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Tape.tv Raises $6.2 Million To Begin An International Roll-Out

admin — Thu, 24 May 2012 01:57:16 +0000

tape.tv has been around for a while – since July 2008 to be exact. It operates like a mix between an online version of MTV and Pandora. Just like the latter service, on Tape.tv users can skip, like or dislike the videos as they play, so the service starts to tailor itself to their tastes. I came across it in various visits to Berlin over the last couple of years but have been frustrated that this great service has only been aimed at the German market. However, I’m excited that it’s about to scale into new countries. The company has now raised €5 million ($6.2 million) in a Series B funding round. Participants include Atlantic Capital Partners GmbH , Dario Suter, Christoph Daniel and Marc Schmidhelny (DCM), prolific Berlin Angel investor Christophe Maire, alongside Investitionsbank Berlin and VC Kreativwirtschaft Berlin. The cash will be used to scale the business, appear on other platforms like smart TVs and launches into France and the UK in early autumn. The relaunch will also see the creation of an electronic program guide (EPG) for their own live shows and events. Its tape.tv’s catalogue of 45,000 videos has attracted around 3.5 million users in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, its main markets since it launched in July 2008. The company managed to navigate the tricky music licensing laws in Germany, which has seen YouTube hobbled in some areas. Founded by Conrad Fritzsch (CEO) and Stephanie Renner, Tape.tv plans to have an editorial team in each region it launches in, programming its sub channels, like Indie and Hip-Hop. Fritzsch says the company is now aiming at the convergence of Internet and TV towards SmartTV and hopes to extend to mobile as well. “The future of tape.tv will also be more social, based on user behaviour” he says. The company has 65 employees, many of them selling ads around the videos, and also has a real TV show on on the ZDFkultur channel in Germany. But it’s a lucrative business. It’s claiming to be running on €20 million in annual revenues. In Germany it has plenty of strategic partners, including ZDF.kultur, bild.de und spiegel.de and apps with Facebook, Spotify and Last.fm.

Hearst’s Latest Social Launch: A Redbook App For Father’s Day

admin — Thu, 24 May 2012 01:54:35 +0000

Hearst is best known as print publisher, but this year its digital arm has been making a big push into social media. Its latest effort is a Father’s Day themed Facebook app for Redbook magazine . In order to use the Father’s Day app, people need to “like” the Redbook Facebook page. Once you’ve done that, you can bring up a list of all the dads in your network. Then you can post a Father’s Day message to any of their Facebook Walls, and optionally, on yours too. I was a little surprised to see the app coming from Redbook, which targets young married women — not necessarily the first audience I’d think of when it comes to celebrating Father’s Day. However, Brian Madden, director of social at Hearst Digital Media, points out that the emphasis is on thanking not just your father, but all the dads you know, whether it’s your husband, your brother, your uncle, or whomever. He also says this is a way for Redbook to leverage its fans to get into “the feeds of other like-minded women.” While I was interested in hearing about the Redbook app, I also wanted to get an update on Hearst’s general social strategy. Apparently Madden’s team was just created in February, and it’s focusing on two main strategies — increasing social sharing from Hearst websites, while also creating social network-specific experiences to engage fans. “The philosophy right now is to make sure that we have social strategies that pay,” says VP of Digital Grant Whitmore. “And when I say pay, I don’t necessarily mean in a monetary sense. We know that our social strategy can’t just be about counts of fans and followers, but it has to be tied to some measurable engagement.” When it comes to measurable engagement Hearst says the numbers are going up. In the first quarter of the year, on-site sharing was up 74 percent, and in April, Facebook drove a record 2 million visits to Hearst site. During that month, the reach of Hearst publications’ Facebook posts and pages also increased 30 percent compared to March.

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Hearst’s Latest Social Launch: A Redbook App For Father’s Day

KPCB’s Chi-Hua Chien: The Next Wave Of Tech Disruption Will Hit Commerce

admin — Thu, 24 May 2012 01:51:01 +0000

Technology has helped to level the playing field across a wide range of industries, letting more individuals come to the table in fields such as publishing, entertainment and, of course, building web startups. And according to Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers partner Chi-Hua Chien , the next space ripe for a big tech-powered wave of democratization is commerce. In an on-stage conversation with David Kirkpatrick at the TechCrunch NYC Disrupt conference Wednesday afternoon, Chien explained how tech has helped flatten a number of previously stratified spaces. The mid- to late-90′s saw the democratization of information — companies such as Google made data available to everyone, no matter where or who they were. After that came the democratization of distribution, with services such as Twitter and Facebook allowing anyone to broadcast their content and potentially attract an audience. The democratization of computing has occurred as well, with billions of people in the world now having access to computers because of the availability of low-cost mobile devices. Up next? The world of shopping and selling. “We’re now entering an era around the democratization of commerce,” Chien said. The past, he said, has been about “mass aggregation,” with companies such as Safeway and Wal-Mart rising to the top of the commerce space by simply being the best at aggregating a suite of products into one space. These big companies also built up their own brand names to make shoppers feel secure in buying things from them. Today, though, we are starting to “see an unwinding of aggregation of commerce as technology starts to disrupt” the industry, Chien said. “If you think about what a Wal-Mart does, it aggregates credibility and inventory,” Chien said. Credibility is the Wal-Mart brand name, and the inventory is simply products and storage. Today, credibility can be established by smaller players via social media, and real estate and inventory can be outsourced much easier. Chien pointed to two Kleiner Perkins portfolio companies to illustrate this movement: Square , which he said is democratizing becoming a merchant, and Zaarly for democratizing the ability to do a particular job. In a short conversation off-stage, he told me that Gumroad is also one of the Kleiner-backed startups that is leading the way toward big commerce disruption. Looking at Kleiner Perkins itself, Chien not surprisingly declined from discussing the lawsuit filed by investment partner Ellen Pao (the news of which TechCrunch was the first to break yesterday) during his fireside chat. But, he did shed some light on the firm’s larger strategy, in particular its increasing focus on making digital investments, after a few years of being more well-known for making moves in the green tech space. “In the last five years, [Kleiner has] added four investing partners focusing on consumer digital,” Chien said.

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KPCB’s Chi-Hua Chien: The Next Wave Of Tech Disruption Will Hit Commerce

9M Users Strong, MapMyFitness Brings Check-Ins, Advanced Google Maps Integration To Fitness Tracking

user — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:47:27 +0000

MapMyFitness is a veteran of the online health and fitness space, with the first iteration of its website appearing back in the summer of 2005. Since then, the startup has developed a suite of fitness-oriented websites (like MapMyRUN.com, MapMyRIDE.com, MapMyWALK.com, et al) to let users track and store their running, cycling, walking and hiking endeavors, along with accessing a database of international routes, fitness calculators, nutrition tracking, events listings and more. MapMyFitness has long had a stable community of committed users, but over the last year, things have been moving steadily north. CEO Richard Jalichandra (who joined the startup from Technorati last year) tells us that MapMyFitness recently passed 9 million registered users, and that, collectively, its mobile apps have amassed over 30 million downloads, making it one of the biggest players in the fitness tracking space. The good news for MapMyFitness, however, has been the recent telescoping growth in registrations (not downloads), with the latest 1 million registrations occurring over the last 40 days. That’s an increase from the 54 days it took for the site to go from 6 million to 7 million users, and the 47 days it took to pass 8 million users. All in all, that’s 3 million new users in the last 5 months, and the CEO says the company is today seeing 25K new registrations a day, significant when viewed against its nearly 7-year history. It’s based on this recent uptick in activity that MapMyFitness is today launching one of the biggest feature updates the platform has seen since rebranding in 2007. The startup has completely rebuilt its portfolio of websites, and is now beta testing three big new features: Updated routes, personal challenges, and courses, with the main attraction, Jalichandra says, being the latter. The CEO claims that the introduction of its new feature makes MapMyFitness the only online fitness service to have integrated Google Maps API v3.9 (the latest version of its API) and leverage its full functionality. What does that mean? While MapMyFitness users could already plan, track, and share their routes, Jalichandra says that Courses adds a notable difference in performance and user experience, enabling users to go beyond the actual route. By incorporating realtime info on traffic, weather, safe routes, directions, realtime elevation, and custom markers, now users can go beyond the route, planning the best Segway route home from work, for example.. Really, the feature is intended to bring MapMyFitness into the gamification/Foursquare era, as it provides both hardcore and casual athletes with both leaderboards and check-ins. Courses offers an automatic “check-in activity” for every exercise logged to track the speed, distance, consistency, and intensity of workouts, ranking users by gender, age, and weigh on the platform’s new leaderboard. There’s also a group segmenting feature that allows users to compare themselves, leaderboard-style, against specific groups, be they local clubs, friends, or fierce cycling rivals, backed by a points system that incorporates personal best times and monthly consistency, awarding badges to the users with the most overall points on climbing courses, those with the most completions of a course, the fastest time, etc., etc. Courses will span MapMyFitness’ five primary categories, including cycling, running, walking, hiking and winter sports, as well as hundreds of subcategory specialties (like unicycling) and enables users to create new Courses directly from their iPhones, BlackBerrys, Androids, Windows Mobile phones and iPads. It also helps that Courses leverages the startup’s database of more than 50 million routes, 1 million climbs, and 30K event courses through realtime processing, allowing users to measure fitness and track progress in realtime or over time. With RunKeeper on a laudable mission to build “the health graph,” alongside an API that’s already attracted 50+ integrations , big funding , and a platform that’s quickly becoming one of the top destinations for tracking and sharing fitness routines, incumbents are feeling a little bit of pressure. But, as its name implies, MapMyFitness does maps better than most, especially now that it is powering its new features with Google’s latest mapping technology. According to the startup’s CEO, other than Strava , MapMyFitness is the only platform that offers realtime GPS activity leaderboards, and he thinks that components of the service, like route mapping, the ability to send a route to your phone to route with directions, along with the ability to choose from over 40 sports give its service a leg up on the competition. MapMyFitness also capitalizes on three revenue streams: Media, digital commerce and subscriptions, and enterprise software, with this diversity resulting in the startup’s revenue doubling each of the last four years, the CEO says, and is projected to triple in 2012. This has allowed the startup to avoid raising outside investment beyond its series A in 2010 and to grow, under its own volition, to a team of 78, giving it an advantage over its competition in terms of good old human capital. With its a deep database of courses, routes and trails, some added stickiness thanks to leaderboards and check-ins, and some big data collection and storage capabilities on the back-end using postGIS, it wouldn’t be surprising to see MapMyFitness continue in its accelerating growth trajectory. And maybe even find a little funding waiting in the wings. Also, don’t be surprised if MapMyFitness ends up being featured by Google at some point. My guess would be here . Courses will be available initially through a private beta test for first 100,000 users who sign up here . iPhone and Android MMF users will only see superficial changes reflected in its new site — now available to one and all — at new.mapmyfitness.com . Widespread access to Courses et al will be offered later this summer. What do you think?

The Final Six Disrupt NYC Startups: Ark, Babelverse, gTar, Open Garden, Sunglass, Uberconference

vertical8 — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:10:13 +0000

It has been a wild week so far at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City . Rainstorms and traffic jams couldn’t stop nearly 2,000 people from making it to our big weekend hackathon, and our last two days of interviews, panels and startup presentations over at Pier 94 in Hell’s Kitchen. Tomorrow is going to be the grand finale. Following an announcement from the White House’s top tech officers, interviews with Brooklyn hardware makers, the appearance of an entrepreneurial movie star, and much more, we’re going to be hearing from the top final six companies from our Startup Battlefield. The winner will be selected tomorrow afternoon by our panel of all-star tech judges : top New York entrepreneur Chris Dixon , Google executive Marissa Mayer , leading New York investor Fred Wilson , Kleiner Perkins partner Chi-Hua Chien , Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha , plus TechCrunch founder and CrunchFund investor Michael Arrington . Here are the six finalists appearing on stage tomorrow, in alphabetical order: Ark, the people search engine that was so popular with users on Monday that the carefully-prepared company got taken offline. Babelverse, the human-powered translation service that won its way out of one hundred companies in Startup Alley. Gtar, the iPhone-guitar hardware startup that has blown past its goal on Kickstarter after launching on stage. Open Garden, the mobile app that lets you tether Internet connections across multiple devices. Sunglass.io, which is bringing 3D modeling to the browser for designers everywhere. Uberconference, the cross-platform service that makes conference calling easy for everyone. See you all tomorrow!

About Last Night Wants To Improve Your Nightlife By Making It Even More Social

kram412 — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:56:26 +0000

They say that all work and no play makes for some dull boys, and I think brothers Darren and Derek Dodge would definitely agree with that sentiment. The two of them have just launched a new iPhone app called About Last Night here on our Disrupt stage that aims to connect fans of the nightlife and help them find the best parties, clubs, concerts, and games every night. “We like to think of ourselves as a social network completely geared around nightlife,” Darren told me. About Last Night is a simple service to get started with — after logging in with their Facebook credentials, users can share photos and videos of where they are, tag their Facebook friends, and upvote the events they attend if they’re particularly good. Images of events and venues that are especially well-rated are pushed to the top of the app’s main activity feed and can even garner bronze, silver, and gold medals to highlight just how good a time everyone is having. Those posts can be set to private if users want to keep some parts of their night hush-hush, but they generally don’t last too long anyway. In a bid to make sure users come back again and again, those posts will disappear after 48 hours. Users can navigate through the app by swiping left and right from the main landing page — they’ll always be just a swipe or two away from listings of nearby events, friend activity, and locations that they’ve chosen to follow. Tapping an icon on the top left causes the entire panel to slide to the right, revealing a control panel a la the Facebook iOS app from which users can search for their friends on ALN. With all the location posting, About Last Night sounds a bit reminiscent of Foursquare. Indeed, the brothers Dodge told me that Foursquare got people into the rhythm of checking in, a behavior they’re clearly keen to harness. Still, their unwavering focus on the nightlife also means that their audience of potential users are avowed fans of finding things to do into the wee hours of the morning, an audience that they believe plenty of brands are itching to reach. While the brothers are all about making sure you get to have a good time — the idea struck them while enjoying the heady party scene in college, after all — they also want brands and venues to be able to connect directly with their users. “Brands spend billions of dollars yearly on the nightlife,” Darren noted to me. “But they’ve had no other way to reach these people other than advertising.” Then plan to do this by giving them the ability to create sponsored and contextual posts to be injected into the streams of users who follow specific brands or venues. Those venues will also be able to offer discounts and deals a la Groupon to lure people through their doors. But that will all come in time, and they tell me that they don’t plan to monetize the service yet — they’re planning to flip that switch within the next few months. Disrupt Q&A Q: How big a market can this address? What are the demographics? A: Nightlife is huge, we think that college kids we be heavy users, but anyone who goes out often will benefit. Q: Do you have a sense of the scale needed to attract national brands A: We’re already talking to big brands — Sam Adams for one. Q: How you brands know when to send out deals? A: Will be able to detect when a user is actually at the location, businesses will create their targeted posts from a web front-end. Q: How will heavy partiers remember to set their sensitive posts to private? A: There’s a rocker directly in the Post page that’s pretty hard to miss.

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About Last Night Wants To Improve Your Nightlife By Making It Even More Social

Ron Conway Will “Never” Run For Mayor Of San Francisco

vertical8 — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:50:05 +0000

In case you were wondering: Ron Conway says he will not be running for mayor of San Francisco. Apparently that was on Mike Arrington’s mind when he interviewed Conway and SV Angel partner David Lee on-stage at Disrupt today. He said he heard from more than one source that Conway is considering a run “somewhere down the line,” and asked flat-out if that’s true. “That’s a rumor I can assure you is false,” Conway replied. “There’s an old saying: ‘Never say never.’ I actually believe in that saying, but I will never run for mayor of San Francisco.” Had he explored it at all? “Not for a nanosecond.” The idea isn’t quite as out-of-left-field as it sounds. Conway has been visibly involved in civic issues recently — apparently he met with Senator Chuck Schumer recently to discuss SOPA/PIPA and immigration issues, and along with current Mayor Ed Lee and former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, he recently helped launch a program called sfCITI aimed at helping the tech industry and the city work together. (In fact, Conway’s relationship with Mayor Lee seemed close enough to prompt a largely critical Bay Citizen article printed in The New York Times .) When grilled about how much of his time he’s “throwing away on government work” (Arrington’s words), Conway estimated that it was 20 percent. On the mayoral question, Conway’s response might seem pretty definitive, but Arrington wasn’t satisfied. He asked if Conway might be lying. (Conway: “I would never lie to you about this.”) Later, he asked again Conway was running. “Last time I checked 10 minutes ago, I was not running for mayor,” Conway said.

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Ron Conway Will “Never” Run For Mayor Of San Francisco

Now On Your iPhone, ReadyForZero Is Ready To Save You From Debt

jos — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:30:21 +0000

YC alum ReadyForZero , an online financial service that’s trying to get people out of debt faster, is today expanding to mobile with the launch of its first mobile app. For now, the experience is designed mainly to give you at-a-glance insight into your current debt situation. However, the mobile app also uses iOS push notifications to alert you to large purchases and payments which could impact your financial goals. Says ReadyForZero CEO and co-founder Rod Ebrahimi, this feature is designed to “keep you honest,” similar to the free ReadyForZero credit card stickers , which shame you into putting your card back into your wallet. As with the stickers, ReadyForZero’s push notifications are like nagging reminders when you’re not staying on course. But while the stickers are like a simpler solution than having to put your credit card in ice (yep, this is a thing), the app’s push notifications aren’t just about keeping you from being naughty – they also alert you when you complete financial goals, make payments, or the interest rate changes. For those unfamiliar with the service, ReadyForZero automatically imports data from your bank accounts, credit card accounts and loans, then uses this information to actively make recommendations as to when you’re able to make extra payments in order to save on interest. It can also alert you to the repercussions that recent big-ticket purchases will have on your plans to pay down your debt within a given timeframe, and can suggest ways you can get back on track. The mobile app, like the desktop-size website, lets you track your progress, payments and view all your accounts (loans, credit cards, etc.). Ebrahimi says that he knew now was the right time to go mobile because of the huge problem with student loan debt in particular. “Earlier this year, total outstanding student loan debt surpassed $1 trillion, overtaking total outstanding credit card debt,” he says. And on July 1st, the federal student loan rate is scheduled to double from 3.4% to 6.8%, he adds, depending on the results of this vote. In other words, it’s a good time to expand the ReadyForZero service to other platforms – especially one favored by students (their phones). The iOS app is going live now in iTunes. And yes, Android version is in the works.

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Now On Your iPhone, ReadyForZero Is Ready To Save You From Debt

Amazon Appstore For Android Now Lets Users Test Drive Apps Right On Their Devices

admin — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:23:09 +0000

Unless an app you have your eye happens to have a free demo version to muck about with, there’s little one can do to try out an Android app on a device in advance. Sure, you could buy the app straight from the Google Play Store and get a refund within 15 minutes if you’re not satisfied, but Amazon has a new solution in place that helps take the friction out of that testing process. The latest update for the Amazon Appstore Android app packs a welcome surprise — instead of being stuck Test Driving your apps on your PC, you’ll now be able to do it from directly within the app . Well, some of you will be able to do it. Not every Android phone will be able to take part in the Test Drive program quite yet, as Amazon points out that the service is only set up to work with certain devices for now. My Galaxy Nexus doesn’t seem to be on the list at the moment, and Engadget reports that the immensely popular Galaxy S II is similarly shut out of the fun. Still, it seems to be quite a treat for the devices that do work (Amazon doesn’t have a list of supported hardware just yet). Once you’ve got the updated app in place, you’ll see a nice big Test Drive button under the images on an app’s landing page. The new feature leans heavily on Amazon’s massive EC2 backend — once the Test Drive button is pressed, an instance of the app starts running on EC2 server, with inputs being sent to the server and video/audio being sent back to the device. It’ll be interesting to see how well the feature actually works, but methinks I’ll have to dig through my box of Android gadgets for a bit before I find something that plays actually plays nice with it.

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Amazon Appstore For Android Now Lets Users Test Drive Apps Right On Their Devices

Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, And Others Will Share Wi-Fi Hot Spots

kram412 — Tue, 22 May 2012 01:19:51 +0000

Imagine for a moment that you are sitting in your front yard in a lawn chair, sipping lemonade while attempting to read the latest news on your WiFi-only iPad. You’re just out of range of your WiFi signal. Your neighbor’s signal is super strong, but that selfish hooligan didn’t leave it wide open for you to leach onto. Relax. Depending on where you live and who your service provider is, you may be able to use your neighbor’s hotspot regardless of his futile attempts to lock it down someday soon. A consortium of cable companies (Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp., Bright House Networks LLC and Cox Communications Inc) have agreed to enable the sharing of WiFi hotspots at a grand scale, creating a large region of available signal, in select markets in the U.S. According to the Wall Street Journal, a single hotspot name and sign on scenario will be used to make it easier for consumers to log in and use available spectrum to surf. It will be a perk for paying broadband account holders in the consortium, but certain providers like Time Warner will let you pay as you go if you like. I assume there will be measures in place to prevent people from consuming all of the available bandwidth of someone else’s node, but they haven’t explicitly laid out how or when throttling will occur. [via WSJ ]

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Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, And Others Will Share Wi-Fi Hot Spots