Category: Tech news

We try to act cool and pretend holiday gifts are more about giving than receiving. But here’s a stack of loot that brings out the salivating 14-year-old in all of us.

Here are Wired’s staff picks for the best toys to give and get this season.

We promise you won’t find any bad kerning, sloppy chamfering, or rote material choices on these design-minded gifts.

I use Twitter a lot, as I’ve been reminded in the past by folks like my boss at TechCrunch. It’s cool though, it’s kind of my job to keep up with the latest trends and what-have-you. Twitter is a great place for that. I don’t watch everything that happens in my stream, but certain things pop out at me, such as when someone asks a question.

A cool site called “You Asked It” turns Twitter into Chatroulette, but without all of that nudity stuff. And video. Let me explain. Basically, the site pulls in tweets that have a question mark (?), figuring that the person tweeting it is indeed asking a question. A random tweet question pops up and you have a few seconds to answer it. The tweet goes back to that person and boom, you’re now connected to someone that you wouldn’t have ever met before.

This is the type of cool discovery and originality that I hope Twitter supports moving forward. I hope it sticks around. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the better uses of Twitter’s API that I’ve seen in a few years.

You can put in a search term to get specific types of questions to pop up. Like, baseball, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Interestingly, before I saw this come into our tips line, I witnessed what I thought to be the oddest, yet coolest, connection ever made on Twitter:

In a way, this is a bat signal for Twitter users, some asking real questions, some wondering out loud. It’s random and something you have to try out. It’s like a real-time, human-powered search engine. For those who complain about Twitter’s onboarding process and getting new users to tweet, this is a pretty damn good way to do it.

Sure, You Asked It! isn’t a startup with any business models, but it’s a fun project by Maarten Schenk, and I take my hat off to him. Try the site out, have a play, answer some questions and use Twitter to make new friends and continue the conversation on Twitter itself. See? Twitter is also also great for that. Ahhh, serendipity.

@0526_rie that sucks, hope you feel better – because youasked.it

—
drew olanoff (@thatdrew) November 20, 2012

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Facebook is on a quest to quantify the value of its ads, and TechCrunch has attained the first public details on its recently expanded ad tracking program called “View Tags”. It lets advertisers drop cookies on people who see their Facebook ads and track if they buy something later. I’ve also got the first View Tags results showing up to 87% of conversions can come from views, rather than clicks.

View Tags could help Facebook keep Google from claiming responsibility for driving sales triggered by the social network’s ads. They serve as an alternative to the openly available conversion tracking tool Facebook announced and Reuters covered last week. That system relies on an advertiser’s site detecting the  User ID of someone who converts. Facebook cross-checks the ID against lists of who saw what ads to establish attribution instead of using traditional cookies.

Both help advertisers see whether or not their Facebook ads earn them more money than they cost, which is critical to Facebook luring more advertisers on board.

How “View Tags” Works

Facebook quietly began the View Tags program a year ago with a select group of partners that could only drop cookies only premium ads managed directly through Facebook’s sales team. During recent talks with Facebook adtech startups, I heard that over the summer Facebook began allowing partners in its Preferred Developer Consultant club members to run View Tags campaigns for advertisers.

I asked Facebook for details, and now I’ve got the full low-down. The social network confirms with me that the View Tag program beta began conservatively, presumably to monitor for privacy issues and performance. Since then, Facebook has begun allowing all of its ads to drop View Tags cookies that link a user to a specific ad they saw. Facebook has also been slowly loosening up what ad platforms can employ View Tags. To gain admission, adtech partners must undergo a grueling privacy audit to ensure their stack doesn’t suck in any personally identifiable information about the user.

Advertisers can work with approved partners to drop View Tags cookies from their ads. The cookies remain on a user’s browser until they’re cleared or naturally expire after a few months, though they can last upwards of years. Initially, they help advertisers tell what anonymous demographics of users have seen their ads, and how many times. Then if a viewer makes a purchase, signs up for a service, or takes some other conversion action on the advertiser’s site later on, the advertiser can see which ad led to the conversion.

Why Facebook And Advertisers Need View Tags

View Tags are a big deal because right now, Facebook’s isn’t getting credit for a lot of the business and sales its ads drive. Many have likened Facebook to a party where no one wants to suddenly stop talking with friends to go shopping. When someone sees an ad, they’re not always in the mood to click through and immediately purchase, but that doesn’t mean the ad wasn’t effective.  With View Tags, an advertiser could tell if a certain campaign wasn’t driving a ton of clicks, but generated a huge return on investment down the line.

Since impressions often cost orders of magnitude less than clicks, advertisers could drastically boost ROI by homing in on ads that work just by being seen. Businesses can even watch their View Tags to see what ads work best and shift their ad budgets to show more of them. Better ad-to-conversion attribution helps advertisers get the most bang for their buck, and keeps them coming back to Facebook and spending more.

Do They Work?

Yes, at least according to some of the first adtech partners getting to use them. SocialCode ran an ad campaign for a consumer packaged good company looking to get people to redeem an offer. Thanks to View Tags, it found that of the total 5,924 people who redeemed the offer, 5,127 had only viewed the advertisement, compared to 797 users who clicked through to the offer directly from the ad.

While this is just one campaign, it showed that 87% of conversions came from impressions, not clicks. SocialCode’s CEO Laura O’Shaughnessy tells me that without View Tags, “we were missing the largest segment of those acting” on the offer.

Another campaign from social ads giant Kenshoo saw View Tags reveal that 34.6% of conversions were coming from impressions where users didn’t click. Impression-only conversions generated over $31,00, or 29% of the campaign’s total revenue. Kenshoo’s senior director of product marketing Todd Herrold tells me that “Marketers are beginning to understand how Facebook ads generate brand and product awareness and influence purchase decisions, and many are increasing Facebook ad budgets as a result.”

Previously, if someone saw and remembered an ad on Facebook, then later Googled the brand’s name and clicked through to make a purchase, Google would have been credited with driving the sale instead of Facebook. View Tags could help Facebook prove that just because it’s not always the last click before the conversion doesn’t mean it’s not the inspiration.

Salesforce.com this afternoon posted its financial results for the third quarter of 2012, and the enterprise cloud computing giant’s report bested Wall Street estimates at both the top and bottom lines.

Salesforce reported Q3 revenue of $788 million, up 35 percent year-over year and up 7.6 percent from the second quarter of 2012. On a non-GAAP basis, which is where Wall Street analysts typically evaluate the company’s earnings, Salesforce’s earnings per share (EPS) was 33 cents, a one cent decline from its EPS in Q3 2011 and nine cents down from its Q2 2012 EPS.

Wall Street analysts had expected the company to post revenues of $776.6 million and non-GAAP EPS of 32 cents, according to FactSet, so today’s results surpassed both of those estimates.

According to Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff, the company’s recent performance has been strong — compared both with its own history and the sales numbers of its peers. The executive said in a press release accompanying the earnings statement:

“Salesforce.com is the first enterprise cloud computing company to exceed a $3 billion annual revenue run rate, with outstanding third quarter revenue growth at 35% in dollars and 37% in constant currency.”

On a GAAP basis, however, Salesforce’s operations were in the red during the third quarter — GAAP net loss per share was -$1.55. This was due in large part to a $149 million one-time, non-cash income tax related charge incurred during the quarter, the company said. Salesforce’s non-GAAP results exclude that charge as well as certain interest and stock-based compensation expenses.

In all, Salesforce expects to finish the year on a strong note. The company today raised its guidance for revenue and non-GAAP EPS: Salesforce now says its full-year revenue should be between $3.041 billion to $3.046 billion, and its full-year non-GAAP EPS should be between $1.50 and $1.52.

A new AngelPad-backed payments startup called Ribbon is launching today with a simple concept: Make digital payments easy no matter the platform. To do so, the company has developed a one-page checkout system that lets anyone sell whether on Facebook, Twitter, on the web, email, and in the future, Pinterest, YouTube, and elsewhere.

The company, founded by Hany Rashwan and James Elkins, was inspired by Rashwan’s experience watching a friend try to sell online last year, when Rashwan was still a junior in college. “PayPal has a horrible checkout abandonment rate,” he says. “Up to 95 percent of people leave the PayPal shopping page.” This inspired Rashwan, a programmer since age 12, to start building a solution. He describes that early version of the product as a simpler version of Shopify.

However, after speaking with more users, Rashwan says the company came to realize that what people really wanted was a way to directly monetize their followings on other platforms, like Facebook or Twitter, for example. Today, when someone wants to sell something, they have to redirect traffic to some other place, like PayPal or a marketplace like Etsy, where the percentage taken is seemingly unfair, given that the users themselves were the ones responsible for generating all that traffic. Why couldn’t they just paste in a link instead? With Ribbon, they now can.

To use Ribbon, a seller adds a product — whether digital, physical, or a service — and they’re then given a URL. “Think bit.ly with payments,” says Rashwan. “And that URL is then a one-page checkout. All you need to do to sell across other platforms is copy and paste this URL into your Facebook fan page, your Twitter stream, or your email.”

There are already platforms for social commerce, such as Chirpify, which lets you sell on Instagram and Twitter, or Soldsie, which works via Facebook comments. What makes Ribbon special is that it can auto-detect where the user is coming from and then tailor the resulting experience accordingly. “If you click on it inside Facebook, it will go somewhere different than if you click on it inside Twitter,” Rashwan explains. In the Facebook scenario, for instance, that means users are taken to an app instead of pushed outside of Facebook.

Another major difference between this and others is that Ribbon is not built on top of something like Stripe or PayPal, but is its own payments network. The company has deals with credit card companies to support Visa, MasterCard, Amex, and Discover payments. It also prices the service at 5 percent plus 30 cents per transaction. By contrast, Stripe prices its service at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, competitor Gumroad is 5 percent plus 25 cents, meanwhile.

Ribbon ran a private alpha for the past month and through word-of-mouth grew its initial install base of 250 to around 3,000 users, indicating early demand for such a service. Today, it’s open to all. Sign up here.

We’ve called Saavn the “Spotify for India”, and now the company is preparing to compete more directly with Spotify and other Western digital music services, because it’s launching Saavn English.

Saavn has already launched in six languages, but co-founder Param Singh said English is particularly important. Until now, the company’s real strength was Bollywood music, but he noted that, with 125 million English speakers, India has a big audience for Western music. Meanwhile, Spotify, Pandora, and Rdio have yet to launch there, so if they decide to come to India, Saavn should already have built up a big lead.

The English-language service is launching with more than 250,000 tracks thanks to deals with Sony Music and Universal Music Group. That includes music from Michael Jackson, Shakira, Beyonce, Bob Dylan, Britney Spears, Johnny Cash, Justin Timberlake, Bob Marley, Kanye West, and many others. Singh said that Saavn landed those deals because the labels “have seen the success that we’ve built with Bollywood.”

“We understand the way that music companies and film companies think,” he added. “That differentiates Saavn from many technology music startups. We come from a technology background and a media background. So there is an understanding that is required when you work with these music labels and you’re licensing their content — to be able to make sure that you’re delivering what they need to be comfortable.”

Seventy percent of Saavn’s users are located in India. The company is also looking to build an international audience, Singh said, but again, he thinks there’s a big audience for Western music within India itself.

Saavn English is first launching on the company’s website, and the company plans to add English to its iPhone, Android, and feature phone offerings, as well.

Promoting new businesses on social services is all the rage these days. Ask Twitter. Today, Foursquare is getting into the act by adding a new section called “Recently Opened” to its iOS app (no word yet on Android updates). The hope is that you will try out some new venues within Foursquare and potentially like them…and continue going there.

Sounds great for a new business, right? It’s good for Foursquare, too, because it can now build relationships with venues at a very early stage, hoping that they stay on the platform for the future.

Here’s what the team had to say about it:

Want to find the latest and greatest in your neighborhood? With today’s iPhone update, we’ve added a one-tap way to find “Recently Opened” places in Explore. Just tap the search icon and scroll down to select it.

As we mentioned before, Foursquare is settling into its current path as a discovery and exploration company quite nicely, now giving businesses the opportunity to be proactive by getting onto the service. Basically, if you open up a coffee shop, Foursquare wants you to immediately list it on the service. It’s smart, and very Yellow Pages-like.

Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s CEO, has gone on record as saying that he considered selling the company, but he views the service as the “Best local search tool on the planet.”

We dove deeply into Foursquare’s new approach with Explore, and I called its new rating system for venues “magic.” I stand by that, as the experience I’ve had with the app has continually gotten better with each update.

Will users and businesses agree? It’s not just about check-ins anymore, folks. The real business has only just begun. Oh, and just so you know, Crowley said at the beginning of the year that half of its users are outside of the U.S., so keep that in mind when you wonder how the company will do in the future. He sat down with us in June to discuss re-inventing Foursquare:

[Photo credit: Flickr]

For most consumer-focused apps, a redesign can be a daunting experience. If users don’t love it, a startup must either go back to the drawing board or stick with something and hope that users will eventually respond positively. And then there are the rare cases when usage explodes following a redesign. Shopkick says it is experiencing that moment, following a complete redesign of its mobile shopping app in October.

For background, Shopkick’s free mobile app for iPhone or Android rewards consumers for walking into the store. The app uses proprietary technology that involves in-store hardware that emits an inaudible signal that gets picked up by the shopper’s mobile phone. Shoppers are also rewarded for other actions, such as scanning barcodes or trying on clothes, for example. Shopkick’s retail partners include big names like Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, and others.

Engagement with the app, says founder Cyriac Roeding, has skyrocketed since the redesign. Users have reviewed products more than 340 million times, which amounts to over 100 products per user per day. If this engagement keeps up, Shopkick will reach 1 billion product views within 12 weeks. With the old app, it took the startup one and a half years to reach 1 billion product views.

Roeding explains that users are actually using the app when they are not in the store. This is due to the new content-rich “lookbooks,” which include must-have items by store or brand, and give users a view into what products are new at a particular store. Users can also save these products to wish lists for items to be purchased on the next shopping trip.

He compares the feature to a “personalized store catalogue or Sunday Circular,” but this is with you when you walk in to the store. Any items saved in a user’s account can be pushed via notifications as soon as a user walks into a given store.

Shopkick also says that over half of all users (52 percent) now prepare their shopping trips at home by building up walk-in kicks (more products viewed at home means more kicks earned at walk-in). They are more valuable shoppers for retailers and brands, because they are more prepared.

Additionally, the number of store walk-ins shot up 40 percent in the first week of Shopkick’s redesign compared to the month before (September). For the first time, shopkick reached over 1 million verified walk-ins to partner stores in a month. For comparison, just six months ago it was fewer than 500,000.

Lastly, the new version of the app drove up the revenue generated for partners by 50 percent. In the first 10 months of 2012, Shopkick drove around $130 million in revenue for its partners. After the redesign, Shopkick’s monthly run rate shot up to $26 million in revenue driven for its partners; up from $15 million previously and $8 million last year.

The redesign, of course, was timed with the beginning of the holiday shopping season. But Roeding is fairly confident that the amount of engagement in the app is not a reflection of the holiday rush. He believes that the new features and UI represent the future of shopping. The startup now offers both an in-home, leanback experience as well as an in-store retail focus.

This is a turning point for us, he explains. The test for Shopkick will be whether this engagement can actually grow, or if things will level off post-holiday. Regardless, the success of Shopkick’s app has made it clear that shoppers want both a leanback, in-home experience as well as a way to research and find products while in-stores. We’re seeing eBay and Amazon move down this path; and I’d bet more retailers join the mix.

Republicans have not had a friendly relationship with science these past few months: crazy theories about rape, attacking climate scientists, and referring to evolution as “lies straight from the pit of Hell.” Just yesterday, 2016 Republican presidential contender, Marco Rubio, made headlines for refusing to answer how old he thinks the Earth is, sparking widespread concern over another anti-science congressman who ironically sits on the Committee on Science.

The overwhelmingly lopsided attack on scientific research from conservatives raises a very important question: Are Republicans more averse to science than Democrats? According to the most recent evidence from Yale University on how ideology impacts belief in scientific research, the answer is most likely, “no.” Everyone, liberals included, is primed to trust evidence based on whether it confirms our pre-existing beliefs. It is only when scientific theories threaten core conservative principles, such as small government (environmental regulation), religious dogma (creation), and abortion rights (pregnancy from rape), that individuals turn on their mental blinders. Indeed, Yale University researchers can experimentally make partisans more amenable to researchers simply by reframing the purpose of their expertise to be more conservative friendly.

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point,” wrote psychology legend Leon Festinger, who pioneered early work on motivated cognition, the study of stubbornness.

One of the earliest and most powerful studies of motivated cognition involved an undergraduate sports rivalry after a heated basketball game. The study found that supporters of each team believed that the other side had committed more fouls, even though all participants watched the exact same footage. In other words, sports fans disputed objective facts about reality based on their own vested interests.

The personal stakes wrapped in politics can be even worse, making an open-minded search for the truth in policy debates rarer than a Republican camp at Burning Man. Professor Dan Kahan of the Yale Cultural Cognition Project found that he could experimentally manipulate how credible scientific research seemed by selecting studies based on whether it supported or contradicted participants’ political beliefs.

Kahan and his colleagues confirmed that far more conservatives than liberals believed that there is no scientific consensus around climate change (19 percent of conservative-leaning participants believed “most” scientists agree vs. 78 percent of liberal-learning participants). Yet, when it came to evidence on the safe disposal of nuclear waste, conservatives, who generally favor nuclear power, were almost twice as likely to believe that that there was scientific consensus on safe disposal procedures.

Partisans “retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs,” Charles Taber, professor of political science at Stony Brook University, told Mother Jones magazine, “and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they’re hearing.”

In other words, it’s only incidental that, at the moment, conservatives seem anti-science. The hot-button issues of the day (reproductive rights and the environment) pit many conservatives in uncomfortable opposition to broad scientific consensus. If nuclear system defense weren’t a backburner issue, conservatives might seem like the science geeks, given their propensity to funnel millions into missile-stopping technology that has yet to work consistently.

It might be only a matter of time before scientific evidence doesn’t threaten core conservative values, like if green technology becomes an avenue for less governmental regulation. Until then, it doesn’t help that some biblical interpretations have trouble denying that the Flintstones was not inspired by real life events.

*Post-Script: To be sure, Republicans do not have a monopoly on crazy scientific theories, like when Democratic Representative Hank Johnson hypothesized that further military buildup in Guam would cause the island to capsize. This post, explored why, on average, Republicans seemed more at odds with broad scientific evidence than Democrats for recent issues. For the record, we say plenty of nice things about both sides.

In conjunction with Small Business Saturday (that’s November 24 this year), Twitter just announced a promotion to bring up to 10,000 new small businesses into its advertising program.

The company says that the first 10,000 eligible small businesses that apply for the program will receive up to $100 in credits that can be used to pay for Promoted Tweets or Promoted Accounts. In order to qualify, businesses must be based in the U.S. and already active on Twitter, but not yet an advertiser on the site.

This seems like a smart way to grow the company’s advertiser base, assuming that a significant portion of participating businesses are happy with their results and come back for more. Twitter actually ran a similar promotion when it first started rolling out its self-serve ad program in February, and since then, the company says, “thousands of U.S. business owners have used Twitter advertising to quickly gain new followers, reach new customers and drive more traffic.” (The February promotion was run in partnership with American Express, which also came up with Small Business Saturday and the Shop Small initiative.)

As examples of successful small business campaigns, Twitter points to a Promoted Tweet campaign from Brooklyn-based clothing store Alter, and to a Promoted Account from Philadelphia-based Whipped Bakeshop, which “reached hundreds of new, local customers in just a few weeks.”

You can read more details on the Twitter Advertising blog and the company’s Shop Small sign-up page.

GrexIt, the company behind the email collaboration tools for Google Apps users, is out with a new product today designed to address our collective email addiction (or OCD, as the company puts it.) The startup is launching an email add-on for Gmail and Google Apps users called InboxWhiz which allows you to schedule when your email arrives in your inbox, thereby quelling your Pavlovian response to the “ding” and alerts that accompany the arrival of new messages.

The idea that you should only check email a few days per day at specific intervals is one of the methods touted for dealing with inbox overload, as well as for reaching the so-called nirvana known as “inbox zero.” But it’s hard to resist reading those new emails when they just keeping showing up.

That’s where the GrexIt InboxWhiz add-on comes in. Once installed, it automatically creates a filter in your Gmail or Google Apps inbox that sends all the incoming emails into a folder labeled “Inboxwhiz.” They’re still there if you absolutely have to find one – you know, after receiving the urgent phone call, where someone shouts: “DID YOU GET MY EMAIL?”

At whichever intervals you configure, InboxWhiz will relocate the emails from the folder back into your inbox, ready to be dealt with. The company tested the extension with around a 100 users before today’s launch, and according to GrexIt founder Niraj Ranjan Rout, they were surprised to find out that even though testers knew about the folder’s existence, it didn’t cause them to keep peeking to see what they were missing. “The tool is effective even with the user knowing this,” Rout says. It seems we really are just conditioned to respond to those alerts, as it turns out.

Rout adds that in the future, the system will add a white-listing feature, so you can make sure not to miss emails from the boss, for example. This puts it in similar territory as AwayFind, though it’s clearly meant to be a simpler system, as AwayFind includes auto-responders, SMS and voice call alerts, mobile apps, and more.

You can try InboxWhiz for yourself, from here.

Mixpanel, the analytics company that has made a name for itself changing the way analytics are handled in a world where models designed for web-based products don’t necessarily transition to mobile models, today introduced a new feature called Activity Feed. Basically, it’s like having a Path-like timeline of your visitor’s actions on your site, but with more detail and with an eye to helping you analyze what is and isn’t working about on your site or app.

You can check out a sample activity feed in the picture below. Essentially, Mixpanel is taking what it started with People Analytics, which puts a personal face on the aggregate data generally collected by website visitor and app user data measurement. In an interview, Mixpanel CEO Suhail Doshi explained that he thinks there’s opportunity for both person-specific and general user data to work together to inform product development and direction.

“Activity Stream helps our customers see the full story of how their customers are using their application,” Doshi said. “Mixpanel’s measuring engagement, so we don’t measure any page views, and we work on mobile more specifically. Mobile doesn’t even have the idea of page views at all.”

So the company took their existing prototype activity monitor and made it into the more full-featured Activity stream, which includes detailed information around every action a visitor takes on a page, including where they completed it from, and when it occurred. The whole idea is to provide a way for Mixpanel’s customers to quickly and easily see exactly where their visitors are running into trouble, and what they can do to help, all while presenting it in a format that’s easy to grasp and understand.

The feature goes live today, and is a free addition for existing Mixpanel customers. Doshi says to expect more developments along these lines, as the company continues to try to build an alternative to Google Analytics and other products out there that better addresses the type of software that users are using more frequently these days. It still might be challenging for users to begin to take a more personal look at their user engagement, when a high-level view seems to be more convenient and more efficient in the long run, but Doshi thinks offering both perspectives is the best way to help his customers truly improve their products.

It seems like just a month ago that Peek launched as an editorially curated, aspirational travel site with a transactional business model. Actually it was! But don’t let that stop you from reading the rest of this article, because it’s doing something new.

At launch, Peek had only a few destinations for travelers to check out, with some in Hawaii and a few in California. But it provides travelers going to those places with some smart editorial, some high-quality activities to choose from, and some insight from celebrities and tastemakers who know those locations best. That list bit — what Peek calls “Perfect Days” — has been extremely popular so far, as users have flocked to check out what Jack Dorsey likes to do in San Francisco, or where Devon Aoki gets drunk in Napa.*

But “perfect days” aren’t just for celebrities, right? Anyone can have a perfect day every now and again. And so Peek is now allowing everyone to contribute and curate their own favorite activities for visitors to the site.

Peek has rolled out a section of the site just for Perfect Days that are created by the community for cities all over the world. And it’s giving users the tools to create their own curated lists of things to do in the cities they love. On the Perfect Days section of the site, users can easily build lists by adding places and short descriptions that accompany the location. The site works by pulling in Foursquare location data and images to make Perfect Day locations look good. And at the end of each Perfect Day, the site builds a pre-populated map of the area for easier navigation.

That means users will no longer just be limited to the half-dozen or so destinations that Peek has created editorial for, or struck deals with local merchants at. It also means they’ll have insights into locations submitted by the broader Peek community. And for Peek, the new feature gives it a view into which places and activities resonate with users as it expands into new markets, helping it to determine what content should appear in new city guides.

Peek was founded by Ruzwana Bashir, who previously worked at Gilt Groupe, Art.sy, Blackstone, and Goldman Sachs, and Oskar Bruening, who worked at VMWare and Symantec. The startup has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from investors that include Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, SV Angel, and Khosla Ventures.

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* Lying. Most of Aoki’s Napa stuff involves moving and hiking and not actually drinking wine.