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Wednesday, 15 January 2014
xPC wants to be your next tablet, desktop and crowdfunding gamble
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Men’s Fashion Club Jackthreads Makes Online Shopping Less Lonely
Jackthreads, the members-only online shopping club helmed by founder Jason Ross and Thrillist’s Ben Lerer, is working on something brand new in the ecommerce space. The goal: to make the online shopping experience more like the real-life, brick-and-mortar shopping experience.
Today, the move is but an incremental one, as the site launches a new button alongside items that shows number of views, number of times that item has been placed in a cart, and the number of times someone has “wanted” the item.
The company has been focused on this initiative since last year, when Jackthreads launched “Chat with Jill.” The feature allowed young, female customer service agents to live chat with customers, giving those guys the feedback of a woman. The idea is that many male shoppers want more social proof when they’re preparing to make a purchase, and Lerer claims that this feature resulted in a “huge spike in conversion.”
Today’s feature launch moves toward the same goal, though this time letting male members of Jackthreads give each other social proof. By seeing that a certain item is wanted or purchased by many of your peers may just be the tipping point to a sale, giving the customer the confidence to pull the trigger.
“It’s a small gesture, but we expect to substantively affect conversion for a certain kind of guy,” said Ben Lerer. “It’ll be interesting to see how it goes as we measure it, but we think it should change the game for a lot of our guys.”
Early last year, Jackthreads claimed to be doing 30 percent of its traffic and revenue via mobile, and in May the company launched an iPad app.
Today’s that’s grown to 65 percent of traffic and half of revenue coming from mobile, pushing the company to focus on a mobile-first lens as well as social proof going into 2014.
After all, that’s seemingly the key for man-focused online shopping, and we’ve seen a number of companies cater these needs.
For women, moving to online shopping just meant avoiding the hassle of a store. Women know their sizes, what they like, and trust their opinions. For men, according to Jackthreads, the transition is a bit more daunting.
Instead of shopping with a friend or girlfriend in a store filled with patrons and store attendants, online shopping is a lonely experience. It’s all up to the shopper.
Today’s new views button (internally called “Busy Store”) is just one step toward changing that.
This is a very step-by-step process, however a year from now this social visibility should be present across the entire shopping experience,” said Jason Ross. “At the product and sale level, shoppers will be able to see which sales and items are getting the most engagement, and within the navigation they’ll be able to sort and filter by engagement as well. It aligns perfectly with our strategy of reducing the barriers to fashion and lifestyle discovery for our guys.”
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HP Chromebook 11 with Verizon LTE now available at Best Buy for $379
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Sequoia-Backed Mobile Browser Dolphin Hits 100M Installs, Launches Innovation Lab Focused On Smart Devices
Dolphin, the third-party browser made by Sequoia Capital-backed startup MoboTap, announced today that it has reached 100 million downloads globally, fueled in large part by tackling emerging markets such as Russia, India, and Brazil. Dolphin also officially launched the second part of its growth strategy, Dolphin Labs, a team of engineers who will find ways to extend Dolphin’s ecosystem by integrating it into smart TVs, wearable tech, smart cars, and other new hardware.
While operating in stealth, Dolphin Labs launched its first product, an ephemeral mobile browser called Dolphin Zero that automatically deletes user info like browsing history, passwords, and cookies. The team is currently working on several projects, including a partnership with a smart TV manufacturer that will be announced in March, and integrating Dolphin’s browser with Chromecast, which will allow users to browse the Web on their TV sets with Flash support.
“The whole idea behind Dolphin Labs is how to combine the Internet of Things with the Dolphin experience. We want to highlight the ability of users to control Dolphin with voice and gesture,” says Edith Yeung, Dolphin’s vice president of business development. “We want to make it easy and really fast to browse the Internet with any smart devices you have.”
Once Dolphin is available for smart TVs, for example, users will be able to navigate the browser on their television sets by speaking into their smartphones. Other Dolphin users have already found ways to use the browser on their Samsung Galaxy Gear watches by connecting Dolphin Browser Mini to their smartphones with Bluetooth, an experience Dolphin Labs wants to refine and release officially.
Despite hitting its impressive 100 million download milestone, Dolphin still competes with other third-party mobile browser makers, including Mozilla, Opera, and Maxthon. To differentiate, Dolphin’s strategy has focused on quickly adapting to the needs of users in vastly different markets.
The first version of Dolphin was available only in English and targeted to the U.S., Yeung told me. Then after landing a $10 million Series A from Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners in July 2011, Dolphin began focusing on growth in Asian countries, especially China, Japan, Vietnam, and India, and inking deals with original equipment manufacturers.
In countries with where many users don’t have credit cards or are on limited data plans, they can bypass Google Play and native apps in favor of the Dolphin Web apps store. Dolphin has also signed strategic partnerships with search engines in Russia, China, Japan, and the U.S. Dolphin Zero, meanwhile, was created to attract users of other ephemeral apps like Snapchat, most of whom are located in the States.
Yeung tells me that products created by Dolphin Labs will probably gain traction first in the U.S., Western Europe, and China, where a lot of the hardware used in smartwatches and smart TVs is manufactured in Shenzhen.
“Essentially we are mapping out all the potential use cases and prioritizing them,” she says. “If you have a laptop, a smart watch, a smart TV, a smartphone, then what are all the possible ways you can browse the Web?”
[[Image: Jesslee Cuizon]]
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Handybook Hoovers Up Exec For “Under $10M” To Sweep The Home Services Market
Justin Kan launched Exec in early 2012 as an on-demand errand service for businesses, but over time, morphed into a cleaning service to focus on its most popular offering. Unable to scale “Errands” and struggling to find its legs, the startup folded its personal assistant service in September and later dropped prices for home cleanings in each of its nine markets.
Rumors of Exec’s trials have been swirling for several months now, as the startup found itself paddling upstream and competing against fast-growing services like Homejoy, MyClean and Handybook in an increasingly crowded on-demand cleaning market. Today, those rumors appear to have been confirmed as Exec has opted to join the ranks of a competitor, rather than go it alone. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, as they say.
After what co-founder and CEO Oisin Hanrahan called a “competitive bidding process between multiple companies and home services brands,” Handybook announced this morning that it had won out, completing an acquisition of Exec that will see the two on-demand home improvement and cleaning brands join forces.
In an equity deal valued at “less than $10 million,” according to the companies, Exec will continue to operate in its West Coast markets, but under the Handybook brand. Co-founders Justin Kan, Daniel Kan and Amir Ghazvinian will stay on in an advisory role — with Justin Kan providing “strategic counsel” — while Handybook co-founders Hanrahan and Umang Dua will continue as the chief officers of the new company.
But, given the competitiveness of the space, why was Handybook able to win the bidding for Exec? Of all the companies in the space, Hanrahan tells us, the chief reason Exec ended up going with Handybook was that it was able to offer the most potential synergies — especially in terms of marketshare.
Launched in June of 2012 to help people find better, trustworthy professionals to take care of their household needs, Handybook currently operates its on-demand cleaning and household services in 13 markets across the U.S. However, Handybook’s strongest markets have traditionally been on the East Coast and in the Mid-west, owing to the fact that it was founded (and is now headquartered) in New York.
In contrast, while Exec has been operating in nine markets since September, it’s penetration has been strongest on the West Coast, particularly in Los Angeles and San Francisco. By acquiring Exec, Hanrahan says that Handybook will now be able to bring its services to new communities and grow its footprint on the West Coast, where Exec currently serves the four largest cities in California — San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Jose.
The acquisition enables Handybook to create a “brand with bi-coastal hubs,” he says, and leveraging Exec’s traction in its home territory, will allow Handybook to open its first Los Angeles office in Santa Monica later this year.
With an acquisition price reportedly less than $10 million, it’s not a big win for Exec, which has raised $3.3 million to date from investors like CrunchFund, SV Angel and Y Combinator. However, if Handybook is able to continue scaling at its current pace and grow into the market leader, the equity the Exec co-founders now have in Handybook could negate any loss incurred over the long run.
For Handybook, the Exec acquisition allows it to add a recognized brand to its ranks and significantly expand its footprint on the West Coast, enabling it to better compete with the fast-growing and well-funded Homejoy. The company expanded into five new cities in 2013 and launched a new version of its mobile app this fall, which gave the product much-needed compatibility with all iOS devices.
In short, the company’s web and mobile service aims to simplify the process of booking cleaning and repair services, trimming the process down to three steps. The user selects the service they’d like, confirms the time they want to cleaner or repairperson to arrive and then enters their email address.
The startup offers both home and office cleaning along with the ability to book a handyman, plumber and electrician, but it also allows users to book unique requests across the home improvements category. And, while Exec never focused specifically on facilitating award-winning home improvements, its TaskRabbit-like origins make its founders and team potentially useful to Handybook as it looks to expand its on-demand service coverage.
While Exec founder Justin Kan said that cleaning had become “more impactful than its errands business revenue-wise after only a few months of operation” — and was accounting for 90 to 95 percent of usage when “Errands” was shut down — the latter was one of his favorite parts of the business.
However, “Errands” was something that users had to “work to use,” in that customers would have to get “creative to think up ways to save their own time by having someone else do something for them.” Moreover, beyond founders and engineering types, it was difficult for potential customers to get into that mindset, he tells us, and while people initially liked the idea, it didn’t stick.
But as for Handybook, Kan says that the conversations began about eight months ago and, initially for advice, but then, after seeing that they were “pretty far along on the user acquisition and business model sides,” they quickly began to consider an acquisition. On this process, Kan offered advice to founders, saying that it’s important for entrepreneurs to be honest with themselves and identify where their strengths lie — and what’s outside of their core competency.
“For us,” he said, “we believed we were doing a good job with Exec, but that the growth could be seriously accelerated if we joined Handybook.” In the end, when Kan and his co-founders had to “decide between trying to chase and replicate some of the things competitors had done or be acquired, the decision became clearer.”
Ultimately, although Kan is an investor in Homejoy as a seed investor at Y Combinator, he felt that Handybook was a better fit for Exec than the YC grad because it had “figured out cross-selling services,” he said. It’s a tough road to convince customers to not only buy cleanings from the phone or the Web, let alone convince them to book repair and electrical work, plumbing services and so on. In the end, Kan said, Handybook had that figured out better than the rest.
Handybook has raised $12 million in total funding to date, from General Catalyst Partners, Highland Capital Partners and TechStars co-founder David Tisch, among others. With Exec in tow, the startup now has to go out and live up to its promise of not just taking on competing cleaning services, but disrupting the home services industry and, potentially, giants like Angie’s List.
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Box redesigns its iOS app for simplicity, speed and real-time search (video)
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Pandora now recommends radio stations to Android and iOS listeners
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James Frey and Google team up to fuse interactive teen novels with AR games
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Chrome updates bring data compression to all Android and iOS users
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La sociedad de la información en España en 2013
La Fundación Telefónica acaba de publicar su informe La Sociedad de la Información en España 2013 , que se puede descargar en PDF y EPUB, aunque para los más impacientes tienen el vÃdeo que está aquà arriba.
Puntos a destacar de este informe es que somos casi 25 millones los españoles de entre 16 y 74 años los que usamos a Internet, cifra que incluye a 700.000 nuevos usuarios frente a los de 2012 y que supone un 71,6% de la población; el 69,8% de los hogares dispone de conexión a Internet.
En cuanto a tecnologÃas de conexión, la fibra óptica es la que está experimentando un mayor crecimiento en cuanto a banda ancha fija, mientras que en telefonÃa móvil 2013 ha marcado el comienzo de la carrera por el despliegue de redes de telefonÃa móvil 4G.
Y es que la banda ancha móvil sigue ganando en importancia, con 8,5 millones de usuarios que empezaron a usar este tipo de conexión en 2013, lo que supone que en un par de años se haya duplicado su penetración en el mercado.
De hecho hay 26 millones de móviles con conexión a Internet en España, más que usuarios que nos conectamos a Internet a diario, que somos 18,6 millones de personas; asà nos va y como media cada uno de nosotros consulta el móvil 150 veces al dÃa.
El resumen es que, crisis o no, 2013 ha sido de nuevo un año de crecimiento para las nuevas tecnologÃas y de su consolidación en nuestros hábitos y en nuestras vidas.
Si quieres comparar, aquà tienes el resumen de 2012.
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Titanfall special edition Xbox One controller drops this March
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Nike launches FuelBand SE Silver Edition, available January 19th for $169 (hands-on)
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Venga Reserves $1 Million Series A To Create Restaurant Customer Profiles
Venga, a DC-based startup, has raised $1 million in Series A financing to help restaurants create profiles of their customers by whipping reservation data, point-of-sale, and other basic information into a soufflé of delicious CRM.
Militello Capital led the round and a number of major restaurant groups and angels also invested. Think Food Group, Bill and Pat Anton, and Cornell’s Big Red Ventures were also on the menu.
Founded by Sam von Pollaro and Winston Bao Lord, the company incubated in the The Fort in DC. The company bills itself as the only “complete guest management platform for restaurants” and essentially takes reservations data and point of sale information to create a customer profile. This allows restaurants to offer dedicated, personalized service as a matter of course, ensuring that VIPs get extra breadsticks and chilled tap water.
“Venga is completely seamless for the restaurants that use it and the guests that benefit from it. The guest does not have to opt into a program or give an email address, credit card or a phone number, which eliminates the hassle and annoyance associated with many guest management systems,” said Lord. “Similarly, the restaurant’s staff does not have to change the way they work as the system was created to link with the point-of-sale and OpenTable systems the restaurant already uses.”
The system also maintains the customer’s purchase history and, if the guest provides an email, it can segment customers into special mailing lists. For example, restaurants can offer wine tastings to the lushes and chocolate parties to the chocoholics. It also allows waiters to know a bit more about their customers before they sit down.
“We allow our clients to track not only who came back to the restaurant but also how much they spent as a result of the campaign,” said Lord.
At its core, the company basically connects two pieces of information – the reservation with preferences. By doing this they can achieve what most restaurant hosts only acquire with years of experience and identify customers by name and supply them with perks that only long time customers can get. After all, the hotel industry has done this for years. Venga is simply trying to help restaurants catch up.
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Email Advertising Startup LiveIntent Raises $20M More
LiveIntent, a startup that provides tools for advertising in email newsletters and alerts, is announcing that it has raised $20 million in Series C funding.
The company launched at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in 2010, though at the time its goal was helping publishers “create meaningful connections on social networks.” Now it offers an ad exchange for real-time, automated buying and selling of ads in email. (Its website declares, “Email is no longer about email,” and you can see a sample ad to the left.)
I asked CEO Matt Keiser via email how LiveIntent fits into the broader email marketing landscape, he replied, “We do not plan to fit in [see what he did there?], we are changing [the] landscape of email marketing with real time programmatic buying and selling.”
The company says that it reaches more than 55 million consumers each month while working with brands like LaQuinta, Kraft, Chrysler, as well as publishers like the Weather Channel, Hearst, and AOL (which owns TechCrunch). It also says that it has tripled revenue and doubled its workforce in the past year.
The plan for 2014, Keiser said, to continue growing and “leveraging big data and artificial intelligence to deliver timely targeted ads.”
“Since every commercial entity is becoming a publisher in their own right, the market is only getting bigger,” he added.
The Series C was disclosed in part through a regulatory filing, but the filing didn’t show that the round had closed, the total size of the round, or who was investing. The new funding was led by Bullpen Capital with additional money from Alpha Capital, Valor Capital, and Brazilian investors VR.
LiveIntent has now raised more than $32 million in funding.
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Fotolia Launches Dollar Photo Club, An Exclusive Club For Heavy Stock Photo Clients
Stock photo company Fotolia just launched a new vertical named Dollar Photo Club with a brand new offering targeted toward heavy stock photo customers. Instead of amassing the biggest database and trying to reach as many clients as possible, Dollar Photo Club will target a small audience of approved members and provide exclusive photos.
“We want to target big buyers, and provide them with exclusive offers,” co-founder and CEO Oleg Tscheltzoff told me. “For example, when it comes to content, if it’s a royalty-free photo website open to everyone, images quickly become overused. That’s why we are doing a club.”
When you sign up, your application is reviewed by the team. After that, you get access to 25 million high-resolution photos at $1 each. More precisely, you first have to sign up to a $10 monthly subscription, which gives you 10 free photos. After that, you pay $1 for every subsequent image.
Simplifying the price will be a big time-saver as traditional stock photo websites can carry photos that cost between a few cents up to hundreds of dollars. Similarly, you don’t have to sign up for large plans with a lot of downloads or credits. There is only one plan and you can cancel anytime.
“This pricing is very disruptive compared to everything else that exists, including Fotolia,” Tscheltzoff said.
Dollar Photo Club represents Fotolia’s first step in the microstock photo market and will compete directly with Shutterstock (which completed its IPO in 2012) and Getty’s iStockphoto. Yet, even though Fotolia isn’t the first to tackle the lower end of the market, its take is a bit different thanks to its $1 fixed price.
While the company promises exclusive content, some photos will come directly from Fotolia. Dollar Photo Club’s main challenge will probably be to attract users. Its cumbersome signup process could discourage potential clients. At the same time, the new website emphasizes its exclusive content offering to retain existing customers. When you are in, you get access to a lot of underused cheap stock photos.
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Honda's new EV charger can draw some of its power directly from the sun
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Facebook to Launch a News Reader and Other News You Need to Know
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Hay quien opina que éste es el mejor invento de los últimos tiempos
Para los impacientes el invento de Ford se revela a partir del primer minuto. Mi voto para que éste elemento sea obligatorio en los coches, igual que lo son los cinturones de seguridad.
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Netflix commissions third season of Lilyhammer and a new show based on Marco Polo
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