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The FitBark Pet Activity Monitor Is A Reasonable Device For Pet Owners
May 01, 11:39PM
I don't want to awaken the ire of any committed pet owners but I would be lying if I said I didn't cringe a little bit when I hear about extreme pet products and services like doggie treadmills, pet psychiatrists or pet fitness centers. Still, I came across FitBark on the floor at TechCrunch Disrupt and while it could, at first, seem "extreme" I found that after hearing the creators' explanation, their device actually seems pretty reasonable.And The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 Is… Enigma!
May 01, 11:21PM
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. This year’s crop of Disrupt NY Battlefield startups has been one of our strongest yet, but out of the 30 that entered the fray only seven would go on to the final round. HealthyOut, Enigma, Floored, Glide, HAN:DLE, SupplyShift, and Zenefits emerged from the pack as our seven finalists, and their respective teams were faced with another challenge. They had to take the stage one more time to present and face even more intense scrutiny from our judges, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, Allen & Co. managing director Nancy Peretsman, SV Angel managing partner David Lee, KPCB partner Chi-Hua Chien, CrunchFund partner (and TechCrunch founder) Michael Arrington, and TechCrunch co-editor Eric Eldon. Our judges sequestered themselves backstage at the Manhattan Center for quite some time, but they eventually settled on one ambitious startup. Disrupt NY Battlefield winner: Enigma Enigma, founded by Marc DaCosta, Hicham Oudghiri, Jeremy Bronfmann, and Raphaël Guilleminot, is a web service that allows its users to dig into a vast amount of publicly available (but hard-to-obtain) data. The service pulls its data from more than 100,000 data sources, but the process of sifting through all this information is deceptively simple — a quick search for a person's name and company brings up multiple previewable tables of information, and jumping in and playing with data is thoughtfully executed. Thinking of Enigma as a sort of Wolfram Alpha for public data gets you close, but Enigma is much smarter when it comes to finding connections between seemingly disparate data points. To date, Enigma has raised $1.45 million in seed stage funding, and has locked up partnerships with the Harvard Business School, research firm Gerson Lehrman Group, S&P Capital IQ, and newly-minted strategic investor the New York Times. You can read more about Enigma here And the runner-up: Handle Handle (or HAN:DLE), founded by Shawn Carolan and Jonathan McCoy, is a so-called "priority engine" available as a web app and iOS app that aims to make users become more productive. And how do the apps do that? By basically folding the functionality of an email client and a task manager into a single service. Users are able to "triage" their emails, as well as archive them for later perusal, but they're also able to create tasks and schedule them for completion on a given day. The web app is full of power-user shortcutsDavid Karp: Ten Out Of Ten Of The Biggest Hollywood Studios Now Advertise On Tumblr
May 01, 10:38PM
Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Tumblr founder David Karp and Sequoia partner (and Tumblr investor) Roelof Botha took the stage to talk to TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington about how the blogging platform's plans to take over the world. After a conversation about the merits of building a startup in New York City versus Silicon Valley, the talk turned to how Tumblr plans to monetize their platform.Yahoo Acquires 4M-User 'To Do' App Astrid, Will Shut It Down In 90 Days
May 01, 10:26PM
"Happier, healthier, more productive." That was the goal of mobile app Astrid, and now Yahoo is taking up the mission as it's just acquired the to-do app developer. Co-founded by a former Palantir engineer, Tim Su, Astrid says that it has four million users, who as of September 2012 logged 30 million plans on the platform.Angel Investor, Spotify Fixer Shakil Khan Launches Coindesk, A Bitcoin Resource
May 01, 10:15PM
Shakil Khan, an angel investor and advisor to Spotify, just launched Coindesk, a Bitcoin resource and news site, amid a boatload of hype and VC interest in the crypto-currency. Khan says Coindesk was a project he conceived of about four weeks ago, around when Bitcoin was surging to an all-time high. It’s now trading at around $124.38, or about half as much as it was trading at a few weeks ago. “I was just sitting there and I literally had five e-mails that day from very seasoned entrepreneurs, asking me — what do you know about Bitcoin?” said Khan, who has invested in the space. He was part of a roughly half-million dollar round in Bitpay, which is trying to make it dead simple for merchants to incorporate Bitcoin as a payments method. “There’s a lack of transparent information. Where do you go to read what’s right or wrong?” said Khan, who has been a head of special projects for Spotify for five years. He was also briefly a head of special projects for Path too. No, Khan’s not starting a Bitcoin media business. (That would be a head-scratcher.) “I have absolutely no desire to be publisher,” he said. “That is not my goal. I am just fascinated by the digital currency space.” Khan says that existing resources out there like Bitcoin Magazine and other message boards are too technical for a more mainstream audience. While helping put together the deal to sell Summly to Yahoo over the last couple weeks, he got together a team of people and part-time writers to publish news about the Bitcoin ecosystem. But he adds that building a news site is not just a side project either. “CoinDesk, Bitcoins and digital currencies are way, way more than a hobby for me,” he said. Khan has personally vetted about 15 deals in the Bitcoin space, and moved forward with just one. “The early guys who are having the ideas have not necessarily run businesses before. They’re looking at it more from an idealist perspective or vision,” he said, explaining why he didn’t go in on other deals.Big Brands Want Ads On Instagram, But Facebook Is Focused On Growth For Now
May 01, 10:14PM
Facebook says that there are no plans for now to add advertising to Instagram, even though advertisers are approaching them, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today during the company's Q1 earnings call. But adding ads could end up stunting Instagram's rapid growth. He said, more than once during the call, that Instagram is currently growing at a faster rate than FB did at the same age, and it now has 100 million users. We think Facebook won't add any ads to the platform until Instagram's growth starts to slow.Take The H.E.L.M. 2.0 Is A Competition Designed To Encourage Startups To Move To NYC
May 01, 9:57PM
Take The H.E.L.M. 2.0 is a competition from the New York City Economic Development Corporation that is designed to encourage tech startups and other fledgling companies to move their offices to lower Manhattan. They’re accepting applications today, and eventually the applicant pool will be narrowed down to 20 finalists that will compete for one of four grand prizes of $250,000 to assist them in moving their offices into the city. The first stage of the competition runs until July 15, 2013, after which time 20 finalists will be selected to compete in the second round. These finalists will be given opportunities to present a detailed pitch as to why a move to lower Manhattan would boost their growth as a company. Each of the 20 finalists is guaranteed $10,000 in prize money, while the four runner-ups are presented with a prize of $50,000 each. The four grand prize winners will be presented with $250,000 in prize money to seek out or expand their office space in a location south of Chambers Street. This competition is the second round of Take The H.E.L.M., which ran for the very first time last year, where the pool of finalists included a number of notable tech startups: Booker, STELLAService, Grapeshot, Paperless Post and The Flatiron School. The contest isn’t exclusive to tech startups, but the large majority of the applicant pool are young tech startups looking to get a boost with NYC office space. So why is being based in New York City so important? “The power of branding in New York City is really about convening and talking about the right things,” says Kyle Kimball, executive director of NYCEDC in his interview with TechCrunch. ”Our role is to try to solve some of the systemic problems in New York City to try and make it easier for tech companies to grow and be here.” You can apply for NYCEDC’s Take The H.E.L.M 2.0 competition here. The deadline for applicants is July 15th.Microsoft WebMatrix 3 Web Development Tool Comes With Deeper Windows Azure Integration And Support For GitHub
May 01, 9:57PM
Microsoft has released WebMatrix 3, the latest version of its free web development tool. The new version now comes with deeper Windows Azure integration and support for GitHub. WebMatrix users can now sign in through Windows Azure and create up to 10 sites for free. The capability means users can manage their sites locally or in Windows Azure. In WebMatrix 3, developers can do remote editing of their sites. It has a new visual site gallery that allows the user to open existing sites on their local machines, or to remotely edit sites that are hosted in Windows Azure. According to the Windows Azure blog, one of the most requested features users wanted improved upon from WebMatrix 2 was support for version control software: Following the TFS and Visual Studio announcements to support Git version control, WebMatrix 3 supports both Git and TFS. The source control experience is extensible, and we've worked with a few partners to include rich support for CodePlex and GitHub: The Windows Azure blog also notes that the Git tooling will work with a user’s urgent repositories, configuration, and existing tools. It includes support for commits, branching, multiple remotes and publishing web sites to Windows Azure. WebMatrix, first introduced in 2010, offers support for ASP.NET, PHP and Node.js. Its deeper fit with Windows Azure follows a pattern. Microsoft is pulling in more of its tools into Windows Azure. For example, last month Microsoft announced general availability for Active Directory in Windows Azure.App Install Ads Earned Facebook "Real Revenue" And Helped 3800 Developers Drive 25M Downloads
May 01, 9:34PM
Facebook app install ads were the star of Facebook's earnings call today. Sheryl Sandberg said 3800 developers, including 40% of the top 100 iOS app developers, used the ads to drive over 25 million installs. Mark Zuckerberg meanwhile said, "We're starting to see real revenue from selling mobile app installs."Snapzoom Gives You A Smartphone Camera Mount That Turns Binoculars Into A Super Zoom Lens
May 01, 9:31PM
A lot of people don't carry cameras anymore, now that they have smartphones. But that means that you could miss opportunities to capture great moments, especially when you're missing out on the great optical zoom available on some more expensive or specialized dedicated camera devices. That's what Snapzoom hopes to fix with its binocular mount for smartphone cameras, and the best part is that it's completely universal, meaning it fits a wide variety of both phones and binoculars.Taking A Different Tack, Nimbuzz Chat Startup Partners With Pakistan Operator Mobilink
May 01, 9:10PM
Recently we've seen a lot of news articles about the potential for chat apps to take over the role of SMS. Analysts Informa recently came out with the research that suggested that 2012 was the tipping point, with nearly 19 billion messages sent over chat apps daily globally, versus 17.6 billion SMS messages. In 2014 some 21 billion SMS messages are predicated as against 50 billion app-based messages. Now, while the the user numbers of chat apps are significantly lower right now when set against chat apps (3.5 billion SMS users in 2012, against 586.3 million users of WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, Viber, Nimbuzz, Apple's iMessage and KakaoTalk), those ratios are changing. Given that SMS is 20 years old and chat apps have been going for only 5 years, the trend is concentrating the minds of mobile operators.Apple's iOS 7 Will Ship On Time For A Preview Release In June And Full Launch In September, Report Says
May 01, 9:07PM
Apple's iOS 7 will arrive "on time," according to a couple of well-placed sources following a report from Bloomberg this morning that suggests it was risking delays in the face of major software changes. Apple blogger and noted beard-wearer Jim Dalrymple gave one of his famous one-word confirms today on his blog, agreeing with a source which told AllThingsD that while Apple has had to shift engineering resources away from OS X to iOS to make sure things proceed on schedule, the update will arrive on time.Facebook Earnings Graphs Shows Shift To Mobile May Be Depressing Domestic Ad Revenue Per User
May 01, 9:00PM
It appears that as people switch from the desktop where Facebook shows multiple ads per page to mobile, Facebook is earning less ad revenue per user in its most important markets. While user growth helped total revenue increase, in the US and Canada Facebook earned $2.85 on ads per user (ads ARPU) in Q1, down from $3.30 in the holiday Q4 2012, but also down from $2.87 in Q3. Another important stat is that Facebook’s monthly active and daily active users in the US and Canada increased, despite erroneous recent claims from third-party data providers and critics that Facebook had lost users in US. That’s critical because the US and Canada are where Facebook earns the most money per user. One graph we wish Facebook would release is mobile user counts by geography. This could show whether developing markets coming online mobile-first are responsible for its huge surge to 751 million mobile monthly users from 680 million in Q4 2012. Check out the rest of these graphs for detailed stats on Facebook’s user growth, income, expenses, and more. ANd here are our own Bryce Durbin’s graphs that sum up Facebook’s earnings: <A Walk Through Hardware Alley At TC Disrupt
May 01, 8:40PM
Dogs, drones, and digital controllers, oh my! This year's Disrupt conference in New York was full of amazing webs services and software, but Hardware Alley brought out the best in hardware startups and showed the world that hardware is finally serious business.About 30% of Facebook's Advertising Revenue, Or $375M, Came From Mobile Platforms
May 01, 8:22PM
Almost one-third of Facebook’s advertising revenue is now coming from mobile platforms, according to the company’s latest earnings release. About $375 million of Facebook’s $1.25 billion in advertising revenue came from products like the company’s new mobile app install ads. That’s up from last quarter, when Facebook said it made 23 percent, or $305.9 million, from mobile ads. So this is a nice 22.5 percent quarter-over-quarter increase in mobile advertising revenue. Because Facebook now sees about three quarters of a billion users per month on mobile devices, the company has to make a commensurate amount from these platforms. Analysts and investors are closely watching to see how well Facebook makes this leap from desktop-based ads to mobile ones. Unlike Apple and Google, Facebook doesn’t own its own smartphone OS or sell its own hardware. It doesn’t have a way to earn a cut of app sales or in-app purchases like it does with games and apps on the Facebook platform. Advertising is the key way that Facebook will monetize its mobile users. Up until the middle of last year, Facebook didn’t really have a program to earn revenues from mobile devices. But then it aggressively stepped up ads for apps in the mobile news feed. It’s well-positioned to do this as app discovery and user acquisition is still a hairy problem for mobile developers across the board. Yesterday, Facebook's product director of advertising Gokul Rajaram said at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York that mobile install ads were “performing well, and we're seeing them deliver really high quality users that take actions."Yelp Cuts Losses In Q1 To $4.8M, Sees Revenue Jump 68% To $46M And Record 102M Monthly Uniques On Web, 10M Mobile
May 01, 8:16PM
Yelp, the local online business and restaurant guide that first launched in the U.S. in 2004 and now lives in 21 countries and 12 languages, and has more than 100 million monthly unique visitors as of January this year, launched in New Zealand this morning. On the heels of bringing its review data to Kiwis and continuing its international expansion, Yelp announced its first quarter earnings at market close today. In the fourth quarter, Yelp missed earnings expectations, with net revenue coming in at $41.2 million in Q4 of 2012, a 65 percent growth in new revenue from 2011, while it saw a net loss of $5.3 million, or $0.08 per share. Today, Yelp turned things around, as it announced net revenue jumped to $46.1 million in Q1, reflecting a 68 percent growth from Q1 2012, while cumulative reviews grew 42 percent year-over-year to more than 39 million, average unique visitors grew 43 percent y/y and local business accounts grew 63 percent. Wall Street’s consensus estimates were that Yelp would see $44.5 million in revenue for the quarter, and $1.5 million EBITDA. Yelp hurdled over the bar, in fact, seeing a net loss in the first quarter of 2013 of $4.8 million, or $0.08 per share. This means that while net losses only fell slightly from Q4 2012, it saw a more significant reduction in losses year-over year, $9.8 million, or $0.31 per share, over the first quarter of 2012. In addition, compared to Wall Street estimates, Yelp said that adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2013 was $3.2 million, in comparison with an adjusted EBITDA loss of approximately $1 million for the first quarter of 2012. In the quarterly earnings release today, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman trumped up Yelp’s milestones in the last quarter, namely its hitting a record 102 million unique users over the last quarter, while touching on its plans to improve on its mobile experience. Something that should be music to the ears of anyone with a smartphone. “We had a great start to the year and are excited about the large opportunity in front of us,” Stoppelman said. “This quarter we achieved many milestones including a record 102 million unique visitors on a monthly average basis, demonstrating the strength of our content and the trust we have earned from consumers. We provide valuable leads to local businesses because consumers turn to Yelp at theFacebook's Monthly Active Users Up 23% to 1.11B; Daily Users Up 26% To 665M; Mobile MAUs Up 54% To 751M
May 01, 8:11PM
In Q4 of last year, Facebook’s mobile MAUs surpassed desktop for the first time in its history. That trend continued in Q1 2013 with 751M MAUs. This is what we learned with today’s release of Facebook’s Q1 results. Despite claims earlier this month, Facebook didn’t lose users, but gained 2M. Asia continues to be the largest area of user growth, according to the slides provided by Facebook today. During the earnings call, COO Sherly Sandberg mentioned that mobile ads are performing well particularly in Asia. Here’s a full rundown for Q1 year-over-year user growth: - Daily active users (DAUs) were 665 million on average for March 2013, an increase of 26% year-over-year. - Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.11 billion as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 23% year-over-year. - Mobile MAUs were 751 million as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 54% year-over-year. As you can see, the overall growth of monthly active users is incremental from the past quarter: Something we’d like to find out is if certain age groups are growing faster than others. Some feel that even though the social network is an essential utility for many all over the world, the younger crowd might be starting to spend time socializing on other platforms. This was of course one of the reasons that Facebook acquired photo-sharing app Instagram last year, since the younger crowd had flocked to it as their sole social network. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that Instagram’s community is growing faster than Facebook did when it was at a similar size. There’s another reason. The mobile user growth kicked up its ad revenue numbers as well, accounting for 30%, or $375M. As our own Josh Constine predicted, mobile app install ads certainly helped. [Photo credit: Flickr]Facebook Q1 Earnings Beats With $1.46B In Revenue, Up 38%, But Misses With Flat EPS Of $0.12 Non-GAAP
May 01, 8:07PM
Facebook has just posted its earnings for the quarter that ended March 31, 2013. Facebook hit $1.46 billion in revenue up 38% from Q1 2012, beating Wall Street estimates of sales of $1.44 billion. Facebook reported earnings of $1.06 billion for the same quarter a year ago. Earnings per shared missed estimates, staying flat at $0.12 (analysts had expected earnings per share of $0.13. Net income was up 7% to $219 million, versus $205 million a year ago (GAAP figures). While revenue only grew slightly, the amount of its 1.11 billion monthly users that returned daily, 665 million, was slightly better than last quarter. For more details on user growth, read our post by Drew Olanoff. Facebook also noted in an SEC filing issued today that Chief Accounting Officer David Spillane is leaving the company. Spillane had been the company’s revenue controller since 2008, overseeing growth and IPO. He is getting replaced by Jas Athwal effective May 10. Initial reactions from the stock market were mildly positive, with the Facebook’s share price increasing slightly in after-hours trading just after the earnings were released, though the price had fallen 1.22% and closed at $27.43. The percentage of Facebook’s total ad revenue that came from mobile surged to 30%, up from 23% last quarter. Read more on Facebook’s mobile progress from Kim-Mai Cutler. Last quarter, Facebook posted earnings of $1.59 billion, a rise of 40% year-over-year. Last quarter the company had 1.1 billion monthly users, 618 million daily users, and 680 mobile monthly million, up 57% year-over-year. In the lead-up to today’s earnings, there were a lot of expectations about how Facebook would perform performing around some key metrics. User numbers. As noted in the WSJ, one area where Facebook will be scrutinized will be in its proportion of daily to monthly active users. In Q4 the figure was 58.5% globally. Mark Mahaney of RBC Capital Markets told the newspaper that he expects that to go up to 59% but “anything less than 58% would be a negative for Facebook.” Elsewhere, there have been some reports of user attrition. However, Facebook hit a 60% daily to monthly users, showing slightly better engagement. The fact that Facebook saw a higher DAU/MAU ratio means that Facebook was more engaging this quarter than last, a strong sign rebuking critics who claim people are using the site less. However, Facebook’s user growth is currently coming predominantly fromTumblr's David Karp On The Pros Of NYC As A Startup Town: At Least Not Everyone's Wearing "A F*cking Dropbox Or Airbnb Shirt"
May 01, 8:03PM
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 NY today, Tumblr founder David Karp and Sequoia partner Roelof Botha took the stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington to discuss Tumblr’s history, the relationship between Karp as an entrepreneur and Botha as his investor and why New York is such a great city for a startup. The discussion really only got heated once Arrington started asking about New York, though. Karp clearly doesn’t have much love for Silicon Valley. He noted how University Avenue is perfectly pleasant and “smells great,” but he also feels he can’t be there for more than a few days. In New York, he said, at least “not everyone you run into is wearing a fucking Dropbox or Airbnb Shirt.” In New York, he believes, people can still appreciate a good idea from the users’ perspective and – because not everybody already works for a startup – from a startup perspective. Asked why that’s the case, Botha argued that New York has a real advantage because it is “one of the densest urban environments in the U.S. If you are in Mountain View, you don’t resonate with the needs of urban dwellers,” he said – and the demographics are shifting toward these dense environments. “Tumblr couldn’t have emerged in Sunnyvale,” Botha noted, though he sadly didn’t quite explain what exactly it is that makes Tumblr a service for the urban jungle of New York. Karp – always the optimist – believes that Tumblr can be an iconic New York startup and play the role Amazon and Microsoft currently play in Seattle and that some of the early Silicon Valley companies obviously played for the whole Bay Area ecosystem. (Disclosure: CrunchFund has invested in Tumblr)SV Angel's Brian Pokorny Says Facebook Isn't As Much Fun Anymore - It's A Utility
May 01, 7:41PM
Brian Pokorny, who recently rejoined SV Angel as a general partner, weighed in this afternoon on the future of a number of high-profile companies — Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo. Pokorny was interviewed at Disrupt NY, where he was joined onstage by his partners David Lee and Ron Conway. When TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington asked them how they felt about Facebook and whether it was going to "pull a Myspace," Conway and Lee deferred to Pokorny as the youngest of the three of them.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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