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Virtual Currency ¥Coins Helps Foreign Developers Gain A Foothold In Japan
Nov 05, 8:47AM
Mobile services cloud company Infobip has launched ¥Coins (pronounced Yen Coins), a virtual currency for Japanese mobile users. The online tokens are intended to help international companies break into a market that is often described as "insular" by serving as a mobile payments gateway. 
Google Launches Helpouts, Paid Video Chats With Experts To Address Whatever Is Bothering You Right Now
Nov 05, 5:00AM
Helpouts, Google’s fusion of Google+ Hangouts, Google Wallet, and its identity tools is now live. A ‘Helpout’ is a Hangout-like video chat, but instead of speaking with a friend, you are connected to a purported expert in whatever it is that you need help with. The tagline that Google has come up with for Helpouts is “real help from real people in real time.” Imagine a video chat session that you are paying for, that lasts for as little as a minute or two. You have an issue, say, what is this lump on my hand, or, how do I pull off a particular makeup trick, and have a quick chat with a person who can see what your problem is. And think broadly, That’s the edge that Google thinks Helpouts has over every other content variety and service that helps you solve the situation you find yourself in. Today at its San Francisco offices, Google gave the media a look at the product, and proffered some hands-on time with its interface. The assembled tech press watched someone attempt to correct a drywall hole, apply lipstick in a particular way, and zest a lemon. If you need a deep dive into the mechanics of Helpouts, TechCrunch helped break the story that Helpouts existed earlier this year. In this post, I want to dig into the economics of the offering, and its potential to succeed as a product. Platform Google is fond of calling Helpouts a platform and telling you that its team is separate from the Hangouts group. So, while the services share the core video experience, they should be thought of as distinct. Helpouts uses your Google+ identity, Wallets payment features, and Hangout’s video technology to service its marketplace of providers. To seed Helpouts, Google has assembled a collection of just a little more than a thousand brands, Sephora for instance, and individuals so that people can dig in from day one. Helpouts will need far more providers — diversity of offering here is key, naturally. Google has to demonstrate that its offering is better than what currently exists and that it is worth paying for. It must expand its database of on-demand information providers so that it can take nearly any request – if Helpouts doesn’t manage that, it will be niche, and therefore far too hit-and-miss to be compelling. Google is working on an API for Helpouts, though it remains unclear to what
Lady Gaga Splits From Manager And Rising Tech Investor Troy Carter
Nov 05, 4:09AM
Troy Carter has been making a name for himself in tech thanks to investments in Uber, Spotify, and Dropbox, but his biggest tie to the music industry has just been severed. Lady Gaga has split from Carter, who has managed her since 2007, according to multiple sources of The Hollywood Reporter Showbiz411. The separation could shake his status as he raises a new $75 million investment fund.
Dropbox Snatches Up Sold, The Service That Simplifies Selling Online, To Help It Build A New Mystery Commerce Product
Nov 05, 3:01AM
Sold launched early this year with a plan to help remove some of the frustration from selling online. Debuting on the iPhone before moving to Android in September, Sold aimed to help busy people avoid the hassle of eBay and Craigslist and simplify eCommerce by taking the whole process out of their hands. 
Hired.com Looks To Destroy Recruiting Invoices With New Subscription-Like Billing
Nov 05, 1:37AM
Hired.com, which runs weekly auctions of developers for hire, is looking to challenge the way that traditional recruiting agencies charge their startup clients. Technical recruiting in the Valley is often done by boutique agencies or headhunters with long rolodexes, histories and networks among local developers. Often, if they’re successful in getting a candidate, they’ll hand over a lump sum bill worth about 20 percent of a hire’s first-year salary. But Hired.com, which started out as Developer Auction, is looking to change that. They’re introducing a payments model that resembles more of a subscription. Instead of charging for new hires up-front, they’ll be charging 1 percent of a developer’s salary for the first 24 months of their employment. If the hire stops working for the startup, Hired.com will stop charging. If they stay longer than two years at their new employer, Hired.com will also stop charging after the 24th month. It looks like a way for Hired.com to lock in their clientele over the long-run. Clients that are already paying Hired.com one or two thousand dollars a month might be more inclined to keep using the service if don’t get sticker shock. “A company that’s adding 10 employees could be facing several hundred thousand dollars in recruiting fees,” said Matt Mickiewicz, who founded the company after starting crowd-sourced graphic design community 99Designs. It will also help them expand their market reach out to companies that haven’t historically relied on recruiting agencies. Hired runs weekly auctions with 50 to 60 developers each that are hand-selected by an in-house team for their technical skills and work histories. They started out last year to become a “transparent marketplace for recruitment," where engineers could attract offers of interest from multiple startups instead of having to seek out each one by one. With the imbalance of supply and demand for good engineers in markets like San Francisco and New York, the auctions took off. The company is profitable and now has 25 of its own employees, up more than threefold from six months ago. They place “dozens” of candidates every quarter and in one day, they even placed five hires. They recently raised $2.7 million from NEA, Sierra Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Google Ventures, Sherpa Ventures, Jeff Clavier's SoftTech VC, and John Suliman's Step Partners in March. They’ve signed up hundreds of clients including Airbnb, Twitter and OpenTable and recently launched in New York, Boston, Los Angeles
Hands On With The Afinia H-Series 3D Printer, A Rugged Printing Rig For Home And School
Nov 04, 10:27PM
In the kennel of 3D printers, I'd equate the oddly-shaped and homegrown RepRap printers to lovable mutts. The Makerbot is a golden retriever, ready to please. And the $1,599 Afinia H-Series is a solid, scrappy Jack Russell terrier, willing to get dirty and able to take on all comers. The H-Series looks like it was built by the same industrial design team that built the original metal-clad Apple IIs. The device is almost entirely self-contained and there are none of the familiar cables running up and down the various arms and cams. The print head is connected via a large wire ribbon to the control board and shielded by a 3D-printed plastic screen that keeps the .15mm print head protected. The spool sits on a fairly solid hook on the side of the machine and the plastic runs through a guide into the extruder. In short, there are very few visible moving parts, which is a good thing and a bad thing.
Apple Expands 'Made In USA' Efforts With Sapphire Glass Plant, Manufacturing Deal In Arizona
Nov 04, 10:26PM
Apple has plans to build a manufacturing plant in Arizona that will extend its 'Made in The USA' efforts beyond the Mac Pro and other silicon facilities it maintains in Texas. The news came via a release from both the state of Arizona and the company GT Advanced Technologies, which will produce sapphire material.
Twitter Could Price IPO Well Above New $23-$25 Range, After Strong Private Market Interest
Nov 04, 8:47PM
Twitter could price its IPO well above the new $23-25 range it set earlier today, according to MicroVentures CEO Tim Sullivan. The pricing range was originally set at at $17-23. Though he's providing no guarantees, Sullivan says that there has been strong interest in the private market for Twitter shares over the past few months, which indicates that Twitter could price as high as $25-28 when it finalizes its S-1 this week.
Eric Schmidt Joins The New Advisory Board At Cloud Rendering Company OTOY
Nov 04, 8:45PM
OTOY, a company building rendering technology for running games and other applications in the browser, is announcing a new board of advisors, including Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt. "Six years ago, in an interview with the New York Times, I predicted that 90 percent of computing would eventually reside in the web based cloud," Schmidt said in an emailed statement. "OTOY has created a remarkable technology which moves that last 10 percent - high-end graphics processing - entirely to the cloud. This is a disruptive and important achievement. In my view, it marks the tipping point where the web replaces the PC as the dominant computing platform of the future."
Cloud Printing & Shipping Service Lob Raises $2.4 Million Seed Round
Nov 04, 8:37PM
This summer, the Y Combinator-backed startup Lob launched a new developer API which lets companies easily integrate printing and shipping services into their applications. Today, the company is announcing $2.4 million in seed funding from various YC partners and angel investors. Participating in the round were Kevin Hale, Dalton Caldwell, Sam Altman, Joshua Schachter, Alexis Ohanian, Paul Buchheit, Garry Tan, Polaris Partners, and other undisclosed investors.
Microsoft Azure Now Lets You Import/Export Data By Shipping Hard Drives
Nov 04, 8:32PM
Microsoft today launched a large update to its Azure cloud computing platform that introduces features like WebSocket support, segmented customer push notifications, New Relic support and a new billing alert service. The one feature that will likely get the most attention, however, is that developers can now sign up for a preview version of the Azure Import/Export service. With this, developers can import and export their data from Windows Azure using hard drives and old-fashioned FedEx shipping.
Local Delivery Startup Postmates Introduces Uber-Like Blitz Pricing During High Demand
Nov 04, 8:00PM
Local delivery startup Postmates has been growing fast, which is a good problem to have. That is, unless demand is completely outstripping supply. With that in mind, the company is taking a big step toward regulating demand with the implementation of a new Uber-like Surge Pricing program called "Blitz."
Jeff Bezos' Wife And Co-Workers Call Out Brad Stone's Amazon Book As Inaccurate…On Amazon
Nov 04, 7:54PM
Amazon was one of the first retail websites to allow negative reviews of the products that they sold to appear right in the listing. This revolutionary practice which has been mimicked earth-wide at this point was one item focused on in Brad Stone’s recent book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Updated below with personal statement from Craig Berman, VP Global Communications at Amazon. The book, which I found very interesting and a great read overall, was released last month and is available on Amazon’s site for purchase. In what can only be seen as a moment of delicious cyclical irony, a new fairly negative review of the book has been posted by none other than Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos’ wife, MacKenzie Bezos. We’ve confirmed the identity of the reviewer, the only peson to leave a one-star reaction so far. MacKenzie’s review is an intriguing read, and features the incredible qualifying disclosure “Jeff and I have been married for 20 years.” In her review, she calls out what she feels are ‘numerous factual inaccuracies’ in the book, including one right off the bat: In the first chapter, the book sets the stage for Bezos's decision to leave his job and build an Internet bookstore. "At the time Bezos was thinking about what to do next, he had recently finished the novel Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, about a butler who wistfully recalls his personal and professional choices during a career in service in wartime Great Britain. So looking back on life's important junctures was on Bezos's mind when he came up with what he calls 'the regret-minimization framework' to decide the next step to take at this juncture in his career." It's a good beginning, and it weaves in nicely with what's to come. But it's not true. Jeff didn't read Remains of the Day until a year after he started Amazon. MacKenzie also takes an exception with the fact that the book, in its effort to delve into the motivations of Bezos, strays from fact and into the realm of ‘characterization’ too often: "Bezos felt…" "Bezos believed…." "Bezos wanted…." "Bezos fixated…" "Bezos worried…." "Bezos was frustrated…" "Bezos was consumed…" "In the circuitry of Bezos's brain, something flipped…" When reading phrases like these, which are used in the book routinely, readers should remember that Jeff was never interviewed for this book, and
MediaSpike Raises $5.2M To Bring More Product Placement To Mobile And Social Games
Nov 04, 7:02PM
MediaSpike, which runs a marketplace for in-game product placement, is announcing that it has raised $5.2 million in Series A funding. The round was led by CMEA Capital, with the participation of existing investors 500 Startups, Google Ventures, and Raptor Capital. New backers include include Andreessen Horowitz, Inspovation Ventures, and angel investors such as Jonathan Abrams, Othman Laraki, Rick Marini, and Naval Ravikant. 
Viddy Rebrands As Supernova, Launches New Slo-Mo Video And Anonymous Group Messaging Apps
Nov 04, 7:00PM
Supernova is made up of the core engineering team that had been behind Viddy, about a dozen in all. It's led by technical co-founder and new CEO JJ Aguhob along with chairman Jason Rapp, and is using the infrastructure it built to support the Viddy video-sharing app in order to explore other types of social media sharing.
Ubertesters Makes Beta Testing Mobile Apps Easier, Will Offer Crowdsourced On-Demand Testers Soon
Nov 04, 6:52PM
When it comes to testing mobile apps, most developers today rely on Testflight or HockeyApp to get their betas in the hands of testers. Ubertesters, a relatively new player in this business, challenges these incumbents with a more comprehensive testing solution that offers a wider range of tools for distributing new builds and reporting bugs. It also includes a crowdsourced component that gives developers access to a team of mobile app testers that is ready to take their apps through their paces on demand.
AetherPal, Software That Lets Mobile Carriers Remotely Support Your Smartphone, Grabs $6M Series A
Nov 04, 6:45PM
In a world where consumers are just now beginning to understand how little privacy they have online and on their various connected devices, a company like AetherPal, whose pre-loaded software allows mobile carriers remote access to your smartphone may initially give you pause. But for AetherPal, its purposes are not surveillance or data collection, but rather remote support. And it has now scored a $6 million Series A round of funding to continue to grow its business. The round is led by New Venture Partners and Boston-based Point Judith Capital, and comes at a time when the company has also just announced a new CEO, Daniel Deeney. Previously, Deeney led investments at New Venture Partners, and has served on the board of number of companies in the wireless and I.T. sectors, including Blinq Networks, Vasona Networks, Airclic, Neohapsis, and VPI Systems, according to his profile on NVP’s website. Deeney explains to us that he became interested in AetherPal for an investment, but after spending time speaking with its founder Ron Parmar, he realized that there was a different opportunity for him to actually lead the company, not just invest. “I told my partners I love venture capital and it’s really fun – I’ve been doing it for 13 years, but this is a company that I really think has a successful future here, and I want to jump in and do this as CEO,” Deeney says. Of course, he still gave NVP first crack at investment in the Series A, and they decided to proceed, putting up half of the $6 million. Parmar, meanwhile, is stepping back to serve as chairman, while co-founder and engineering head Deepak Gonsalves remains. AetherPal may not be a household name, but its footprint involves preloads on over 20 million mobile devices, including those sold by two large wireless carriers in the U.S. The company is not permitted to disclose these carriers by name due to NDA’s, but we know from previous reports that one is Verizon. The idea, from the consumer’s side, is simple enough to understand: if your phone is acting up, instead of having to drive to a store or call support and being frustratingly walked through various menus on your phone, a customer service representative could instead just take control of your handset – after you granted permission, of course – and fix the problem for you. Remote access and support technologies
The Three Reasons Twitter Didn't Sell To Facebook
Nov 04, 6:36PM
![Ev Williams [ (CC) Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com]](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/4436910627_18bc1e5c00_z.jpg?w=100&h=70&crop=1)
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg tried to acquire Twitter not once but twice, through official channels and via co-founder Jack Dorsey. The details of the efforts are revealed in Nick Bilton’s new book Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal. I’ll have a full review of the book soon, but I found one passage in particular worth noting. It was late October of 2008, shortly after Dorsey had been ousted as CEO and consigned to a silent role as Chairman, with no voting stock or operational control. Fellow Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone had been invited to visit Facebook for a sit-down with CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The purpose? An acquisition of Twitter. Zuckerberg, Bilton explains, had been working Dorsey for months to try to arrange a buyout. But his plans were thrown into disarray when Dorsey was yanked from the CEO slot. An email at one point to Jack had given a point-by-point reasoning on why Facebook+Twitter made sense. Among those reasons was the customary threat that Facebook could choose to ‘build products that moved further in [Twitter's] direction’, a tactic that we’ve personally heard many accounts of Zuckerberg employing. The implicit threat: sell to us or we’ll clone your product. During the meeting, Williams and Stone threw out a valuation: $500 million. Zuckerberg was not shocked, as Dorsey had already informed him that this was the range that would be sought. But the sale didn’t happen, and the reasoning behind the rejection was outlined in an email by Williams to the board, which is partially quoted in Bilton’s book. It seems to me, there are three reasons to sell a company, Ev wrote in an e-mail to the board outlining why they should decline Facebook’s offer. 1. The price is good enough of or a value that the company will be in the future. (“We’ve often said that Twitter is a billion dollar company. I think it’s many, many times that,” Ev wrote.) 2. There’s an imminent and very real threat from a competitor. (Nothing is going to “pose a credible threat of taking Twitter to zero.” 3. You have a choice to go and work for someone great. (“I don’t use [Facebook]. And I have many concerns about their people and how they do business.”) There are a few interesting points in this passage, which we’ve emphasized. First among those is that the board saw
Apple's Tim Cook Is Right, Anti-Gay Policies Hurt The Economy
Nov 04, 5:34PM
The elusive CEO of the richest company in the world, Apple’s Tim Cook, has taken a rare step into the spotlight to urge Congress to ban sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace. In a Wall Street Journal OpEd, Cook argues that passing the Employment Nondiscrimination Act is not only a moral imperative, but sound economic policy: “Those who have suffered discrimination have paid the greatest price for this lack of legal protection. But ultimately we all pay a price. If our coworkers cannot be themselves in the workplace, they certainly cannot be their best selves. When that happens, we undermine people’s potential and deny ourselves and our society the full benefits of those individuals’ talents.” I’m no fan of bigotry, but is Cook, who is widely thought to be gay himself, right that discrimination hurts the economy? In short, yes, but it’s hard to determine the impact. A UCLA Law review of research finds that anti-discrimination policies make for healthier, more cooperative, and committed workers [PDF]. IBM-sponsored ethnographic research finds that gay workers who feel accepted in the workplace are also more willing to share creative ideas [PDF]. “If I'm not out at work, I spend more time trying to conceal my home life and therefore not concentrating on my job.” explained one respondent. To some extent, we’re lucky to live in a country where our economy isn’t held hostage to Congress’s inability to promote equality. Nearly every major company in America supports gay workers and knows they’d face crippling public backlash on top of missing out on top-notch talent by discriminating. The companies most in charge of innovation won’t be impacted by legislation. Still, every sick, disparaged, and fearful worker hurts the economy. Innovation comes from unexpected places: every fired teacher and bullied teenager makes it that much less likely innovative Americans will ever reach their potential. One of the godfathers of modern computing, Alan Turing, died shortly after the British government forced him into chemical castration for being gay. Turing’s revolutionary mathematical theorems proved how computers could be more than simple calculators. He died at the young age of 41 directly from discriminatory legislation. Who knows what he could have contributed to computing in the later years of his life? [Image Credit: Flickr User Goedegebuure]
Hasty Rebrands As Zesty, Launches In San Francisco To Convert Your Local Chinese Joint Into A Healthy Delivery Option
Nov 04, 5:00PM
Zesty is a new healthy eating app available in San Francisco that provides customers with only healthy options for delivery or takeout. It does this by working with restaurants to identify healthy options and working with them to improve different menu items. In that way, Zesty is able to convert your local Chinese joint into a haven for healthy food options. 
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