Category: Tech news

Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired

Spend enough time immersing yourself in the consumption of just about any grown-up beverage — beer, wine, or spirits — and a young man’s fancy inevitably turns to thoughts of, “Hey, I bet I can make this stuff at home.”

Even casual beer snobs dive happily into homebrew, and making your own wine in the garage isn’t that complex of an undertaking, either.

The ante is raised, though, when it comes to the hard stuff. Making vodka, rum, or whiskey at home requires a still, which is complicated and prone to exploding if operated incorrectly. And unlike homemade beer and wine, home stills are completely illegal in some states. Anyone wanting to make his own whiskey will have to be extremely devoted, and possibly a scofflaw. Even then, a home whiskey (something more sophisticated than moonshine) is likely to take years of careful barrel-aging to become palatable.

So consider the next best thing: Blending your own whiskey from ready-to-drink stock.

You can do this at home tonight if you’d like. Gather up a handful of your favorite whiskys (stick with all scotch) and pour a bit of each into one glass. How’s it taste? It could be a delight. It could be awful. (You can do the same experiment with wine, too.) But either way it will probably be very expensive and difficult to repeat the next time out. What’s an enthusiast who just wants a wee dram he can call his own to do?

Enter Whisky Blender. Operated by Drew Nicolson and Andy Davidson with the aid of Master of Malt John Lamond, this Scotland-based outfit lets anyone in the free-drinking world make his own blended whisky. The company has stocks of seven whiskys (some are single malts, some aren’t, and none are revealed by name), which you mix and match to develop your own customized blend, 10 ml at a time. The catch is that you only have Lamond’s tasting notes to go on, and these are all both fanciful and delicious-sounding. (Who could turn down “creamy smooth with a taste of buttery vanilla?”)

Being turned loose in the Whisky Blender website is both like Christmas morning and terribly daunting at the same time. Now, I have blended whiskeys on several occasions, but always with live samples you could nose and taste and tinker with as you went along, adding this or that or starting over if things weren’t working out. That’s hard enough. “Blending blind” is far trickier.

I went back and forth on my blend several times, second-guessing myself in a way that must hardly be unique: Whisky Blender has shipped 600 bottles, but 16,000 custom blends have been made using the site. After my blend had already arrived, Davidson gave me some advice that any of you reading this story would be wise to consider: “Pick one of the seven whiskys and go heavy on that,” using it for up to half the bottle. “Trust your instincts and don’t overthink it. And don’t be afraid of making something bad.”

Turns out it’s pretty tough to make a disaster using these spirits, though Nicolson notes that mixing 100 ml of each of the seven whiskys will result in a less-than-stellar blend. To date, the company says it’s received only one negative response to a whisky creation, and even then the customer says he “knew where he went wrong.”

Another helpful tip: If you’re not thrilled with your whisky at first, drink a bit, then put it back on the shelf for a few weeks. A bit of air in the bottle plus some time will help the different spirits to marry, and Whisky Blender says your first dram from the bottle will likely be significantly different than the last.

As for my very own Wired Blend (see makeup in sidebar), I took one of my favorite whiskys, Highland Park 18-Year-Old, as inspiration, while knowing full well I would never be able to nail the same experience exactly. Choosing from the seven whiskys to build it is tough stuff, mainly because Lamond’s tasting notes sound really great all around. Ultimately I chose to focus on the Touch of Spice (“buttery cereal notes… with a delicate chocolatey oak”) whisky with Vanilla Fudge (“medium-sweet with a light floral note”) and Burnt Puddin’ (“dark chocolate with just a hunt of sweetness”) as backup. I used all the other whiskys in progressively smaller doses, notably adding a light touch of peat smoke to the finish (Smoke on the Water, I’m told, is a top-shelf Islay).

The results, I feel, were good but not great: The color is a lovely amber. The nose — surprisingly — starts off with fresh apples, offering fresh grain, banana, and then nougat and shortbread character. Sipping brings similar notes: perhaps less apple, plus a touch of chocolate and, of course, peat smoke on the finish. (If I did anything right, I think I nailed it on the Islay proportion.)

The blend is ultimately a mild whisky, and for sure, it evolves in the glass. But I felt the balance of the whisky was off a bit — my fault, I’m sure, for using all seven spirits instead of just four or five, even in small proportions. Maybe in a few months things will have changed. But the bigger issue, I thought, was in the whisky’s body. All the single malts I compared the Wired Blend to had a much fuller, rounder body, while my blend was comparatively a bit on the thin side.

That said, I’m satisfied with the quality, and so are most of Whisky Blender’s customers. Whether they use two whiskys or seven, “Most people are so amazed,” says Nicolson, with what they end up creating. It’s all a question of approach. “Some people want to make a budget version of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, but we try to convince them to create something of their own.”

LEDs (light-emitting diodes) have been around since the 1960s, when they were put to use providing simple displays in electric components. But the technology has progressed to the point where LEDs can be used as a primary lighting source — not only in our HDTVs and smartphones, but in our homes.

They have incandescent bulbs beat. LEDs are more cost-effective and eco-friendly than both older, filament-based light bulbs and newer compact fluorescents. LEDs last for tens of thousands of hours, they don’t generate a lot of heat, they consume only a few watts, and up to 85 percent of the electricity they draw is converted to light, making them one of the most efficient sources of electric light. They are also versatile in the light they produce, from a soft glow to a sharp, blazing spotlight.

Here, we’ve zoomed in on the “soft glow” end of the spectrum, testing three artfully designed, LED-powered table and desk lamps. All of them use practically no electricity but still provide abundant illumination. There are cheaper LED lamps out there (these range from $80 to over $1,000) but we chose products that put design first, so you won’t offend your Barcelona chair and ottoman set by plopping one of these showpieces on the table next to it.

Energizer Edge Accent Light

There are no power switches to be found on Energizer’s Edge Accent Light ($80). Instead, the sides of the lamp base are all touch-sensitive. One touch and you get the full blast of light from 16 LEDs which kick out a whopping 400 lumens while drawing only a measly 9.3 watts. If anything, the Edge may seem too bright at first. Keep touching the base and the lamp will gradually dim until you find your sweet spot. All of the LEDs are located in the Edge’s short, black base. They’re pointed upwards, so they illuminate the four clear plastic panels from below. The panels glow softly, but the etched dots in the plastic plates show up as a grid of sharply lit pin-points, giving a nice, dramatic effect.

WIRED Unique, sci-fi-inspired design has no switches, just touch controls. Generous 66-inch power cord. Stays cool to the touch. Looks great on a living room table or on your desk.

TIRED At brightest illumination, light may seem too bright or glaring. Touch controls aren’t that sensitive, so it takes some trial and error to dial in the exact brightness setting you want.

Flos D’E-Light

The minimalist design of Flos’s $396 table lamp — created by French designer Philippe Starck — all but screams ultra-moderne. The chrome-plated, reverse-L-shaped extruded aluminum chassis is about a foot tall, and directly above the lighting element is a 30-pin port for charging an iPhone, iPad or iPod. The 14 LEDs’ power rating of 5 watts belie the amount of illumination they produce. The optical touch power switch can be dimmed to 50 percent with a second touch and powered off with a third. When set to either the 100 or 50 percent level, the lamp offers a rather concentrated beam that’s best suited for a desk or other workspace. And if you put it on a desk, the iOS port sits at eye level, so your phone is within reach.

WIRED Quality of light is very pleasant. Slick but simple design. iOS dock connector on top charges your handset.

TIRED Lights a small space on a desk, but little beyond that. The iOS connector works great with iPhones and iPods, less so for iPads. Polished chrome shows every fingerprint.

Vibia Mini Sigma Studio Lamp

With a curvy design worthy of the MoMA, the Mini Sigma Studio lamp from Vibia is more sculpture than lighting device (and at $1,460, it’s priced like a sculpture). The Mini Sigma’s single, graceful swoosh of lacquer (in white or black) and metacrylate (a type of plastic) seems to defy the laws of gravity. Integrated into the underside of the nearly 17-inch-tall lamp are five one-watt LEDs. The power switch is hidden in the base. While designed to be used on studio or office desks, the 27-inch width might be an issue on cramped desktops. The very look of the Mini Sigma seems to call for a desk with wide open space. Surprisingly, the array of five one-watt LEDs were rather muted, providing more of a soft glow than anything that could be described as vivid. So, this lamp proves itself to be ultimately more of a sensuous art object than a utilitarian one.

WIRED Eye-catching design makes your desk look like an art museum. Gravity-defying counter-balanced arm is a marvel.

TIRED Expensive. Impractical as a desk lamp. LED lights are not as bright as expected.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

For those who subscribe to the Apple way, owning an Apple TV set-top box is a given. It integrates seamlessly with Apple’s existing iTunes and iCloud services and connects instantly to other Mac and iOS devices, effortlessly pulling video, audio and photographic content from these disparate sources to your big screen, where you can enjoy them from your couch using a remote control.

The Apple TV was first introduced in 2007, but it didn’t really push the envelope, and it was only picked up by curious consumers, hobbyists, and early adopters in the streaming game. Since then, we’ve seen a number of smarter streaming boxes appear at the same $100 price point (Roku, WD TV Live), and Apple has largely played catch-up, revamping its entry a couple of times to incorporate new features.

But this version, new for 2012, has the big feature we’ve all been waiting for that makes it truly competitive among set-top streamers: Full 1080p HD output from iTunes and Netflix.

Add the new high-quality 1080p video to the Apple TV’s unique ability to stream content from your iPhone or iPad to your TV using AirPlay, and suddenly the Apple TV leaps to the short list of set-top boxes we can recommend.

The new Apple TV (just like MacBooks and iPads, there’s no 2, 3, or S to differentiate this product from its earlier iterations) is still a 3.9-inch by 3.9-inch svelte black puck, and the outside remains largely unchanged, as does its silver sliver of a remote. But inside, it packs an upgraded single-core A5 chip that deftly handles the added workload of processing 1080p content.

Setup is a snap: Plug in the power cord and hook it up to your TV using an HDMI cable (NOT included, frustratingly). If you have a separate surround-sound system, there’s an optical-out port for audio. Connect to your network by entering your Wi-Fi info or using an Ethernet cable. Lastly, enter your iTunes account information. Boom, done.

From there, you’re taken to Apple TV’s revamped icon-based interface, which is evocative of the iOS home screen. I found the new Apple TV interface makes better use of positive and negative space, filling up the screen with large, button-like rectangles. But as for navigating, it’s not an improvement over the previous Apple TV’s text-based menus. For now, there’s no way to rearrange or delete icons, so even if you’re not a sports fan, you’ll have NBA, NHL and MLB TV sitting prominently on the first row. Netflix is there by default, too, so if you’re not a subscriber, you’ll be tempted.

Using the remote to navigate these menus generally works well, but the minimalist design — a play/pause button, a menu button, and a directional pad — reveals its weak spot when you tediously have to arrow through an onscreen alphabet. This is a common gripe of all these boxes with simple remotes, and Apple’s implementation is just as inelegant as the others. Also, if you tend to work on a MacBook while you watch TV, be sure to turn off IR receiver or you’ll discover your Apple TV remote will also adjust your notebook’s volume.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Another week on the countdown to the big event at the Pier, another chance to share more of our star-studded lineup for TechCrunch Disrupt NY! As our awesome cast of speakers continues to grow; here’s this week’s peek into our program.

Former Facebook executive and unconventional venture capitalist, Chamath Palihapitiya will be on the Disrupt stage as well as John Lilly, former Mozilla CEO and current Greylock Partner. Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers Partner and previous Twitter VP of Engineering, Mike Abbott and Google’s Vice President of Location and Local Services, Marissa Mayer will also take the stage.

While it’s always exciting to share the next bit of our stellar lineup, we’re also coming to the end of the Startup Battlefield application period. Don’t forget, applications for the Startup Battlefield are due by 11:59PM PDT on Sunday, April 1, 2012.

Disrupt NYC kicks off on May 19th with our 24-hour Hackathon, and the main event starting May 21st and going through the 23rd. Stay tuned as we’ll reveal more of what’s in store for Manhattan in May. Early bird ticket pricing ends this Friday. Get your tickets now.

If you’d like to become a part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Leslie Hitchcock and Jeanne Logozzo for more information.

Michael Abbott
Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Michael is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Michael was previously Twitter’s Vice President of Engineering. Before that he lead the application platform and services development for Palm’s next-generation Palm webOS platform. He has extensive experience in building technically challenging web-based applications and services. Before joining Palm, Michael was the general manager of .NET Online Services at Microsoft, where he led efforts to deliver a services platform that enabled the development of large-scale Internet-based services. Prior to Microsoft, he co-founded Passenger Inc., where he served as chairman and led the development of the company’s consumer marketing SAAS platform. Michael also founded Composite Software, creator of industry-leading enterprise information integration software, where he served as the CEO/CTO.

John Lilly
Partner, Greylock Partners

John joined Greylock as a partner in 2011. Prior to Greylock, John was CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, an open source Web browser used by more than 450 million people. John also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007, where he served as founding CEO and later CTO.
Earlier in his career, John held positions on the executive team at Trilogy Software and as a Senior Scientist in Apple’s research labs.
John is currently on the Board of Directors of Citrus Lane, Clearslide, Code for America, Mozilla Corporation, and the Participatory Culture Foundation. He is a board observer at Tumblr, and led Greylock’s investment in Dropbox. John previously served on the boards of directors of TripIt (acquired by Concur in 2011), CenterRun (acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2003), and Reactivity (acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007).
John holds a BS in Computer Systems Engineering and an MS in Computer Science with a focus on Human Computer Interaction, both from Stanford University. He is currently a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford’s d.school, and an adviser to the Stanford Technology Ventures Program as well as SSE Labs, an incubator at the University.
He is a co-inventor on seven United States patents.

Marissa Mayer
VP, Google

As a VP at Google, Marissa Mayer leads the product management and engineering efforts of Google’s local, mobile, and contextual discovery products including Google Maps, Google Maps for Mobile, Local Search, Google Earth, Street View, Latitude and more. At 35 years old, she is also the youngest member of Google’s executive operating committee. During her 11 years at Google, Marissa has led product management and design efforts for Google web search, images, news, books, products, toolbar, and iGoogle. She started at Google in 1999 as Google’s 20th employee and first woman engineer.

Chamath Palihapitya
Founder, The Social+Capital Partnership

Chamath Palihapitiya is the founder of The Social+Capital Partnership. Previously, Chamath was the executive responsible for overseeing Facebook Platform as well as launching Facebook’s online advertising channel. He vacated his most recent role as Vice President of User Growth, Mobile and International Expansion at Facebook in June, 2011. Chamath joined Facebook from The Mayfield Fund, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley where he was focused on consumer Internet, advertising and technology investments. Prior to Mayfield, Chamath spent five years with AOL, most recently as the Vice President and General Manager of AIM and ICQ, where he oversaw two of the most popular instant messaging businesses on the Internet. Chamath began his career as a derivatives trader before leaving finance to work for Internet music pioneers Spinner.com and Winamp. Chamath grew up in Canada (born in Sri Lanka) and graduated first class honors in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo.

Image credit: Screanews.us

If you were to make a list of the business models most popular among tech startups today, a snail mail-based subscription service probably wouldn’t be at the top of the list. On that level, the Los Angeles-based Quarterly is somewhat of an outlier, having created a design-oriented subscription service and accompanying web platform, which allows anyone to sign up and receive receive curated, physical gifts from influential contributors like President of the Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda, Behance Founder Scott Belsky, and Alexis Ohanian of Reddit, Breadpig, and Hipmunk fame — by mail.

Tapping into the piping hot collaborative consumption movement, with notable designers and tech entrepreneurs contributing original products, it appears that Quarterly’s quirky cause has not gone unnoticed among investors. Today, we’ve uncovered a SEC Form D filing, which shows the startup recently closed a $1.25 million round of series A financing, led by Tony Conrad and True Ventures as well as Craig Shapiro’s Collaborative Fund.

We first covered Quarterly back in December, when it launched its subscription service into the wild. At the time, founder Zach Frechette (formerly Editor-in-Chief of GOOD Magazine) told us that Quarterly sprung out of our increasing reliance on digital technologies to interact and communicate with each other.

With digital blinders on, people forget the pleasure of tangible, more traditional interaction and sharing, so Quarterly wanted to bring the tastemakers of digital technology and social networks into the real world to facilitate an old school connection between influencers and the people who “follow” them. And, because it’s essentially a universal truth that people love to receive cool stuff in the mail from people they love, or are inspired by, Quarterly naturally chose the United States Postal Service as its distribution service.

Having worked in media, Frechette draws an analogy to magazines, explaining that, instead of subscribing to receive words on a page, Quarterly users pay $25 every three months to receive packages that “tell a compelling story crafted and narrated by the contributor.” What kind of “packages” do subscribers actually receive? It depends, but they are meant to help you better understand or connect with them, as well as to support the “process of creatives,” so if the contributor is a novelist, a user might receive the same kind of notebook they used to plot their bestseller.

With revenue models still in development, the startup raised a round of seed funding pre-launch to help it get off the ground. Investors included Craig Shapiro, Behance Co-founder and Pinterest early investor Scott Belsky, CEO of Sugar Inc. Brian Sugar, and Co-Head of IDEO NY, Ryan Jacoby, among others.

Quarterly isn’t giving any details at this point on its series A raise, so it’s not clear what other firms, if any, participated in the raise beyond the follow-on contributions of Collaborative Fund and first-time investor, True Ventures.

The team is also being tight-lipped about its progress since launch, but at the time, it was adding a new subscription every 5 minutes. Quarterly’s website does give some indication, however, saying that “due to high demand,” it has temporarily closed the service to new subscribers. The website also seems to make mention of some new contributors on deck, so we’ll update when we learn more.

Readers can check out Quarterly at home here.

The other day, Matt made a desperate plea: “Please don’t buy cheap Android phones.” To do so is a mistake, and the more you buy, the more cheap phones flood the market, and thus more people are walking around with crap up against their faces.

And after hearing that Samsung has sold 5 million Galaxy Notes, I think it may be time to make my own plea: Please stop buying giant phones.

Now, obviously I don’t take this request as seriously as the whole cheap Android phone thing. But I was actually musing to myself just last night that if people continue to buy phones with 4.5-inch + screen sizes, phone makers will think that’s OK. It’s not. It’s just as dumb as Motorola’s advertising, directed squarely at men with robots and cyborgs.

I totally concede that a large display, perhaps at 4.3-inches tops, is nice. Watching video and playing games on those honking Android phones tickles my fancy in a way my little iPhone cannot. It’s quite glorious.

But then I try to do something normal. You know… text a friend, send an email, browse the web, get directions, tweet, Instagram a pic… or whatever. Sure, I check out YouTube a handful of times a week to show a friend some crazy sexy Japanese beatboxing girl and if I’m really bored and away from all of my other devices, I’ll sit down and switch on an episode of The Office within the Netflix app on my phone. And of course, when I’m chilling at home and news is dead, I’m probably running through a temple or flinging birds or effing up Liberty City in a freshly stolen car.

But on the whole, I’d say that 90 percent of what’s done on my phone has nothing to do with video or gaming, which is where the larger screen really wins.

Of course, mobile gaming figures are up as more and more users buy smartphones and developers pop out better and better games, but gaming is still relatively low on the list of usage scenarios. comScore’s January Mobile report said that the most common activity on a phone was text messaging, with 74.6 percent of U.S. subscribers (aged 13+) using their smartphone to send a text. Moreover, text messaging is still on the rise. Nearly tied for second, the next biggest mobile activities were using an app and browsing the web, followed closely by accessing a social network.

And at the bottom of the list is gaming, with 31.8 percent of users saying they’ve used their phone to play a game. Meanwhile, viewing video on mobile didn’t even make the list.

My phone is first and foremost about utility. I’m connecting to work, I’m emailing, I’m texting, I’m checking in on my social networks, and I’m surfing the web constantly. It gets me where I need to go first, and as a bonus, helps me get through those bored moments.

The issue I have with the big phones is that it cuts off a chunk of the market, and at the cost of innovation.

Phones are mobile. You know… mobile phones. By their very nature, they must be able to comfortably fit in your hand and in your pocket. They must be relatively light, and in a lot of instances, they must be discreet.

The bigger the display gets, the bigger the phone gets. It’s just simple math. But the trade-off we’re making for it is weak at best. As I said, mobile video isn’t something that most of us actually do very often, and gaming (while on the rise) isn’t the priority of a phone.

Sure, a big display makes some games a bit more enjoyable, but let’s think through the actual quality of game play. The most shining example I can think of is Madden ’11. I’ve played the game on both my 3.5-inch iPhone 4S and on a Droid Razr. (To be clear, the Droid Razr has a 4.3-inch display, which is exactly where I draw the line between fine and too big.)

I concede that I could physically see more of the game when I played on the Droid Razr, but any improvement wasn’t all that significant. This is because there’s only so much accuracy you can have with touch controls, and whether the screen is big or not, mobile gaming is thus far crippled by them. If you really need the very best portable gaming option out there, go get a PS Vita or a 3DS, or better yet, go get yourself a really nice gaming console. Hell, most people play games on their phone at home anyways. (Seriously.)

Then we have the mobile video argument, which doesn’t really deserve a response. (Obviously, I’ll give one anyways.) For one thing, we don’t watch video on our phones enough to warrant carrying around something so uncomfortable for the next two years. But it’s more than that.

Soon Nokia will release the Lumia 900 into the U.S. market. It’s got a 4.3-inch 480×800 display, and while I’m impressed with how resilient the screen is under bright sunlight, I would never choose this phone to watch a movie on over my iPhone 4S.

Mobile video is all about the pixels and the processing power, and a large screen (once again) is just a bonus — a bonus that isn’t all that worthwhile. Granted there are giant phones out there with 4.3-inch+ 720p displays, and sure, watching video on them is swell. But would I trade everyday comfort for only a slightly better experience on non-primary activities? Absolutely not, and I honestly don’t think you should either.

To all of you out there with hands giant enough to honestly and genuinely feel comfortable with the Galaxy Note, first and foremost, congratulate your girlfriends for me. But secondly, I understand that you can and will want to take advantage of bigger screens. You have giant hands, it only makes sense.

But there are lots of us, especially women, who physically cannot send a text on those giant phones with one hand. Do you know what an inconvenience it is to be forced into using two hands on a mobile phone? Let’s add to that the fact that these phones don’t fit into any pocket of a girls’ pair of jeans.

So just to clarify, roughly half of the population can neither text nor comfortably carry around these phones. And yet phone makers think that a honking display is somehow en vogue, likely because they simply follow each other in terms of trends.

There’s a reason that phones became smaller and smaller back in the day, and there’s a reason why phones are getting larger today. Back when we had button-covered flip phones, portability was the name of the game. But once the iPhone hit the market, non-Apple phone makers were tasked with finding a way to persuade customers toward something different. To that end, we’re seeing LTE become a focal point of manufacturers, and larger screens are not only a by-product of that, but they are seen as an additional selling point.

An LTE radio requires bigger hardware, period. It’s a larger radio, to start, but also requires a larger battery. With that, displays get larger and since the iPhone has one of the most pixel-dense displays on the market, competitors need something (anything) that competes directly with that. It’s easier to go big than to build a more pixel-dense display, and the big screens mesh well with adding other features like LTE and extending battery, so that’s where OEMs are headed.

But if we keep encouraging them, phones will keep getting bigger. The Galaxy S III, a phone that I’ve been excited about since the day the S II launched, is rumored to have a 4.8-inch display. This nearly ruins it for me, and the phone’s only saving grace right now is that it’s the Galaxy S III and I can’t help but give it a chance.

If you have the hands for it, then by all means, go get yourself a Note or a GalNex or that giant Galaxy S III when it’s available. But for the rest of us, the 99 percent if you will, don’t feel suckered into getting a giant phone just because it’s a flagship.

HTC has some beautiful smaller phones coming out like the One V (with a 3.7-inch display) and the One S (4.3-inch), and the Nokia Lumia 800 and 900 are both very appealing options for anyone considering Windows Phone. Oh, and the iPhone is always a good choice too.

All I’m saying is that if we continue to get pushed into buying big phones, OEMs will only continue to compete on screen size, and we’ll all eventually be walking with tablet-sized phones to our faces.

And to me, that look is so over.

Avira, a security company headquartered in Germany, just announced that it has acquired social monitoring startup SocialShield and will be adding the service to its lineup of free security products.

“Avira is broadening our security focus from safe-guarding computers to now protecting the people who use them, and that requires us to look beyond viruses and worms and Trojans,” Avira Products and Markets COO Sascha Beyer says in the press release. “The acquisition of SocialShield not only brings child safety technology into Avira’s portfolio, but it also enhances our knowledge of social networking security and our awareness of the risks within the ‘cloud.’”

SocialShield launched in 2010, promising to help parents protect their children from risks on social networks. For example, it offered “friend verification technology” to check a child’s Facebook and MySpace friends against 50 Internet databases. The company was founded by Noah Kindler and Arad Rostampour, and George Garrick (former CEO of Offerpal and many other companies) took over as CEO last year.

The company’s investors include Venrock, U.S. Venture Partners, Russell Fradin, Larry Braitman, George Garrick, Craig Sherman and Rick Thompson. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

On March 1st Facebook let the world feast its eyes on Timeline for Pages, and tomorrow after a month of voluntary migration it will force all Pages to switch to the redesign. But don’t worry, 95% of Pages who’ve switched have seen more Likes of their posts and people talking about them, and it doesn’t significantly impact the rate of new Page Likes according to a study that social marketing platform Wildfire gave TechCrunch an early look at. Only megabrands with over 10 million Likes have seen reduced engagement, but this was in part due to a lull following press exposure during the Timeline launch.

There’s more good news for smaller Pages. A study shared with us by enterprise marketing platform Hearsay Social shows local business Pages with fewer fans get 5x more exposure in the news feed, and 8x more of the fans reached will engage with a post. That means big brands with lots of local branches can get 40x the engagement by having a Page for each store.

In the first week after Timeline for Pages launched 8 million Pages voluntarily switched over, but limited early data showed the migration significantly reduced the rate at which big pages were gaining fans. But data from Wildfire’s much more comprehensive study of 43 brands had rosier results.

First, fan growth rate was only down between 0.02% and 0.06%, which is essentially insignificant. That’s no win for Facebook’s design team but at least growth didn’t plummet. Small Pages with under 1 million fans are seeing engagement soar. People Talking About This, a measure of total mentions of a brand, is up 67.4%, comments per post is up 40%, and Likes Per Post is up 60.3%. Middle to large Pages with 1 million to 10 million fans are also doing alright with PTAT up 28.858, Likes per post up 13.56%, though comments per post is down 17.43%.

Megabrand Pages with over 10 million fans  (think Michael Jackson, Coca Cola, Disney, and MTV) faired worse after Timeline. PTAT was down 13.72%, comments per post down 16.72%, and Likes per post down 11.57%. This data was confounded, though, as all 7 of these Pages that Wildfire studied were promoted by Facebook in press around the launch of Timeline, and saw rapid returns to pre-press engagement levels that looked like declines. So most Pages should be excited about the new Timeline features, which Wildfire will be reviewing in a webinar at 10am PST today. (Update: You can now also download the full report in exchange for an email address).

As for the study commissioned by Hearsay Social from independent researcher Mainstay Salire (Update: now publicly available for download in exchange for an email address and there’s also a blog post of insights and an infographic), the 40x value of local fans should alter the Facebook marketing strategy of brands with locations around the US or the world.

Hearsay Social’s CEO Clara Shih tells me Having a massive, multi-million fan count “might be good bragging rights, but from a fan’s perspective they’re not as special, they’re just one of millions rather than part of a personalized community.” If brands willing to invest the time and money to manage all their local Pages it can give directly boost to their business. That’s because some of that 8x engagement comes from more link clicks to ecommerce sites that drive social marketing ROI.

What should brands with just one big Page do now? Hunt down unofficial Pages that represent their local stores and either claim them or have them shut down, then start official ones. Hearsay’s Rogue Page Finder can help. Then establish local admins for each Page or use a corporate/local-focused Page management software like Hearsay Social to syndicate updates from your main brand Page to that of each store.

Timeline and managing local Pages sure doesn’t make Facebook marketing any easier, but it does make it more effective. For these reasons, expect the Page management software industry and importance of trained community managers to keep growing.

Suffering from inbox overload? Of course you are – everyone is. And now thanks to Google’s Account Activity report, we can see exactly how much email we get. It’s scary. From my personal email address, I received 9,000+ emails last month. (Haven’t checked out my TechCrunch address, though…) It’s reasons like this that draw me to email-improving startups, whether mobile apps, CRM tools, filtering products, etc. Email needs to get better.

One such startup, Unroll.me (still in private beta), previously allowed you to unsubscribe from mailing lists from an online dashboard. But recently, it launched a tool that aggregates all your subscriptions into one daily “roll-up” email that contains everything you still want to read – for example, all those Groupons, your social media updates, newsletters, company news blasts, and more. And it’s sent on a schedule you configure.

The startup has been dishing out invites here and there (yep, yours are below), and has starting seeing some pickup during its private beta. When first launched, Unroll.me allowed you to sign through your email account (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL), see a list of subscriptions, and click those you want to unsubscribe from. That’s it.

The new version now available offers a more polished dashboard where you can see your subscriptions and then unsubscribe and resubscribe at will. (Sounds like a feature email clients should have, doesn’t it?) This way, if you’re planning a trip, you can switch on your travel newsletters and deals, for example. If you’re in the market for a new flatscreen TV, you could turn on Best Buy’s email for a while. Of course, you could do this by unsubscribing/resubscribing at the company’s website, too, but this way is far easier.*

*Except for one thing – they’re marketing the startup by forcing you to share with friends (via email, Facebook or Twitter) in order to unsubscribe from more than five newsletters. Bleh. 

From the beta, a little data on the service’s users:

Unroll.me found that the average user on their system has 104 subscription emails and generally unsubscribes from 18 of them. The top five most popular email subscriptions are mainly those from social networks (updates, messages, etc.). The list includes: Facebook (66.49% of users have it), LinkedIn (59.94%), Twitter (55.22%), Pinterest (35.71%) and then Groupon (34.12%).

Meanwhile, the top five most unsubscribed lists are Spotify News (33.47% ditch it), Formspring (28.11% drop it), TicketMaster (23.30% drop), Best Buy (23.15%) and LivingSocial Escapes (17.4%).

In addition to the new dashboard, Unroll.me also now offers an option that bundles your subscriptions into one daily email called the “roll-up.” You can customize this email with just those subscriptions you want to read, which you can change at any time.

“Most users, after unsubscribing, still have 70-plus subscriptions in their inboxes,” explains Unroll.me co-founder Jojo Hedaya, ”so we allow them to add the subscriptions to a digest email that comes from Unroll.me at the time of their choosing…instead of receiving the 20 subscription emails you get harassed with all day, you can receive one email at 8 PM with all the activity.”

The time of day is customizable, of course, as is the content.

The feature has another interesting component, too: personalized recommendations. The startup will suggest newsletters you may want to subscribe to – and the funny thing is, now that you only have the one roll-up email hitting your inbox, you might actually do so. Hedaya says the eventual goal is to turn this feature into a newsletter discovery service.

The NYC-based startup was founded by Josh Rosenwald, Jojo Hedaya, Steven Greenberg and Perri Gorman, and is currently bootstrapped while raising its VC round.

It’s still in private beta, but you can test it out yourself with an invite here: Unroll.me/techcrunch.

Famigo, the Austin-based startup building a directory of family-oriented and kid-friendly mobile apps, announced today that it has raised $1 million in funding led by Silverton Partners. Also participating in the round were Zilker Ventures, Liahona Ventures, and CapitalFactory.

The company, which currently offers an online directory of apps as well as parental control software for Android, says it will use the new funding to help continue development of its platform and expand access worldwide.

With the ever-growing size of the mobile application stores, both on iOS and Android, a number of companies have sprung up to help curate the apps in new ways. Some provide search engine-like interfaces (like the recent Apple acquisition Chomp), while others provide social recommendations (like Crosswalk), and others still create their own directories (like Appolocious).

Famigo’s app directory shares the most in common with the latter, although its focus on kid-friendly apps means it’s also similar to efforts like KinderTown, for example.

KinderTown, I’ll admit, has been a personal favorite since its launch last year, as it curates the iTunes App Store for quality, educational-focused apps, vetted by former teachers. Famigo also supports iOS in terms of app curation, but goes further by supporting Android as well. On Famigo, apps are rated not by popularity, as they are on app stores, but by how family-friendly they are, using metrics like educational value, level of entertainment, age-appropriateness, etc.

The startup also offers parental control software for Android owners, called “Sandbox,” which helps parents lock down devices so kids can build wishlists of apps, but not purchase them. The software loads up a customized kid-friendly interface, but requires a password to exit back to the Android homescreen.

Famigo, which launched last fall, is one of many new startups to address the “kids with smartphones” market. At this week’s YC Demo Day, for example, a company called Kyte also launched a solution to turn Android phones into kid-safe devices. More on that here.

Hailo, a European mobile taxi network, is announcing a $17 million round of Series A financing led by Accel Partners. The company previously raised $3 million in seed funding from Wellington Partners and Atomico, who both participated in this round as well.

Hailo, which has been operating in London since last year, is a mobile network that matches passengers and licensed taxi drivers (a differentiation from Uber, which uses private black cars). Here’s how it works (check out the video below as well). The Hailo Driver Network can be accessed via iPhone or Android apps is designed to be a taxi driver’s companion and offers social features, advanced, private stats, sharing of traffic and demand events relevant to drivers. These apps also allow drivers to accept credit cards as well, and includes a tipping functionality.

The network aspect of the app allows drivers to access traffic patterns and problems, messages about where pickups are light or heavy, airport information and more. Along with this information, Hailo also offers an interface that will show drivers where pickups are ordered (through the Hailo consumer app), and will allow drivers to process these pickups seamlessly. Additionally, drivers can use the app for credit card processing for pickups unrelated to Hailo.

On the consumer side of things, Hailo’s iPhone and Android apps allow you to order a licensed cab in a similar way you order a car with Uber. Once you open the app, Hailo will detect your location on a map and you can adjust where you’d like to be picked up. The app will tell you how close the nearest drivers are to your location, and you can then request a pickup. When the driver is nearing arrival, the app will alert you of the arrival. You can also see a profile of the driver, his or her ratings and more.

In terms of payments, you are charged based on what the taxi’s meter reads for the trip. With Hailo, you enter your credit card information once and the app will always use this information for payments without having to renter the details for each ride. Via the app you can choose to add a tip, as well as choose to pay via cash. A receipt will be emailed to you and you can rate the driver.

Hailo has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times by consumers in London and over 3,200 taxi drivers have already downloaded the app since its launch last November. In London, the startup says its average pickup time is around two minutes, and the app has around 1,700 taxi drivers as active users.

As explained to me by CEO Jay Bregman, Hailo, which was co-founded by three London cab drivers and three technology entrepreneurs, is working on making the app appealing to both drivers and consumers. By offering a network that includes traffic, pickup, and other info, the startup is actually making Hailo useful to taxi drivers beyond just providing pickups. Bregman tells me, “We don’t look at this as a transactional booking app. We are building an app that helps solve the fundamental pain points of being a driver.”

The company also enlists drivers as the managers of operations in its cities. In London, Hailo is managed by three drivers, and in the startup’s next stop, Dublin, current drivers will also help set up operations.

It’s important to note that Hailo can work with any taxi company since it simply sits on top of the meter—drivers manually input whatever the meter’s amount is into the app for charges to go through. This enables drivers who don’t pickup fares via the Hailo app to input a charge manually through the app for a credit card payment. Hailo makes money by taking a percentage of each fare that is processed via its consumer pickup app.

With $17 million in new funding in-hand, the startup is setting its sights on the U.S., looking to launch in Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C. and even New York. Although Bregman acknowledges that new York is a more challenging city to enter because of the heavy regulation of the taxi industry in the city.

And the company, explains Bregman, is not trying to provide taxi drivers with a full day’s worth of work. Hailo wants to simply account for 10-20 percent of order volume and provide orders in downtime. He feels that taxi cab companies will be responsive to this because drivers will be more productive.

Accel partner Adam Valkin tells me, “This is a massive market and a market that is inefficient. Passengers are frustrated and drivers aren’t making enough money. The smartphone is the tipping point.” He adds that Hailo has thought carefully about the internationalization of the app and feels that the startup has a clear strategy for becoming a global leader in the space. Valkin, who is based in Accel’s London office, will join the Hailo Board, and Palo Alto partner Sameer Gandhi will join the Board as an observer.

While Hailo has major ambitions of entering the U.S., the startup will certainly face competition from some of the more established and popular players. Uber has been exploding in growth, and armed with $32 million of new funding, the company also has its eyes on London. TaxiMagic also offers an online taxi booking app in the U.S. And GetTaxi is expanding in Europe.

Bur Bregman is confident that the model that has proven to be successful in London can be scaled quickly in the U.S. and even Canada. Already, Hailo has hired a Chicago general manager and is looking to quickly expand in the coming months.

Zite, the newsreading startup acquired last year by CNN, is launching its Android app today.

Co-founder Mike Klaas demonstrated the app for me earlier this week. The interface and features should be pretty familiar to anyone using the previous versions. You enter your Facebook or Twitter information, then Zite brings up a stream of stories that are likely to interest you. You can improve the app’s understanding of your tastes by hitting the thumbs up or down button for each article. And you can import your account if you’ve already set one up on a different device. (Klaas says there’s a fair amount of overlap between iPhone and iPad users, but he’s not sure whether that’ll be the same with Android — “The question is, what tablet do Android users use?”)

The new app integrates with Android’s sharing features, making it possible to hit one button and share via pretty much any method or social network you want.

For a relatively small company, Zite has been moving pretty quickly onto new devices. It launched on the iPad, then released its iPhone app in December of last year. Flipboard, on the other hand, has a larger team (Klaas says Zite runs as a largely independent unit inside CNN and currently has 11.5 full-time employees) and is currently available only for the iPad and iPhone.

Klaas says that one of Zite’s advantages is that “although we try to have a really good, clean UI, that’s not the value proposition.” Instead, Zite’s focus is on searching far and wide across the Web for news stories, and delivering genuinely personalized content — technology that carries over onto any platform.

Sneakpeeq, a social shopping startup that debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, has raised $7.5 Million in Series A funding led by FirstMark Capital with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures and Metamorphic Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to over $10 million.

The startup aims to replicate the experience of shopping for items in a retail store with a social twist. Similar to the way you flip over a price tag to look at the cost of at item at a store, Sneakpeeq doesn’t tell you the price instantly when you visit a product’s landing page. You click a “Peeq” button to find the price. The site features daily boutiques that offer discounts on clothes, shoes, home accessories and more from 1,000-plus brands, from well-known names like Kate Spade and Puma to smaller designers and purveyors.

Sneakpeeq incentivizes engagement by turning user actions into discounts. By Peeqing, buying, sharing items on Facebook, and more, you earn badges on Sneakpeeq, which can then be applied for discounts on an items. Each boutique has a leaderboard where fans can compete by peeqing, sharing, and buying products. Additionally, every member on Sneakpeeq builds a discovery profile through peeqing, sharing and buying things. Users can also see who shares common interests in various product categories including Taste (gourmet foods), Living (home), and Style (fashion and accessories).

The startup’s key engagement metric is defined as the sum total of peeqs, loves and shares in a month. When Sneakpeeq launched last year, the startup was at 78,745 engagements per month. In January 2012, Sneakpeeq saw 600,641 engagements. And in March the startup is past 2 million engagements and the month is not over just yet. And founder Henry Kim tells us the startup is consistently doubling sales every month.

FirstMark partner Rick Heitzman, who is joining Sneakpeeq’s board is extremely bullish on the startup’s prospects as a social shopping destination, saying “We expect Sneakpeeq to revolutionize online shopping, and become the definition of ‘social shopping’.”

The startup has also worked with Pinterest power users and YouTube celebrities where they can curate their own boutiques. Eventually, the company will connect Sneakpeeq curators with brand partners to design products.

The new funding will be used towards brand growth and product development. Sneakpeeq plans to launch tablet and mobile apps soon, and will be furthering its expansion in Asia.

ShoeDazzle, the subscription service that sends out its own selection of women’s shoe designs curated each month by celebrities and Hollywood stylists, has expanded its offerings to include women’s clothing and lingerie.

ShoeDazzle CEO Bill Strauss said in an interview (embedded above) that the expansion was inspired by the company’s subscribers, who have been asking for clothing to match ShoeDazzle’s shoes for months. ShoeDazzle, based in Santa Monica, Calif., was founded in 2009 and counts reality star Kim Kardashian as a co-founder and its “chief fashion stylist.”

The company has also tweaked its business model to let people buy items as often as they like, rather than on a once-per-month subscription basis.

ShoeDazzle has had robust growth recently, Strauss said, with its member base expanding from 3 million to 10 million within the past 12 months. Now that its offerings go beyond shoes, the company is considering a name change, but has not made a final decision as of yet. ShoeDazzle has raised some $60 million in venture capital funding and is not looking to raise more money at the moment, Strauss said.

Watch the video above to see Strauss discuss the expansion to clothing, how ShoeDazzle stacks up against competitors such as Beachmint, how ShoeDazzle designs and commissions its own products in-house, and why fashion and technology are really coming together right now.