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Qwiki Launches A Publishing Platform For ABC News And Others

Achilles — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:05:44 +0000

Qwiki , the startup that won Disrupt in San Francisco two years ago , is announcing a new platform today for bloggers and other online publishers. The company’s initial product basically assembled a multimedia “story” around Wikipedia articles, with images, videos, maps, and more. But the vision was bigger — to present a new kind of information experience. Now Qwiki is pitching its platform as a way for publishers to quickly and easily create short, interactive stories, which can be embedded on the publisher site and also featured in a “channel” on Qwiki. Initial partners include ABC News, which is embedding Qwikis throughout its website, and fashion publisher Stylecaster . You can watch some of the sample ABC News Qwikis here . In some ways, they look like regular news broadcasts, but presumably assembled with much less time and effort thanks to Qwiki’s technology, and with a layer of light interactivity (allowing viewers to drill down on individual topics). “What interested us in being the first media organization to use Qwiki’s innovative new video format is the ease with which reporters and producers can create informative and creative video content in almost no time,” says Maya Baratz, senior product manager at ABC News. “We plan to use Qwikis regularly on ABCNews.com and Goodmorningamerica.com on Yahoo!” Qwiki seemed to have a bumpy 2011. It raised $9 million from big-name investors including Lightbank (the investment fund of Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky) and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, then released an impressive iPad app that took off quickly . However, it also lost its famous co-founder Louis Monier (who founded search engine AltaVista) and other technical executives . This might look like a new direction, but a Qwiki spokesperson tells me, “This isn’t a pivot.” He says the startup will continue working on its consumer products, while also making this platform available to consumers soon. Qwiki will be demonstrating the platform at Disrupt this afternoon.

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Qwiki Launches A Publishing Platform For ABC News And Others

Startup Alley Is Doin’ It, And Doin’ It, And Doin’ It Well

jos — Wed, 23 May 2012 19:34:26 +0000

Every time I think TC Disrupt’s Startup Alley can’t get any better, it does. TC Europe Editor Mike Butcher and I ventured into the chaos, accosted at every turn by startups from across the world. We even had a startup, iLiftOff, fly all the way in from Mumbai on a 21-hour flight. It’s almost a shame that we can’t have all the Startup Alley companies in the Battlefield, but at the same time, the beauty of the alley is that we can talk to them for far longer than six minutes. And we often do. In this particular video, we checked out LocalBonus, LiveAll, Jaxx, ScreachTV, iLiftOff, ColourDNA, Snoozy, and Speaktoit. You can view all of our Startup Alley companies right here .

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Startup Alley Is Doin’ It, And Doin’ It, And Doin’ It Well

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!

The 15 Startups That Launched At Disrupt NYC Day 2. Who’s Your Favorite?

kram412 — Wed, 23 May 2012 03:37:32 +0000

Disrupt NYC day two has just wrapped up. During the conference today, Michael Arrington demanded to know from Ron Conway when he was going to run for Mayor of San Francisco (he kept saying he would “never” ), our very own Josh Constine grilled Tim Armstrong with questions about AOL, layoffs, which publication he likes more: Huffington Post or TechCrunch (he said “both”), and we watched 15 more amazing startups battle it out for the ultimate Disrupt prize — the Disrupt Cup and $50,000. Starting tomorrow at 3:30pm ET we will have our Startup Battlefield Disrupt finals. Yesterday, we wrote detailed articles with pictures and pitches from all of the startups who presented . Below are the ones who were featured today. Out of these 30 companies, both from yesterday and today, five will be chosen to fight it out for the ultimate prize. We will have an all-star panel of judges tomorrow for the finals and things will probably get intense; people always get a little crazy at the finals, but as you can imagine, it’s a blast to watch. So, take your time in reviewing all of the stellar startups below. Compared to the brilliant ones yesterday , which startup do you think will make it to the finals? Going further, any guesses on who you think will win it all? Tune in tomorrow for the results! Session 4: Disrupting Local SpotlessCity SpotlessCity helps local dry cleaners connect with customers in a brand new way and lets people finally get their clothes cleaned in the same convenient way they already handle all of their other chores – online. Mirth Mirth is a principled objection to the frenzy of details. It’s a card-linked loyalty experience for the regulars of business with character. SnipSnap SnipSnap is the first mobile application to let you scan, save, and redeem printed coupons on your smartphone. It was featured by Apple on the App Store front page and rose to a top-50 ranking after going live. Centzy Compare services in your area by price, rating, hours, and more. We use paid crowdsourcing to gather comprehensive data from every local business, including the 75% of them that don’t post their information anywhere else online. Cardify Unlock VIP rewards and perks at your favorite places when you pay with a credit card that’s connected to Cardify…. throw away your punch cards and keep that phone in your pocket. Session 5: Disrupting Collaboration Vinlymint Vinlymint is a real-time creation web application that easily fits into your existing production methods, allows you to store and manage projects from a single place and collaborate with anyone, anytime and anywhere. Postwire Postwire enables you to make a private webpage for each client. You can collect videos, photos, web links, and documents and share them on each client’s private page. Sunglass Sunglass is a cloud-based platform that enables designers to collaboratively build tomorrow’s products, buildings and cities, democratizing access to 3D content across formats. Talkdesk Talkdesk allows any company to create a call center in 5 minutes – all in the browser. Apptegic Apptegic helps online businesses keep and up-sell their existing customers. Use Apptegic’s online service to understand each of your customer’s visit patterns, actions, and business metrics and to respond appropriately in real-time. Session 6: Disrupting Identity Networks Hmmm Hmmm empowers you to express and share your life without inhibitions. You can tailor your online-identity like you do in the real-world, as you interact and selectively share with people from every walk of life. Social Stock Social Stock is a stock market of places and people, where every place and person has a stock price based on their social interactions and enables trading social shares in places and people. About Last Night About Last Night is your social network for nightlife. It’s about the party last night, the concert last night, or the date last night. Do you want to know where the hot party is happening, where your friends are, or what is happening at your favorite hangout? Do you want to know who is performing at your favorite club, or learn about special deals and offers? Are you visiting from out-of-town and want to know where to go? About Last Night is for you. Hownow Hownow is a mobile app that allows users to post geo-fenced messages in order to have semi-anonymous, locally relevant conversations. Buyou (Startup Alley Audience Choice Winner) Buyou is a free online mall that aggregates various brands into one beautiful, easy to use interface. And while it’s great that the app begins learning your taste through your likes and dislikes, it’s even better that it relays that information back to its brand partners. This means that a retailer like Express will begin to learn the clothes you like and more asily target clothing you may enjoy to you. All in all, it was a very fun day. And will be even more fun tomorrow. See you then.

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The 15 Startups That Launched At Disrupt NYC Day 2. Who’s Your Favorite?

Women At Kleiner Perkins: By The Numbers

Budowniczy425 — Wed, 23 May 2012 03:33:51 +0000

As TechCrunch was the first to report , Ellen Pao , an investment partner at Sand Hill Road venture capital stalwart Kleiner Perkins , has filed a lawsuit alleging that during her seven year career there she has been the victim of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and acts of retaliation for rebuffing unwated advances and reporting her alleged experiences. You can find a full rundown of her complaint here , along with the lawsuit document in its entirety. In a statement sent today to TechCrunch, Kleiner Perkins said the suit is without merit and vowed to “vigorously defend” itself regarding the matter. It’s all shocking for a lot of reasons, one of them being how it seems so contrary to Kleiner Perkins’ longtime reputation. Kleiner Perkins has had a sterling image for years, and it has actually become known for being especially female-friendly. The VC space is widely known for being a boys’ club, but Kleiner Perkins has actually been one firm that’s seen as bucking that trend. KPCB has assembled a partner roster with a particularly healthy number of females in leadership positions — Aileen Lee , Juliet deBaubigny , Beth Seidenberg , and Mary Meeker are among its current senior investment team. In a recent roundup of female investors in the tech space by Whitney Hess, KPCB was found to have the highest ratio of female investors — 10 out of 44 — of any other VC she compared it to. Today, there are a total of 12 female partners at Kleiner Perkins, nine of whom are investing partners. Overall, when it comes to women in the tech investing space, Kleiner Perkins has historically been perceived as one of the good guys. This news is still breaking in many ways, so it will be fascinating to see how it plays out.

Startup Alley Day 2 — It’s A Jungle Out There, But The Startups Keep Coming

admin2 — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:35:30 +0000

Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt makes for a pretty grueling experience when so many companies are pitching every passer-by. But Jordan Crook and I went in feet first to check out some of the startups there. In scenes more reminiscent of tag-team pro-wrestling, or perhaps a sort of Startup relay race, we tag-teamed around and interviewed a bunch of them including Jaxx, Screach, Fanitics, Edaman, SnapCrowd, ColourDNA, Atticous and BuzzCard. Check all of Tuesday’s startups out here . We also took a trip over to the Israeli Pavilion to check out the likes of Drippler and Vodio among others. Enjoy!

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Startup Alley Day 2 — It’s A Jungle Out There, But The Startups Keep Coming

SAP To Acquire Ariba For $4.3 Billion

jos — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:08:31 +0000

Business software giant SAP announced today that it will acquire Ariba’s cloud -based business commerce network for approximately $4.3 billion. SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., is offering $45 per share for the platform, and plans to close the deal during the third quarter, pending Ariba shareholder approval of the sale. Ariba had 100.2 million shares on the market, as of March 31st, according to an AP report citing FactSet data. The Ariba board of directors has already unanimously approved the transaction. The per share purchase price represents a 20% premium over the May 21 closing price and a 19% premium over the one month volume weighted average price per share, says SAP. The deal will be funded from SAP’s free cash and a €2.4 billion term loan facility and is expected to be accretive to SAP’s non-IFRS earnings per share in 2013. SAP says the acquisition will combine Ariba’s successful buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP’s own customer base and solutions in order to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud. Sunnyvale-based Ariba has approximately 2,600 employees, $444 million in total revenue, and experienced 38.5 percent annual growth in 2011. Its business network recorded 62 percent organic growth in the same period. With the addition of Ariba, SAP will acquire the leader in cloud-based collaborative business commerce. The focus of Ariba’s business is in procurement, spend management, and supplier discovery, and is partnered with major ERP suppliers, including SAP, as well as Salesforce, IBM and Oracle. “The cloud has profoundly changed the way people interact. The impact will be even greater as enterprises connect and collaborate in new ways with their global networks of customers and partners,” SAP Co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe said in a statement . “Cloud-based collaboration is redefining business network innovation, and we are catching this wave in the early stage of its evolution. The addition of Ariba will create the business network of the future, deliver immediate value to our customers and provide another solid engine for driving SAP’s growth in the cloud.”

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SAP To Acquire Ariba For $4.3 Billion

Apptegic Uses Big Data Analysis To Help Companies Retain And Upsell Their Customers

Budowniczy425 — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:00:15 +0000

For SaaS companies, whose customers are usually signed up on recurring monthly billing cycles, the art of retaining customers is just as important as winning them over in the first place. In fact, it’s probably more important, since customers aren’t tied in to long-term deals. It’s also a lot cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. So they need to better understand them and work harder to keep them coming back, which is where Apptegic comes in. The startup, which is being launched as part of TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, uses big data to provide detailed analytics that companies can use to better engage with their customers. To do so, Apptegic is introducing what it calls a “customer guidance system” (CGS) to identify trends among customer usage and to give them tools to message users in real time and suggest new features that they can use. Founders Karl Wirth and Greg Hinkle worked together at Red Hat, where they built operations management tools for SaaS companies. What they found was that there weren’t a lot of tools out there to help those businesses understand their customers and retain them. So they set out to build those tools. Apptegic provides a cloud-based platform that essentially uses big data to analyze behavioral click-through data from customer interactions, then scores the engagement so that businesses can know which features customers find important, and which aren’t. What’s sticky, and what keeps customers coming back. Once a business recognizes that, it can build tools to improve the way that it interacts with those customers. They can customize those reports based on the data that they find important. Apptegic customers can also use the platform to set rules around certain types of customer usage and message their users in real time. That can help guide them to features that they might not be aware of, or to help upsell them on features they haven’t yet bought. Currently Apptegic is focused on web applications, but Wirth told me that it’s looking to extend onto other platforms, and could optimize for mobile applications. It’s currently working with 30 beta customers, but will be launching the cloud-based service this week to add more trial users. Apptegic has five employees now, and has raised $2 million from Point Judith Capital, Advanced Technology Ventures, Jit Saxena, and other angel investors. Disrupt Q&A Q: What do you include that current systems don’t? A: We combine real-time click-stream data and real-time messaging. Q: What was the Ah-ha moment that told you the world needs this? A: We were working with a lot of customers and realized that there were a lot of people building this themselves. Q: How is this more than Google Analytics? A: This gives you information down to the user and offer the opportunity to reach them in real-time. Q: Where are you in terms of launching, and what’s the revenue model? A: We’re launching today and starting to charge today. We charged based on the number of end users that our customers reach.

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Apptegic Uses Big Data Analysis To Help Companies Retain And Upsell Their Customers

From SF Disrupt To 500 Startups, CardFlick’s Next Trick Is Managing Your Personal Connections

admin2 — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:00:03 +0000

The winner of the Audience Choice Award during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco , CardFlick launched with an application for building digital business cards on your mobile device and sharing them with new contacts. Rather than bumping to share those cards, users “flick” them to other users who have downloaded the app. After that, the next step was refining things. To do that, CardFlick has joined the most recent 500 Startups Accelerator class and is working on the next big transition in its evolution. To start, it’s adding more features and functionality around its core card product. While CardFlick initially launched with a limited number of themes, it has been working on providing more customization for its users. The startup is currently doing that through its Instacards site. The next version of the CardFlick app — which will be released over the next few weeks — will bring similar customization features available to the app itself. But CardFlick founder Ketan Anjaria sees an even bigger opportunity ahead. The team brought on Jared Kopf, cofounder and CEO of deals company HomeRun ( acquired by Rearden Commerce last September), as an adviser. And as part of its 500 Startups experience, it’s begun working on expanding beyond just business cards and the way people present themselves to others. It’s all part of a pivot toward the introduction of a new product that will be introduced at 500 Startups Accelerator demo days on July 17-18 in Mountain View and July 23 in New York City.

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From SF Disrupt To 500 Startups, CardFlick’s Next Trick Is Managing Your Personal Connections