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Wednesday, 30 October 2013
After Nearly 5 Years And 5M Backers, Kickstarter Gets A New CEO As Two Founders Step Back
As it approaches its fifth birthday, Kickstarter's star continues to rise, as the indie crowdfunding goliath announced yesterday that five million people have now collectively pledged nearly one billion dollars to its crowdfunding projects.
Today, in a somewhat surprising turn after yesterday's milestones, it appears that an impromptu version of the “Management Shuffle” will be rolling into Kickstarter. In a blog post today, Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen announced that he will be stepping down from his role as CEO and will instead assume the role of chairman beginning January 1st.
Chen explained that the move will give him more time to pursue his own creative projects: “I'm looking forward to stepping away from the day-to-day to consider our path from a new perspective … [and] I'm also looking forward to having time to work on creative projects of my own, after all these years working on an engine to support them.”
But Chen isn't the only co-founder to depart as part of the company's management shuffle. Charles Adler, who “has long been itching to move with his family back to Chicago,” is also planning to leave his day-to-day role at the company and will assume the role of an adviser.
In Kickstarter's version of the management dance (we're still waiting for the music), when two co-founders step back, one must step forward. With Chen and Adler set to depart, Yancey Strickler, who has held a number of roles within the company, with community, communications and customer service among them, will be taking the reins as Kickstarter's second CEO.
Considering that its leadership has remained largely unchanged over the years, the Management Shuffle represents a significant change for Kickstarter. Usually, when companies undergo signficant changes to its founding leadership team, it's not a good sign. These kind of moves always produce speculation and a few worried looks, but Chen assured readers in his post today that the move shouldn't have any impact on the company itself - or its mission.
In fact, Kickstarter PR Chief Justin Kazmark tells us that Chen plans to stay involved, both in company projects and by supporting Yancey in his transition to CEO. Instead, by assuming the role of Chairman, Chen is looking to use the position to gain a new perspective on the company's trajectory and plans to spend a significant chunk of time focusing on the big picture and keeping Kickstarter close to its core mission.
In fact, Union Square Ventures co-founder and early Kickstarter investor Fred Wilson sees Chen's fingerprints all over the impromptu management shuffle. Reflecting on the changes in a blog post today, Wilson quipped, “like all things that involve Kickstarter, this is a classic Perry move.”
The company and its CEO have always marched to their own drummer, and Kickstarter's Management Shuffle is yet another example of this freewheeling mentality, Wilson explains. While its expected that the company's investors would look to temper speculation and air on the side of its founders, Kickstarter has given them plenty of very legitimate reasons to do so. To illustrate the point, Wilson described the long-time CEO as an entrepreneur that was very “wary of taking money from VCs … and had no intention of taking the company public and no intention of selling it,” and was determined to put creators first.
Although he was initially skeptical of the founder's motivations, they decided to invest anyway. Over time, the investor said that Chen ended up proving him wrong, and his perspective ultimately led to just as much, if not more, value creation - a model which remains in place today:
Four and a half years after launch, Kickstarter is a very important and sustainable business. It will continue to grow, it will continue to fund creativity, and it will continue to do things its own way. Kickstarter was built in Perry's mold and the unique culture and mission of the Company are derived from him. I suspect his decision to step up to Chairman and allow the team to run the business day to day is Perry's way of saying to the team that they have his confidence to lead Kickstarter into the future. Kickstarter will always be Perry's work and we are very happy to be a part of it and be inspired by it every day.
For more, find Wilson's post here and Chen's announcement on the Kickstarter blog here.
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Think Your Dell Laptop Smells Like Cat Pee? You Aren't Alone
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Daily Roundup: Tesla's Supercharger Corridor, Sprint Spark, Steam's battle for the living room and more!
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Sprint's Dan Hesse confirms unlimited data isn't going anywhere after Spark rollout
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Women Likely to Buy Silver iPhone 5S, Men Pick Space Gray
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Changes coming to Engadget's RSS feed
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Facebook exceeds expectations as it tallies 874 million monthly mobile users
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Google Fiber app gains new DVR features, now on iPhone and iPod Touch
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Sony confirms its official PlayStation 4 launch titles: 21 games including five indies (updated)
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gdgt's best deals for October 30th: Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13, 55-inch LG 4K Ultra HDTV
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Can Samsung's MultiScreen SDK Make TV Apps a Thing?
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Be a volunteer at Engadget Expand from November 7-10!
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This Woman Got the World's First Ticket for Driving With Google Glass
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Facebook considers tracking mouse cursors and screen views to improve targeted ads
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Airbus vende el A320 número 10.000
Airbus acaba de anunciar la firma de un contrato con JetBlue en el que la aerolÃnea hace un pedido en firme de 15 A321ceo, o lo que es lo mismo, A321 de toda la vida, y 20 A321neo, con los motores nuevos y sharklets, además de cambiar 8 A320ceo y 10 A320neo por otros tantos A321 y A321neo.
No es que sea un pedido de cifras descomunales, pero según se puede leer en JetBlue Deal Marks 10,000th Airbus A320 Family Order con este Airbus pasa la cifra de 10.000 aviones vendidos de la familia del A320, una cifra que muy pocos modelos han alcanzado.
De hecho sólo el Boeing 737 ha alcanzado un éxito similar en lo que se refiere a aviones de pasajeros, aunque también es cierto que la demanda de aviones como el Airbus 330 o el Boeing 747, de enorme éxito en su segmento nunca podrá ser tan alta como la de estos aviones destinados para rutas más cortas.
Eso sÃ, Airbus tiene aún pendientes de entregar unos 5.800 de esos 10.000 Airbus A320, algo a lo que ayuda el que el A320neo se haya convertido en el avión comercial que más rápido se ha vendido de la historia, con 2.400 unidades vendidas desde su lanzamiento en diciembre de 2010.
Modelo de ordenador del A320neo, que está previsto que entre en servicio en 2015 - Airbus/ FIXION - GWLNSD
En la actualidad los A320 se fabrican en Toulouse, Hamburgo, y TianjÃn, China, aunque en abril de este año empezaron las obras de una nueva factorÃa en Mobile, Alabama, que deberÃa estar produciendo aviones en 2016.
Será, de hecho, JetBlue la primera aerolÃnea que reciba un avión producido en esta fábrica, que para 2018 deberÃa estar produciendo entre 40 y 50 aviones al año, aunque los aviones de este nuevo pedido no serán entregados hasta 2018.
Al mismo tiempo Airbus ha anunciado también el programa de instalación de sharklets en A319 y A320 ya en servicio, que arrancará en el primer trimestre de 2015.
El EC-LUO es el segundo A320 totalmente nuevo que recibe Vueling, y el primero con sharklets - Foto: Airbus / e'm company / H. Goussé
Estas nuevas puntas de ala curvas 2,4 metros de altura, que vienen de serie en los A320neo y que son opcionales en los A430 nuevos, permiten según las cifras de Airbus un ahorro de combustible de hasta un 4 por ciento comparado con las alas tradicionales.
Instalarlas en un avión que no las tiene supone una parada de unas dos semanas.
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Tesla Opens Free West Coast Supercharger Corridor
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Sprint introduces Spark enhanced LTE, promises unprecedented speed, futuristic app support
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NSA reportedly tapped into Google, Yahoo data centers worldwide without telling either company
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Announcing Engadget's #ScaryGadget Costume Contest!
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Lawdingo Raises $690K More To Help You Talk To Lawyers Instantly
Y Combinator-incubated legal startup Lawdingo is announcing that it has raised another $690,000 in funding.
The company's goal is to make it more convenient and affordable for users to connect with a lawyer (in contrast to a service like LegalZoom, which offers legal forms rather than actual consultation with an attorney). Users can search the site and browse profiles based on a lawyer's location and expertise, then schedule an appointment or talk to them right then.
Founder and CEO Nikhil Nirmel said one of the more popular features, which was added since I last wrote about the company, is the ability to “get a call now” - Lawdingo can instantly connect users with a relevant lawyer by phone. Lawyers provide Lawdingo with their availability, so when a request comes in, the system reaches out to the ones who are available and have relevant expertise until it finds one who's free to talk.
Nirmel added that this is an efficient way for lawyers to find new clients. They're available for these conversations because lawyers “don't operate as much on a strict appointment schedule … Unless they're in court, they can still take client calls.”
The business model has also been tweaked, with Lawdingo abandoning a plan where lawyers bid to promote their listings. The company has since gone back to the flat subscription fee that it started out with.
Lawdingo now has lawyers in every state, with the biggest concentration in California, New York, and Massachusetts (Nirmel said there are more than 200 lawyers listed in each of those states). To address the challenge of managing supply and demand in different categories, he said his team built a feature that will automatically spend more money in targeted advertising when the site needs to attract more clients in a given area.
Speaking of advertising, Lawdingo also produced the tongue-in-cheek marketing video that I've embedded below. Nirmel said his aim is to “lighten up the legal industry,” which he said “takes itself too seriously - they're a service provider like everyone else.”
Nirmal participated in the Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator program earlier this year but has since moved to New York. Lawdingo's 15-person team remains distributed in multiple locations, with Nirmal using tools like GitHub and Skype to manage everyone. When pressed on whether this is actually an effective way to run a company, he replied, “Truthfully, I don't know how large it can scale, but for now, I think it works well.”
The new funding comes from angel investors (and funds run by angel investors) including Nathaniel Stevens, Kartik Hosanagar, Gene Alston, Altair Capital, Atsany Captial, and Andrew Moroz. It brings Lawdingo's total funding to $850,000.
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Analytics Startup Mixpanel Expands Into Mobile Surveys
Mobile-focused analytics company Mixpanel is growing its offerings today with the launch of Mixpanel Surveys, a product that allows developers to integrate user surveys into their mobile apps.
Currently, co-founder Suhail Doshi said the options “kind of suck” for developers who want to find out more about what their users think. Usually, they end up emailing a giant list of user addresses, an approach that isn't particularly well-targeted and doesn't necessarily result in many responses.
With Mixpanel Surveys, the questions can be integrated into the app itself, so users are being surveyed in a context where it's relevant, which should lead to “conversion rates that are much higher,” Doshi said. He gave me a quick demo of the editor, and it took only a few minutes to create a survey that looked like it was a native part of the app.
The surveys that Doshi created only had one question per screen, and he said that mobile surveys really shouldn't be longer than a few questions. Nonetheless, Doshi argued that the results can still be quite meaningful, especially when paired with Mixpanel's audience segmentation capabilities. For example, if a developer wanted to know if level 10 of their game was too easy, too difficult, or just right, that's a one-question survey that could be targeted specifically at players who just finished that level.
When I asked whether other companies couldn't do the same thing, Doshi replied that the makers of most survey products aren't “mobile first”:
The technology that you're asking about, it's not so much that SurveyMonkey couldn't go and build this UI, but I don't think they have the DNA to go and build it. They don't have the design DNA and the mobile DNA. That takes a long time to build.
One specific technical challenge that Doshi said Mixpanel has solved is the ability to integrate these surveys “at scale” while minimizing any effect on the performance of the mobile apps in question.
He also argued that surveys are a “natural, tangential” area for Mixpanel to move into, and something that many of the company's current customers have already expressed interest in. The existing analytics product helps developers understand how their users behave and how much money they're worth to the business, but with surveys, Mixpanel can also “help companies measure how people think and feel about things.”
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ZTE launches Blade Q smartphone line in Mini, regular and Maxi sizes
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WebMD Acquires Avado For $20-$30M To Help Drive Its Evolution From Media Company To Patient Engagement Platform
Seventeen years after its inception, WebMD remains one of the go-to resources for basic health and diagnostic information (and hypochondria enablement) on the Web. Born at the height of the Dot-com Boom, WebMD is on a very short list of companies that were able to not only endure the ensuing crash, but go on to achieve profitability, a billion-dollar market cap and maintain their position as a market leader - even today.
It's been a bumpy road for WebMD, however, and the potholes ahead aren't getting any smaller. As the transformation of the healthcare industry accelerates, the threats to WebMD's business and its position atop the food chain have begun to multiply. Though WebMD announced today that its health network saw 138 million unique visitors per month and total traffic of 2.95 billion page views during the third quarter - after reporting its first profit in six quarters in July - its popularity has wavered over the last decade. At times, WebMD has been more punchline than pioneer.
Adapt Or Die
Today, WebMD is primarily known for its consumer-facing health and diagnostic web portal and mobile apps. When you think of WebMD, you think of its classic symptom checker, where you can enter in keywords like “runny nose,” whereupon it will serve you with possible diagnostic matches. However, over the years, the company has been quietly diversifying, adding services that allow it to reach new audiences.
Through Medscape, for example, the company offers medical news and information to healthcare providers through its registration-based portal and apps. In turn, WebMD has also begun to target employers and health plans with its subscription-based patient engagement platform and private online health portals, which give employees a secure gateway through which they can access their personal health information, plan data and insurance claims.
WebMD 2.0: From Media To Tech
While WebMD has build a solid foundation around its flagship health information site, each of these services still live apart from each other. As people continue to adopt and become comfortable using a wide range of digital health tools, the opportunities for patients and healthcare providers to connect and communicate, for patients to take control of (and better monitor) their healthcare will increase exponentially.
If WebMD is going to continue to be a part of the conversation in the emergent HealthCare 2.0 Era, it's going to have to step up its game and adapt to these changes.
What's more, WebMD has business model that's very much centered on advertising. Where the pharmaceutical industry goes - its primary source of advertising dollars - so goes WebMD. But, as the company looks to close the gap between its consumer-facing apps and services and its provider-facing portal by allowing doctors to push content to their patients' phones, for example, opportunities begin to present themselves. By giving doctors the ability to prescribe educational material and content across apps, stepping into personalized healthcare information services and behavior change, WebMD could be able to reduce its reliance on advertising.
Looking forward, WebMD will continue to deliver its core media services, but perhaps more critical to its survival will be the process of redefining itself as a health technology company. To do so, WebMD took its first step in that direction today with the announcement that it will be acquiring TechCrunch Disrupt finalist and the maker of “Patient Relationship Management” (or “PRM”) software, Avado.
Avado And Patient-Focused Healthcare
Like healthcare itself, WebMD has historically tailored its products to address the two very distinct “worlds” within the system: The consumer world and the professional world. Traditionally, it was as if these two divisions were separated by 30+, New York City blocks. With its first acquisition in five years, WebMD is looking for Avado to both metaphorically and physically become the connective tissue between its offices and between its customers - consumers, patients and doctors.
Since launching in 2011, Avado founders and Microsoft veterans Dave Chase, Bassam Saliba and John Yii have sought to do for healthcare and personal health records what Salesforce has done for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). [Disclosure: Dave Chase has contributed a number of articles on the HealthTech space to TechCrunch over the years.] The idea, Chase says, has been to increase the level of connectivity between healthcare providers and consumers to make the delivery of care more efficient and improve patient outcomes.
“The timing is right,” WebMD CTO and COO Bill Pence tells us. “Traditionally, patients and healthcare providers have lived in separate silos, but with the growing adoption of electronic health records and mobile devices, coupled with the advance in sensor technology, there are now more opportunities than ever before to connect the two and offer personalized, direct-to-consumer services.”
The Road Ahead
While the companies aren't yet ready to talk about the new products that are on the roadmap in the wake of the acquisition, Pence did say that these products will directly integrate Avado's technology. Beyond that, as to what will become of Avado once it's folded into the WebMD ecosystem, Chase says that Avado will take up residence within WebMD's technology team, currently a small but growing portion of the company's 1,600 employees.
Avado founders Chase and Saliba will be staying on after the acquisition, and will be reporting to Pence. The other members of the Avado team will also join WebMD's tech team and will remain at their company headquarters in Seattle.
While the two companies declined to share details in regard to the terms of the acquisition, TechCrunch sources close to the deal said that the price fell in the $20 million to $30 million range and was a positive outcome both for the founders and for its investors. Avado raised $1 million back in March from investors that include The Partnership Fund for New York City and healthcare angels like Andy Palmer and Dr. Daniel Schwartz.
Though Avado managed to secure outside investment and attract “hundreds” of healthcare provider customers and “many thousands” of consumers, its traction is minuscule in juxtaposition with WebMD. While WebMD may not be the sexiest brand in healthcare, it reaches the largest audience of health-focused consumers and healthcare providers in the U.S., Chase said.
And therein lies the real value of this outcome for Avado - the opportunity to not only help WebMD in its plans to build the “Health Graph” and integrate its technology into a larger suite of connectivity and patient-empowerment services, but reach an audience of (hundreds of) millions.
On the other hand, while WebMD finds itself back in the black and holding fast to its position in the market, the online consumer healthcare pioneer is at a crossroads. Yes, they have a long reach, but without talent that can help it build third party ecosystems, WebMD risks missing a big opportunity.
WebMD is eager to reposition itself and transform itself from a digital media company to a health technology company, and, in particular, become a true patient engagement platform. Avado believes it can help WebMD shave two years off of that transition. Integrating Salesforce-like patient empowerment software (and APIs) into its portfolio and infrastructure are the first real step in that new direction.
For more, find the acquisition announcement here.
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Steam now 65 million users strong as Valve makes a push for the living room
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Court rules that Deutsche Telekom can't throttle internet speeds on flat-rate plans
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Fantastical 2 for iPhone wants to be your all-in-one calendar and reminder app
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Tesla's West Coast Supercharger Corridor now open, charging the Model S from San Diego to Vancouver
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Adobe Data Breach Affects 38 Million — Not 3 Million, as Reported
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Nike bringing new features to original Fuelband on November 6th
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iPads Hold a Staggering 94% of the Education Market for Tablets
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