Thursday, 6 February 2014
Snippit Launches An App To Add (Brief) Soundtracks To Your Photos
Snippit is a just-launched app offering a twist on photo-sharing.
The idea is pretty straightforward — instead of sharing a photo on its own, Snippit allows users to add a 4-to 10-second clip of their favorite song. The song can be something that’s downloaded on their phone, or they can select from the 30-second song previews that are available on iTunes (yep — a clip of a clip). And they can also add text captions, location check ins, and tag friends.
Co-founder and CEO Joe Grano said he first started thinking about this on a trip back to New York (he currently works in Los Angeles), when he realized that instead of just declaring “I’m in New York!” or posting an NYC photo on Facebook, he wanted to share a clip of a relevant Jay Z song. More broadly, he suggested that this is a way to give a picture more personality and emotion than it would have on its own, “in the same way that a filter on Instagram can change how a works.”
This is one of those social media ideas that might be a little too simple, but hey, simplicity can be an advantage, particularly in smartphone apps. The photo/music combinations that I saw in the app today were pretty fun, and the limit on the clip length makes it easy to browse the feed without bogged down.
The length, Grano said, also means that Snippit’s usage falls under fair use, so the company doesn’t need to negotiate deals with the recording companies (and can therefore avoid the licensing costs that other online music services struggle with). At the same time, since users can buy the full song from iTunes (earning revenue for both the record company and a small affiliate fee for Snippit), he suggested the company could start making promotional deals. with those same companies.
Given Snippit’s dependence in downloaded music and iTunes, I asked Grano how he felt about the rise of subscription music services like Spotify. He replied that with the iTunes preview integration, users don’t have to own a song to use it, and that if Spotify or other services want to release an open API, “I think it would be great for the app.”
The company has raised $500,000 in seed funding. It was basically “an internal family round,” Grano said, with investors including his father Joseph Grano, CEO of Centurion Holdings and former chairman of UBS Financial Services.
Apparently, Grano has been building Snippit while also working as an executive assistant at production company Leverage Management, whose credits include the TV show Entourage. It’s been like “doing two full-time jobs,” he said, but in about a month he’ll leave Leverage to focus entirely on the startup.
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Here's a possible sneak peek at the homescreen for HTC's next flagship
Redbox gets a new president plucked from the studios, former Warner exec Mark Horak
Curiosity fotografía la Tierra y la Luna desde Marte
El punto brillante que se ve en esta imagen como a un tercio de la parte superior y hacia la izquierda es la Tierra fotografiada con la cámara izquierda de la Mastcam de Curiosity el pasado 31 de enero unos 80 minutos después de la puesta de Sol, tal y como se puede leer en Bright 'Evening Star' Seen from Mars is Earth .
En la imagen a resolución completa [jpeg 3.200×2.000 puntos, 0,39 MB] se puede apreciar otro punto debajo de la Tierra, que es la Luna.
También hay una versión con el contraste aumentado en esa zona que permite distinguirlas mejor.
Pero de hecho un ser humano con visión normal podría distinguir ambas perfectamente; en la imagen de Curiosity es un poco más difícil por el procesado que ha habido que hacerle para eliminar los efectos de los rayos cósmicos.
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LinkedIn Snatches Up Data Savvy Job Search Startup Bright.com For $120M, In Its Largest Acquisition To Date
Today, alongside a fourth quarter earnings report in which it beat Wall Street estimates yet again, LinkedIn announced its intentions to acquire data-savvy job search startup, Bright.com, for $120 million. The deal, which was 70 percent stock and 30 percent cash the company said, will be completed during the first quarter of this year.
In a statement today, LinkedIn said that “several members of Bright’s team,” which now numbers over 50 –particularly those on its engineering and product teams — will be joining LinkedIn in the coming weeks. However, one notices that the announcement conspicuously leaves out any mention of Bright’s founders and whether or not they will be joining the team. As a result of the acquisition, Bright’s users will be able to access the startup’s tools until February 28th, at which point it appears LinkedIn plans to shut it down.
Updating
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Steve Wozniak thinks Apple should build an Android smartphone
Minuum Virtual Keyboard Maker Whirlscape Lands $500K From Y Combinator, BDC And More
Toronto-based startup Whirlscape has secured $500,000 in seed funding in a round that included Y Combinator, FundersClub, BDC Venture Capital and more, the company announced today. The startup created Minuum, a software keyboard that reduces occupied screen real estate to a single line, and that works with a range of devices, including wearables with small screens – or no screens at all.
The company launched its Minuum beta last year, and then made the software available to all on Google Play as a paid app later on. The 10-employee team has no only shown the value of its software on traditional hardware like smartphones, but also on devices breaking new ground in emerging categories, such as the Samsung Galaxy Gear, as seen in the video below.
Minuum made its debut on Indiegogo, where it managed to raise $87,354 over the course of its crowdfunding campaign, or almost nine times its original $10,000 goal. There’s a clear continued interest in alternative input methods for mobile devices, as evidenced by the success of others including Fleksy and SwiftKey. Growing interest in wearable tech, and the prospect of devices from major players like Google and Apple on the horizon have only served to fuel additional interest in alternative input methods for text and numbers.
“We’re working with a number of wearable device partners to try and really demonstrate the potential that Minuum has on their devices,” explained co-founder and CEO Will Walmsley in an interview. “I can’t get much more specific, but definitely there are a couple of smartwatches that we’re working with, and a couple of devices beyond smartwatches, too.”
Besides building wearable integrations, Whirlscape is also going to focus on growing its Android user base and engagement stats, leading up to the YC demo day in March, after which point Walmsley says they’ll probably turn their attention to bringing on new talent to add to the existing ten person team.
There will be a big reward for the first company to make it easy to do text input on a tiny, wrist-borne screen if the interest in smartwatches from big OEMs continues, so Whirlscape is smart to be trying to solve that problem early on.
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Descomplica Lands $5M From Social+Capital, AngelList’s First International Syndicate To Become Brazil’s Go-To Online Classroom
Internet penetration and social media usage are on the rise in every corner of the globe, but few can hold a candle to the level of adoption one finds in Brazil. According to the Internet Telecommunication Union, the UN’s specialized agency for information and communications technology, the percentage of people using the Internet in Brazil skyrocketed from 9 percent in 2002 to nearly 50 percent in 2012. What’s more, with over 60 million Facebook users, Brazil is now the third largest market for the social network outside of the U.S. and India.
Thanks to its high level of Internet usage and the growing popularity of social media, Brazil is undergoing a digital transformation, which brings with it a number of promising opportunities. While the growth of eCommerce in Brazil gets most of the attention, Descomplica is one of a growing number of local startups that sees big potential in Brazil’s rapidly changing educational landscape.
Thanks to its decentralized educational framework, Descomplica thinks that Brazil can not only serve as a sort of natural testing ground for educational innovation (and policy), but is primed for a true, online classroom. Launched in March of 2011, Descomplica has been on a mission to become the go-to, full-service online classroom for Brazil.
To do so, the company decided to start with the high school market, developing a content library and set of tools that aim to help students better prepare for university entrance exams and improve their test scores. Since then, Descomplica’s primary focus has been content, or said another way, on building out an extensive library of test prep materials and study guides and offering students as many ways to consume that material as possible.
While this has mainly taken the shape of online video content — as co-founder Marco Fisbhen tells us that the startup had more than three million students using its live online broadcasted lessons, for example — the startup has been keen to diversify. To cater to the growing mobile adoption among Brazilian teens, Descomplica offers SMS-based study tools as well, and is working with “three of the four big mobile phone carriers in Brazil,” the founder says. More than 200K students are now using the startup’s SMS-based mobile education services, he added.
This effort to provide full coverage for all the ways in which Brazilian students consume content led the company to develop a DVD collection for its content library, which ended up selling “hundreds of thousands of copies,” Fisbhen says. And, up to this point, all product decisions have been made in service of reducing the iniquity that they believe has come to define the Brazilian learning market. (Particularly, what Fisbhen describes as the astronomical price of quality tutoring services, which are really the only ones that provide any real value.)
With millions of students now using its online tutoring and learning resources, and having built a solid foundation through its content library which now includes over 10,000 videos, Descomplica is ready to take on a new round of capital to begin Phase Two. While the focus of Phase One was content and building its infrastructure, the thrust of Phase Two will be technology and distribution, the Descomplica founder says.
To help it invest in technological improvements, like refining the tools it uses to personalize its content, and to help not only build out a new recommendation system, but develop native apps and a real mobile platform, Descomplica has raised $5 million in Series B financing led by The Social+Capital Partnership.
The startup’s existing investors, like Peter Thiel’s international investment vehicle, Valar Ventures, Valor Capital Group and 500 Startups, also contributed to the round, along with a number of angel investors. In fact, these angels invested in Descomplica through an AngelList syndicate that the founder says is the first on AngelList to make an international investment and included investors like the platform’s own Naval Ravikant, as well as Eric Ries and David Sacks, among others.
As part of the new round, which brings the startup’s total funding to just over $7 million, Social+Capital Partner Brigette Lau will be joining Descomplica’s board of directors.
The key to Descomplica’s value proposition both now, and in the future, is that it takes a truly student-centric approach to both its product development strategy, and the philosophy of the business itself. This, reiterates Colingo co-founder and Descomplica investor Lee Jacobs, is what sets Descomplica apart from other players in the Latin American education market. And that’s reflected in the platform’s engagement rates, he says.
The keys to that, at least during “Phase One,” has been the development of a learning platform that goes beyond simply offering pre-recorded video lessons. The platform offers live, streaming classes 7 days a week, as well as live tutoring that includes comments, feedback and grades on prep essays, along with quizzes and “real-time answers.”
As Fisbhen told us when we first spoke, to build a successful online education company in Brazil, “at the end of the day, it’s not the algorithms that matter,” he said, “but finding a compelling, adaptive way to deliver subject matter from Brazil’s top educators.” If Descomplica can find creative ways to follow through with this promise, it very well could become one of the Pied Pipers to help usher in a new era of online education in Brazil.
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CoolaData Takes Its Behavior-Focused Analytics Platform Out Of Beta
Israeli startup CoolaData is taking its mobile and web analytics platform out of beta testing today and launching it in general availability.
CEO Tomer Ben Moshe pitched the service as a way “to answer complex business questions with the language that analysts can relate to” — in particular, to make it easy for e-commerce and gaming companies to get the very specific data that they might need.
“We believe that online businesses should change the way they analyze data,” Moshe said, “They need to move to a behavioral-based model … They will need both real-time and predictive capabilities, and not based on the regular [questions of] ‘What is your age? How much you spend?’ and so on.”
There are other analytics tools offering behavioral data, of course, but Moshe emphasized that behavior is really at the center of how CoolaData organizes its data, and that it allows customers to examine data in very granular ways. For example, he said the platform allows customers to find “the most popular session of a song streamed twice, leading to a purchase of more than $5,” or to “target users by city who purchased, then had another session but didn’t purchase again over time.”
CoolaData says it can bring together a customer’s data as well as external data sources. That data can then be queried using the CoolaSQL, the company’s extension of the SQL programming language — but you don’t actually need to know SQL to use the product. The company has built widgets on top of CoolaSQL for asking questions in regular English (you can see some sample widgets below), and it’s hoping other developers will build widgets too.
The final result of those queries is an analytical document, which can be stored, accessed, and embedded via Google Drive.
“CoolaData’s service helps us find answers to deep business questions, even questions which are clearly specific to our specialized service,” said mySupermarket CEo Allon Bloch in the launch release.
CoolaData raised a $7.4 million Series A last year.
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The 7th Annual Crunchies Awards Are In 4 Days And Tickets Are Almost Sold Out
Tickets for this year’s Crunchies are almost gone. The show is next week. A few tickets can still be had, but sections are selling out quickly. This is the biggest night of the year for Silicon Valley. Get dressed up and come celebrate technology with us.
Next Monday, starting at 7:30, we’ll take over the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco to recognize the best startups, founders, engineers and venture capitalists from last year. Along with Gigaom and VentureBeat, we’ll award 20 Crunchies in total ranging from Best Technology Achievement to Best Mobile Application to Founder of the Year.
John Oliver is hosting again this year. That alone is worth the price of admission.
The after party begins immediately following the ceremony at 9:00 pm until 11:30 pm. Admission to the party is included with a purchase of an Awards Ceremony ticket. As always there will be a hosted bar, music, and other fun surprises.
See you next week!
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Twitter offers researchers data grants to study your 140-character LOLs
Engadget UK Giveaway: Win an Advent Tegra Note 7 courtesy of NVIDIA
Ancient patent troll case against Motorola leaves jurors too baffled to reach a verdict
Google tweaks its search results to throw more YouTube music videos at you
Hechos verdaderos que suenan como si fueran falsos, pero no
Kottke extrajo algunas de las mejores afirmaciones de esta curiosa y sorprendente lista que hace las rondas por Internet de vez en cuando: What’s the most bullshit-sounding-but-true fact you know? (Afirmaciones que suenan a gilipolleces pero son verdad).
A destacar:
Cuando te hacen un transplante de riñón normalmente se dejan los riñones originales en su sitio y te ponen el nuevo en la pelvis.
Hay suficientes direcciones de Internet IPv6 como para que cada átomo de la superficie de nuestro planeta tuviera una distinta; de hecho sobrarían unas 100 veces más.
La superficie de Rusia es mayor que la del planeta enano Plutón: 17 millones de km² frente a 16,7 millones.)
Cuando se construyó la Gran Pirámide de Guiza todavía existían mamuts vivos
Los seres humanos compartimos el 50 por ciento de nuestros genes con los plátanos.
Y recordad:
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Experience life as an England rugby player with an Oculus Rift, nine GoPros and zero bruises
A este bolígrafo «infinito» nunca se le acabará la tinta
Diseñado por Pininfarina y Napkin el [PDF] 4 Ever Cambiano Inkless Pen es un bolígrafo que no utiliza tinta para escribir, sino que mancha el papel con una punta metálica específica que permite «escribir indefinidamente sin tinta y sin necesitar recargas».
Tanto el diseño del bolígrafo como su nombre proceden del Cambiano, un vehículo conceptual presentado hace un par de años por el diseñador que ha dado forma a buena parte de los Ferrari y a otros muchos coches.
Vía Uncrate.
- Un bolígrafo con wifi que transfiere lo que se escribe en papel a Evernote
- El bolígrafo que es también compás, transportador de ángulos y regla
- Líneas rectas y de medida exacta sin usar una regla
- Un bolígrafo con escáner (o un escáner del tamaño de un bolígrafo)
- 3Doodler: el bolígrafo para dibujar en 3D (¡físico!)
- Enviar mensajes por Internet, pero desde el bolígrafo
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