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The Transit App Launches On Android, Will Find Out If Users Need A Tool Beyond Google Maps
Montreal-based startup The Transit App is expanding its mobile domain after a strong showing at the Founder Fuel demo day earlier this month. The app offers real-time transit directions, notifications and route planning, and on Android brings most of the features from its iOS counterpart to devices running Google’s mobile OS, with full feature parity planned to arrive in earnest.
The Transit App offers a great experience for regular commuters looking to check schedules and stops for their regular and nearby bus and subway stops in major cities around the world that support open-data initiatives. Transit App founder Sam Vermette explained in an interview that more and more companies are realizing the benefits of making that data public, since it means outside sources can help them develop insight on what needs changing with their own transit systems. Mexico City and Paris have recently opened up their data, which enabled Transit App to add them to their database.
“We’ve been working on it for the past two months, and we’re really excited to see how it’s received,” Vermette said. “The fact that Android already has Google Maps pre-installed on the phone is definitely going to give us a good idea of what it’s like to compete on a platform that already has a great poly-transit solution.”
That’s important as Vermette is anticipating that Apple will introduce transit directions to its own mapping app after acquiring HopStop last month. iOS and its lack of native transit directions in the Apple Maps app have helped propel The Transit App to some impressive early milestones, but it’s one thing to capitalize on a huge gap in a native platform offering and another to compete with a built-in, widely respected transit direction service.
Vermette believes that what his company offers is something that’s different enough from Google Maps to attract an audience of dedicated commuters, however. Transit App is designed from the ground up for people who use public transit daily, and surfaces immediately useful information right when you launch the app. That’s very different from how transit works in Google Maps, for instance, which mostly is about route planning, or with Google Now, which surfaces nearby stops but not necessarily the ones commuters are looking to use.
The Transit App is free to use on Android and supports a wide range of devices, which Vermette says is one of the advantages of expanding to Android, as the user base of Android devices covers a wide range of demographics vs. iOS. At launch, the Android version lacks real-time tracking of buses and trains, but that and other features from iOS will be coming soon, as Vermette said getting the app up and gathering feedback was top priority for his startup’s small team.
30 years later and our word processing software hasn't changed, not even to adapt to mobile. That changes tonight with the launch of Quip, a free new word processing app from former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor's new startup. Quip works on desktop but is designed for mobile. It automatically formats documents to the size of your screen, offers in-app collaboration and messaging, and works offline.
Google is bringing more Glass Explorers into the program, and it's doing that the best way it knows how: by letting current users invite a friend. Those among you old enough to remember when Gmail first started will remember this was once the only method to get on board with that service, and now Glass-owning folks can ask a single friend to join them in testing out Glass before its wide consumer release.
Whispering in a riot is how I would describe commenting on a Facebook Page's feed posts. No matter how thoughtful they are, your words get drowned out. But a combo of new features is fulfilling Facebook's promise of two-way conversation. Devise a comment that resonates with others, make it a catchy image macro meme, score enough Likes, and your message gets hoisted to the top of the thread.
Korean gaming giant Nexon is making another deal to expand into Western markets with a strategic investment in Rumble Entertainment. They didn’t disclose the size of the deal except to say that it was an all-cash investment for a minority stake in the business. Nexon’s CFO Owen Mahoney also joins Rumble’s board. Nexon’s announcement comes just on the heels of another strategic investment it made in Zynga’s former chief game designer Brian Reynolds’ new startup. Nexon is making these deals to expand into Western audiences, after building up longstanding franchises in China, Japan and South Korea like MapleStory. While Nexon generated nearly $450 million in revenues in the first three months of this year, European and North American markets contributed less than 5 percent of the company's revenues during that time. In contrast, China makes up nearly half of Nexon's revenue base. So the company is looking to grow its presence in the West at a time when barriers between international markets are falling. Rumble is led by Greg Richardson, a 15-year veteran in the business, and the team has people from Zynga, Activision, BioWare, Blizzard, Playdom, Electronic Arts, Turbine, LucasArts and RockYou. Their mission is to bring triple-A quality titles to mobile platforms, which so far have been good for casual and then now, midcore games. The company has announced games like KingsRoad, a medieval action role-playing game; Ballistic, a 3-D first-person shooter; and Nightmare Guardians, a multiplayer tower defense game. All of these titles aren’t fully released yet; they’re either in open or closed beta. They had previously taken $15 million in funding from gaming-focused Signia Venture Partners, then Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
Back in February, I wrote about a startup called Cube that was trying to build a point-of-sale system for small and medium-sized businesses that would eventually give analytics about inventory. Cube has since pivoted, and now they’re going after a completely different market under a new name, Slidepay. They’re trying to offer a payments API for third-party developers that want the ability to accept credit card payments through a reader. For example, Joist, an app for contractors who might do repair work on homes, now has a way to accept payments through a Square-like reader without kicking their customers out to another payments flow. Slidepay is essentially a white-label version of Square. Square doesn’t currently offer an API for third-party developers, but hasn’t ruled out the possibility of building one. There are some strategic reasons for this beyond preserving a high-quality customer experience. The more of a direct relationship that Square can have with its customers, the more opportunities it has down the line to earn a cut of revenue through future services and products without being crowded out by more powerful players in the payments ecosystem. But that also leaves room for a white-label service like Slidepay to exist. “We take a very Android-like approach to what Square does. They want to own the end-to-end experience where everyone has to go through their experience and everything has to be processed through their brand,” said Charlie Pinto, the company’s CEO. “We want people to provide their own applications.” Under this approach, Slidepay takes 2.5 percent of each transaction plus 10 cents, or 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction if a card isn’t present. There aren’t any other set-up or monthly fees. They have other deals for businesses that are processing more than $10 million per month. They own the merchant account and handle underwriting and identity verification, which increases Slidepay’s risks and liabilities. But Pinto feels they have a good internal system for dealing with fraud without going into specifics. “We feel we built a really good risk platform and we verify every person who processes payments,” Pinto said.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added some support that will make it a bit easier for developers to better track visitor traffic to their apps when an IP address is served and connected through the 
Post-PC, indeed. Today Microsoft released its 
A group of engineers from the Mars Curiosity Rover mission answered questions in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session today. In addition to questions about the mission and Mars, the Curiosity Rover team responded to numerous comments about how to intern or work at NASA and what the process is like, but did not respond to several questions about SpaceX, Elon Musk's privatized space exploration company.
The California Public Utilities Commission issued its proposed framework for the regulation of ride-sharing services today, granting a huge victory for companies like Uber, Lyft and SideCar. The proposal follows months of discussions between the regulator and the startups, which seek to connect passengers with drivers who haven't been licensed for commercial driving.
The U.K.'s 
Today in an SEC filing, Microsoft revealed a very interesting fact: Its Surface tablet hybrid line brought in revenue of $853 million in the company's fiscal 2013. That places Surface revenue on a per-day basis at $3.4 million. Extrapolated for a one-year period, that financial rate puts the Surface line on a $1.24 billion per-year run rate.
Hello again, tech company voyeurs, and welcome to a new episode of 
Pro-level audio and video software has always been daunting. While the average computer user knows how to operate them in a general sense (the advent of non-linear editing has essentially changed how we think about what we shoot and record) the addition of pro-level features like effects, mixing boards and MIDI instruments may make Trent Reznor drool but frightens bedroom guitarists.
After your 
If you've got an Android device running version 4.2 or later, chances are you've tried capturing a photo sphere -- one of those nifty little 360-degree panoramas that let you spin around to capture your surroundings until vertigo sets in. Instead of just letting those photo spheres languish on your phone or on your Google+ account, though, Google has thought up something 
Opera today detailed a proposal for NEX, the Navigator Extension format, a new vendor-neutral browser extension packaging format that it hopes to turn into a future W3C standard for packaging cross-browser, add-on development.
Sam Brin, 26-year old younger brother of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, has spent the last few months in a bit of borrowed office space with his college pal, Jon Li, quietly building a startup of their own. Lest you get too excited about the possibility of a bit of brotherly rivalry: Sam and Jon aren't setting out to build a search engine. They aren't building an ad platform. They aren't building their own pair of crazy controversial robo-glasses.
Accel Partners is announcing a major talent win tonight, with the addition of former Bitly chief scientist 
The startup behind a "wearable smart vibrator" called 
IT should ignore the naysayers and consider adopting the 
In the last month, Zynga has quietly parted ways with three of its executive staff, early changes under the period of transition that the company's 
Kickstarter success Vaavud is a thing of beauty. Created by a Danish team of enterprising inventors, it plugs into your iPhone or Android device's headphone jack and connects with an app to tell you the current wind speed. It uses no power, and actually talks wirelessly to your phone via the built-in magnetic field sensor that ships with modern smartphones.
Archenemies for decades, video games and exercise are about to unite. Atlas is a cheap, new "walk-around" virtual reality system that uses markers you put on the ground to track your movements as you play with an Occulus Rift headset. Protagonist is Kickstarting Atlas to get real-space VR into the hands of developers, so they can build games that ditch joysticks and actually let you run-and-gun.
As part of our tour of 
It looks like Twitter is now hiring out of its new Sunnyvale, Calif. office. The leasing of an 8,000 square foot office in downtown Sunnyvale was 
Andreessen Horowitz-backed analytics startup Mixpanel has been growing quickly over the last year, adding new customers and rapidly expanding the amount of data it tracks. Now it's looking to grab more customers and help them better understand their users, with a big marketing push in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, as well as the launch of a conference about data-driven decision making.
If you're a photographer who has gotten into the hobby, you probably know that it's a very expensive one which starts accumulating gear costs quickly. All those costs can be hard to keep track of, and make it imperative that you get your stuff insured and/or protected against theft somehow, and new site Lenstag wants to help with that.
Microsoft is in the smartphone game until the smartphone game is over, and Windows Phone is its vehicle. That said, the company's success thus far appears to be slightly lumpy and downright sluggish on the home front.
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You can't be a little pregnant, and you can't be slightly censorious. Word out of Russia is that the country is working to further denigrate free speech, this time with a proposed law that would make the use of naughty language online a punishable offense. Ludicrous? Certainly. Outside the bounds of possibility? Not in the slightest.
This week on TechCrunch TV's Ask A VC show, we have Greylock's newly appointed partner 
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Apple has released a new beta of iOS 7 today, which is the fourth in the series. There are only a couple of months to go at most before we see the final edition roll out, so it's not surprising that this update contains a variety of notable visual changes that smooth out some of iOS 7's rough spots. There's also a new iTunes beta of version 11.1, which brings iTunes Radio to the OS X desktop.
The PC market is in poor health, and consumers love tablets. When do those two trends cross? No prediction is perfect, but given simple trend analysis, it appears that by the second quarter of 2014, tablets will likely outsell the PC market. That said, current market dynamics could accelerate, pushing us over that mark a bit sooner. Let's get into the figures to untangle just where we stand.
Google today gave Zagat, the restaurant review service it acquired in 2011, a set of new mobile apps for iOS and Android, as well as a complete facelift on the web. For the first time, Google says, all of the service's ratings and reviews are now available for free and without the need to register.
Bob Mansfield is leaving his role as Senior VP of Technologies at Apple, but will remain at the company to work on special projects reporting to Tim Cook.
It's interesting to watch Microsoft pivot to liberalize their platform and allow self-publishing for indies, but that doesn't mean Xbox will suddenly be the home of the next SuperCell. There's still too much legacy in how console makers think to let that happen. Microconsoles, on the other hand, may well offer that possibility.
The team behind 
The first mobile devices running Firefox OS are out in the market. It's too early to say how well Mozilla's fledgling open web HTML5 mobile platform is doing in its bid to steer budget buyers away from Android gateway devices. Which is, make no mistake, exactly the hope of the carriers throwing their weight and influence behind this alternative open platform.
For 100 years or more, architects have relied on a massive catalog sitting on their desk to find the right products to use in their architectural project — this brand of glass, or that brand of toilet. That catalog had a monopoly on the market for a century, but with the birth of the internet, that catalog never made the transition over to digital. But a site that launched back in 2009 as a platform for architects to publish their work, Architizer, is relaunching tomorrow to finally fill that void.
Google's $35 
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It's probably the most overused quote in tech writing... which sucks, because I'd really like to use it to describe how I feel about the Chromecast.
The 
Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil. Throughout high school and college, I took a heavy dose of political science and history classes. As a result, those teachers and professors stressed the importance of investigating primary source documents and analyzing them on their own merits versus secondary sources (like textbooks, for instance), even though we were all issued textbooks, essays by subject matter experts, and a range of other interpretations. Eventually as college ended, the courses focused more on the primary source and our own interpretation of it. Fast forward to today. At least in the world of startup technology news, which moves too fast to be captured by textbooks or print-versions of magazines, primary sources remain important, but social sources — at least for me — trump all. Of course, in early-stage, private companies, obtaining primary sources is difficult. In my world of tech news, like many, Twitter is my main source of information and how I surf the web. Specifically on Twitter, however, I do not follow any "news sources" directly. There is too much information out there. As a result, I try to follow people who've I've grown to trust who read and share articles or random blog posts. In order for me to read something, I need a social signal to trigger and capture my attention. "Who" shares it with me matters. The "source" matters still, just not as much. And, in some cases, the source online can be propped up by a brand and hold power in its distribution. Real estate to create content online is infinite. There is no barrier to entry to create information, to build an audience, to generate page views, and to peg those against ads. Therefore, at least in my small world of online tech news, social sources reign supreme. I'm guessing many of you reading this may feel the same way. The social signal from following a friend or trusted industry source motivates me to gain interest in a link, to read the story, or save for later. The most critical piece of information in that decision is not where the link originates from and resides, but rather who has shared this link. In a way, the tweet itself, as a unit of social currency, is more important than the source itself. One product which demonstrates the pervasiveness of
When a leaked memo broke the news earlier this year that Yahoo was ending its work-from-home program, CEO Marissa Mayer was both lauded and lambasted for the decision. Companies such as Best Buy followed suit by announcing they too would end their flexible work options, while some industry observers called the move an "epic fail.
Today 
AngelList is testing out a new service that lets angel investors syndicate deals with each other, a feature that could allow startups to raise venture-sized rounds of money with relative ease. Called Syndicates, the private-beta product lets any accredited investor on the AngelList fundraising platform essentially create, lead and collect carry for a fund of angel money for a specific startup. The carry part could help motivate an angel who truly believes in the startup to put in the hard work of helping it raise all the money it thinks it needs. In a world where more startups than ever are trying to raise money, and more investors are competing to find the best ones, this model may quickly become popular. Here’s a bit more about how it works, as gleaned from the newly-public FAQ from AngelList, the resulting conversation around the news on Twitter, and a conversation with AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant. The news, we’ll note, was broken by anonymous startup personality Startup L. Jackson… who presumably has investor-level access to AngelList, whoever he or she is. VCs and their limited partners (the entities who put money into VC funds) already use carry to align their interests. In addition to the VC partners collecting a set management fee for each fund, the carry provides them with a percentage of the profit for the fund. In the AngelList implementation of the concept, the lead angel picks the percentage carry that they’ll get from a positive return in the company if it has a liquidity event. They can set this to zero, which would make the most sense if they’re relatively unknown and most concerned with building a reputation. Or they can set any amount above that — 40% could make sense, for example, if you’re a top angel and looking to monetize your reputation and deal flow. The FAQ provides the following example of how a lead angel would use Syndicates: Sara decides to invest in a startup and asks for a $250k allocation in the company. She personally takes $50K of the allocation and decides to syndicate the rest. She shares the deal with investors and specifies that she is charging a 20% carry on the remaining $200k of her allocation. Sara’s capital and her co-investor’s capital is pooled into a $250K fund which invests in the startup. Sara’s co-investors pay carry for her access, governance and value-add. She sourced the deal
For the first time in years, I spent 72 hours without Internet or cell phone reception. While I didn’t experience any life-altering epiphanies that some claim comes from a digital detox, I now enjoy a handful of very meaningful relationships that never would have existed, with the constant temptation for shallow interactions with dozens of peoples’ avatars, thousands of miles away. I learned that when you’re stuck with people, you’re forced to find meaning in conversations that otherwise wouldn’t have seemed more entertaining than YouTube at the time. I don’t buy the snake oil that cutting ourselves off from the net makes us better thinkers; access to the world’s information has made me more informed and creative. But, the Internet can’t give you friendship, nor can it help you discover ideas that people have never told anyone about. Last week, I had the fortune of testing the “never detox alone” hypothesis at two back-to-back business conferences held in the mountains. The first, Summit Outside, was an invite-only Burning Man-like gathering of 800 young social entrepreneurs in the Utah Mountains. Completely cut off from the Internet, attendees slept in tents, could go horseback riding, dance to A-list DJ’s under a full moon, or attend spirituality-themed talks. I left Summit Outside with more friends and business ideas than I have at any other conference–some from people I’d know for years, but thought I didn’t even like very much. On the flip side, CEOs and investors that normally would have avoided a tech journalist like the plague, were forced into uncomfortable conversations that unexpectedly led to great ideas. The Internet has spoiled us; at the slightest hint of boredom or unpleasantness, we escape to the Internet. Modern life is a constant elevator pitch. Potential friends and projects that don’t enjoy a good first impression get tossed out. Indeed, Summit Series itself has built a thriving company on top of the theory that the best business relationships start out as friendships. Since 2008, Summit Series has held a pricey annual conference of socially oriented entrepreneurs. Held on a cruise ship, at a ski resort, and in a makeshift camping mountain village, the Summit conferences intermix crazy-fun activities, such as shark tagging in the Caribbean, with A-list speakers, from the likes of Richard Branson and Bill Clinton. Now, Summit has raised $40 million to purchase a mountain and build permit home in Eden, Utah for
Welcome to a brand new episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few of us writers together in front of the TechCrunch TV cameras to dish on some of the more interesting stories from the past seven days.
Traditionally photography is about preserving a moment in time; you take a picture literally because it'll last longer. The entire art is built around a quest for permanence, and archival desires. But with Snapchat, you're casting off those things you photograph almost as soon as you take the picture – in many cases it's less permanent than just continuing to look at something. For a an avid hobbyist photographer, it's somewhat counterintuitive, but also very liberating.
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — celebrate Google's gift to StreamTV. ChromeCast is cheap, small, simple, and extensible, just in time to kickoff the run up to Apple's big move to the Big Screen. It's a win-win for everybody involved, except maybe Microsoft and its XBox offering. Suddenly 3 screens and the cloud has shrunk to 2, or maybe 1. It's no cakewalk for Google, who must navigate and resolve desktop and mobile OSes and native hardware only seen briefly held to the ear of Eric Schmidt. But Chromecast altering the landscape, making the new Nexus 7 into a peripheral controller for the TV rather than the other way around, will shake up Hollywood's world view just as Netflix is reprogramming our kids' attention from channels to apps.
Although blogging is nearly as old as the Internet, it still feels like something is amiss. From Dustin Curtis’ Svbtle to Ev Williams’ Medium, there is a feeling afoot that existing platforms for blogs and long-form content still need a lot of improvement. Five years ago, early platforms like Blogger gave way to micro-blogging and networks like Tumblr. Now we’re seeing the pendulum swing back with platforms for longer-form stories and media. SETT is a blogging platform that’s looking to emphasize community, so that new users can find a right audience immediately and long-time bloggers can interact with higher-quality commenters and contributors. Aside from features that are now standard these days like a news feed of content and WYSIWYG editing, SETT has a top bar where it’s easy for bloggers to track comments or even private messages from others in the SETT community. From the start, when new users sign up for an account, SETT refers readers to your site. It has a word-matching system internally that compares posts to one another. If a reader happens to like a post about one topic, the platform will recommend other similar ones to them. The site is the brainchild of a long-time blogger named Tynan (who declines to use his last name online ever) and Todd Iceton, a developer who worked for Nutshell Mail, the company that was acquired by e-mail marketing giant Constant Contact. Tynan has been actively blogging for six years but found that it was a bit of a slog for any new user. “For people who are just starting out, their biggest hurdle is just getting that community first,” he said. There are other features meant to enhance a reader’s relationship with a blogger like a simple, one-click e-mail subscription system. Subscribers get notified of new posts and new comments on posts they’ve decided to individually follow. Readers can also start their own independent discussions about posts in a community section, where they can see who is online and which posts are being actively read by a lot of users. The site has had about 100 or so active blogs in beta form, but they’ve opened it up since. Some of the more popular voices on the platform are entrepreneurs like Dick Talens, who co-founded 500 Startups-backed Fitocracy and blogs about how to stay in shape. The bootstrapped startup earns revenue through premium or subscription accounts that range
In preparation for 
