Category: Tech news

If you work in online advertising, until recently there hasn’t been a very good way to find out which ads are running across the Internet. Search engines like Google index the underlying web pages, and strip out the display ads. But if you work at an ad agency or are a sales guy at an online publisher getting ready for a meeting with a big brand, it helps to know what display ads they are running. You could click the refresh button on a bunch of big sites a few dozen times, or you can go to Moat, which is a search engine for display ads.

Type in Apple, Android, or Blackberry, and it shows you all the creative ad units running right now across the web. It’s a pretty handy tool for anyone in the industry, or even casual observers.

But the ad search engine is just eye candy. Moat is working on so much more, including heatmap engagement analytics and a crowdsourced marketplace for display ad designers. The New York City startup is self-funded with $3 million from co-founders Jonah and Noah Goodhart (who are brothers), and Mike Walrath. All three were involved with Right Media, the ad exchange Yahoo bought for $850 million in 2007 (Walrath was the founder and CEO, and the Goodharts were investors).

“Part of the problem with digital advertising,” says Walrath, “is that we think we know what is happening with an ad and what makes it successful. Right now, all you have are clicks and conversions.” Walrath thinks the industry is measuring the wrong things: impressions on one end, and clicks on the other. Big brand advertisers care more about attention. (Walrath has discussed this before on Founder Stories).

Moat has a proxy for attention. It can generate a heat map of where people hover their mouse over an ad, and where they click as well. What you end up with is something like the heatmap shown above for HauteLook. An image of a woman in the ad, while more attractive, turned out to be too distracting, whereas an image of a shoe results in 2.6 times more clicks on the join button. Moat offers these heatmap analytics to brand advertisers, to help them figure out which display ads are the most engaging and to give them tools to fix the ones that are not working.

According to Jonah Goodhart, typical clickthrough rates on display ads are less than 10 out of every 10,000 visitors (or 0.1%), whereas about 500 of every 10,000 people (5%) spend at least half a second hovering their mouse over an ad, and 1,000 out of 10,000 (10%) touch the ad in some fashion without clicking on it. Moat wants to capture all of this data and deliver it to marketers so that they can test different images and wording in their display ads just like they do today with keyword search ads. The answer in display is to just make the ads bigger, instead of changing the elements inside the ad.

The final piece of the puzzle is a crowdsourced marketplace of designers that advertisers can tap to pump out different versions of their display ads. Each designer will be rated and ranked and placed into different categories. The marketplace for display ad designers was actually the initial idea for the company, but the founders realized that they first needed to provide a better way to measure engagement.

Unlike other automakers, Tesla is headquartered in the hills of Palo Alto next to beautiful rolling hills with lush green scenery and horse crossing signs. As you can imagine, a place like this would have some of the best driving roads in the country. We were slightly disappointed that the man behind it all, Elon Musk, was out of town. But coincidentally this gave us the perfect opportunity to borrow his personal Roadster Sport while he was gone.

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Walmart this morning said it is buying Mountain View-based Kosmix, a heavily funded social media technology provider that has built a platform that enables users to filter and organize content in social networks, in order to connect people with information that matters to them, in realtime.

The platform powers a site called TweetBeat, essentially a realtime social media filter for live events that saw more than five million visits last month alone according to its maker.

Additionally, the technology is used to power RightHealth, a popular health and medical information site as well as Kosmix.com, which lets you ‘explore the Web by topic’.

So what is the retailing juggernaut doing picking up a social media startup, which has raised $55 million in funding from a slew of investors over the past few years?

According to a statement, Kosmix’ founders and team will operate as part of a newly formed group dubbed @WalmartLabs and remain based in Silicon Valley. Walmart expects them to create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce that will support its multi-channel strategy, thus blurring the line between offline and online shopping.

The founders of Kosmix, entrepreneurs and investors Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, can be considered ecommerce pioneers. Their first company, database tech company Junglee, was acquired by Amazon for a boatload of stock back in 1998.

They later created crowdsourcing Internet marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmart’s vice chairman, comments:

Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers’ day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping, both online and in retail stores. We are excited to have the Kosmix team join us to accelerate the development of our social and mobile commerce offerings.

It’s worth noting that Walmart has a director on its board that knows a thing or two about social networks and online commerce, namely Jim Breyer, partner at Accel Partners and an investor in companies like Facebook, Etsy, Brightcove, Art.sy and Prosper.

But notably, Accel Partners is also a major shareholder in Kosmix – the VC firm has participated in three of four rounds of funding according to CrunchBase. Other Kosmix investors include Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Lightspeed Venture Partners and DAG Ventures.

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions – Walmart anticipates the deal to close during the first half of this year. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Facebook Pages — the social network’s profiles meant for businesses, celebrities, and public entities — are becoming an increasingly important way to establish a long-term relationship with customers and fans. Many businesses are sprucing up their Pages with applications, and everyone is always on the hunt to get more Likes and Comments on their Updates (posts with higher user engagement will show up in more News Feeds).

Facebook’s built-in Insights tool does a decent job helping you keep tabs on your Page’s performance, but there’s some data that may be even more important: how your arch-rival is doing. Which is where ContentAide, a new startup from VentureBeat writer Cody Barbierri, comes in handy.

The service is pretty straightforward: tell it what Facebook Pages you’d like to keep an eye on, and the site will automatically generate a daily report on how that Page is performing. This isn’t just a Page’s overall ‘Like’ count either — ContentAide will also send you each individual status update and photo posted, along with how many Likes and Comments they received. You can receive reports for your own Pages and for competitors’ Pages as well.

Barbierri says that ContentAide uses an algorithm to figure out the relative success of each status update — if your page has hundreds of thousands of fans, then obviously it’s much easier to get 50 ‘Likes’ on a post than if you only had 1,000 fans, and the reports take this into account. Down the line, Barbierri hopes to add some deeper analysis, like automatic reports on what types of updates have been most effective.

ContentAide is charging $20 per month for one daily report and goes up from there — Barbierri says that in addition to individuals and small businesses, the service is looking to cater to consultants and firms that may want to receive multiple reports every day.

Exclusive – Elite Media Worx, the startup behind local deals bidding site Bidmyway, has secured $1.35 million in financing as it gears up for the public debut of its ‘eBay for deal-of-the-day sites’.

Four Directions Holdings led the round, joined by senior management and other investors, including Brad Ohlemacher, President of EMC Precision.

Bidmyway is billed as an ‘online-to-offline bidding service’ that basically allows people to name their best price, in true Priceline.com fashion, but for local goods and services, specifically.

Unlike collective purchasing sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, Bidmyway lets people individually determine what an offering for a specific restaurant, spa, hotel, or other local merchant is worth to them, based on their budget. Participating merchants can accept or reject bids based on an undisclosed threshold, and winning bids are kept confidential.

Bidmyway is also similar to the two fast-growing local commerce sites mentioned above, and many others who’re trying to emulate their business models, in the sense that you can also use the site “get daily deals now” at a given price. Elite Media Worx, the company behind Bidmyway, also operates a straight-up deal-of-the-day site over at Elite City Deals.

The startup, we should note, is the latest venture of telecommunications industry vet John Shave. The entrepreneur sold his previous company, telecom carrier Globalcom, to First Communications for close to $60 million a couple of years ago.

Shave says Elite Media Worx plans to raise a much larger round of funding in the near future, which will allow it to expand into 10 markets across the United States.

As far as I can tell, Chicago’s the only city where Bidmyway features deals for now.

Alright, who is up for a round of Lily Allen Tetris? Yes, that’s right, now you challenge your friends to various games on Facebook and select the music as well. But this is about more than just background music. MXP4‘s new social music gaming app – called Bopler Games – uses the company’s “automated level design” technology to automatically synchronize the game with the song, based on its melody, rhythm and structure. Translation: the difficulty of the game will reflect your selection in music.

The application currently features 4 different games – including previously released Pump it, which hit 1 million users within its first month. MXP4 is also in the process of developing another 6 games, which should be released shortly.

When Apple announced back in February that The Daily would be the first subscription news app on iTunes, it was seen by other publishers as the model going forward. Some like it, some don’t, but at least Apple knows how it wants to treat subscriptions going forward. Or does it?

Some subscription news apps seem to be in limbo right now while Apple figures out how to handle special situations. If you are a single-title publication like the New York Times, The Daily, or Businessweek, then it is pretty straightforward and the current rules apply. But what if you are a news reading app that brings together articles from many sources, some paid and some free? In other words, what if you are an aggregator app like Flipboard or Zite, but you want to charge a subscription for the app? How should that subscription be split up between the app and the publishers, and should Apple even be involved with policing those types of licensing and copyright issues? It’s all getting sorted out right now.

One of the issues revolves around Apple’s rules for listing subscription apps under free apps. They obviously aren’t free apps, but it helps with the marketing and getting people to try them out if they can start out free. In order to justify the free app description, subscription apps must offer something of value for anyone who downloads the app—perhaps a free issue of a magazine, or free top stories. Then the in-app subscription unlocks the full experience.

It’s a bait and switch because the apps become pretty much useless without the subscription. A free issue is a sample which becomes stale within a few weeks at most, then you have what amounts to a dead app on your iPad if you don’t subscribe.

For aggregator apps that want to go the subscription route, it is not clear what the free portion of the app would be. Is it just the open RSS stuff that comes free, and the subscription unlocks and articles behind a paywall? Or maybe you get the full app for a week and it doesn’t update unless you subscribe. But then you encounter the bait-and-switch problem.

Wouldn’t it be more honest if subscription news apps were listed under paid apps? Or at least under a new category: subscriptions.

Mobile app analytics provider Localytics, a graduate of the 2009 TechStars Boston class, has raised $2.5 million in new funding from Launchpad Venture Group, New York Angels and Hub Angels. This brings the company’s total funding to over $3 million.

Localytics offers a comprehensive mobile analytics platform to help give app developers and publishers with real-time reports on how customers use their applications on Android, Blackberry, iPad and iPhone devices. The startup’s product can be used to monitor basic usage, custom events, and enables publishers to dynamically generate custom segments and chart results with hourly granularity.

Today, Localytics is also unveiling a new premium offering, which includes a custom charting feature to build and share customized reports, additional analytics and more. time. Additionally, a new App
Comparison tool allows developers to compare performance across a number of apps. Developers can see which apps are contributing most to growth across different markets and platforms. The Premium version costs $95 per month for Android, BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and Windows Phone 7 applications.

We have a number of discounts for the service. Readers that enter TC35X6 as a coupon code when signing up here for Localytics Premium before April 30, will get 35% off their first 6 months of the analytics service.

Localytics’s platform is being used by a number of well-known companies including News Corp., Skype, Bluefly, RueLaLa, Turner Broadcasting and more.

Digby, which helps retailers design, deploy and manage mobile commerce web sites and rich applications optimized for smartphones, has raised $8 million in Series C funding led by Battery Ventures with RIM’s BlackBerry Partners Fund, S3 Ventures and Daylight Partners participating in the round. This brings the startup’s total funding to $16 million.

Digby’s Mobile Commerce product helps retailers create mobile websites that display rich product images and live catalogs, expands the ways they can buy from merchants and more. Digby also allows retailer to create native applications for iOS, BlackBerry and Android devices. Digby has a number of well-known retailers using its offering, including Costco, Toys “R” Us, The Home Depot, Lilly Pulitzer, and 1-800-Flowers.

The startup also recently landed a deal with AT&T to power the telecommunications giant’s mobile commerce software platform for developers.

The new funds will be used to expand global operations including sales, marketing, client services, research and platform development, and for new client acquisitions. As mobile commerce ramps up, there’s no question that more retailers will be looking to platforms like Digby to create a seamless mobile shopping experience for consumers. Digby could also be an acquisition target for a retail giant like eBay, so it should be interesting to see how the company performs in the coming year.

Does the world need another iPod dock? Probably not. Still, the Soundfreaq’s inaugural SFQ-01 “sound platform” (hint: it streams music too) is not only nice to ogle, it also delivers surprisingly good sound at super reasonable price.

The entire front side of the Soundfreaq — or ‘the Freaq’ as I’ve grown fond of calling it — is dominated by one grill. Tucked behind this sonic drapery are two balanced, Kevlar-reinforced drivers that provide ample oomph for a small-to-medium sized space — think bedroom or office, not living room. That space will also look a hell of a lot better thanks to the unit’s glossy sharp lines, sleek orange backlighting and retro-futuristic styling.

A slight lip protrudes from the bottom of the Freaq, and here you’ll find bass, treble and UQ3 knobs on the left (more on the latter in a sec), the standard 30-pin iPod connector in the center, and all the media-control buttons on the right. There’s also a small door on the side that pops open, revealing a place to stash the included remote. You can leave it stashed if you’d like and just use the Soundfreaq Remote iOS app to control it.

While the sound system is small (6 x 12 x 6 inches) and relatively easy to move around (4.4 lbs), it ain’t no ghetto blaster. There are no battery options and you’ll have to plug the unit directly into an outlet for power. The Freaq just wants to sit on your desk and look good.

But enough about appearances and specs. A sound dock should be judged on its, you know, sound quality. And unfortunately, it’s here that the system loses some of its luster. The inherent limitations of those two closely spaced 2.75-inch drivers are all too apparent when you move out of the dock’s direct sound field. I found the overall sound quality to be fine when it was parked on my desk — clear soundstage and punchy, but not overwhelming bass. The dock is far less ideal for parties, however, and had some serious trouble filling up larger rooms with sound.

Thankfully, the Soundfreaq includes a bit of proprietary DSP magic, something it calls UQ3. Twist a knob on the left side and you’ll get a faux boost to the spatial sound and some added stereo separation. Once I discovered it, I never turned it off.

There’s also the matter of loudness. When I punched up the sound (in both modes), there was a fair amount of distortion, especially with bass-heavy songs like Massive Attack’s “Angel” and Meat Beat Manifesto’s “Dub 62.” This wasn’t a consistent problem, but you’ll want to take it easy on the Jack Dangers.

Instead of Apple’s AirPlay, which has only made it into a handful of docks and stereo systems thus far, the Soundfreaq relies on Bluetooth for wireless music streaming.

This turned out to be both a curse and a blessing. On the plus side, you can stream audio from nearly any device. I tested the dock with an assortment of Bluetooth-equipped devices — laptops, phones and MP3 players — and never had even the slightest hiccup in connectivity.

Even better, setting this connection up literally takes seconds and is accomplished by hitting the “Pair” button on the unit and waiting for the device to find it. Finis.

One thing to note: This is definitely not lossless streaming. As such, using the digital dock connection or the analog Aux input will yield noticeably better sonic results in terms of overall fidelity. The good news is you probably won’t notice this discrepancy unless you’re constantly switching back and forth between Bluetooth and the dock.

There are other small details that keep the SoundFreaq from true greatness. I wasn’t really a fast fan of the capacitive touch buttons on the right side of the dock, especially after using nubby tactile goodness of those knobs on the left. Similarly, the remotes — both the physical version and the virtual iOS app — were rather unpolished and felt like hasty add-ons.

Still, none of these quibbles diminish the fact that the Freaq remains a fantastic value. Can you pony up more and get better sound? Absolutely. Will you find a sound dock that offers a better combination of looks, features and decent sound for less money? Probably not.

WIRED Great design and thoughtful extras make this box stand out from the pack. Connectivity o’plenty, including Bluetooth streaming, FM radio and a 3.5mm Aux input. Pairing the Freaq is quick and painless. Great range: Walk 25 feet away without losing a signal. Three dock inserts handle almost every current or recent iDevice — even a fatty 40-GB clickwheel iPod. The Soundfreaq can be had for under $200.

TIRED Do not crank it to 11. Distortion becomes noticeable at higher volumes. Dim, non-adjustable display on front. Emits an annoying buzz in both standard and UQ3 modes when not playing music. Sound quality drops when streaming over Bluetooth. Alright, already, I’ll download your app — docking your iDevice brings up a message telling you to download Soundfreaq’s remote app. Every single time. Worse? The app really isn’t that useful.

Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired

Yesterday, the story on everyone’s mind in the tech world was the turmoil at Twitter. Led by the Fortune cover story written by Jessi Hempel, if you read it, you might think the sky is falling on Chicken Little. Not surprisingly, Twitter responded — sort of.

Though it wasn’t an “official” response, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone put up a post on his personal blog late last night directly addressing the Fortune article. He even invoked Rocky.

Yes. Fight!

The problem with Stone’s post is that he fails to respond in any way to the actual content of the Fortune story. Instead, he focuses on Fortune’s history of flip-flopping. They love Facebook, they hate Facebook. They love Google, they hate Google. They love Twitter… You get the point.

It’s a smart maneuver by the man who actually used to run communications for Twitter back in the day. (As a sidenote, I fondly recall our back-and-forth emails along the lines of “Hey Biz, why is Twitter down now?” “Hey MG, looking into it.”) But let’s be clear about what the maneuver is: straight-up diversion.

Stone’s post is implying that Fortune’s post is simply a continuation of a cycle they follow to build a company up only to knock them down. Though not stated, the underlying idea here is that these stories create more interest and thus, more readers. That’s undoubtedly at least partially true. But again, it’s also implying that there is actually nothing wrong at Twitter. And that’s simply not true.

Anyone with any sort of connections to the tech scene out here will know that a few things have been afoul for quite some time at Twitter. That’s not saying the company is collapsing, but Fortune doesn’t say that either. There has been trouble behind the scenes. It’s real. And it’s hardly some well-guarded secret.

You’ll notice that Stone does not deny any of that. Again, he simply diverts attention away from it by throwing a punch at Fortune for their editorial practices. “Are there problems at Twitter?” “Hey, look over there!!”

Stone also notes that, “Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press.” Apparently, he hasn’t been closely reading TechCrunch over the years. While all of us love and are addicted to Twitter, we’ve had dozens of negative stories about the service — and rightfully so. These include stories wondering if yes, Twitter is collapsing. We even had posts with the title “Trouble At Twitter“.

What Stone likely means, of course, is that the mainstream media has been largely kind to Twitter over the years. That seems largely true but for a different reason than Stone concludes.

Stone suggests that the mainstream media has shown Twitter nothing but love, but he leaves out the fact that it’s largely because they did view them as Rocky (to borrow Stone’s metaphor) for a long time. As in, they thought Twitter was a joke that could never compete on the big stage.

Hell, most of the mainstream media had absolutely no idea what Twitter was until mid-2009 or into 2010.

Stone does end his post strong though. “Twitter is an important company and it’s under scrutiny from journalists—this is exactly how it’s supposed to work,” he writes  Yes, that’s exactly right. You know what’s worse than getting taken down in the press? Getting no press at all because your company is considered irrelevant (see: above).

“Now it’s our job to prove the reporters wrong so they can write an article later about how we have made dramatic progress,” he continues. Again, right. At the end of the day, what matters are results. None of Twitter’s issues are unfixable. And even better, if Twitter continues to achieve growth and gains success from a monetary perspective, it will coat any problems they do have in a fine gloss that the press and others will look right past. You think Facebook doesn’t have internal issues? Yeah, right.

Stone then does what needs to be done and (rightly) praises the 400+ employees working for Twitter who are devoting their lives to it. It’s rah-rah from a journalistic perspective, but it’s exactly what a leader of a company needs to do when employees are reading about company troubles in the press.

But now I’m glossing over Stone’s glossing over of the real issues at hand. In Rocky’s boxing parlance, his post was a phantom punch. Sometimes you can win with those. But throw too many and you might end up on the wrong side of Clubber Lang’s prediction in Rocky III: “pain.”

[image: MGM]

Note to startups: Don’t publish your lawyer’s notes about the various ways you may or may not profit off of user data.

Video chat site Chatroulette  seems to have just done just that with its privacy policy, publishing lawyer’s notes like …

“[Andrey, does Chatroulette intend to share the personally identifiable information of users with third party companies for them to send direct marketing or promotional materials to your users e.g. name, email address, postal address etc.? If not, please delete this Section 5.]“

And the precious …

“[Andrey: Do you have any reasonable security measures in place to protect any personal information you may collect e.g. SSL? If so, keep in the bracketed language but remove the brackets. If not, please delete the bracketed language as Chatroulette should not state that it has security procedures in place if this is not currently the case.]“

– right within the policy itself.

The “Andrey” being addressed here is presumably the site’s teenage founder Andrey Ternovskiy. [Note: I’ve been a huge fan of Chatroulette since I first reviewed it, but this was too good not to post. ]

I mean it’s standard procedure to get notes like this from your lawyer to review, but not so standard to publish them. Those who want to take a look at the suggested policy revisions can check them out here, but act fast, as they probably won’t be up for very long.

Click images for a larger version.

LA-based Internet forum community CrowdGather has acquired free forum hosting platform Forumer for $400K in cash. Forumer will be joining CrowdGather’s other platforms Lefora and FreeForums.org as a hosting option for its 65,000 plus online forums.

Forumer currently serves 35 million monthly pageviews for 200,000 forums. The purchase increases CrowdGather’s network traffic by 50% from 90 million monthly pageviews at the beginning of this year to 135 million monthly pageviews and 13 million monthly unique visitors (CrowdGather was at 100 million monthly pageviews before the acquisition).

CrowdGather (CRWG.OB) has been a publicly traded company since 2008 but just raised $7.85 million through private placement in March. Apparently it’s spending the money by going on a forum shopping spree, snapping up underpriced forums communities like rapmusic.com and digishoptalk.com and optimizing them for monetization.

A report from the Association of American Publishers reveals that e-books sales experienced “powerful continuing growth” as they colorfully put it, and paper books of all types dipped, compared to the same period (January-February) from last year. This isn’t surprising news, mainly because it isn’t news — and even if it were, it’s just history repeating itself; we’ve seen the same thing happen to music.

The parallels are clear, though the situations and reactions of the RIAA and AAP are somewhat different. Mostly in that the AAP and other booksellers aren’t being dragged kicking, screaming, and suing into the future, but are embracing it despite its implications.

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Spring is upon us and a young geek’s mind turns to thoughts of love. And what better way to win the heart of the guy (or girl) of your dreams than to dress up like Darth Vader in a completely authentic Sith Lord costume (saber not included). People will be able to sense your confidence along with your off-the-charts midichlorian count as you stride up to the bar and, in your deepest, smokiest voice, say to the bartender “I find your lack of MGD 64 disturbing.” You will be, as they say, unstoppable.

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