Category: Tech news

Today Facebook co-opts the best thing about Myspace pages — rapid music discovery — by prominently adding a “Listen” button to musician Pages right next to the Like button. When clicked, the artist’s jams will start to play in your most frequently used Facebook music streaming app such as Spotify or MOG. If you haven’t authenticated any music apps, Facebook will prompt you to set up the one that’s most popular with your friends, or around the world.

Now with just a single click of an immediately visible button, visitors to Facebook Pages can sample an musician’s sound and decide if they want to “Like” them. The button will help artists get more people to fall in love with their recorded music, and while streaming royalties are small, it could get inspire people to buy high margin t-shirts and concert tickets.

The Listen button has just been rolled out to all musician Pages (try it here on Radiohead’s Page), but will only be available from the web for now. Hopefully a mobile version that fires up your native streaming apps is on the way. Down the line, Facebook could even add a similar “Watch” button to TV show and movie Pages that would launch Hulu or Netflix. While most engagement with Pages happens in the news feed, these buttons could make sure Page visits to media entities actually turn into media consumption.

Depending on what streaming service you use you’ll hear a slightly different playlist. Spotify plays through the five most popular songs of an artist in a row, whereas Rdio starts playing a mix of songs through an artist’s “radio station”. Other apps like Slacker, Earbits, and Deezer are all compatible. I think Spotify has the right idea playing the most popular tracks first, and other apps might do well to put an artist’s best foot forward as well.

Some developers might not be singing along with the latest feature, though. Musician profile apps like BandPage, ReverbNation, and FanRx have classically been the way you listen to music on a artist’s Facebook Page. But those apps are buried under one more click deep through app tiles located directly under the Listen button. In fact, BandPage’s app often labels itself “listen”. Facebook downplayed the threat when I asked, but if someone wants to hear a band right away, they’re likely to click the new Listen buttons and traffic to musician profile apps could suffer.

Overall, this is a smart build-out of Facebook’s music partnerships from f8, and the synchronous “Listen With” feature it added in January. This could make Facebook Pages your first stop when you want to check out a new band. It’s a great experience because now it doesn’t matter what app you or a band prefers. You just go to their Facebook Page, find the Listen button that’s in the same place every time, and crank it up.

In its investigation of whether Google’s Street View cars illegally collected personal data from WiFi networks, the Federal Communications Commission has reached a decision that seems like a mix of good news and bad news for the search giant.

The good news: The FCC did not fine Google for violating electronic eavesdropping laws. Instead, it concluded that there was no precedent for the commissions’ enforcement of the law in connection with WiFi networks. The FCC also noted that, according to the available evidence, Google only collected data from unecrypted WiFi networks, not encrypted ones, and that it never accessed or used the data.

The bad news (which, given the size of the fine, isn’t too bad at all): The FCC is proposing to fine the company $25,000 because it “deliberately impeded and delayed the investigation” — specifically, it says that for several months, Google did not provide emails that the FCC requested or identify the engineer who authorized the data collection. “Google’s level of cooperation with this investigation fell well short of what we expect and require,” the commissions said.

Google can appeal the fine before it becomes final. A company spokesperson sent me the following statement: “We worked in good faith to answer the FCC’s questions throughout the inquiry, and we’re pleased that they have concluded that we complied with the law.”

You can read a PDF of the FCC’s (long, somewhat redacted) decision here.

[image via flickr/Tim Pritlove]

Editor’s note: Dick Talens is one of the founders of Fitocracy and an amateur competitive bodybuilder. Follow him on Twitter @DickTalens.

Little sleep, lots of stress, free food at all hours, and Paul Singh constantly try to booze you under the table. Sounds like the old college days when you tried to rush for Sigma Chi, doesn’t it?

But nope. That describes life at 500 Startups.

For a former fat kid like me, it’s an environment where I can accidentally gain 15 lbs in the blink of an eye.  Put a pizza or a tray of doughnuts in front of me and I will devour the goodies without a second thought.  Unfortunately (or fortunately), being the co-founder of a fitness startup does not afford me this pleasure.

I’m sure you’ve heard it before – the myth that losing weight is impossible for the busy entrepreneur.  As a veteran dieter, amateur bodybuilder, and nutritional coach, I knew that this was wrong, and decided to prove it. My time in 500 Startups’ 4-month program turned out to be the perfect case study to show that you can still play beer pong with Dave McClure and discover your abs.

Exercise

I skipped cardio

Herein lies the greatest irony: in the office, we endlessly obsess over ROI; in the gym, however, we pound away on the treadmill for hours and hours (probably while thinking about none other than ROI). What most entrepreneurs don’t realize is that cardio is the very last thing that’s going to yield an appreciable return.  Think about how many lines of code you could have written instead of all that time on the hamster wheel!

Weight loss comes from nothing more than a caloric deficit.  You can either create a caloric deficit through diet, or additional exercise.  I chose the former.  In other words, would you rather gruel through 30 minutes on the treadmill (which may actually leave you hungrier afterwards) or skip the equivalent of four Oreos per day?

I focused on strength training

Instead, my time at the gym consisted of 45 minutes/session, 3 times a week, performing only 5 exercises.  These exercises hit every single muscle group in the body.  By tracking my workouts and making sure that I increased the weight or reps that I performed each week, I ensured that I was constantly building muscle. This was great, as lean tissue burns more calories pound for pound than fat does, even while sitting all day. Below is an outline of what my routine looked like:

Monday (40 minutes) –
3 sets of barbell squats
2 sets of stiff legged deadlifts

Wednesday (45 minutes) –
3 sets of dumbbell bench press
2 sets of incline dumbbell bench press

Friday (45 minutes) –
3 sets of deadlifts
2 sets of chin-ups
2 sets of barbell rows

(Each session also included 15 minutes of light warm up sets)

Creating a caloric deficit through cardio, instead of diet and additional muscle, is like flipping burgers to pay for a developer, when you already know how to code.  You’ll also notice that I did no abdominal work, which is another low ROI exercise.  Abs already get stronger from deadlifts and squats, and it’s fat loss which gets them “defined”.

Diet

I counted calories

At the end of the day, weight loss is determined by burning more calories throughout a day than you consume.  This is the most important determinant of weight loss.  I consumed 11 times my bodyweight in calories (a good starting point for an otherwise sedentary individual), which came out to 2000 calories/day. I tracked my calories on an online calorie tracker like FitDay.com.  I did have some other tricks up my sleeve, however.

I only ate lunch and dinner

Breakfast? No thanks. “But you’ll be mentally lethargic!” is what you’re probably thinking right now.  That’s a myth.  The truth is, I’ve never been a breakfast person.  In fact, on days that I would eat breakfast, I often felt hungrier by the time lunch rolled around. I soon discovered the Leangains method, which entails skipping breakfast (a huge time saver) and consuming all of my day’s calories from lunch and dinner.  Many Leangains practitioners also report an increase in concentration and energy once they get used to breakfast skipping.

I ate lots of protein and skipped the other free snacks

While I avoided breakfast, I did not avoid protein.  In fact, I ate a lot of it, to the tune one gram per pound of bodyweight (180g for me). Eating protein kept me fuller for a longer period of time.  When free food rolled around the 500 Startups office, I only consumed the protein portions of those foods.  This kept my overall calorie intake lower while still being able to dine on Dave McClure’s tab.  From geeking out on recent nutrition studies, I knew that more protein in place of carbohydrates was beneficial in decreasing fat and increasing muscle.

I developed food staples

Since I aimed for 2,000 calories/day, I simply sourced meals that contained 1,000 calories each and ate them repeatedly for lunch and dinner.  One of those was a large plate of beef and vegetables from a Mongolian barbeque restaurant.  Another go-to was a foot-long Subway sandwich with double meat and baked chips.  These were extremely large, filling meals that left even a bottomless pit like me extremely satiated.

I restricted alcohol choices, not quantity

I limited my beverage of choice to liquor and diet soda with the occasional light beer, but I drank as much as I wanted. You see, alcohol’s fattening reputation is misleading. Alcohol in itself does not contain many calories (less than 60 calories per drink). When people talk about getting fat from college late-night partying, they conveniently forget about the Big Mac and fries they ate afterwards (as well as the not-so-attractive girl they brought home). It’s the sugary drink mixes and after party binge food that contain lots of calories, not alcohol.  I used this handy guide to determine my alcohol choices, and paid no attention to quantity.

Taking all of this into account, here is what my typical Friday looked like:

9-10am – Gym
10-12pm – Work/Meetings
Lunch – Footlong from Subway, chips, free food from 500 Startups.
12:30-8pm – Work/Meetings
Dinner – Large plate of barbeque beef with unlimited veggies
8:30-10pm – Work/Meetings
10pm – Party with the 500 crew.  Anywhere from 5-15 drinks.

I used the schedule above to achieve the results below. If it seems a little too simple, that’s because weight loss is just that – simple. There is no magic pill, no special trick.  The only secret is making sure that everything you do has high fitness ROI.

What I’m about to tell you is very powerful: Not only is weight loss possible with a hectic schedule, but it’s actually easier. Think about it. The more free time a dieter has on his/her hands, the more time he/she has to actually obsess over food. It’s why people eat when they’re bored. Thinking about dieting all the time ironically makes the process an uncomfortable, miserable one. Develop a plan with high ROI, stick to it, and then don’t think about it.  Take advantage of the fact that you’re too busy focusing on your work to focus on the tire that’s on your waist.

When Google launched Gmail in Germany in 2005, it was quickly barred from using the Gmail name for its email product there. German entrepreneur Daniel Giersch, after all, had registered the ‘G-mail’ trademark (short for Giersch mail) for his physical and electronic mail service in Germany in 2000, long before Google had even announced its own service. Instead of ‘Gmail,’ German Internet users who wanted to use Gmail had to go to googlemail.com. Google tried to appeal this decision, but ran out of legal options in 2007, after Europe’s Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market rejected its appeal. For a long time, it seemed like that was the end of the story, but last week Google quietly settled its dispute with Giersch. According to Germany’s GoogleWatchBlog, the gmail.de domain and the Gmail trademark were transferred to Google on April 13.

Neither Google nor Giersch have commented on whether money was exchanged in this transfer, though it seems unlikely that Giersch would have just transferred the domain to Google without some compensation. In 2006, Giersch claimed that Google had offered him $250,000 for the German trademark rights to the Gmail name.

It’s not clear if Google will now change the official address of its email service in Germany to Gmail.de. It’s worth noting, though, that German Gmail users were already able to use @gmail.com and @googlemail.com interchangeably.

After a similar trademark dispute in England was settled, though, Google quickly made this switch. There, the company also offered its users the option to change their existing email addresses from @googlemail.com to @gmail.com.

Editor’s note: Bob Buch is a two-time startup founder, was VP of Business Development at Digg, then at AOL, and is now working on founding his next business. Follow him on Twitter @bobbuch.

There is a certain type of company that can only exist in Silicon Valley. People outside of the Valley scratch their heads at how a company with no revenue and no apparent business model can be called successful, much less be worth $1 billion.

But maybe the problem is that we’re mis-categorizing Internet and mobile products as businesses in the first place. What if we looked at them as TV shows instead – where success and failure is determined by ratings not revenue? Isn’t Instagram closer to American Idol than it is to Oracle? It entertains millions of us for a few minutes every day – maybe that’s enough. Perhaps the Valley is pioneering a new business model, one where revenue isn’t the goal but where distribution and engagement are paramount.

The titans of new media have a distribution channel that’s always hungry for more entertainment. They need to feed the beast – and they can’t innovate fast enough. They need to rely on the Pinterests, the Instagrams and the Paths to give them the entertaining new hangouts for their audiences. Big companies aren’t known for their ability to innovate, and certainly not as effectively and nimbly as startups That doesn’t stop them from trying, but frankly my advice to them is to give up on innovation (Google+, ahem). Focus on your strengths – monetization and distribution — and outsource your weaknesses. Be more like a big movie studio. They don’t make The Blair Witch Project, they make $700 million budget James Cameron action movies that are filmed on the moon and in the burning core of the Earth.

So translation to Google – keep going on the self-driving car and the augmented reality glasses, nobody else has the balls or the cash to do that anyway. And see if you can get James Cameron involved somehow.

What big new media companies do well is sell advertising. So think of them as a TV network – NBC doesn’t make shows, they buy them and sell ads around them. You have relationships with the distribution channel, so you get the entertainment in front of the eyeballs, and then you sell it to big megabrands. Little production companies can’t do this, and neither can a little photo-sharing startup. When I was at Digg, we were lucky to even see a seven-figure RFP come through the door from a big brand, much less win it, and we had an audience of 40 million people. At AOL, it was just a given that we were getting a piece of it – when you’re a top five Internet property, the advertisers have to spend there if they want to reach enough people. The big companies should stick to monetization and distribution, and let the Instagrams focus on building the cool stuff.

This isn’t to say that all Internet startups should take this path. At Digg, we grew so big, so fast, that we aspired to be a network ourselves. If you’re going to turn the corner from TV show to network, you’ve got to have your own ad product. Our idea for this was DiggAds – ads that behave like news stories and could be voted upon. We had aspirations that these ads would be the answer to the online news industry’s monetization woes. We were off to a good start; the ads were extraordinarily successful – so much so that you can see echoes of them in Twitter’s Promoted Tweets and Facebook’s Sponsored Stories. Despite our early success with DiggAds, Digg failed to become a studio ultimately because people stopped watching the show – we didn’t build a network so all our bets were on a single show.

Welcome to Valleywood where talented creative people can come up with a crazy idea that no big company would ever take a flyer on, and getting rewarded if it becomes a hit. I think we should encourage this model – maybe even have ways for the big companies to participate without having to purchase the entire company. Maybe startups will form themselves into labs and crank out multiple products, build up followings, and then license them off to big companies. Maybe incubators like Y Combinator and Techstars will become the mini-majors or the great independent production companies.

Before leaving Goldman Sachs to earn a millionaire’s salary with Chicago High Frequency Trading (HFT) startup Teza Technologies, Sergey Aleynikov made one last transaction. At 5:20pm on his last day, just before his going-away party, Aleynikov uploaded 500,000 lines of encrypted source code from the Wall Street firm’s proprietary HFT system to a server located in Germany. Following the clandestine upload, Aleynikov deleted the encryption program, wiped his command history, and headed to the party.

Although Aleynikov later managed to download the source code to his home computer in New Jersy before flying to Chicago, he was apprehended by the FBI while returning through Newark Liberty International Airport.

But after his conviction at trial and imprisonment during the appeals process (his dual US-Russian citizenship presented a flight risk), Aleynikov is now a free man.

The reasons why touch the entire software industry.

The appellate court for the Second Circuit released an opinion on Thursday finding that the HFT source code did not fit within the scope of the National Stolen Property Act (“NSPA”), which makes it a crime to transport or transmit stolen goods, wares, or merchandise. The court concluded that Aleynikov did not steal physical “goods” per se, but rather, software code which was “purely intangible property embodied in a purely intangible format.”

Because the statute was interpreted to apply only to physical goods, the court declined to “stretch or update statutory words of plain and ordinary meaning in order to better accommodate the digital age.”

Nor could Aleynikov be punished under the Economic Espionage Act (“EEA”), the court concluded, because the HFT source code was not a product that was “produced for” or “placed in” interstate commerce, as required under the EEA. Goldman Sachs planned to keep the HFT source code secret, having no intention to sell or license it to anyone in the market.

The appellate court’s decision overturns Aleynikov’s conviction, which had sentenced him to eight years in prison, followed by a three year supervised release, and a $12,500 fine.

Contrary to some previous coverage, the court’s decision is focused not on whether software code is property capable of being stolen, but instead, on the specific scope of the NSPA and the EEA as enacted by Congress. The impact is smaller than it might have first appeared.

In fact, the decision is based on a careful consideration of prior legal precedent, the precise language of each law, relevant legislative history, and the well-reasoned principle that courts should favor narrow interpretations of criminal laws that are ambiguous.

But the decision is nonetheless a setback for businesses hoping to protect intellectual property trade secrets. Since the court concluded that the NSPA does not apply to “intangible” intellectual property, insiders may now have less to fear by stealing proprietary software. This reality will not be lost on unscrupulous employees: although Aeynikov clearly stole valuable proprietary software from Goldman, he was able to escape conviction by uploading the information to a remote server (rather than downloading and storing the code on a physical device, such as a flash drive).

Moreover, as proprietary software is increasingly integrated into business methods, the incentives and opportunities for theft will grow. The impact could be especially large for technology companies that develop and market software as their primary product. In particular, software-based trade secrets that are not actually designed for licensing or sale in the open market (like Goldman’s HFT system) will be especially vulnerable. Companies concerned about intellectual property trade secrets should therefore begin monitoring HTTPS transfers on their servers, paying special attention to any instances of large amounts of data leaving their network.

The court recognizes this negative impact. As argued by Justice Calabresi, who concurred in the opinion (although somewhat reluctantly it seems), courts should consider the actual “mischief” that a law is designed to address when interpreting its context and meaning. As Calabresi acknowledges, “[I]t is hard for me to conclude that Congress, in this law, actually meant to exempt the kind of behavior in which Aleynikov engaged…I wish to express the hope that Congress will return to the issue and state, in appropriate language, what I believe they meant to make criminal in the EEA.”

[Image via Dealbreaker.com]

Editor’s note: Dan Kaplan does Product Marketing for Twilio, which is hosting a conference on cloud communications in October. Follow him on Twitter @dankaplan.

If you are a marketer who has spent the last 10 years mastering the art of capturing and converting customers on the desktop web, the rapid rise of smartphones and the iPad might make you nervous.

You’ve built businesses on paid search, written essays about optimizing lead forms and studied the ever-changing subtleties of SEO. Using cookies that follow us around the web, you’ve turned display advertising into a performance medium. But just as you were beginning to wrap your heads around the whole social thing, along come the iPhone, Android and the iPad and with them a whole new reality: the post-PC world.

The post-PC world is radically different from the world in which most marketers honed their skills. Here, horizontal keyword search is losing ground to vertical-specific apps like Yelp and Hipmunk and a stream of recommendations from Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and maybe Path. Along its frontiers, touch- and voice-driven interfaces write most of the laws. This landscape is unfriendly to lead forms. It rejects traditional tactics like SEM and SEO. In the post-PC world, the marketing methods of the last decade will be on their way out the window. Marketers and businesses that can’t adapt will be on their way out the door.

But there is good news for those ready, willing and able to evolve: Post-PC consumers – like generations of consumers before us – will still want ways to entertain our senses, engage our imaginations and stimulate our minds.

The future of marketing in the post-PC world is not about showing up high in search results. It is about reputation and spontaneous discovery. It is about weaving yourself into the feed. This is an evolution of what is known these days as inbound marketing. It involves creating awesome content that makes you relevant and then leveraging your overall awesomeness to establish a relationship with your target customers and maintain it over the years.

When you do it right, your customers want to find you. They need to find you. Your existence delights them because you are exactly what they were looking for – whether they knew what they were looking for or not.

But post-PC consumers are not patient. When we want to engage with your business, we expect you to respond in an instant, on the communications channels we prefer to use. Responding to our emails in a few hours or days just ain’t gonna cut it: depending on our demographics, we are either overloaded with email or hardly use email at all.

But we do consume almost every text message (SMS) that we receive. When we’re in info-gathering, entertainment or transaction mode, we tap on links that seem enticing and follow push notifications into our favorite mobile apps. And if your business offers a frictionless way to contact you, many of us will even call.

This is where cloud communications comes in.

Cloud communications democratizes telecom, making it easy for anyone with access to programming chops to create applications that historically required tons of expensive telecom hardware, big contracts with telecom carriers and a slew of esoteric telecom skills. Cloud communications abstracts these challenges away, making things like interactive voice response, automated outbound dialing, two-way SMS, text-to-speech and even mobile VoIP as simple to implement as a few lines of code.

In practice, this means embedding SMS tools into your CRM, email software or whatever else you want to use. It means using call tracking to gather metrics on phone calls or sending voice and text messages to notify sales reps about new leads in real-time. It means creating “tap-to-call” capabilities that instantly connect smartphone or iPad users via VoIP to your sales or support agents with a tap on a link in a mobile app or an ad. And for these agents, it means taking calls straight from an iPad – not locked down in some office or call center, but anywhere that wireless internet can go.

If what you’re selling is weaksauce and your content is boring, you will find the post-PC era to be a cold, cold world. But if you can produce products that incite our passions and generate content that resonates through an ever-more-insane degree of noise, you’ll have a shot at becoming part of our feeds. If you do these things while creating new ways to engage us when and where we want to be engaged, the future will be yours.

So what are you waiting for? The latest iPad is selling like crazy and it’s time to think different.

The post-PC world is almost here.

Editor’s note: Jeremy Liew is a managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Follow him on Twitter @jeremysliew.

The April 5 edition of The Wall Street Journal had two articles about direct selling. One notes that the key driver of Coty’s takeover attempt of Avon is the ability to move additional product through Avon’s dominant direct sales channel in Brazil.

Avon’s door-to-door sales force in Brazil has given it a leading role in the country. Rivals who sell through traditional stores — such as L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble — have struggled for as much traction.

Coty Chairman Bart Becht said in an interview he would like to use Avon’s direct-sales channel to push his company’s lower-end, mass-market brands such as Adidas and Playboy colognes. The company’s main business is designer and celebrity fragrances.

“A key win for Coty is to get into Brazil,” Mr. Becht said. “Door-to-door is a key way of getting into the market.”

The second article is about Tupperware’s direct sales efforts in Latin America, also with a focus on cosmetics.

Tupperware Brands Corp., the maker of plastic food containers, has a surprising path to sales in Latin America: perfume and skin cream.

After realizing about a decade ago that consumers in the region spent more than 20 times on beauty products than they did on containers for leftovers, Tupperware altered its strategy.

In 2005, it bought six beauty brands, spending $557 million. Since then, the beauty business has quietly grown to account for 26% of Tupperware’s total revenue.

In 2011, Tupperware’s revenue totaled $2.6 billion. Sales for South America increased 50%, largely driven by Brazil. And about half of Tupperware’s $711 million in sales in Latin America came from the beauty products category.

As my partner Bipul Sinha noted in a post last year, direct selling is one of the most interesting opportunities in commerce in the time of social. Direct selling is being invigorated right now, not just in Latin America, but also in the US, due to three key reasons.

The first is the economy. In this slow economy, people are more willing to supplement their income (and seek alternative career paths) than they have been over the last few decades. Direct sales is one of the most attractive and accessible ways for people to supplement their income. The last golden age of direct sales was during a period when women had few traditional career path options. As more women found success in the mainstream economy, the labor pool available to direct sales diminished. In this slow recovery, with unemployment still high, more people are willing to explore direct sales.

The second is the birth of social media. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and even email help all of us maintain our weak social ties as well as our strong ones. According to the Washington Post:

The average Facebook user has 245 friends. But the average friend on Facebook has 359 friends. …

One thing to note ahead of the Timeline switch: Users can reach an average of 150,000 other people through friends of friends,

When you add Twitter and Facebook, that is a tremendous reach for an average person. Direct selling is all about selling through your network – friends and friends of friends. The social networks make this whole network far more visible, and accessible, than ever before.

The third reason is tablets and the internet. These devices, combined with lightweight SaaS ERP, CRM and SFA software, dramatically improve the productivity of direct sales reps. In the old days, a direct sales rep would call on the people that they remembered to call on, host a party when they got around to it, and had to have physical samples, or page through catalogues, to show what they had in stock. They took orders on handwritten forms and faxed them in to the main office. And making repeat sales meant going back to each customer in person.

Today, a sales rep can get prompted on their iPad with who they should be calling on. Perhaps because the prospect has shown a propensity to “like” other similar products, perhaps because they clicked through on a FB post, or perhaps because it’s been two months since they last bought something. They can manage their activity to industry best practices, making sure that they are splitting their time appropriately between calling on new customers and servicing existing ones. They have an infinite catalogue, with video and color photos from multiple angles for each item, available on their tablets. They can take orders on the spot, swiping a credit card through a dongle. And happy customers can self-serve and place new orders directly on a website, without the sales rep having to go back to see them in person. This is a massive increase in productivity.

We’re starting to see a new generation of direct selling companies emerge, including companies like Thirty One Gifts, Stella and Dot, Chloe and Isabel, Gigi Hill, Miche Bags. and J Hilburn. At Lightspeed, we’re tremendously excited about the opportunity to build very big commerce companies in this space.

What next generation direct selling companies have I missed from this list?

Grabio has been around for about a year but they’ve recently update the app and added a number of features. What does it do? Essentially it’s a mobile Craigslist with notifications and location-based searches for classified listings. You can enter any neighborhood, do a quick search, and pick up a broken girls bicycle seat or a gently used full body cast for a few bucks. Pretty slick, eh?

Founded by Horatiu Boeriu and Chris Popa, both currently living in Chicago, the company is bootstrapped and went through a number of iterations before it settled on its current incarnation. At launch they saw 5,000 users, although that number is creeping up.

There are a few similar services out there, most notably EggDrop and Zaarly, but Grabio uses a location aware API notifies you when you’re near deals.

“The secret here is that compared to others, we don’t constantly track your position,” said Boeriu. “We use a cool API from Apple that tells us when you moved without actively tracking your GPS.”

The app also includes user profiles, mobile payments, and reputation based user rating and following. Listings are free, although if you use the Grabio credit card payment system the seller pays a 6% fee.

“In the near future, we will also work with local businesses to provide them targeted leads at a predefined cost,” said Boeriu. Future improvements will include a geo-fencing feature that will notify users when they come into a certain area featuring a hot sale. Imagine being able to know when you can get a box of zwieback or five hundred partially-inflated weather balloons for fifty percent off and you see the real value proposition.

Product Page

Editor’s note: Jeremy Toeman is a founder of Dijit Media, a startup whose vision is to create the ultimate “hyperpersonalised social TV guide” mobile experience. Jeremy has over 11 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, social TV and consumer technology working with companies like Sling Media, Mediabolic, Boxee, Clicker, VUDU, and more. Follow him on Twitter @jtoeman.

From some of the chatter out there, it seems like the prerequisites to have “deep knowledge” about the TV industry is to have ever watched TV.  Yes, that sounds pretty cynical, but I see post after post espousing wisdom on topics that are so misguided it makes my head shake – involuntarily.  While everyone is certainly entitled to their opinions, there’s just something to be said for a little research, a little fact checking, and deep diving with industry experts.  I think the “future of TV” industry at large would benefit greatly from a little more of the above, and a little less jumping on bandwagons.

Accordingly, here are the 5 topics I see on practically a daily basis that are just plain tired, and should be put to rest.

1. The Future of TV is about Voice Control and Gestures

In the future, you’ll tell your TV to change to channel 702, ask it when the next Tom Cruise movie is on, and wave your hand to change the channel.  Really?  This is exciting?  First, when it comes to gestures, the *best case scenario* is using gestures for the most simple of functionality, such as channel/volume adjustments.  What’s the “when’s the next Tom Cruise movie on?” gesture (protip: you jump on your couch).  It’s a model that works great for games, and not much else.

And as far as talking to your TV, whether it’s Jack Donaghy’s awesome voice-controlled TV for Kabletown, or this funny commercial, it’s clearly an easy topic to play around with:

But is there value in it? Some, definitely.  I do not, in any way, question the fact that a well-executed voice interface to change channels, perform searches, etc, sounds great.  But is that really revolutionary?  Considering that TV watching is primarily done with a second screen (iPad, smart phone, etc) in hand these days, the ability to search without using the awful on-screen interfaces as provided by set-top box makers has already improved dramatically.  Searching for show listings, actors, etc, using a dedicated app or even just google is a marked improvement.  I don’t consider a voice-enabled search “revolutionary” at this stage.

2. The Future of TV is all about Social TV

Literally every “big” show event these days has a followup about how it’s the most gigantic moment in the history of #SocialTV ever.  Well, considering this is a fairly new thing, and more people are still signing up to services like Twitter and trying out Social TV apps, that shouldn’t be much of a surprise now, should it?  Of course Game of Thrones broke records, just like how the American Idol season finale will later this year.  As will the Olympics, then next year’s Superbowl.  But here’s the thing: other than huge events, app makers and broadcasters alike are still trying to figure out what Social TV really means.

It’s clearly not about check-ins, that’s very 2011 thinking.  And it’s not going to be about measuring real-time tweets (hello West Coast, sorry, your Tweets just don’t count), which is very 2012 thinking.  There’s something happening in the “engagement with TV” space, but it’s probably a much richer experience than what we’re talking about.  Oh, and so we don’t forget to address it – nothing, not a single thing, in the field of social/real-time engagement works particularly well when it comes to “catch up” TV.  Which there will remain plenty of for years and years to come.

3. The Future of TV is all about Cord Cutters

Auntie May just cancelled cable and bought a Roku, what the what?  Cable is doomed, it’s like newspapers and the music industry.  Slow down folks, not so fast.  First and foremost, not a single report from any credible source has ever painted a picture that cord cutting is having, nor will have, any impact on the industry.  At an average price of $80/month, cable (and satellite and telco, but I’ll just say cable from this point forward – less typing), is about the best deal in entertainment you can find on a dollars/hour basis.  Most Roku, WDTV, and Apple TV owners still have a paid cable service, as do most Netflix and Hulu subscribers.

Additionally, the reason TV != music is about distribution and lockup agreements.  Sure, artists had labels, and labels distributed their music via CDs to retail stores, and there are a lot of analogies to the TV industry.  Except for the lockups, bundles, affiliates, and a dozen or so other participants in the TV production-to-consumption cycle.  TV shows can’t start their own distribution service – because 90% of TV shows are made by the folks who own the distribution side.  And the networks can’t just go direct to consumers, they’d sacrifice huge amounts of money to do so.  Like billions huge.  And for what?  To directly engage with (read: provide customer service for) people who get pissy if their DVR cuts off the end credits one time on a show they don’t even care about. Yeah, sounds great. This is highly related to Death Topic 5 below, so more in a moment.

4. The Future of TV is all about Apps

Just imagine a world where instead of browsing channels or searching for things, you can download apps for it all.  ABC? App. NBC? App. Fox? App. Bravo? Part of that NBC App (or maybe it’s own). TBS? App. SyFy? Same as Bravo, maybe.  How about the shows themselves?  Where’s Seinfeld?  Could be it’s own app!  Or, since TBC has syndication rights (well, some of them), it’ll be in their app.  And I’m sure NBC still owns some rights too, so maybe there instead.  Or possibly it’ll get split up amongst each of the stakeholders, on a per-season basis.  This is the future, and it’s awesome.

If awesome means terrible.

As I’ve said before, TV isn’t about work, it isn’t about search, it isn’t about finding things and effort – it’s about escape. TV should not work like the Web nor like my smart phone any more than my microwave should work like my smart phone.  Yes, we could use some better paradigms for discovering content, and integrating with second screen apps sounds like a good idea in many ways.  But that doesn’t mean I want an app per channel, show, network, etc.

5. The Future of TV is the Death of the Television Industry As We Know It

As I wrote above, TV is dying, it just must be dying!  The kids are watching lots of videos on the YouTubes, and since the Internet by definition is disruptive, it must impact TV.  After all, the TV services business is a $200+ billion dollar a year industry, and if you factor in manufacturing, production, distribution, and other related costs, it easily scales past $500 billion.  And this still doesn’t account for the internal marketplaces within each of the players.  That’s a lot of money for the Internet to kick the snot out of and hand over to the engineers in Silicon Valley!

Well, what if it doesn’t?  What if all the brains and the coding and the apps and the investments can’t topple this old school, well-loaded, not technically unsophisticated industry?  What if instead of disruption, the contributions of the Internet and the tech sector simply contribute to more growth?  After all, that’s what happened with cable in the first place, then VCR, then DVD, …  Sure, some of the deal-making might change, and we should expect to see the players evolve, grow, and of course fade.  Netflix is larger than any US cable operator, maybe they’ll take one of them out?  Or maybe the cable companies will expand into competitive regions?  Maybe the Xbox will be the next generation of set top boxes, with no need for truckrolls?  Lots of potential, lots of Internet contribution, but dying?  I doubt it.

In conclusion…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not all doom and gloom for speculation.  I love some good speculation.  But the above topics are worn thin, dried out, and only mildly less entertaining to read about than tech bloggers getting into spats with each other.

There’s a ton of innovation on the second screen that goes far beyond Social TV.  Future TV interfaces are coming and changing, and Voice Control will play a role, but what else should we expect?  There’s no real evidence that cord cutting is happening, and sure, it might come, but as with all things, it’ll either be massively slower or faster than all typical predictions, so let’s move past that point.  What else is out there?

It is freaking cold here in Indio California, so cold that half of the folks in the house I’m staying with for the weekend left the Coachella music festival last night around 9pm. Even though I stayed until midnight (made it to Swedish House Mafia, yesss!), I ended up buying an ugly $60 Coachella hoodie to not freeze my buns off. A LOT of people now own this hoodie, I think we should totally pass it on to our kids.

In lieu of watching Coachella live, my de facto PGA Villa roommates — who have paid hundreds of dollars for their VIP tickets mind you — have been instead addicted to the livestream on YouTube, sitting in front of our fireplace at home until the wee hours of the night. Brave New Musical Festival world we live in. This is actually the second year that YouTube has livestreamed the festival, and as I attest to above people, like normal people, are watching it.

I don’t know how much State Farm Insurance is paying to Coachella or YouTube for the sponsorship, but it is seriously money well spent. So if you’re into it, you can run your own Couchella through midnight Sunday, April 15, getting your fill of live Radiohead, Miike Snow, Andrew Bird, Florence + The Machine, Bon Iver, Gotye and more on the humble website. I mean, that’s what we’re doing.

One of these days YouTube/Google is going to pull in the SuperBowl and/or the World Cup and change the game for online video. Until then, baby steps. You can watch the livestream here.

Who needs governments? The ongoing trend toward mobile, social and crowdsourcing apps have led to a wealth of new community-based resources that support or supplant traditional civic and government services. Think Kickstarter instead of the NEA or Canada Council. Or consider the new Circle of 6 app, which is intended to help prevent violence before it happens, by letting users reach out to friends when dicey situations arise, instead of calling 911 after they get out of hand.

Circle of 6 is the brainchild of health educator Deb Levine and anti-violence activist Nancy Schwartzman, who have found that it’s often easier for people to reach out for help via a screen, and that it’s important for groups of friends to offer concrete strategies for supporting each other. It’s already won the White House’s Apps Against Abuse challenge, and racked up tens of thousands of iPhone downloads. “We are working to get the app in the hands of Android users as soon as possible,” says lead developer Christine Corbett Moran (an astrophysicist with a double-major Physics/CS degree from MIT, who develops apps in her copious spare time.)

Apps like Circle of 6 are the thin edge of a really interesting wedge. In the rich world, apps that obviate or replace the need to call in the authorities are merely useful; but in the developing world, where competent authorities are much poorer and more thinly stretched, such services are far more disruptive. Community-sourcing apps won’t replace government services that already exist, at least not anytime soon. But where those don’t exist at all, these new services can be downright revolutionary.

Some concrete examples: I Paid A Bribe (which I’ve written about before) helps Indian communities fight the scourge of corruption. Ushahidi maps crises where governments are too poor or paralyzed to do so themselves. A few years ago I helped build the EpiCollect app for Imperial College London, which anyone can use to collect, store, and map their own data; veterinarians used it to track the spread of diseases in East Africa. Ulwazi collects “community memories” — ie cultural knowledge — in South Africa. Esoko helps African agribusiness entrepeneurs share and gather data that is tracked by government statisticians in the First World, but not necessarily by theirs.

As smartphones continue their relentless conquest of the planet — in particular, as the price of a decent Android phone drops below $100, and more than 50% of the poor world has access to one, a mark that I expect will be passed in the next few years — these kinds of community-sourcing apps will grow ever more important. In the same way that the developing world bypassed wired phones and jumped straight into mobile, they may bypass certain forms of top-down hierarchical government services in favor of crowdsourced resources and resilient communities. (More on that last concept in my forthcoming interview with John Robb.) That’s going to have some very interesting ramifications … and I predict that some startups that target this shift ahead of the curve will ultimately make a killing.

Image: Circle of 6 app

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — have a lot to work with this week: Instagram, a Google+ redesign, and Ann Romney joining Twitter. But if Larry is Larry, who are Moe and Curly? @dbfarber makes a good case for Twitter owning the realtime media; if you make it on Twitter, you can make it anywhere. We don’t know Moe’s business model, but who cares.

That leaves Zuckerberg as Curly, the intellectual whose empire keeps growing no matter what mistakes he seems to make. In fact, those mistakes usually turn out to be ephemeral. Lose trust with overwhelming growth, buy the most phatic startup and its 30 million users. Facebook is betting only a few will bolt, and where are they gonna go anyway? The Three Stooges are beating each other up, but what they’re really doing is keeping Microsoft boxed out of the social party. Nyuk nyuck nyuck.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

A year ago, Peter Thiel called it a bubble. Whatever you call it, the cost of attaining a college degree has skyrocketed to the point of absurdity — to the point of one trillion red flags. Student debt in the U.S. recently pushed over $1 trillion, and the average debt per student now stands at more than $25K. (And 30 percent of students are more than 30 days overdue on payments.)

StraighterLine, a Baltimore-based startup, is one of many young companies trying to find a solution to these rising costs, through online education. Founded in 2010, StraigherLine offers a low-cost, subscription-based service that allows students to take a variety of accredited, general ed courses online. And, now, with the goal of bringing its service to a wider audience, the startup has announced that it has raised $10 million in series A funding.

The round of financing was led by New York venture firm FirstMark Capital, with contributions from City Light Capital and existing investor Chrysalis Ventures, among others. The company said that it will use its new capital to accelerate its outreach to colleges, employers, and students, and focus on building a viable, next-gen market for credit-bearing, web-based general ed courses.

With unemployment remaining fairly high and with non-traditional students (older people, single mothers, workers retraining) returning to academia, competition for already-scant resources is growing. Institutions are struggling to carry the load. Yale recently decided to add 250 students to its incoming class, which cost the university a quarter of a billion dollars.

Luckily, as online content distribution media have matured, the quality of online ed is fast-improving as a number of startups, like Khan Academy, 2tor, ShowMe, Udemy, Udacity, Grockit, Lynda.com, and the Minerva Project are all showing how video, mobile devices, games, and advanced web platforms can transform distance learning into low-cost, viable supplement (if not alternative) to on-campus learning.

StraighterLine, too, is focused on bringing price transparency to online education, offering general ed courses that students generally take (and are often required) during their freshman and sophomore years, like Algebra, Biology, Calculus, U.S. History, and English Composition, to name a few — on the Web. If we say the average price for a private institution is about $32K per year, StraigherLine’s pricing compares favorably, with the option to pay $100 a month, plus $39 for each course started, $399 per course, or a full freshman year education for $1K.

Included in this pricing is free live, on-demand instruction, although if students choose to buy a textbook, they have to do so separately. But the cool part is that the startup’s courses are ACE Credit recommended and can be transferred for credit to a number of degree granting institutions. Over 25 grant credit today, with more than 200 universities across the U.S. having accepted post-review.

There aren’t yet many “big name” institutions accepting StraigherLine credits, and obviously it will be important for the startup to expand its list of participating universities if it hopes to reach the tipping point. But the model is certainly an appealing one, as it means that students can participate in a flexible, low-cost education and transfer into institutions that accept its courses for credit, significantly reducing the cost of a four-year degree. A degree that they eventually receive from the universities themselves, not StraighterLine.

It’s also all about quality when it comes to online education, something 2tor has been religiously focused on and is raising big money to take the necessary steps to ensure. StraighterLine, on the other hand, doesn’t have to offer an Ivy League education like that which Minerva is setting out to build, as long as it offers those quality, prerequisite courses that students can knock out on their way to an on-campus degree. In this way, it can provide a great complement to community colleges and equivalent feeder programs into four-year institutions.

The company said that it is working towards building out its platform so that it can begin to offer the kind of robust online education (multimedia, interactive content, live, on-demand instruction, employment resources, etc.) that is now expected of distance learning. It also plans to boost its offerings around placement, career training, and is hustling to engage the employer community so that its educational platform maintains relevance to students’ futures, beyond just being an easy way to knock out first-year requirements.

The founder and CEO of StraighterLine, Burck Smith, has experience building online educational programs, having sold his online tutoring and support services company, SmartThinking to Pearson early last year.

For more on StraighterLine, check ‘em out at home here.

Editor’s note: Tim Chang is a managing director at Mayfield Fund. This is the third in a three-part series about the Quantified Self movement. Follow Tim on Twitter @timechange.

I left off last time talking about how gamification and the Quantified Self — the use of sensors and devices to gather and analyze as much personal numeric data as possible for new insights into the self–can help us have fun while getting closer to our ideal selves. It’s time to explore how that last idea has evolved in the past few years and how savvy entrepreneurs are putting it to work.

Each of us has that picture of who we want to be and where we want to go. This is the version of ourselves we want the world to see. Convincing others that there is no gap between that image and our real selves used to be the domain of public relations professionals and doting parents. But in this era of social networks and constant connectivity, we all take the reins of our own reputations.

This brings up what I refer to as the “Aspirational Self.” It’s what we do when we post to Facebook or Twitter — constructing and branding the person we want to be seen as, by portraying our most desirable qualities. You tweet on the Saturday night when you’re at the club with Kanye, not the following Saturday when your date cancels and you wind up doing the laundry you’ve put off for two weeks. (In many ways, social media itself is an implicit “game,” in which failed status updates and tweets are the ones which attract no comments or likes…)

Quantifying the Aspirational Self

So how do we further our Aspirational Selves? On social networks, we solicit “likes,” “shares” and “follows,” which are forms of approval and validation by others. Tallying those affirmations enables us to be ranked, attract a following, and achieve more perceived respect. This same need and new ability to practically measure and score our lives are what drives the Quantified Self movement.

The Aspirational Self and the Quantified Self dovetail to create a kind of feedback loop that drives self-promotional behavior in the user on social networks. Some of the smartest new companies have taken this aspect of the social networking explosion and used it as leverage on consumer behavior. The results are striking.

Bringing it to market

The healthcare industry has always sought effective ways to motivate patients to actively improve their habits. With that goal in mind, Healthtap enables consumers to ask questions of more than 10,000 certified U.S. doctors through a free mobile app. But despite how impressive and useful this is for end users, the company’s real spark of genius lies in how they leverage the root desires of the doctors through this notion of the Aspirational Self.

Doctors carefully answer consumer questions in the hopes of attracting “Agrees” from their peers. It’s a participation model driven not by monetary incentives, but instead by the identification and public validation or their individual sub-specialties. It turns out that while doctors may care what consumers and patients think of them, they care even more about what fellow physicians think of them. The more doctors “level up” in their specialties, the more their expertise and status is highlighted, leading to a better “score” that can be seen by other doctors and patients — an important consideration in attracting new patients or winning respect from fellow healthcare professionals.

Beyond the health sector, we’re starting to see the Aspirational Self being used to engage consumers in other areas of their lives.

Poshmark, a fashion app that enables users to sell their clothing directly to other users, takes what people do offline and heightens the experience with more measurable behaviors. People can host virtual “trunk shows” that many users can attend online. To attract enough buyers to their shows, hosts actively build up their reputation in the Poshmark community through likes, agrees, and followers. Aspiring fashionistas—or just women who want to sell a seldom-worn skirt—can become curators and emerging style icons, building up a following of their own, just by using the app regularly.

Multiplayer Marketing

We’ve reached the era of the Quantified Self — and quantified respect, too. Facebook and Twitter helped set this loose, and now it’s time for entrepreneurs to harness it and make it work. The implications for advertising are huge–what better way for a product or brand to reach new users than a recommendation from a consumer rated as an expert by his peers?

The implication for the consumer and his Aspirational Self are just as huge. If I buy one pair of an exclusive run of 200 Air Jordan sneakers, the first thing I’m going to do is tell people I got them. The purchase and the subsequent sharing of that purchase both become steps in attaining that Aspirational Self. Product promotion and self-promotion become intertwined, and, as the old ad slogan goes, they’re two tastes that taste great together.

[image via flickr/Michael Pick]