Category: Tech news

Google today launched a native iPhone version of its Google Offers app. Unsurprisingly, the app is very similar to the Google Offers Android app, which the company launched last November. With the new iPhone app, Google Offers users in the U.S. will be able to buy deals right from the app and find nearby deals while they are on the go. They can also use deals they have already bought right from their iPhone without having to print their coupons. Google, of course, always offered a mobile web version of Google Offers, but using the native app is significantly faster and also offers a number of new features.

Given that Google just launched its Groupon Now-like free offers a few weeks ago, offering an easier way for iOS users to discover these free coupons will surely expand the reach of these promotions. Users can use these coupons right away or save them for later. While the mobile web version of Google Offers doesn’t seem to feature these free offers, they are front and center in the new native app.

iPhone users can now also opt-in to getting daily push notifications about new deals and alerts when deals they have already purchased or saved are about to expire.

Google, of course, has also been integrating Google Offers closer into its Google Maps for Android product in recent months. Now that Google will likely offer a stand-alone iOS version of Maps as well, chances are we will see a similar integration on Apple’s platform, too.

For the most part, Google’s app is obviously not that different from the ones its two biggest competitors Groupon and LivingSocial already offer. Google is still playing catch-up in this market and it’s actually a bit of a surprise that it took the company this long to launch an iOS version of this app.

3D printing company Shapeways today announced that it has raised a $6.2 million Series B funding round led by New York-based Lux Capital, with participation by existing investors Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures. Shapeways also announced that it has now printed over 1 million 3D objects and currently powers over 6,000 shops on its platform. The service now has over 150,000 members (up from about 100,000 last November) who can upload and print their own 3D creations through the site and sell them to other users.

The New York-based company, which was founded in 2007, currently has over 50 employees. Shapeways operates its own printing facility in Eindhoven, Netherlands and uses third-party vendors to augment its own production capabilities. The company raised its first funding round ($6 million) in 2010 and a $5.1 Million Series B round in 2011. Today’s new funding round, which is an add-on to the previous Series B round, will enable the company to expand its team and help it “bring creative commerce and 3D printing to everyone.”

As the company announced last year, it’s also planning to build out its NYC facilities (its “factory of the future”) with the help of this additional funding.

Shapeways’ users can currently choose between 30 different materials for their creations, including ceramics and Elasto Plastic, a fully flexible material the company just introduced last month.

If 2012 turns out to be the year when the online privacy economy really takes off, then the “private social network”, EveryMe is likely to become one of the big new stories in Silicon Valley. Formed a year ago in Menlo Park out of the Y Combinator stable, EveryMe now boasts $1.5 million in start-up capital and over 500,000 users of its “circles” (heard that one before, eh?) product which is available as both Android and iPhone apps. As co-founder Vibhu Norby told me when he came into our San Francisco studio, EveryMe was originally founded as an address book company but “pivoted” to a private social network when it became obvious that the world was “waking up” to the problems of online privacy.”We do not sell data to advertisers,” Norby boldly told me.You can’t get any more explicit than that.

“WE DO NOT SELL DATA TO ADVERTISERS”

That’s EveryMe’s “core idea”. And so “privacy”, Norby explained, is “built into the ethos” of the EveryMe product. There is, therefore, no public sharing at all on EveryMe. And that’s because, he explained to me, content is more valued when it’s private. Norby claims that EveryMe is changing the way in which advertisers are working with social networks by challenging them not to exploit private data. Brave words.  Let’s hope that users agree with Norby that privacy is, indeed, better and make EveryMe one of Silicon Valley’s poster children of the growing backlash against Facebook.

Vungle is all about taking a unique and aggressive approach to promotion. That’s because the startup is on a mission to give mobile developers a better way to promote their apps — and an alternative to banner ads — by helping them create short, HD video trailers that can be shown across other apps in its network. But alternative advertising isn’t just for their customers, Vungle’s co-founders have employed it themselves.

After reading TechCrunch’s post about AngelPad, Co-founders Zain Jaffer and Jack Smith bought targeted search and Facebook ads to reach the accelerator’s founder Thomas Korte and his friends. The ads said they had an urgent message for the founder and included a link to their pitch for Vungle. And it worked … they got in.

At AngelPad, the co-founders went on to use their unique (or spammy) promotional techniques on investors. That, too, worked out. Last month, Vungle closed a big $2 million seed round from notable VC firms like Google Ventures, AOL Ventures (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL), Crosslink Capital, SV Angel, 500 Startups, SoftTech VC, and several angels, including Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy and Tim Draper.

And now startup is at it again, announcing today that it will be using its seed funding to launch a $1 million fund to entice developers to use its platform and its alternative mobile advertising.

The co-founders told us that, since launching their closed beta last month, they’ve seen a lot of interest from advertisers, specifically, app developers like NgMoco, Pocket Gems and XMG. Thanks to this demand, they’ve decided to make its “publisher SDK” self-serve so that any app developer can now show video trailers for their apps and games.

Jaffer and Smith believe sincerely that they’ve created “an entirely new ad unit for mobile,” but in order to compete with well-established monetization options like banner advertisements, they have to sign up as many publishers as fast as possible.

So their logic goes: What better way to incentivize developers to join their platform than by dedicating half of their funding to the cause? With its new fund established, Vungle will work with selected developers to guarantee payouts ahead of time should they meet certain objectives — like showing a target number of app trailers, for example.

The co-founders also said that, in order to assuage developers’ common concern that there won’t be enough ads available to show even if they agree to the terms, they want to offer publishers a “100 percent fill rate” guarantee.

Though they do seem realistic enough to admit that, as a new form of ad-unit (and ad network) — and a young company that’s been in closed beta — they won’t be able to offer every publisher that 100-percent fill rate guarantee.

So, while they’re building their inventory, their fund will allow them to guarantee developers payment, regardless of whether or not they meet their ambitious fill rate goal.

The co-founders are still deciding on pricing for video trailer creation, but, whether or not their approach to promotion is right for your startup, you have to give Vungle credit for being willing to throw themselves into the fire. The interest from investors has certainly been real, and if developers give them anywhere near the same credence (and early signs show they’re at least willing to test the waters), then Vungle just may be onto something.

Of course, walking the walk can be another beast entirely.

Find Vungle here.

LocalResponse, a network that targets ads based  on social network data (such as check ins), is sharing some news about its growth. The big number: It says it’s serving more than 7 billion impressions per month.

To be clear, it isn’t actually filling all of that inventory, or even close to 100 percent, as CEO and co-founder Nihal Mehta admits. However, he says that if LocalResponse could fill even half of it, say at a $6 CPM (the rate for each thousand impressions), it would still be a big business.

Mehta argues that by looking at a social data, the company (which was formerly a location-based network called Buzzd) does more than just tell you someone’s location. For example, he says that if someone happens to be outside a Babies R Us, that’s a much weaker signal of their intent and interests than if they actually check-in to the store.

“We think that being able to create much more targeted ads based on social can close the gap between mobile versus desktop ad spend,” he says.

Mehta adds that LocalResponse  currently works with more than 75 advertisers, and that it has run campaigns for Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Walgreens. The company is “very close to profitability,” with revenue in the second quarter of the year four times what it was in the first, and he says he expects it to become profitable in Q3.

LocalResponse, which is headquartered in New York City, is also opening an office in San Francisco, led by newly-hired Jennifer Bennett, who previously worked at Google and Admob. The main focus of the West Coast office will be sales, Mehta says, though it may add some engineering team members too.

As for what comes next, Mehta says the company will be focusing a lot of its attention on its new pro version, which helps advertisers understand more about the impact of their ad campaigns, for example seeing “the secondary and tertiary effects of that campaign through the users’ immediate social graphs.”

Until I passed the radar-equipped eye of the local constabulary, nobody had noticed the Toyota Camry I was driving.

“Do you know how fast you were going?” the officer predictably asked. I was dumbfounded — before I’d been pulled over, the drive had been a total blur. Outside of speed traps, the Camry beats Buster Bluth at being neither seen nor heard. That’s why consumers love it and enthusiasts hate it, and why I had paid scant attention to speed limits or blue-and-white Crown Vics. Substitute a hazelnut latte for amphetamines and Terry Gross for Super Soul, and I was Kowalski.

After I got off with a warning, the rest of my week with a Cypress Pearl (gray) 2012 Camry Hybrid XLE (MSRP $30,021) was predictably uneventful. It’s a competent cruiser with a big back seat and unobtrusive technology on the dash and under the hood, but the sedan has a few shortcomings that keep it from being a pantheon of practicality.

Outside, I found the Camry’s new look to be a vast improvement over its predecessor, which suffered from the same bulbous front end and tail that had spread across Toyota’s lineup like a scabies outbreak at a Vegas motel. Designers smoothed down the older car’s prominent schnoz and squared off the decklid for a cleaner, handsome look. From a distance, its lines were vaguely reminiscent of the old Alfa 164 — and not unattractive in the least.

The interior was a mixed bag. I counted 11 different varieties of plastic — from taxi-grade pleather to a shiny oil slick surrounding the center stack. A French-stitched dashboard cover looked most incongruous above the hard, grainy glovebox. And though engine and tire noise weren’t noticeable at speed, there was a significant amount of wind noise over 45 mph.

The car I drove was equipped with Toyota’s Entune infotainment system, which relies on a smartphone’s data connection to run apps like Bing and Pandora on the large touch screen. Entune will eventually run other programs, like OpenTable and MovieTickets.com, and is free for three years and $5 monthly thereafter. While internet optimized for in-car use is better than futzing around with a phone, I’m not sure why Toyota requires users to go through the extra step of downloading the Entune smartphone app before syncing phone and car. Audi, for instance, just uses Bluetooth to hijack any data-enabled phone’s internet connection.

Even Entune-equipped Camrys surround the big touchscreen with chunky buttons and dials — good for changing the station or temperature by touch and feel, and perfect for gloved hands in wintertime. Those glittery plastic knobs may make the Camry’s dash look like a mid-’90s Aiwa boombox, but the setup is far more functional than one where often-used options hide deep within graphic menus.

On the road, the Camry proved to be pleasant and relaxed — perfect for drivers who care more about the destination than the journey. Highway cruising was an absolute joy, though the cushy suspension and light steering masked a little too much road feel for my taste. Even in energy-saving Eco mode, acceleration was far from exhilarating but more than adequate for highway merging and passing maneuvers. And although the redesigned car has lost weight, every ounce of its near-3,500-pound curb weight was noticeable under heavy cornering.

In a mix of highway and city driving, I managed a respectable 38.1 mpg. Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive has come a long way from the early Prius, with barely noticeable transitions between battery and internal combustion. Though they’re still perceptibly unconventional, even the regenerative brakes and CVT shed lots of the nonlinearity of their forebears. If a driver had somehow missed all the hybrid-only badging on the outside of the car and the numerous hybrid-specific displays overflowing from the dash, he or she might not even know about the electric motor and batteries lurking beneath.

I hardly noticed myself, until I had to put an oversize item in the trunk. While there’s a Container Store’s worth of cubbyholes and hideaways throughout the car, the location of the hybrid’s batteries prevents the rear seats from folding down. In a midsize sedan aimed at families, that’s a major drawback.

Suddenly, the similarly priced yet oddly shaped Prius V made total sense to me. It offers a similar driving experience and nearly the exact same fuel economy as the Camry Hybrid. It’s bigger than the standard Prius and has plenty of room in the backseat and trunk. About the only place where the Camry Hybrid has the V beat is 1.8 extra inches of width. As a three-box sedan, the Camry Hybrid might make the better taxi, but the Prius V is more practical overall.

Better still could be the upcoming 2013 Ford Fusion Hybrid. I haven’t driven it, but I suspect that its movie-star good looks and estimated fuel economy of 41 mpg must be keeping Toyota’s sales team awake at night. Unlike the Sonata and Optima hybrids, the new Fusion’s rear seats fold down, too.

The Camry’s detractors often rely on arguments tinged with subtle elitism: Anything that’s popular must also be pedestrian. Though the 2012 Camry Hybrid didn’t get my heart racing, it proved exactly what it promises to be: a comfortable, roomy sedan with stellar fuel economy. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Until now, Toyota has dealt with its critics by taking business advice from noted economist Curtis Jackson III: Let ‘em hate and watch the money pile up. It’s worked so far, but with increased competition both on the horizon and at their own dealerships, it’s time to step things up. The Camry Hybrid doesn’t have to win over enthusiasts — but it does have to beat its rivals on the sales floor.

WIRED Entune optimizes internet for the car. Touch screen coexists with physical buttons. Excellent fuel economy.

TIRED Not nimble. Rear seats don’t fold down. Uneven interior. Strong competition muddies the purchasing decision.

Photos courtesy of Toyota Motors

The current gen Xbox may be a year past its halfway point but a purported “leaked” document dating back to August 2010 from a Microsoft presentation details the next gen Xbox 720 in great detail.

Features for the next Xbox, according to the document, will include native Blu-ray playback, full support for HD and 3-D, and beefed up hardware (graphics and processor) under the hood. Other bits and pieces from the doc include PVR functionality, a low power mode setting during media playback and what amounts to an always-on mode. Gates did say years ago that the Xbox would eventually become the nerve center for any living room. And based on recent events, it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that Microsoft is making a play to turn the Xbox into a stand-alone set-top box for all things video. After all, they do offer Hulu, Netflix and ESPN. Also, future Microsoft devices will have universal access to content whether you’re on the Xbox, your smartphone or tablet. Duh, right?

The most interesting part of the leaked 56-page document – which has since been taken down – is something called Fortaleza, Portuguese for “Fortress”. Given the environment of traditional cable providers, the next logical step for the Xbox and others is to create and dictate what content they provide for their respective platforms. At this point, that could be anything but the document details Fortaleza as a way of consuming content through VR. A set of wireless glasses that supposedly won’t arrive until 2014 will connect to the Xbox 720 over Wi-Fi and give the player/user access to all manner of content in a virtual world. Future versions will apparently connect over a cellular connection for persistent connectivity – most likely 4G.

Whether Microsoft announces the 720 at next year’s E3 is anyone’s guess.

Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 12-city event series helping educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. He’s also ex-Electronic Arts, the founder Commonred, as well as product incubator Vaporware Labs.

WWDC this past week confirmed that Apple is as strong as ever. The company’s steady stream of new products and announcements are a good indication that it’s business as usual. But when will Apple face its first real post-Steve Jobs test? It’s hard to say but not anytime soon.

Last week at Startup Grind in Palo Alto I sat down with Adam Lashinsky, the author of Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired and Secretive Company Really Works. The book is the most compelling inside look I’ve seen of the culture and attitude that Steve Jobs instilled after his return in 1997 and what it will take to maintain that lead without him.

The first positive or negative indicators will come from within Apple’s walls and work it’s way out. That will start and end with the secrecy that the company maintains. The mystique and intrigue they have kept over the years through their secrecy have helped drive internal product development as well as consumer demand.

While Steve Jobs sought after and coveted publicity like magazine covers and selective interviews in the early days, secrecy was always part of the culture. In a recent Startup Grind Marin interview with MACWEEK founder Michael Tchong, he describes dumpster diving in Cupertino with his staff in the late 1980′s to get product details and tips left in the trash. And you wonder why Steve Jobs was so paranoid. In 1988 Apple launched the Macintosh IIcx and printed a full color spread for all Apple employees as part of the launch. The printed brochure read in part: “Today we launched the Macintosh IIcx worldwide. Too bad it wasn’t the first time it was seen” with a front cover shot of MacWEEK’s exclusive on the release.

In a recent Quora thread on the subject, a former NEXT employee Ken Rosen talked about how early on everything was open. Ken says, “There was even a binder in the CFO’s office with everyone’s salary. We were told we could go check it out any time. Few cared to. Steve told us, “Inside NeXT, everything is open. Outside NeXT, we say nothing.” He added, “This will continue until the first leak. As soon as we prove we can’t keep a secret, we go back to being like every other company.” No one wanted to be the one to kill the open goose.”

Adam describes the secrecy at Apple as cult-like, similar to what you experience in a devoted religion or terrorist cell. There is complete confidentiality that extends to family as well as co-workers. My personal experience speaking with Apple employees over the years has at times been frustrating. It’s fascinating to talk to someone that’s experienced the inside, but getting the classic CIA-like line of “I’m not allowed to talk about that” quickly kills a good conversation. Apple blood oath of silence is positioned as something almost worse than betraying family or country.

But how does Apple manage to enforce this part of the culture? Adam says, “It works because they are believers. If they saw this as a job it would be a lot harder.” In another Quora post, a former employee’s wife describes her husband’s role in Apple’s switch to Intel chips. When Bertrand Serlet saw what the engineer had created while working from home, he told him that his wife is to forget everything she knows, and he will not be allowed to speak to her about it again until it is publicly announced.

So will Apple manage to maintain the secrecy? They will try. Tim Cook recently told the D10 conference that, ”We’re going to double down on secrecy on products. I’m serious.” While some product details like the new iPhone and new iPad have leaked out, there’s been nothing major. Generally speaking it feels like Apple employees I know have collectively exhaled just a bit. While they maintain the status quo, secrecy in general seems to be less extreme.

Lashinsky’s recent Fortune cover story talked about the ”Top 100″ meeting that was held in mid-April this year (watch video below), the first since Jobs’ death. With no major product details from the ultra secret and exclusive meeting leaked, pundits must look at this as another good indicator. Because until that starts happening, Job’s cultural staple of secrecy remains intact.

As Lashinsky recently told me, “He (Tim Cook) could be a caretaker, but it could be a long caretaker period. He might be what they need right now.” With hundreds of millions in options vesting over 10-years, it may be a long period. But like any home where the master is gone and the caretaker is in charge, the tight grip of rules are loosened, and defense usually becomes offense. While that “caretaker” approach might be great for Apple over the next 2-3 years while it iterates on previous homeruns, its not likely to fuel innovation over the next 10-12.

It feels like only days have passed since TechCrunch Disrupt NYC went down, but as every season turns (turns, turns…) another Disrupt is on the horizon. Our San Francisco event will commence on September 8, and every time preparation begins for the massive conference I can’t help but take a look back at the incredible success stories to come out of Disrupt.

In fact, a whole mess of them can be found right here. But those aren’t even the half of it, which is why we’ve decided to revive our “Where They Are Now” series, starting with TripIt. Since launching on the TC40 stage back in 2007, TripIt has survived the rise of the smartphone, raised a total of $10.1 million in funding, and completed a super successful exit in the form of a $120 million acquisition by Concur.

I sat down with Andy Denmark, a founder and VP of Engineering, to hear the tale of TripIt’s journey from our stage almost 6 years ago to today.

Here’s the interview in its entirety:

TechCrunch: What was it like launching on the TC40 stage?

Andy: Well, actually, we were back with the servers, watching the live stream. We wanted to make sure we didn’t go down. In the first few days we had over 10,000 new users. I mean, we had gone from only having our friends and spouses using the product to over 10,000.

Even though we didn’t win, we were one of the finalists. And it wasn’t about winning. The outcome was all about accelerating our growth from the day we launched the product and never looking back.

TechCrunch: Tell us about the following months after Disrupt.

Andy: Being a part of TC40 made a lot of the first few months easier for us. We had that big day but it didn’t end there. We were tracking referrals and we found that traffic wasn’t coming only from the TC site but from all over the place. A lot of follow-up inquiries came after the conference, and we spent a lot of time talking to other outlets, too.

TechCrunch: I’ve heard a lot of investors say that they like watching on-stage launches at Demo days and conferences like Disrupt because it gives them a real feel for the founders, and we all know how important investor/founder chemistry is. Do you think having an on-stage launch at TC40 made a difference with investors?

Andy: I think it did. I still remember the sweater Gregg was wearing. Some purple thing. I only bring that up because it did give investors a product, but it also gave them a kind of insight into our personalities and what we were trying to do. With these conferences, a lot of people who attend are traveling in and the launch at TC40 gave us a great opportunity to talk about a very recent experience that they had. Plus, they could use the product on the way home.

It also helped that the folks who attend Disrupt and TC40 are generally early adopters. They get it pretty quickly. When you try to create a new category of app, like we did, it helps when you can collect an incredible concentration of people who just get it. They can be your ambassadors, and they ended up being huge fans. As they left and went back into the world the kept talking about it and using it.

TechCrunch: How has TripIt changed between then and now?

Andy: I’d say the biggest change that happened… Well, we launched in late 2007. You gotta remember that there was a world that existed that didn’t have iPhones and Androids. SMS was hot and feature phones with WAP browsers were the shizzle. That was the world where we launched TripIt.

So, one of the biggest changes to the product is our support of mobile platforms and native applications. Because we’re a travel site, it’s obvious why that was so important. Another thing we obviously changed was we went social. Social didn’t really exist back then either. There was Facebook but you had to be 18-22 to use it.

I remember sitting in the TripIt office in that summer when they opened it up to the world. Back then it wasn’t even a question to use the Facebook platform but that was another huge change we’ve embraced and adapted to.

TechCrunch: Do you think your success at Disrupt played a part in the Concur deal? At the very least, did it help out your credibility? I know Michael Arrington loves you.

Andy: It’s interesting because Concur is in a completely different space. Their core space is enterprise travel and highly managed travel programs with large Fortune 500 companies. TripIt comes from the complete opposite. TripIt is for consumer travelers.

But the guys at Concur really saw the future when they were talking to us. They have and continue to provide a great distribution platform for the TripIt application. The marriage of the two really provides a great opportunity for what the future of the travel industry could look like. That’s why I think the acquisition made a lot of sense. It will continue to be disruptive.

TechCrunch: What advice would you give to future Disrupt companies?

Andy: I think Disrupt is an awesome experience. If you can get in, go for it. Be ready for a huge avalanche of traffic and interest. That’s the core advice. In addition, you have to keep yourself grounded and remember why you’re there. For us, it was what problems are you solving for the traveler. If you put those things together you’ll have a message that resonates and captures imaginations.

Disrupt NY is great, but Disrupt SF is where the magic happens, right around the corner from our nation’s technological pride, Silicon Valley. There will be plenty of brilliant speakers, Hackathon magic, and the usual barrage of amazing startups battling it out for the Disrupt cup.

If you’re interested in learning more or getting tickets, check out our events page.

Paper continues to be a problem inside organisations. we just can’t seem to get rid it despite all these computers. And organising it is annoying. Doo.net hopes to solve the problem by organising documents with a cloud-based service.

It’s now launched its public beta on OS X and announced a Series A round which takes the companies total funding to $10m. Plus, an app for the Windows 8 Store is close to final approval and mobile apps for iOS and Android. A Google Docs integration, will come in the next few weeks.

doo.net automatically collects documents from your hard drive as well as from online services such as your email account via IMAP integration to allow importing of documents from attachments. Documents are via Optical Character Recognition, keywords, date extraction, and organised into such as people, company, place and document type. Files are backed up with OAuth 2.0 authentication and version control

We caught up with founder Frank Thelan at the Founders conference in New York.

Editor’s note: Leo Chen is a former product manager at Amazon and is currently the co-founder of Monogram, an iPad fashion discovery and shopping app funded by 500 Startups. You can find Leo on Twitter @leoalmighty.

Death of brick-and-mortar retail

Andrew Chen recently recommended a video to me, which inspired this post. It’s a keynote by Ron Johnson, the CEO of JC Penney and the man behind Apple’s retail revolution. In the video, Johnson spoke about the history of the department store and why JC Penney has fallen behind.

It wasn’t very long ago that stores like JC Penney, Nordstrom, and Gap were the pinnacles of fashion retail. These retailers provided better products at unbeatable prices. Retail buyers acted as personal curators for customers and the in-store experience was exceptional.

Then came e-commerce. Predictable products like books, CDs, and electronics drove the first wave of e-commerce for e-tailers like Amazon. But fashion lagged behind. Consumers want a tactile, in-person experience when it comes to garments. They need to touch and try it on. Even as e-tailers offered lower prices, consumers preferred to shop in stores.

That all began to change when Zappos came along with free shipping and returns; customers are encouraged to order multiple sizes and colors, try on the items in the comfort of our homes and return what we don’t want. For free. Coupled with better product visualizations (large images, multi-angle views – see Warby Parker and MyHabit), consumers are increasingly turning to the web for their fashion needs.

‘Apparel and accessories’ is projected to be the leading category in e-commerce in the US over the next 5 years.

But soon, online retailers will also become less relevant

The bar for e-commerce is rising every day: great visuals and free shipping are fast becoming commoditized. If product, price and service are the same, consumers will grow indifferent towards the seller.

Retailers still drive marketing, supply chain and distribution for designers and brands, but how long before brands figure this out themselves? Social curation and discovery tools like Pinterest and Fancy are leveling the playing field for retail marketing; Amazon is disrupting supply chain and fulfillment (more on this next).

So why are we still shopping at a handful of our so-called “favorite stores”? Because the internet has a noise and discovery problem. I believe that’s where the next wave of fashion tech innovation will take us.

Pinterest

Pinterest has found an optimal balance between aspirational browsing and shopping. Social shopping is more about discovery, conversations and relationship building, something that’s apparent in the way Pinterest users interact.

As Pinterest evolves, they will focus more on monetization and driving direct commerce. They have already experimented with affiliate links and the Rakuten investment is a strong hint at direct commerce. Here’s what I predict Pinterest might do next (purely speculative, of course):

• Branded pages for brands, stores and boutiques
  • There’s already evidence that Pinterest users spend more money than Facebook users.
  • Pinterest could compete directly with Facebook pages by offering brands a better way to showcase products with access to a higher quality audience.
• Integrated/Universal checkout
  • If users are already discovering products through Pinterest but going off to merchant sites to transact, Pinterest should own that transaction and offer a consistent user experience.
  • For smaller retailers and boutiques, Pinterest could integrate, acquire or build their own version of Shopify and let merchants sell directly on the Pinterest platform.
  • For large retailers and brands, Pinterest will have to form partnerships and integrate with retailer payment systems: essentially selling products on Pinterest, and having the retailer drop ship inventory. Retailers may resist this initially because Pinterest will effectively render the merchant less relevant.
  • Brands will be more inclined to work with Pinterest because they see it as an effective distribution channel. Brands can ultimately skip the retailer if they can get distribution through Pinterest. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) solves the logistics challenges — brands can simply ship inventory to an Amazon warehouse and have Amazon handle fulfillment. Consumers get the added benefit of Amazon Prime.
• Create an e-commerce channel
  • To mitigate the risk of disrupting (and irritating) current user, Pinterest will likely create a separate shopping channel if they decide to focus on commerce (e.g.shop.pinterest.com).
  • This shopping channel will be product and commerce focused. You won’t find the cute puppies and fortune cookie quotes here, but you can bet Pinterest will leverage all your data for targeting.

Challenges Pinterest will face

As Pinterest scales, the biggest challenge will be surfacing signal buried in noise. It’s the Facebook Newsfeed problem, but much more difficult because of its focus on fashion and other tastemaker products.

• Facebook is about people, so to make my newsfeed relevant it has to factor in the quality of my relationships. Who am I closer friends with, who is my family, which fan pages do I interact with most, etc. This is easy because we give Facebook that information every time we look at a friend’s photos, like a status update or comment on a post. Facebook doesn’t care what content we interacted with; it only needs to know who produced that content.
• Fashion and other tastemaker products (e.g. home decor) are highly subjective, which means that I don’t necessarily like the same clothes or sofas as my closest friends. If I like a picture of a cute puppy my friend pinned, doesn’t mean I share his taste in fashion. Aside from existing Pinterest categories, they will have to find ways to add deeper tags on the products pinned (e.g. brand, color, style, season, fabric, patterns, etc…) to accurately target.

What’s next in fashion tech?

To date, most fashion tech companies are more commerce than tech. If you look at Gilt and Fab, they’re primarily commerce companies built on fairly standard e-commerce backends with some slight twists. It’s hard to drive disruptive innovation when your KPI is revenue.

In order to fundamentally change the way people shop, we will need teams with fashion experts, product visionaries, deep technical horsepower and growth hackers. It’s a hard combination to find, especially when most hackers in the valley shlep around in jeans and t-shirts — they’re not their own target user.

What will online fashion shopping be like in the future? I believe today’s multi-browser-tab search and filter behavior will feel as ancient as printed maps and yellow pages are today.

When I have a specific purchase in mind:

When I’m in the mood to browse:

Welcome to the future.

We’ve just been given a first look at Saga, a new mobile companion emerging from Seattle startup A.R.O. You can think of Saga as Siri’s little sister, perhaps. Instead of asking it questions or giving the app simple tasks (what’s the weather, add meeting calendar, e.g.), Saga is there, quietly tracking your behavior, your location and learning about your preferences, in order to make smarter recommendations about what you should do next. It’s the next evolution of those “ambient location” apps which were all the rage at this year’s SXSW, perhaps.

A.R.O is run by CEO Andy Hickl, formerly of Swingly, the NLP-based answer engine launched back in 2010. Saga is not the company’s only product – A.R.O. currently offers Bubbleator, too, which is a live wallpaper for Android. You may also remember hearing of A.R.O. back in 2010, when it first launched a suite of “semantic” core apps for Android phones backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Those Android apps have since become part of Xiant Software, a Paul Allen company and a brand that Chris Purcell runs. They do email and productivity apps for the Kindle fire right now, with more to come. Saga is A.R.O.’s new direction, run by an all-new team.

Saga: The App For Your Past, Present & Future

Saga is a somewhat complex product to describe. At its core, it’s aiming to deliver value in return for the abandonment of our privacy through location-sharing. That’s something which the new-ish “ambient location” apps have been struggling to do. For Highlight, Sonar, Banjo, INTRO, and the like, location-sharing has served one purpose: networking, both business-related and/or personal. That’s not enough of a return on the investment (namely, battery drains), for some uses, however.

If anything, Saga is more of a competitor to Foursquare, the local discovery app that recently shifted focus away from the check-in to focus instead on its recommendations engine. Foursquare was able to do this because it had finally amassed a large enough place graph tied to our social connections and history of our visits to make sense of that data on a personalized level. Saga will attempt to do much of the same, but in a different way.

There are three components to Saga’s app: location-tracking, recommendations, and gamification. It’s hard to not see the Foursquare comparison, given those elements. However, unlike Foursquare, which still relies on the manual check-in to record your location, Saga will automatically locate you – and you don’t have to open the app for this to happen. But if you do open the app while at a venue, Saga will tell you things like how long you’ve been there, how many times you’ve visited and it will even guess at what you’re doing, which you can correct when wrong. And it will make recommendations as to what to do next. (You’re at Home Depot? Maybe you should grab a bite at that Indian place up the road, after all, it’s lunchtime, you’re hungry and you love Indian food.)

With all the data it collects like this, Saga can later provide you with a history of your activity for the day, week, month, etc. It can show you where you’ve been, how far you traveled, your top places and more. Basically, all that “quantified self” data that some people get a real kick out of.

Recommendations Are Key

But Saga’s bigger draw will be it’s ability to get to know you and make recommendations. At least, that’s the claim. And these won’t necessarily be places to eat, drink or shop, as in Foursquare, but other things, too. For example, Saga could learn your commute and warn you about traffic. It could remind you that it’s been three weeks since you took your dog to the dog park. It could recommend a whole day’s activity based on a theme (foodie, health nut, etc.). It could tie your bookmarked venues to those of your friends and recommend you get together soon and where.

Not all these features are live, however – they’re Saga’s potential. Of course, how well it works will be based on a number of factors, including the accuracy of its recommendation algorithms, its location accuracy, the overall users experience, and more. But the location accuracy seems promising, because it’s not based on GPS only. Instead, Saga uses a combination of factors (past history, similar users, accelerometer reads, set preferences, routines, etc.) to determine where you are. (The platform appears to use Alohar Mobile, more on that here, but the technology was built in-house, we’re told.)

The app is scheduled to launch in late June or early July on iOS, with Android to follow. More details are here.

Tweets past, present, and future now show their exact number of retweets and favorites instead of showing “50+” if they pass that count — a move that could promote vanity and competition on Twitter. Since the change is applied retroactively, you can see a tweet about stopping polio from Bill Gates last year got 1,178 retweets and 119 favorites, and yes, all Justin Bieber had to do was tweet “New York City. #BELIEVE” this week to score 22,276 retweets.

The change could remove the need for some wildly popular accounts to use third-party measurement tools, but mostly it will just let the average person see when they or someone else has a true moment of brilliance. Some might find this fun. However, the exact counts could make people feel like they have no influence when they see they’ve received two retweets while someone else got twenty thousand.

Until now if you played Twitter as a sport, you were competing on follower count. But really that’s mostly a sign of celebrity and time on the service. Now if you have an amazing tweet, everyone will be able to see just how prolific you are. All they need to do is click on your tweet from the web or mobile interface to see it expand to reveal its exact retweet and favorite counts. However, there have been reports of the Twitter API and GUI showing different counts.

At TechCrunch we appreciate the 2.2 million savvy readers who follow us, and it’ll be nice to instantly get a better sense of what content resonates with you all. But now it’s more important than ever to remember it’s the quality and thoughtfulness of what you tweet, not the RTs and FAVs that really matter.

After all, many great artists aren’t adored until long after they’re dead. So give it 100 years, Bieber, then we’ll see if which of us got more retweets.

Apple’s WWDC keynote had a different rhythm befitting the post Jobs post Facebook IPO world we’re in. Days after Larry Ellison’s wooden capitulation to the Cloud, the tech press could be forgiven for the pedestrian way they consumed the news. Ellison has clearly absorbed Marc Benioff’s script for the last 3 or 13 years, but made no attempt at challenging his protege’s style and passion. Tim Cook and his team relied on the power of their strategy rather than the stagecraft of the event.

Integrate Facebook. Check. Open Facetime to cellular. Check. Take Google Maps off the table as a disruptor. Check. Siri-fy push notifications, apps, driving, Twitter, Likes, @mentions. Check check check check check check. Set up iPhone 5 as the beneficiary of the new OS, the OS that kills Windows. Check.

How dumb was it for Google to withhold its turn-by-turn directions from iOS? They destroyed TomTom in the process and now it pops back up as the heart of Apple Maps. Now Google has to worry about Microsoft coming up behind them and knocking off a weakened search giant instead of failing to challenge the iPad as the core platform. Somebody forgot to remind Google that they achieved orbital velocity by teaming up with Apple on the iPhone. Microsoft hasn’t forgotten it.

I don’t want to overstate this Google is on the ropes thing, first because it is only partially true and mostly because nobody will lose here as much as others will win. But who are you gonna call when you’re betting on a platform: Apple, Microsoft, or Google? Microsoft has deep pockets, a global marketplace to lose (slowly), and a predatory scoop to mop up after Nokia, RIM, and other fading incumbents of a previous era. Google can’t pivot with Facebook or Twitter for that matter, and Apple just did.

Meanwhile, I sit here typing on a Bluetooth keyboard nestled neatly in a case propping up the new iPad, the closest thing to the new Retina Display MacBook announced on Monday. Not so slowly but surely, Apple is providing soup-to-nuts gestures and hardware around the push notification platform, wrapping the social moment in a warm embrace while Google contaminates its magic in a funk of not invented here stupidity.

Take the Google +1 buttons. As my colleague John Taschek illustrates, the software is magical the way it lets you get around the mysteries of Circles and send what is in effect a direct message with a citation. Click the button on a web site, a requester appears with live lookup of Google +mentions, click, click, beautiful. Now try it on The Platform. Fail. The argument surfaces: it’s about Javascript and pop-up windows, blah blah blah. Remember Flash? Now Adobe is in the rug business or something.

John Gruber says Apple is giving a big -1 to Google. Sure, but what’s worse is that Google is doing it to themselves even harder. It’s one thing to innovate on their own mobile platform, but then isolate themselves from the dominant viral form factor of the Age? Why choke their own aura of inevitability off by turning their enormous lead in the Cloud into a horse race? Google’s magic has always been about the realtime harnessing of interactive data, the coursing lifeblood of instant sentiment, crowd-sourced knowledge.

Not an easy technical challenge, but one that could become a barrier to entry for all but the most powerful competitors, the ones with existing business models that could be undercut by the approach. So it is that Microsoft competes with its own margins, or Oracle with its maintenance revenue. They keep themselves off balance. Meanwhile Google piled on the magic: Gmail with its Golden Goose never-empty storage, never a threat to Office but rather to Windows itself, Chrome the viral browser, and even now Gdrive as it subsumes the rest of Google’s Apps.

Clear sailing ahead, as long as they made their services available to all comers. Search worked precisely because it was the same everywhere. The iPhone succeeded in large part because Google was there. The iPhone survived because of the Web development hole in the architecture. Google was as much a part of the iPad’s success as any other element, by preserving the balance of power long enough to keep Microsoft at bay.

Then the media companies were dragged into the disruption, as readers and viewers migrated from a scheduled land-locked consumption model to one based on realtime social signals. The decision point became an evaluation of the value of the content based on its position in a priority queue. Should we stay on our portable device and keep up with breaking news, and if so, then plan our big-screen watching according to the quality of the series. Enter Mad Men, Downton Abbey, The Killing, even network shows like Revenge, House, and Grey’s Anatomy.

The long-form movie nature of these series created a class of users not unlike the record buying public of the Golden Age of Beatles, etc. where media began to be consumed in album bursts after the scattershot approach of Top Forty. The hard drive capacity of HD DVRs shifted archiving of shows to On Demand services, iTunes, and especially Netflix. Once we realized it was better to capture and wait than be tethered to scheduled cliffhangers, the die was cast. It doesn’t matter how fast cable-cutting matures; the transformation to a user-controlled broadcast schedule is a done deal.

What Apple is signaling with its WWDC announcements is an adoption of this Netflix/iTunes streaming model to the technology business. Built on push notification and the intersection of Siri, Maps, and AirPlay, the next season (iOS 6) begins in the fall, crescendoes with iPhone 5, and then accelerates with software (apps) that harvest the efficiencies and user comfort with the new media consumption model. Cars add buttons for directions, gas, food, group swarming around location-based deals for products, and authority-based recommendations on store-and-view media strategies.

Thanks, Google. Apple couldn’t have done it without you. Now the question is, will you jump back in and make it impossible to say no to your brand of services. It will take a certain humility that perhaps can only come from one of your founders (Brin). And you’ll need to reconnect with your troops, and by that I mean your customers, who surely are questioning the kinds of history rewriting around paid inclusion that make a mockery of earlier definitions of not doing evil. But you need to hurry up, as Apple takes every one of your selling points and tees them up with “there’s an app for that.”

Editor’s note: This post is authored by guest contributor Jon Bischke. Jon is a founder of Entelo and is an advisor to several startups. You can follow Jon on Twitter here.

As the name of a recent conference in San Francisco suggests, there’s a war for talent going on right now. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Over the last couple of years I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to many successful entrepreneurs and executives from some of the fastest-growing companies in the world. While the specifics of those conversations remain confidential, I’ve noticed some general trends that seem to separate the winners in the talent war from those who aren’t doing as well.

Here are five I’ve picked up on:

The talent war winners aggressively seek out passive candidates. It’s the heat-seeking missile approach to recruiting and they do it because they know that they have to go find top talent, not the other way around. They do whatever they can to determine where the people they are looking to hire are likely to be. Often this is knowing what company an ideal candidate might have worked for previously, what school they attended, what Meetup they are going to next month or even what online communities they are hanging out on.

To hear them talk about their process is akin to sitting in the “war room” on Draft Day for a professional sports franchise. Who’s looking to move soon? Whose boss just took a new job? Whose just posted a cool new project to Github? They get very good at figuring out how talent is moving and figure out ways to position themselves in the midst of that flow.

The talent war winners obsess about the “top of the funnel.” They know that recruiting is a numbers game and the most important number just might be the number of qualified people at the start of their pipeline. They get obsessive about this, looking for ways to make their process more efficient.

Another part of this is getting very good at qualifying people. They’ll spend the additional time upfront on a candidate knowing that when a candidate does enter the pipeline, things get progressively more expensive.

The talent war winners give candidates a strong reason to engage with the company. Want examples of this? Check out Dropbox’s quirky jobs page and how it appeals to the very engineers who they are trying to recruit. Or how Asana offers an incredible $10K to people to pimp out their work set-up. Or how companies like Google  and others do Tech Talks to allow their employees access to some of the brightest minds in the world.

Regardless of what it is, they do their best to blow candidates’ minds and they think about every interaction. The company’s Jobs page is an obvious one but these companies also pay attention to the overall candidate experience (as an aside, candidate experience is such a big deal that there are now startups like Mystery Applicant that will help you to optimize in this area). They obsess around the experience candidates have with their brand like Apple obsesses around the experience that users have with its products.

The talent war winners are obsessed with metrics. They track everything. Sure, a lot of companies track their source of hires in their Applicant Tracking System. But that’s just the starting point for these companies. What’s their response rate for sending LinkedIn InMails vs. sending emails to potential candidates and what subject lines perform the best when reaching out? What percentage of candidates make it to a second round interview across their various sourcing channels?

The best recruiting organizations have answers to these questions and many more and use them to continually improve their processes and better allocate resources.

The talent war winners make recruiting their top priority. Their CEOs spend significant amounts of time recruiting (Vinod Khosla recommends more than 50% of time for new CEOs). They invest in the right tools and make sure their teams are fully staffed for the challenge in front of them. Recruiting high-quality candidates is not a “nice to have” for them. It’s an absolute must have.

This only scratches the surface of what the world’s best recruiting organizations do to pull in top talent but hopefully it’s been helpful in gaining a better understanding and provided some new ideas for ways to build great teams.