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Hey! You! Come Build Something Amazing At The Very First Disrupt Europe Hackathon
Oct 04, 6:53AM
In just a few weeks, we're bringing TechCrunch Disrupt to Europe for the very first time — and with it, one of our big ol' Hackathons. If you live in Europe and have never had the chance to build at one of our events, now's your chance.Indian Streaming Music Dhingana Claims 9 Million Monthly Unique Users As It Hones Its Competitive Strategy
Oct 04, 4:41AM
Indian streaming music service Dhingana says it now has 9 million unique users per month from around the world. As music streaming services around the world face down the international expansion of Spotify and Deezer, Dhingana CEO Rohit Bhatia says the startup is hedging its bets on a mobile-first strategy as well as growth in international markets. Over 75% of its users access its one-million song library from mobile devices, which the startup says marks a 200% growth year-over-year.Cotap Launches Mobile Messaging Service For The Business World
Oct 04, 4:20AM
Cotap, a startup that strives to be the GroupMe of the business world, has launched its mobile messaging service designed for corporate customers. The service, available as an iPhHow Many Of Twitter's 218 Million Users Are Just Blind-Tweeting From Other Apps?
Oct 04, 2:00AM
Being a communication backbone of the web has its pluses and minuses. Twitter gets lots of content syndicated from other sites, but those contributors don't necessarily visit Twitter or see its ads. That last part is a problem, especially since these blind tweeters count as some of Twitter's 218.3 million active users.Twitter Has Been Making 80 Cents In Ad Revenue For Every Thousand 'Timeline Views'
Oct 04, 1:49AM
If you're reading Twitter's S-1 filing to see where the business stands as it prepares to go public (hey, that's what everyone's doing at TechCrunch), you may have noticed a number that comes up repeatedly: "advertising revenue per timeline view." What does that actually mean? Twitter says that along with things like monthly active users, ad revenue per timeline view is one of the key metrics it uses to evaluate its business. The company treats timeline views ("the total number of timelines requested when registered users visit Twitter, refresh a timeline or view search results while logged in on our website, mobile website or desktop or mobile applications") as a measure of user engagement, and it uses ad revenue per timeline view to track its ability to make money from that engagement.Lyft Is Expanding Its Ride-Sharing Service To Silicon Valley
Oct 04, 1:07AM
Ride-sharing startup Lyft has been on a mission to make its mobile ride app available in various markets around the country, recently launching service in places like Dallas, Indianapolis, and St. Paul. But its newest market is a little closer to home: Beginning Friday evening, riders in certain parts of Silicon Valley will be able to start requesting rides.Oscar, The New York Health Startup Looking To Revolutionize Insurance, Launches
Oct 04, 12:11AM
Oscar, the New York-based startup from Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, has finally launched. Their debut comes as the U.S. government unveils new health insurance exchanges where consumers can pick and choose plans. The startup, backed with $40 million in funding, is an insurer itself and is looking to make the consumer experience less opaque. They’ve launched four tiers of plans for people of different income ranges and family sizes. Below is an example range of plans for someone with no kids who makes $50,000 a year in New York — which might give you an idea of Oscar’s target demographic. The plans range from $218 ro $365 a month. One of the things they are offering to differentiate themselves against other health insurers is unlimited access to telemedicine. Clients should be able to call up doctors for any ailment at any time. There is also free access to generic drugs on certain plans. Another thing they’re doing is using natural language processing to match symptoms patients are reporting with appropriate doctors. So if a patient complains of chest pain, the system should route them to physicians who might have the matching expertise. Oscar is actually licensed as a health insurance operator in the state of New York, so it isn't some kind of front-end. This also gives it more power to be creative with the entire consumer experience. And the $40 million the company raised isn’t actually all going toward operations. Because of state regulations around the industry, about $29 million of that round is kept in reserve. Only $11 million of the funding is actually going toward operations.Twitter's Accumulated Deficit Is $418.6 Million And That Figure Is About To Get Much Bigger
Oct 03, 10:55PM
It costs a lot of money to build a business of Twitter's scale. The company raised $1.16 billion prior to its planned initial public offering, which could total $1 billion itself. Here's another figure: Twitter's accumulated deficit to date is $418.6 million, a figure that will race to $748.2 million once it goes public and realizes $329.6 million in costs related to stock-based compensation expenses.Twitter's International Revenue Is Skyrocketing, But The Company Is Worried About Sina Weibo And Line
Oct 03, 10:12PM
Twitter’s international revenue is up massively year over year, with the company earning more in the first half of 2013 from outside the United States than it did in all of 2012. Twitter’s full-year 2012 international revenue totaled $53 million, while its first two quarters of 2013 saw $62.8 million in international incomes. According to its S-1 filing, Twitter has sold its “Promoted Products” services in more than 20 countries. That implies that Twitter is able to monetize its service in more than its home market. Users around the world are therefore valuable to the company, and not merely to its usage statistics. International revenue is a growing percentage of its top line, growing from 17 percent of total incomes in 2012, to 25 percent in the first half of 2013. This is healthy for the firm, underlining that it retain revenue growth potential despite becoming an established company. Twitter, like Facebook, generates much of its revenue from mobile usage of its social product. The company, however, is direct that while mobile is currently a strength for it, rival services that are also strong on mobile could slow its growth in usage and revenue. Here’s Twitter’s S-1 name-checking a number of services that could harm its growth: [I]ncreased competition from local websites, mobile applications and services that provide real-time communications, such as Sina Weibo in China, LINE in Japan and Kakao in South Korea, which have expanded and may continue to expand their geographic footprint; If those services were to expand to as many markets as Twitter, they could lower Twitter’s usage, and therefore its ability to sell advertisements. Twitter plans on selling advertisements in more countries in the future it states, but if Line and its ilk slow its rollout, Twitter could find its revenue growth on hold. Twitter is already a mobile company, and it is quickly becoming an international firm. Given strong smartphone penetration in Asia, this is not surprising. But in the markets where it could see the most potential, Twitter will also face the stiffest winds. Top Image Credit: Shawn CampbellThe Twitter IPO By The Numbers
Oct 03, 10:01PM
Here are some accumulated statistics from our scouring of the Twitter IPO filing for your perusal. The overall numbers show a company with good but slowing growth in users, solid revenue in mobile but no profit yet to show. Twitter is absolutely a mobile-friendly company, with some 75 percent of its monthly active users coming on portable devices. About 65 percent of its ad revenue comes from there, too, in sharp contrast to Facebook, which had no mobile revenue at the time of its IPO. Daily Active Users Over 100M Monthly Active Users 218.3M Revenue 2010 $28.3M Revenue 2012 $316M Revenue 2013 1st half $253M Loss 2012 $79.4M Loss 2013 1st half $69.3M Shares of Stock Issued 472,613,753 Accumulated Deficit $418.5M MAUs on mobile 164M, that’s 75% Ad revenue from mobile 65% Tweet impressions 30B Total tweets 300B Spam (Fake) Accounts 5% R&D As Pct of 2012 Revenue 37.5% R&D in 2013 1st half $111.8M Websites Integrating Twitter 3M Registered Twitter Apps 6M Patents 6 Liabilities $255.9M International Revenue 2012 $53M International Revenue 2013 1st half $62.8M Employees 2,000 Notable Shareholders Evan Williams 12%, Benchmark/Peter Fenton 6.7%, Jack Dorsey 4.9%, Dick Costolo 1.6%, Rizvi Traverse, Spark Capital, USV and DST Image Credit: Bruce McKayDell May Have A Winner With Its Windows-Powered Venue 8 Pro
Oct 03, 9:58PM
The most pleasant surprise to come out of Dell's press conference the other day wasn't its line of new laptops or the silly Android tablets it's trying to foist on weary consumers. To my utter shock it was the Venue 8 Pro, the company's first pint-sized Windows 8 tablet.
After Silk Road
Oct 03, 9:40PM
The Internet routes around damage. With the fall of the Silk Road there comes the inevitable expectation that the underbelly of the Internet is somehow cut and something important has been removed like a dark organ of indeterminate worth and function. This is not true. As we well know the Silk Road was not the first nor the last online market - even as the Feds celebrate their victory the Sheep Marketplace and Black Market Reloaded are angling for the crown - but the destruction of the Silk Road and, to a degree, the recent comments by the Lavabit founder, shows how deeply we trust the Internet with our secrets and how readily it gives them up.Rizvi/Sacca, Evan Williams, Spark Capital, USV, Benchmark, DST Among Twitter's Largest Shareholders
Oct 03, 9:33PM
As expected Twitter's S-1 was just released, which states that the company is looking to raise as much as $1 billion in a public offering. As with every S-1 filing, the company reports which individuals/firms hold the most shares in the company. According to this table, founder Evan Williams owns 12 percent of the company before the offering. Benchmark and the firm's partner and board member Peter Fenton owns 6.7 percent. Fellow founder Jack Dorsey owns 4.9 percent and CEO Dick Costolo owns 1.6 percent.In Twitter's IPO Filing, The Letter To Shareholders Is Fittingly Concise
Oct 03, 9:31PM
Everyone's going crazy as Twitter just made the S-1 filing for its IPO public. One of the standard parts of the S-1 is a letter from the CEO to shareholders, where they lay out their vision for the company. In Twitter's filing, however, it's a letter from "@Twitter". And where the letters from Groupon's Andrew Mason, Zynga's Mark Pincus, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg all clocked in at one or two thousand words, Twitter's letter is just 135, plus an embedded tweet.This Week On The TechCrunch Droidcast: Dude, No One's Getting A Dell Venue Tablet
Oct 03, 9:30PM
Dell had an event this week, which is in itself noteworthy regardless of what they launch, but it turns out there were Android tablets there! We talk about those for a while, as well as the Elliptic Labs ultrasound gesture control SDK, Android in the Car, Amazon's four-camera phone plans, and briefly the Kindle Fire HDX.Mobile Twitter: 164M+ (75%) Access From Handheld Devices Monthly, 65% Of Ad Sales Come From Mobile
Oct 03, 9:21PM
Twitter started on mobile, and that's where the service is going. In the S-1 form that the company filed today for its public offering, Twitter called mobile the "primary driver of our business." It said that 75% of its 218.3 million+ monthly active users are accessing the site from mobile devices -- or 161.25 million users. And mobile accounts for 65% of all its ad revenues. In all the word "mobile" comes up 130 times in the 160+ page document.Twitter Files For $1 Billion IPO, Will List As TWTR
Oct 03, 9:09PM
Twitter has just filed for its long-anticipated IPO. The company is looking to raise $1 billion in this initial offering, which is set to mint many millionaires among shareholders and founders like Ev Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone. Currently, the filing does not list a valuation, and sources are saying that’s because they have yet to determine one. Twitter’s revenues have been revealed for the first time, as well. Revenues for 2012 were $316.9 million, for a loss of $79.4 million and in the first half of 2013 they’ve already earned $253.6 million for a loss of $69.3 million. That’s just above estimates from last year but well below tracking of over $600 million for the year. Overall, Twitter has lost $418.6 million since it began. Twitter will be offering up 472,613,753 shares of stock in this initial release. Twitter says that it currently has 218.3 million monthly active users, and those users have created over 300 billion tweets. That MAU number is significantly lower than many had expected at this point as they announced that they had 200 million MAUs in December. Twitter says that it delivers over 200 billion tweets per day. Twitter says that 75 percent of its MAUs access the service from mobile devices (that’s 161.25 million) and that 65 percent of all of its ad revenues come from mobile. This marks a big contrast to Facebook, which had no revenues in mobile at all when it filed for IPO. Twitter says that in the second quarter of 2013 there were approximately 30 billion ‘online impressions’ of tweets off of its properties. The companies’ current estimates put spam accounts at under 5 percent of MAUs, but says that this may not be accurate. On the employment front, Twitter says that it has gained over 900 employees in the year since June 2012, an increase of 90 percent. It currently employs over 2,000 people. Twitter’s IPO has been a hotly anticipated event for some months now, with news of Twitter’s “secret” filing coming via a tweet last month. The stealth filing was made possible by the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) act, which allows companies with less than $1 billion in revenue to file for an IPO without exposing the details immediately. Twitter lists a number of risk factors in the filing, noting that the business could be harmed if “influential users, such as world leaders,Why Did Apple Buy Cue? Because Google Now Eats Siri's Lunch
Oct 03, 8:53PM
Apple has acquired the ‘smart assistant’ company Cue, for over $40M. Why? Because Google is absolutely murdering Apple when it comes to the utility of Google Now. Apple is likely to use the acquisition, or its talent, to bolster the offerings of its Today section with additional signals curated from email, social networks and more. This would improve the utility of the section, which is fairly sparse right now, and enable Apple to more vigorously compete with Google Now. Google’s service already collates data from all of its services and networks, offering proactive information and assistance to users on Android (and in the iOS Search app). Siri and iOS 7′s new Today section of the Notification Center simply don’t compare to Google Now in-depth, usability or overall power. The ability of Google to tap into the deep array of contextual data that people have living in their Gmail inboxes and other Google products is being leveraged wonderfully by the Google Now team. I’ve said before that Google Now can be considered reason enough to buy an Android phone, and I don’t think Apple is blind to how good it is. With iOS 7, Apple introduced Today as a way to show you upcoming appointments, weather and basic directions to home or to work. This is sort of skimming the top of what is possible with the host of sensors your smartphone has available to it and the troves of data that you store in your inbox and other services. It doesn’t dip into your Mail.app data, or provide information based on your location besides simple ‘get there’ directions. Google Now does all of that and a lot more, providing transit instructions and recommendations on timing if you’re traveling. The card-based interface of Google Now offers a really compelling experience that only Google is churning through enough data to replicate. Apple ostensibly has similar data available to it, especially for heavy iCloud users, but it doesn’t leverage it. There’s just nothing on iOS that compares to the power of Google Now, including Siri and the Today feature. Much of that lies in Google Now’s predictive nature. It doesn’t just tell you what’s going on now, it anticipates the information you might need and delivers it to you before you need it. The iOS version of the Google Now service is prevented from doing a lot of this because it has no deepAdobe Gets Hacked, Product Source Code And Data For 2.9M Customers Likely Accessed
Oct 03, 8:52PM
Uh oh — Adobe has just disclosed that one of their servers has been hacked. While their investigations are still ongoing, Adobe has shared a few details on what they believe could have been accessed and obtained in the hack — and it's a big one.Shumway, Mozilla's HTML5-Based Flash Player Replacement, Lands In Firefox Nightly
Oct 03, 8:39PM
Shumway, Mozilla’s technology experiment to build an efficient, web-native renderer for Flash files, has now landed in the latest Firefox Nightly builds. The idea behind this project – which is still far from being production-ready – is to fully replace the Flash Player to display SWF files by using HTML5 and JavaScript. Back in the late 90s, Macromedia’s Flash Player helped bring sound, video and animations to the mainstream web, but today, Flash is probably one of the most hated browser plug-ins. It’s still heavily used, however, and while most mobile browsers don’t support it anymore, it remains a staple on the desktop. Mozilla started working on this project in early 2012 and, as it noted when it last talked about this project in detail in November 2012, the main goals for Shumway are to “offer a run-time processor for SWF and other rich-media formats on platforms for which runtime implementations are not available.” It also wants to push the open web forward by improving ways to display rich media format in the browser without the need for proprietary solutions. Until now, Shumway was only available as a browser extension. It’s still not activated by default in the latest Firefox Nightly builds (version 27), but you can go to about:config and activate it (you still need to have the Flash Player installed, though). Even without installing the latest Firefox Nightly, you can take a look at its capabilities thanks to Mozilla’s online Shumway Inspector. While Shumway won’t run all that many commercially available Flash applications yet, demos like this racing game or this basic 2D physics engine demo show the technology’s potential. Whether it will be able to fully replicate all of Flash’s capabilities remains to be seen, however. For Mozilla, this is the second major project that replaces an Adobe technology. With PDF.js, the organization already replaced Adobe Reader as the default technology for rendering PDF files in the browser. It’s also worth noting that other projects have tried similar approaches in the past. Google’s Swiffy, for example, launched as an SWF to HTML5 converter in 2011, and while we haven’t heard all that much about it since, it looks like that project is still going strong. Adobe itself has also been stepping away from Flash, too, and virtually all of its recent projects for web developers have been about supporting web standards and creating HTML5-based sites.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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