytics. In a move that makes a lot of sense, Taggstar, the interactive images platform that makes images shareable and shoppable (along with other interactivity), has rolled out a new analytics dashboard to enable publishers who use the service to get a detailed insight into how their Taggstar-enhanced images are performing.

Specifically, the new analytics tool lets publishers see which images are driving the highest levels of traffic and engagement, giving them a real-time view into things like unique views, dwell time, and the images that have been shared the most, along with trackback image data via social platforms such as Facebook, and a graphical image view of data over a period of time.

Publishers can also drill down deeper into images that have been ‘tagged’ with Taggstar hotspots, via a data subset within the dashboard that displays how long users have been looking at tags, click-through rates from tags, and the number of tagged image views.

The benefit of having access to Taggstar data in this way, says the company, is that publishers can now think more strategically about the images that they are using on their sites, and fine-tune those strategies accordingly. And in turn, extract more value from using Taggstar, which could add value to the startup itself.

As we’ve noted before, Taggstar’s competitors include Luminate, ThingLink and Stipple. Similar to those offerings it works by enabling publishers to add ‘hotspots’ to portions of an image so that when a reader clicks on those hotspots or hovers over them, additional content is revealed. This might include other relevant images or links, further text, or audio/visual material, such as embedded video or audio. In addition, images can be easily shared on Facebook and Twitter courtesy of a social-sharing toolbar on each image.

However, it’s the e-commerce or ‘shoppable’ element that Taggstar sees as its trump card, which works by turning any image into a mini-store, right there on the page using some clever colour swatch-matching tech and descriptive tags.

Taggstar was founded in 2010 and has raised £1.6 million (approx. $2.6m) in funding. Investors include Rob Hersov (Founder of Sportal and Marquis Jets), Sir Stuart Rose (Former Chairman of M&S), Dr. Thomas Middelhoff (Former Chairman of Thomas Cook and CEO of Bertelsmann), and Ariadne Capital’s ACE Fund.

Lookout, the mobile security company with ambitions to become the Symantec of the wireless world, is picking up a new backer, and and a major distribution partner in its bid to become a household name. France Telecom, owner of the mobile carrier Orange, is making a strategic investment in the startup, and it has also signed a deal in which Lookout will be preloaded on devices that it sells. Orange has 169 million subscribers and it will start first with Lookout service bundles covering antivirus protection and device tracking for Android devices, installing it as standard on devices in France, Slovakia, Spain, and the UK (through its EE JV with T-Mobile) starting in early 2013.

Exact financial terms of the investment in Lookout — which has 30 million active installs and has already raised $76 million from a top list of VCs including Khosla Ventures, Chris Sacca, Trilogy Equity Partnership, Index, Accel Partners, and most recently $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz – were not disclosed, but it could be as high as $20 million (€15 million).

That’s because the investment comes out of the OP Ventures Growth fund, a $400 million fund backed by Orange and two other French leviathans, advertising giant Publicis and Iris Capital Management. First announced in March, OP Ventures makes investments of up to €15 million in startups that are strategic for one or both of the companies. This is the first U.S. investment made out of the fund.

Xavier Perret, VP of partnerships for Orange, says that the investment in/distribution deal with Lookout is structured similarly to its past stake in Deezer, the music streaming company. In other words, the plan is to use the technology as much as invest in it.

“We wanted a strategic investment because this is not just a distribution agreement,” said Perret in an interview. “We are including Lookout into our service bundles, but we also see mobile security as an important part of the bigger security-privacy-personal data issue, and in that sense we wanted to be close in terms of positioning.”

While mobile security may have found early adopters among enterprises and organizations with sensitive information, Perret calls Lookout “a consumer play.” The growth of smartphones has given rise to new security threats in the form of malware and lost devices. But equally, there are now more consumers — later adopters — that may be less proactive in how they use the devices, and will be less inclined to seek out security solutions on their own. Alex Abey, the VP of business development for Lookout, describes consumer awareness of mobile security as still “emerging, although it is increasing over time.”

The opportunity, Orange believes, is to sell consumers — later adopters specifically — more service bundles that include security solutions from Lookout, as retailers have done for years with antivirus software sold with PCs. “Orange has the opportunity to be the digital coach for those consumers, explaining the services and offering support,” Perret said.

Orange is focussing on Android first for a couple of reasons: it is the most popular mobile platform in the world at the moment, but it is also, as an open-source platform, one of the most targeted by hackers. The Kaspersky Lab found that in Q2 2012, the number of malicious programs targeting Android had risen to 14,900, nearly three times the number in Q1. Lookout estimates that 40% of Android users will click on a malicious web link on their phone this year.

Orange plans to extend Lookout to other platforms in the future, too. Lookout’s software already works on iOS and it has plans to cover Windows Phone in the future, and others if market penetration merits it.

While France Telecom may want sole use of new technology in some cases, in this one, perhaps because FT is an investor and can benefit regardless, the deal is anything but exclusive. Lookout already works with other operators — another European giant, T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom, as well as Verizon and Sprint are among Lookout’s customers. Some 40% of Lookout’s 30 million active users are outside the U.S., and international will be a big focus going forward, says Abey.

France Telecom is, however, the first carrier that has chosen to take that customer relationship to investor level. Abey believes that having a carrier as an investor is an important step for Lookout as it continues to develop its mobile security “ecosystem.” His description of that ecosystem could also be an indication of where we might see Lookout announce its next partnership beyond traditional VCs as it continues to build out its product.

“It’s about OEMs, carriers and security companies working together to make mobile computing safer for consumers,” he says. So: perhaps look out for Lookout and what it might do next with device makers.

The PhoneScope 3D from Spatial Vision and Design offers high-resolution magnified 3D scanning that can have applications for users ranging from forensics specialists to CGI animators. But its developers mostly just want people to have fun with the iPhone add-ons. After years in development, PhoneScope 3D is now raising funds on Kickstarter.

The PhoneScope 3D differentiates itself from other iPhone 3D scanning apps and attachments with a macro lens that magnifies the iPhone’s camera view by up to five times. A light lens attachment clips onto the lens and uses ultra-bright LEDs diffused through glass developed by Spatial Vision and Design to distribute light evenly and reduce coning.

The lens clip, designed to have a low profile and fit over an iPhone bumper, is made from plasma-polished stainless steel, while the light lens attachment is built from aircraft-grade anodized aluminum. The light lens is placed directly over the object being scanned, which means that although there are size limitations, the subject can be rendered in greater detail. The PhoneScope 3D is meant to be used with specially designed desktop software and scans can be turned into 3D prints.

Developer B.J. Rao says his aim with the PhoneScope 3D is to build awareness of 3D scanning. Potential users include “a dermatologist or forensics specialist who now has greater means to examine, review and store visual information,” said Rao. With its affordability and ease of use, the set is also a fun introduction to high-resolution 3D scanning.

Spatial Vision & Design, a startup with locations in St. Louis, Amsterdam, and Seoul, develops mobile software and hardware focusing on vision technologies. B.J. Rao said that he and partners Vijay Rao and Lazlo Kleczewski have wanted to create an app and hardware combination for the iPhone since it was first released by Apple, but the project was put on hold several times over the years because of lack of funding. The trio’s prior hardware experience includes developing and calibrating photolithography machines. B.J. Rao has worked with institutions such as the Museum Gouda in Amsterdam, where he helped develop a 3D scanning technology for an exhibit that allowed visitors to interact with fragile artifacts without handling them.

PhoneScope 3D software is currently available for Windows only, but Rao says their target for OSX support is April or May 2013.

Pre-orders begin at $39 for the early bird special, which comes with a lens clip. The team’s goal is to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter before January 8, with a target delivery date of March 2013 for the lens clips and April 2013 for the sets with the lens clip and light lens attachment.

A lot of companies are getting into the content marketing business, creating blog posts and articles to promote their brands and products. But are they doing enough to highlight that content? Well, startup OneSpot is opening a new platform to help them promote those posts by turning them into ads.

OneSpot started out as a news aggregation company, but founder and CEO Matt Cohen, who has worked on technology for newspaper companies and also done time as a VC, said it’s now focused on a bigger opportunity. His basic argument is that editorial content, not advertising, has a much bigger impact on people’s opinions than ads. (It’s similar to the point made by other companies like InPowered.) Actually, he clarified that it’s a false distinction; for most people, it’s not about “commercial versus non-commercial content,” but rather “annoying content compared to content that is interesting.”

So why not promote the interesting content, like blog posts on a company’s own site (assuming they have good posts that aren’t just marketing their products), or a positive review elsewhere? Especially since much of that content just disappears once it has scrolled off the front page.

OneSpot customers can pipe all of their content into the system, then it’s repackaged into standard banner ads, which are distributed across a larger network. (You can see what a TechCrunch ad looks like below.) All of the content from a brand’s feed automatically makes it in, and companies can manually add content from other sites.

The real advantage that OneSpot offers is the way it automatically targets the ad to the viewer, driving them to whatever outcome the advertiser specifies. The first time you visit a OneSpot site, it starts tracking you with a cookie, then, as you visit other sites, it delivers ads that are customized to where you are in the “funnel.” Many retargeted ads, Cohen said, are trying to drive a specific outcome — the purchase of a product, or signing up for email updates. A more effective approach is to build a relationship over time, then try to bring about that outcome further down the road.

For example, if TechCrunch ran a campaign to sell tickets to our Disrupt conference, it would make sense to advertise posts that are of interest to the reader first, then coverage of past conferences or of speakers who will be appearing at the current one, then, finally, after readers have shown a real interest and are already familiar with the event, we can actually advertise the post that says “BUY SOME TICKETS.”

One of the early customers is Remington, and Ryan Koechel, director of e-commerce for Remington at Spectrum Brands, said in the press release:

OneSpot has been able to give us a ROI on display ads that we would have never thought possible and we found OneSpot really enabled us to come full circle with our strategy. They are definitely the missing link in our 360 degree approach to digital marketing are just as valuable as PPC and complementary to every other marketing channel we use.

OneSpot is also announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in new funding from RSL Venture Partners, 500 Startups, Ralph Mack, Mike Maples, Sr. (yes, senior), Josh Baer, and others.

Ever used your iOS device to imagine yourself as Lt. Nyota Uhura receiving an urgent communique from Starfleet? Then you are in luck — the second version of the official Star Trek PADD app is now available with native iPhone 5 and iPad mini support.

The app turns your smartphone or tablet into a PADD, or Personal Access Display Device, a handheld computer interface used from the 22nd to 24th centuries used by organizations including Starfleet, the Klingon Empire and the Cardassian Union.

Developer ArcTouch announced the new version of the Star Trek PADD app in a press release that is delightfully incomprehensible to anyone who did not grow up following the Star Trek franchise:

‘Our team implemented a focused chroniton particle generator to open a temporal wormhole to the 24th century,’ said Captain Eric Shapiro from ArcTouch. ‘We condensed 20 billion gigaquads of data about aliens, planets, and technology into a databank and created an app to access it.’

The PADD app provides beings from every quadrant of the galaxy with the ultimate mobile “Trekkie” experience, including access to data spanning from Star Trek: The Original Series through to Star Trek: Enterprise and the related movies of The Original Series and The Next Generation. The app features a rich database of information, full screen images, actual sound effects from the series, and an authentic LCARS experience.

The original version for iPad was a top seller in the App Store and the winner of the “Best Sci-Fi App” Media Vanguard Award. In addition to iPhone 5 and iPad mini support, version 2 includes an updated databank with over 170 new entries, including one for Gorgan (possibly the last known inhabitant of the planet Triacus); enhancements to terrestrial data feeds from Facebook and Twitter; and under 50 megaquads of data for initial download stream (or to use the language of the 21st century, the app can now be installed over a 3G, 4G or LTE connections, without requiring Wi-Fi). The Star Trek PADD app also features what is probably the only good use for Siri: the Starbase Intelligent Response Integration for voice-activated searching.

The Star Trek PADD app is now available for a few bars of gold-pressed latinum (or $4.99 for iPad, $1.99 for iPhone and iPod touch in 21st century U.S. dollars) in the App Store.

Kleiner Perkins Partner Mary Meeker publisher her annual “Internet Trends Year-End Report” tonight, providing an update on the glimpse she gave us into mobile trends back in November. As per usual, the Kleiner partner’s biggest conclusions are somewhat familiar: Internet growth remains robust, and penetration in the U.S. leads all other countries.

While iPods changed the industry and iPhones “ramped even faster,” iPads leave both of those in the dust, as Meeker’s graphs shows the comparison between the three Apple devices, and yet Android has managed to grow 6-times faster than the iPhone — up from 4x at her mid-year talk. And, yet in spite of all this, Meeker concludes that smartphone growth still has an enormous upside, thanks in part to the fact that 29 percent of adults in the U.S. own some kind of tablet, up from 2 percent three years ago.

Mobile growth, again, continues to be the story. And that’s where we see the first big change from Meeker’s mid-year report. Mobile traffic has grown to 13 percent of Web traffic (up from 10 percent in her mid-year report) and, just in case you’re still looking for a Christmas present, Meeker qualified this by sharing the fact that 43 percent of kids want an iPad and 36 percent want an iPad Mini. That’s for ages 6 to 12, meaning that the demand for tablets among young people continues to ramp and ramp fast.

These are the two biggest changes, along with the fact that mobile phones and tablets represented 24 percent of online shopping on Black Friday, versus 6 percent two years ago, with iOS four-times that of Android on the year’s biggest shopping day.

As a result, mobile monetization and revenue are growing at 129 percent CAGR and mobile and tablet, with both Meeker still seeing a huge up-side in the U.S. for both web and mobile advertising — to the tune of $20 billion.

The growth of mobile has led to the diminishing market share of Windows, which is now at 35 percent, compared to the 45 percent share of Android and iOS. And while global smartphone and tablet shipments surpassed PC shipments back in 2010, Meeker expects the smartphone and tablet install base to hit its inflection point in the second quarter of 2013, surpassing PCs.

The presentation then launches into the roster of industries and segments that the Internet and mobile devices are currently in the process of re-imagining. Most of these we’ve seen before in the mid-year report, including for Meeker’s “white space” — or that which is still left to re-imagine. But there are a few notable additions including the “Back pocket,” or credit card debt, education and health care.

All in all, much of these “white spaces” focus on the elimination of an enormous problem Meeker identifies several times throughout the presentation: Debt. And one slide towards the end of the presentation puts a particular focus on student debt, which has now passed consumer auto loans and credit card debt in size. Which is sad and pathetic, but that’s me editorializing (not the KPCB partner).

But without further ado, find the slides below:

And here’s Meeker’s mid-year report for comparison:

China Unicom announced that it received orders for more than 100,000 iPhone 5s on its first day of pre-sales, according to a report on Sina Tech. A subsidiary of rival wireless operator China Telecom said that it had received pre-orders for more than 5,000 units.

The lag between the iPhone 5′s U.S. and China release dates was thanks to the wait for final regulatory approval from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Apple announced last week that the iPhone 5 will be available in China (and 50 other countries, including Brazil, Russia and Taiwan) on December 14. The iPhone 5 has been available in 47 countries, including the U.S., UK, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, since September 21.

While this is the quickest rollout of an iPhone to date, the long wait for Apple products has turned off many Chinese consumers. China received the iPhone 4S on January 13, three months after the U.S. In August, research group IDC estimated that Apple’s share of China’s smartphone market was cut in half during the second quarter to 10 percent, as customers turned to devices made by competitors like Chinese company Lenovo, which some analysts believe will take the No. 1 smartphone slot in China next year. Lenovo’s products, including the Android-powered LePhone, benefits from strong brand recognition, nationwide availability, and affordable pricing aimed at the mid-to-lower end of the market.

But the company remains upbeat about its opportunities in the Chinese market. During Apple’s Q4 earnings call, Tim Cook said revenue for the full fiscal year was $23.8 billion for China, an increase of $10 billion year-on-year, and that sales of the iPhone in Greater China (i.e. China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) had climbed 38 percent.

Ninety-nine cents here, a buck-ninety-nine there — that’s what were used to spending when Apple introduced the App Store after the iPhone was launched. It was probably one of the most genius software and developer coups in the history of mobile computing. I mean that. By creating the App Store, Apple created thousands, and perhaps millions, of jobs and an all-new form of entertainment and education for consumers.

Instead of using the big, broad Internet, you could do things in a focused environment, natively, on your mobile device. It’s been a thing of beauty and a lot of people have to thank Apple for helping their careers. Having said that, the economics of the App Store haven’t changed much over the years. Many consumers still think that anything over $3.99 is a ridiculous price for an app.

In fact, the only genre of app that is “allowed” to be expensive is games, because consumers are used to dropping $60 for an XBox game. It’s odd, though, that we haven’t seen the needle move on the price of apps, even though developers are working harder creatively and technically than ever.

Some folks have run numbers on what a the third-party Twitter client, Tweetro, would make by charging $10 for its Windows app. Does $10 sound like a lot of money for an app to you? It doesn’t really sound like a lot to me, especially if it’s a killer app that you use everyday and prefer it over Twitter’s own free app.

I currently pay $10 a month for Spotify, because I see the value in using it. If there is a demand for something by consumers, then developers should be comfortable to charge accordingly, based on demand plus the work that went into creating the app. Building apps isn’t easy; it takes money. The reason app companies are raising money is because it takes money to build them.

If It’s Good, It’s Good

For a service like Twitter that a lot of people use incessantly, there really isn’t a “right price” for an application. Instead, certain people are focusing on the fact that Twitter is choking its API, persuading developers to focus on other types of apps. With constraints in place to keep others from flat-out replicating their services, a company like Tweetro decided to simply charge more and accept fewer users, and I give them a ton of credit, because more developers need to think like this.

If you have an eye for design and spend hundreds of hours of blood, sweat and tears building something amazing, you should be rewarded. What if you ask for $40 for your new glossy Twitter app? If it’s not great and nobody likes it, it won’t sell. If it’s awesome, it just might sell. Sure, maybe to fewer people, but to people who really want to use it….and often. That has value.

I don’t see this as a “limitation.” I see it as an opportunity and a challenge.

The genre of “premium apps” on iOS or Android hasn’t fully been realized yet, and I think there’s a huge opportunity to build some. The bottom line is that a lot of folks are building apps, and they’re not very good.

Really crappy apps are crappy, and there’s a lot of them, and they will be reviewed crappily, and won’t sell.

Developers, I challenge you to re-think Appenomics and try things out. You deserve it. Do something different. But first and foremost, build amazing things.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

As you may have heard, Steve Jobs will be getting the Ashton Kutcher treatment in “jOBS“, the first biopic to be released since the Apple co-founder passed away last year. Not to be confused with Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s biography, jOBS reportedly covers the thirty “definitive” years of Jobs’ life, beginning in 1971.

A lot questions surrounded the project when it began filming this summer, and now it looks like those are going to be answered very soon — and at Sundance, no less. Yep, the Sundance Institute announced today that the film will make its public debut on the final night of Sundance.

The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the news, caught up with Trevor Groth, the festival’s director of programming, who said that jOBS was chosen to close the event because “there’s something inspirational about it. To see what he achieved by just staying true to his vision is something that I think a lot of people can relate to and get hope from.”

There has been a lot of interest swirling around the film since rumors of it became reality, amplified by TMZ’s “captured images” that surfaced showing Kutcher ambling around the set in Jobs’ characteristic black turtleneck and New Balances. Kutcher, as we reported back in July, is indeed taking the gig very seriously, even slipping into some method acting and staying in character.

Aside from Kutcher-Jobs, the biopic’s lineup includes director Joshua Michael Stern, was written by first-time-screenwriter Matt Whiteley and includes appearances from Dermot Mulroney, Josh Gad, Lukas Haas, Matthew Modine, and J.K. Simmons.

It should be interesting, and although there’s been no definitive word on when audiences can expect jOBS to hit the theaters, there’s no better way to kick things off than with an appearance at Sundance. jOBS, which will be featured alongside 17 other films, is set to debut on January 27, 2013.

For more, check out our coverage from the set of jOBS, right … here.

Image via Sundance/Hollywood Reporter.

In a world of customizable coffees and individualized experiences, the wedding industry is just recently starting to break from its historical lack of options. Pre-nuptials, many couples still face lists of venue-required caterers and fight their way past other undesirable prescriptions for their big days. Enter NewlyWish, a New York-based e-commerce platform that seeks to provide creative registry options beyond big-box retailers.

With its first product for couples, the newly minted winner of the Women 2.0 PITCH NYC Startup Competition provides a custom multi-merchant online marketplace. Users can choose from and register for goods at brick-and-mortar stores, which have historically been excluded from the $19 billion annual domestic wedding registry market (which, according to The Knot’s Bridal Registry Study, includes a $10 billion traditional gift market and another $9 billion in cash and alternative gift registries). Small businesses have largely been under-accounted for in wedding registries, a tradition that began with Marshall Field’s in the 1920s.

Just as Weduary makes it possible to bring RSVPs, logistics, and sharing tools into a single online platform, NewlyWish integrates inventory across independent shops in one destination. It then fulfills wedding guests’ orders itself, which differentiates it from aggregate registry tools that run the risk of duplicate gifts and packages getting lost in the shuffle. That multi-channel merchandizing is intended to provide profit to NewlyWish and retailers alike.

Company co-founder Amanda Allen and now husband Robard Williams, former colleagues at the Federal Bank Reserve of New York, were reticent to create a registry while planning their wedding. Convinced by their mothers that not providing preferred gift ideas would create more work for guests, they wandered into their favorite New York City shops only to learn that none had online wedding gift capabilities. Realizing that their high number of out-of-town guests would make supporting local businesses through their registry next to impossible, Allen went on to pursue the challenge at business school at Fordham. Williams later joined full-time.

The school would name Allen Entrepreneur of the Year in 2010 for her plan to connect engaged duos with boutique offerings. She and co-founder Mark Bartlett, owner of website development shop Intersect, have since bootstrapped the company with funds including $70K raised from two business plan competition wins. They now offer 6,000 different goods (including artwork and wine) and experiences from more than 50 merchants.

To differentiate itself from national department stores that continue to dominate (and earn eyeballs amidst Etsy offerings for brides-to-be and wedding Pin boards galore), NewlyWish tries to promote gift requests that are based on couples’ own unique styles. Small-batch items and the chance to support artisanal businesses are part of the pitch. “When we do carry major brands–Wedgewood, Waterford, Vera Wang–we put them on the site with a unique twist,” Allen says.

Even with mix-and-match sets, convincing couples to shop on the site is a major feat in the shadow of Wedding Channel companies and SKU guns. As more couples now bankroll part or all of their own festivities, the number of ad revenue and interest charge-fueled honeymoon and cash registry sites has also increased. Allen’s idea holds that a community of independent businesses can provide the same convenience and more personalization.

A baby registry utilizing the sales and marketing platform that Bartlett built would be a natural progression, Allen says. With $2,600 as the average registry value on the site and a reported net sales margin of 25% this year, the company has added team members focused on bridal events and design. The number of California couples using the site has recent surpassed those in the New York metro area who the startup was initially created for.

Short Version

The Doxie Go is a portable scanner with a built-in battery and 512 MB of internal memory. You can bring it anywhere with you and scan all your documents before throwing them away. But the best part is the application that comes with it. It integrates with cloud services, such as Dropbox, Evernote or CloudApp. You can open scanned documents with any local app, as well, or just save it as a PDF with OCR.

Long Version

Features:

• Scan in color or black and white up to 600 dpi
• Use built-in memory, an SD card or a USB stick
• Sync your scanned documents with your computer or iPad
• Built-in battery
• Supports all sizes of paper
• OCR powered by ABBYY

Info:

• MSRP: $199
• Manufacturer/retailer: Apparent
• Cheaper, SD card-only model: Doxie One

The Doxie Go is…

… a small scanner that won’t clutter your desk. It does the job and can easily become part of your workflow. You should consider a Doxie scanner over other brands for the syncing application. You can basically throw anything at it and transfer the scanned documents to many services or applications.

For example, you can make a multi-page PDF document by selecting your pages and clicking the “Staple” button. You don’t have to think about it when scanning – just review every page before adding a new one. In other words, it feels like a current application, not an application that has been developed for the past 10 years and has become cluttered.

Buy Doxie Go for…

… people who want to go paperless easily. Even though it’s a bit expensive for a scanner, its software component and autonomous design make it a very versatile scanner.

If you need to scan books, you won’t be able to do it with the Doxie Go. But for everyday use cases, such as scanning a receipt or printed documents, it’s very easy. You turn it on and introduce the document. It will swallow it in seconds.

Because…

… the Doxie Go isn’t made by your traditional scanner manufacturer and isn’t the feature that made your scanner/printer so big. If you need a scanner that is really well designed from hardware to software, the Doxie Go is a good choice.

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Back in July, collaborative code repository GitHub raised a whopping $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz to build out an enterprise version of the service, among other things. Until now, it’s been in need of someone to help the co-founders manage that cash and keep the fiscal ship from any nearby cliffs. Today, via a blog post, GitHub CEO and co-founder Tom Preston-Werner announced that the company had hired Vlado Herman as its new CFO to do just that.

Before joining GitHub, Herman was the CFO of Yelp, a position he took in July 2010 after initially joining the company in 2006 as the director of finance. Prior to Yelp, Herman was a director of finance at Yahoo and spent time at Ernst & Young and Intel.

Of Herman, GitHub’s first CFO, Preston-Werner says: “From the very first time I shook his hand, I knew I wanted to work with Vlado. He’s sharp, funny, patient, and believes in optimizing for happiness. Finding a proven financial expert that fit our culture wasn’t easy, but we were very lucky to find someone special, and now we’re incredibly proud to call Vlado a GitHubber.”

From what the GitHub CEO has said before — that GitHub is disrupting “how software is written in the enterprise” — there’s a big vision at play here. The company is the biggest name when it comes to code posting and sharing, but the co-founders want the company to play in a bigger arena, one occupied by the IBMs of the world, starting with GitHub Enterprise. But that, of course, is just the beginning. The real future road map hinges on the concept of GitHub Everywhere, bringing every coder, developer — everyone in software — onto the GitHub platform.

The key to creating that kind of stranglehold on the software industry is building a company on top of great social, collaborative technology — but also great culture. And the company clearly thinks it’s getting a solid upgrade in the cultural department by bringing Herman on board — someone, who we learn from Preston-Werner’s blog post, knows his way around a good whiskey. Could be that GitHub just found its Ron Swanson…

Piggy-backing on the recent launch (and massive funding) of SoFi, a new startup is launching today that wants to breathe some fresh air into the broken, complex and molasses-slow student loan system.

New York City-based CommonBond aims to bring the power of crowdsourcing to bear on student debt by connecting student borrowers and alumni investors and offering loans at a lower fixed rate than what they’d find with Uncle Sam. To help kick-start this initiative, the startup announced Friday that it has raised $3.5 million in outside funding.

The three CommonBond co-founders — CEO David Klein, CFO Michael Taormina, and Advisor Jessup Shean – are graduates of either the University of Pennsylvania or Wharton, and so the startup has raised $2.5 million from alumni investors to disburse to students in the form of loans. They raised an additional $1 million from angels to capitalize its business.

Why does this matter? Well, because you’ve heard this story before: The price of a college education has become unsustainable. Thanks to today’s ridiculous tuition inflation, student debt is at a record high. Recent graduates are increasingly finding themselves underemployed (if not unemployed), and graduation rates are slipping as a result.

In turn, when students do need to subsidize their education, they’re forced to deal with some pretty unattractive options in the loan department. Federal loans come with high, fixed interest rates and private bank loans, while variable, are even worse — coming in somewhere around 12 percent. More broadly, anyone looking for a personal loan (to say, pay off credit card debt) finds the same ugly reality. That’s why we’ve seen a big rise in the popularity of peer-to-peer lending platforms of late, with companies like LendingClub and Prosper leading the way.

P2P lending platforms essentially look to crowdsource investment (from individuals, institutions, etc.) in people’s loans, connecting people who want to borrow money with those who want to invest in something with steady returns. The bonus? Cutting out the bank as the middle man.

Naturally, there are many who believe that this P2P, crowdsourcing model can work just as well in education for student loans. Really, anything even slightly better than the current standard will be a huge improvement. And CommonBond is off to a good start, though it’s still early. The company is initially targeting MBA programs, specifically Wharton, where it will fund as many as 100 of its MBA students this semester, before expanding nationally beginning next year.

Under CommonBond’s model, students pay a 6.24 percent fixed interest rate, amounting to what the co-founders believe will be the equivalent of $20K in savings over the course of loan repayment. This is compared to traditional alternatives, like federal loans, which tend to come with interest rates around 8 percent. On the other side, alumni investors can expect an annual return of over 4 percent, the company tells us.

It’s not quite as attractive to investors as some of the loan options at, say, LendingClub, but it’s enough to make investing in student loans — traditionally not something that has been appealing to or even on the radar of — individual or institutional investors. Because of the comparatively high bank or federal loan rates, students end up paying their debt off over years, and many end up defaulting — so what investor in their right mind would want to invest?

Peer-to-peer and crowdsourced debt investment and repayments of this kind are still relatively new to the average consumer, so the barrier to entry can be bit higher. There are risks, no doubt. [See Peter Renton’s analysis for more.] Beyond defaults, there’s the issue of not hedging by remaining diversified, changes in interest rates and regulatory changes — the latter of which there are bound to be at some point.

But, that being said, the P2P lending industry as a whole is gaining popularity and is being validated, in part by increasing interest from institutional investors. Plus, students want to get out of their debt, they don’t want to be paying it off for decades and banks aren’t exactly lending their butts off right now.

For education, specifically, it’s all about creating a trusted community and going beyond being a financial resource to develop lasting connections between alumni and students. That could mean professional networking, or events, alongside financing loans. Of course, to do all this and be successful in this space, startups have to raise a lot of funding. CommonBond is just getting started and it’s got some funding already under its belt, but it’s got a long way to go to catch up with SoFi’s $75+ million.

That being said, it does have some Warby Parker and TOM’s-like philanthropy going for it: It brings the one-to-one model to education and, for every diploma that is fully-funded on CommonBond, the startup will fund the education of a student in need (abroad) for an entire year. It’s starting that by partnering with the African School for Excellence. What’s not awesome about that?

In the end, however, there probably won’t be more than a handful of winners, but right now the student debt problem is enormous — that really can’t be understated — and there’s plenty of green field in the space. Plus, as P2P and crowd-powered lending reach the mainstream, this space is definitely going to become more attractive to investors — venture, institutional and otherwise.

As it does, the startups that can provide low rates for students, consistent returns for investors, and develop a secure, value-adding community around lending will do well. That’s easier said than done, of course, but there’s potential for this emerging model to have an enormous effect on education. And that is money in the bank.

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Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is an investor in about 25 startups and has written ten books. His latest books are I Was Blind But Now I See and 40 Alternatives to College. Please  follow him on Twitter @jaltucher. 

I was lonely and I wanted money. I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens, NYC in 1995. I knew nobody in the area. I would write my phone number on two dollar bills and tip waitresses with them. Nobody called me. Everyone in Astoria is Greek. And they pretty much stick to themselves. Nobody would talk to me. I would walk for miles in Astoria hoping that just one person would talk to me.

Weekends were the worst. I missed my friends at work. The Museum of the Moving Image was down the street so I would go there to watch various indie movies. Two things: the Hal Hartley retrospective was great. And the collection of Bill Cosby sweaters that he wore in his 80s show was prominently on display. The  woman taking the tickets didn’t like me because I always flashed my HBO ID to get in free.

I had about $20 in the bank and lived paycheck to paycheck. I would walk around every part of Manhattan and think to myself, “who are the millions of people who can afford to live here but I can’t?”

Adrian called me. “I have to do this diamond website. Can you help?” We went over to Shlomo’s on 47th Street (Known in NYC as the Diamond District; if you walk down 47th Street it’s all tourists and Hasidic Jews.) Shlomo told me that all the diamonds on 47th Street get smuggled into the U.S. to avoid taxes.

I asked him how they get smuggled. He said, “I will tell you a joke: Two Jews are coming back from Russia. One keeps squirming the whole plane ride. The other Jew finally asks him, ‘Moishe, why all the squirming?’ Moishe says, ‘Because I’m sorting the inventory!’”

Shlomo laughed. Adrian laughed. I thought to myself, I am never going to buy a diamond.

Shlomo wanted to put online his wholesale business, which he used to sell to all the diamond dealers on 47th Street and sell direct to the consumer. “I don’t want my name anywhere on this! If anyone on the street knew I was doing this they would kill me.” Arguably this would be the first diamond site on the Internet. Before Blue Nile, before Tiffany’s went online. Before anything.

He gave us a file, which was his entire database. Every diamond was one line on the file with all the features separated by commas: the shape of the diamond, the 4Cs (cut, clarity, carats, color), the number of the GIA certificate (since certification is the universal scam, even diamonds have to be certified by some bogus organization). He just wanted the database online and a simple design. People would select a diamond on the site and then send him an email and he would call them. Simple.

My room in Astoria had one foam mattress in it, cockroaches in the bathroom, a phone, and a black and white TV about three inches in diagonal that never worked. I didn’t realize that in NYC you needed cable to get a TV to work. I had no chairs, no sheets, no plates or glasses, no food, no closet, and no dressers, and I kept all of my clothes in a garbage bag. Even if a waitress spoke to me, what was I going to do? I felt worthless. I needed the money.

The next day Chet called me and asked me what I was up to. I told him about the diamond project. “What programming language are you going to use?” I told him I thought I would use C++ but I wasn’t sure. I figured it would take me about a month with C++.

“James, James, nononono,” he said, “trust me on this. Go to the bookstore. G-g-g-get O’Reilly’s book on Perl. Trust me.” Chet had a slight stutter when he was excited. His mind was too fast for his words.

“What’s Perl?”

“Just trust me. Get the book. Then call me.”

I got the book, went into Adrian’s office and set up a simple Perl programming environment (downloadable from a dozen sources). Did the basic “Hello, world” program. Kept flipping through the book.

I called Chet later that day. “Did you get the book?” he asked.

“I finished the whole project,” I said. I even added an extra flourish. I found a Perl library for manipulating graphic images so I used it to create the GIA certificates on the fly as images. Perl became my favorite programming language for all Internet projects back then.

—

Here are the lessons I learned from this experience:

• Learn a programming language quickly by modifying other code. I found code for searching a database. I just modified that and fed in this database. As long as you know the basic tools: if, then, loops, recursion, the syntax of the language, functions, etc., you can learn any programming language by having a book for the basic syntax and modifying other code.
• Always add an extra flourish. ALWAYS. No matter what. This was my first client. Of the next five jobs I did, three of them offered me a full time job with double or triple the salary I was making at HBO. It’s because I always delivered the extra something. This is more than “underpromise and overdeliver.” This is using creativity to make the client’s life better. And to always have the element of surprise. They know that when you walk in the door magic will  happen. Doves will fly. I was the magician.
• Always talk to someone smarter than you are and get their advice on how to do a job.

We delivered to Shlomo. He couldn’t believe how fast we did it. He couldn’t believe we also did the GIA certificates the way we did. He paid us in cash — $35,000. I took, $17,500. He gave us more work.

I walked over to The Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street and said I wanted to move in. They were known for only letting artists and writers live there. Arthur C. Clarke wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey” there. Madonna wrote “Sex” there. Dylan Thomas died on the steps in front. Nancy (of “Sid and Nancy”) was stabbed there. I was told to wait for Stanley Bard to see me. He owned the hotel. I waited for two hours, and then he took me into the office. I gave him the $17,500 in cash and asked if I could live there for a year.

He looked at the cash. It was in a paper bag from a supermarket, in hundreds. “What are you,” he said, “a drug dealer?” I should’ve added, the Chelsea Hotel was known for letting artists, writers, and drug dealers live there. And high-end prostitutes. And some not very high-end. I didn’t want to say I worked on the Internet. That was very uncool back then. It meant I was a “computer geek.” Not good.

I said, “I work at HBO.”

“Ok,” he said. And he took me up to the first floor, to the right, to the room where Nancy was stabbed (it had been divided into two rooms by then). “You can stay here,” he said. I later moved several times to different parts of the building. Every floor in the Chelsea had its own little subculture. I felt like an anthropologist as I moved up the different floors, studying the species that inhabited each one. There was art hanging everywhere. All of the art was awful.

A few years ago Adrian called me. He was still working on the site, diamondcutters.com. I think even now he’s still working on it.  ”Shlomo is dead,” he said. “What happened?” I asked.

“He was flying a plane around Russia. I guess looking for diamonds. The plane crashed.”

I thought of Shlomo’s joke about the squirming Jew flying back from Russia. I thought how Shlomo never really liked me. In 1999 I talked him into paying a million dollars to theknot.com to become the exclusive diamond dealer on their site but it resulted in almost no sales for him. He never spoke to me again after that.

I thought of the girl who worked in his office who had the huge scar down one side of her face. I thought of how I loved her and wanted to lick her scar and be the only one to tell her how beautiful she was.

Shlomo’s dead. I am still alive.