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Apple Patent Explores Mood-Based Ad Targeting
Jan 23, 12:57PM
Apple is working on a means by which a targeted ad delivery system could clue in to a viewer’s mood, and serve them ads appropriate to that mood according to a new patent (via AppleInsider). So if, for example, it finds you’re Twitter stalking your ex and looking at pictures they’re posting wherein they’re having fun and smiling with their new beau, you might get an ad for Haagen Dazs or Jim Beam, at least in theory. Already, ad targeting uses a number of factors to figure out which are the best ads to show any particular user, taking into account the time of day, their age range, browsing behavior and location, among others. Apple’s patent describes a way in which mood can be assessed, too, to add an extra dimension to the advertiser’s arsenal of consumer intelligence. Apple’s filing says it can determine mood based on different types of data, including heart rate, blood pressure, adrenaline level, body temperature and verbal cues, many of which are now being volunteered by users of devices in the quantified self space like fitness trackers and more advanced health sensors. It can also use signals like what type of content a user is viewing, which apps they’re using and when, what kind of music they’re listening to, as well as how they’re interacting with social network for finding outwardly expressed cues regarding mood. The system would also establish a baseline mood for each individual user to compare against, since behavior expressing sadness for one might actually indicate happiness for another, and information regarding the user’s tendencies while under the influence of different moods would be monitored to see what kind of advertising works best for them in each circumstance. Then, it’ll serve up ads appropriate to a user’s current mood, in combination with the other ad targeting criteria mentioned above, when it has enough information. Of course, the patent also goes into detail about privacy, describing things like expiring mood profiles that only last a certain amount of time, as well as how any data use in the system described would have to be in strict compliance with existing privacy policies and user agreements. It describes a provision for including an “opt in” or “opt out” toggle for use of the system in a device’s settings application (perhaps similar to the current “Limit Ad Tracking” option found in iOS 7). Really, it’s notNewsCred Raises Another $25M For Its Content Marketing Platform
Jan 23, 12:39PM
NewsCred, a company that helps customers find and create content for their marketing campaigns, is announcing that it has raised $25 million in Series C funding. The funding comes slightly less than a year after I wrote about the company's last round of $15 million. One of the main reasons to keep raising, said co-founder and CEO Shafqat Islam, is that, "We're up against some big players like Salesforce and Adobe, and we need investment and we need a big team."Apple Patents Sapphire Display Tech After Last Year's $578M Deal With Sapphire Maker
Jan 23, 12:10PM
Apple has had a patent approved today (via AppleInsider) that could make it a leader in a new kind of display material technology: Sapphire glass. The patent describes various methods for attaching sapphire crystal to electronic devices, and includes a description of how it does this with the sapphire glass covering the iPhone camera lens introduced with the iPhone 5, as well as a means for attaching sapphire as a cover for the whole display. In the past, the iPhone has used Gorilla Glass to protect its screen (though some believe it may have stopped recently); Apple championed this tech and basically made its maker Corning the default choice for smartphone OEMs looking for a tough, scratch-resistant material to use to protect their screens. But last year, Apple made a $578 million bet on sapphire (which is used often in good watches) with GT Advanced Technologies to have it build a manufacturing plant for the material in Arizona. When the deal was announced, our own Matthew Panzarino took a closer look at the investment, and at what sapphire glass could provide Apple. Sapphire, including the lab grown variety, is much tougher, more resistant to scratches, and more resistant to breakage after scratches than even Gorilla Glass, which has a strong reputation in all those arenas. It’s heavier, too, but would potentially allow Apple to use thinner pieces for both space and weight savings. Of course, there are also existing needs at Apple for sapphire glass, including the iPhone camera lens and the new Touch ID-compatible home button, which many expect to make its way to other Apple devices including the iPad eventually. But the patent uses an iPhone-type device as its illustrative example, and specifically states that while the gadget depicted is a “smart phone,” the techniques described could be used on any number of devices. A smartwatch might be a good target case, for example, given that Apple has been rumored to have been working on one for some time, and that sapphire is a very common case material used in the manufacture of watches from most leading brands. The patent itself details ways in which the sapphire material could be attached to the shell or casing of an electronic device, with examples in illustrations detailing jigsaw-type and tounge-and-groove mechanics for keeping the glass firmly in place. At this stage, it’s more likely that Apple is simply laying theLyst, A Fashion E-Commerce Aggregator, Raises $14M More, Plans Beacon Rollout With PayPal
Jan 23, 11:51AM
Lyst, a platform that aggregates different fashion commerce sites in a single place with a "universal shopping cart", is today announcing a $14 million round of funding -- money that it will use to ramp up its marketing and to hire more data scientists and other engineers to keep building out its algorithms to compete against the likes of eBay, the Fancy and other one-top-shop online marketplaces.Nokia Says Lumia & Other Phone Sales Declined In Q4 As It Prepares To Sell Division To Microsoft
Jan 23, 11:25AM
In what is likely to be Nokia’s last quarterly earnings before it hands off its mobile phone making business to Microsoft, the Finnish mobile maker has reported lower sales of Lumia devices in its Q4. The company also reported a non-IFRS operating profit of €408 million — but based mainly on its NSN equipment business. So the decision to cut loose its mobile phone making business looks to be vindicated by these results. Nokia’s adjusted operating profit in the quarter was €274 million — €243 million of which came from NSN. Its non-IFRS EPS was €0.08. In a preview of the earnings, TC’s Alex Wilhelm suggested Nokia should easily sell more than 10 million Lumias in what was after all the holiday quarter. In the event Nokia has not broken out a figure for sales of the Windows Phone devices — noting only a decline in Smart Devices net sales (and also in basic Mobile Phones net sales), so presumably it sold less than the 8.8 million Lumia reported last quarter. The year-on-year decline in discontinued operations net sales in the fourth quarter 2013 was primarily due to lower Mobile Phones net sales and, to a lesser extent, lower Smart Devices net sales. Our Mobile Phones net sales were affected by competitive industry dynamics, including intense smartphone competition at increasingly lower price points and intense competition at the low end of our product portfolio. Our Smart Devices net sales were affected by competitive industry dynamics including the strong momentum of competing smartphone platforms, as well as our portfolio transition from Symbian products to Lumia products. In its previous earnings report, for its fiscal Q3, Nokia reported a surprise profit of €118 million ($160 million), with 8.8 million Lumia smartphones sold in the quarter — up from 7.4 million Lumias sold in its Q2. Nokia made an operating loss of €115 million ($156 million) in that quarter. In its Q1 Nokia reported 5.6 million Lumias sold — so sales of its Lumia devices were gradually increasing, quarter on quarter. Its Q4 results apparently reverse that trend — and make Nokia’s decision to hand-off its phone business to Microsoft look like a solid one. Back in September Nokia announced it would sell substantially all of its phone making business to Microsoft. That transaction is still expected to close in the first quarter of this year. Commenting on the Q4 results in a statement, Risto Siilasmaa, Nokia Chairman and interim CEO said: “The fourth quarter ofMendix, An App-Builder Platform For The Enterprise, Closes $25M Series B Led By Battery Ventures
Jan 23, 10:47AM
Mendix, an app builder platform for the enterprise, has closed a $25 million Series B, led by Battery Ventures. Existing investor Prime Ventures also participated. Mendix raised a $13 million Series A back in 2011, according to CrunchBase. It was founded back in 2005.EC Creates Corporates+Universities Group And A Thinktank To Help EU Startups
Jan 23, 10:37AM
We've already covered the set of initiatives the European Commission plans to roll out in order to address the pressing need to support tech startups in Europe. Today in Davos, at the World Economic Form, Vice President Neelie Kroes has announced the launch of two initiatives inspired by that work.IBM Dumps Its Server Business On Lenovo For $2.3B
Jan 23, 10:03AM
IBM has finally managed to sell its low-margin server business to the world’s largest PC maker Lenovo. The two companies have been negotiating this deal for past few years, and a potential sale fell off last year when Lenovo did not agree to pay what IBM wanted — $6 billion. Now, Lenovo has informed the Hong Kong Stock exchange that it will pay $2.07 billion in cash to IBM for buying its server unit. This is the second time IBM has managed to get rid of a low-end hardware business by selling it off to Lenovo. In 2005, IBM sold its ThinkPad PC business to Lenovo for $1.75 billion. IBM’s revenue from server business have been declining for past seven quarters, forcing the company to act fast and get rid of the unit. Globally, some of the biggest enterprises including Facebook and Google are increasingly turning to stripped-down versions of hardware, and not the pricey ones. These companies are instead asking manufacturers like Quanta to build customized servers for them that work cheaper and more suited. With almost no brand association, servers from Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers are called the “other” server. For Lenovo, which is already struggling to cope with worsening PC sales because of higher smartphone adoption in the growing markets of Asia, IBM’s server business will give an opportunity to build another revenue stream. As this Reuters article says, IBM’s server business was the world’s second-largest, with a 22.9 percent share of the $12.3 billion market in the third quarter of 2013, according to technology research firm GartnerAs Investor Interest Heats Up In Turkey, Pan-European Accelerator Startupbootcamp Launches In Istanbul
Jan 23, 9:59AM
With news earlier this week that Earlybird, the Berlin-based VC, has launched a new $130 million fund targeting early-stage startups in Turkey and Central and Eastern Europe, it seems apt that Turkey -- specifically, Istanbul -- should get itself a new startup accelerator.iZettle, Europe's Square, Releases An SDK For Direct Mobile Payment Integration On iOS
Jan 23, 9:00AM
iZettle -- a mobile payments startup based out of Sweden that has been referred to as the "Square of Europe" for its small piece of hardware that attaches to a smartphone or tablet -- is today taking one more step to making its service more ubiquitous in the nine countries where it operates: it's releasing an SDK that will directly integrate iZettle mobile payments into third party applications.Old Spice Is Back With Another Set Of Viral Things — This Time, It's Prank Websites
Jan 23, 8:51AM
After a short break, Old Spice — otherwise known as "that company that makes really, really good ads and, I don't know, deodorant or something" — is back with another campaign that proves their ad team is one of very few that can repeatedly and intentionally make things that go viral. This time around, it's prank websites.GoEuro Gets "Multi-Million" Top-Up From Lakestar To Add More Markets To Its Journey Planner Platform
Jan 23, 8:00AM
GoEuro, one of a raft of European startups attempting to simplify the tangled web of transport booking systems us ‘Old Worldian’ Europeans have to navigate if we wish to travel across borders, has topped up its funding level with a new post-seed round “multi-million” dollar investment from Lakestar. It’s also announced Charles Petruccelli, former President of Global Business Travel for American Express, as a new investor. TechCrunch understands the post-seed round is additive rather than essential for GoEuro, which is still maintaining a strong cash position at this point. GoEuro is not disclosing the exact size of the new round but TechCrunch understands it is sizeable. The new funding round follows a $4 million seed for the Berlin-based startup, led by Battery Ventures and Hasso Plattner Ventures in March last year. GoEuro launched a service to users in the U.K. and Germany last May. GoEuro said it will be using the new funding to expand the reach of its platform — which currently serves up transport info such as train, plane and coach timetable data, and estimated journey times for car trips, for travel in three European markets: namely the U.K., Germany and Spain. That market footprint is set to expand to seven by summer 2014 – mostly in Western Europe, according to CEO Naren Shaam. It seems likely that France will be one of GoEuro’s new markets (although he’s not naming the markets as yet), being as geographically it sits between its other operational markets, so any platform users wanting to travel between those countries by land transport are likely to need to make use of French rail and roads. GoEuro isn’t revealing the size of this latest investment but the challenge of making myriad hoary old transport systems play together on a shiny new platform — not to mention get transport providers to sign up — is undoubtedly a costly venture. “Because we need to get to such an extent of technology integration it’s not going to be easy,” ” said Shaam. “Rome was not built in a day, we can only go country by country — because Europe has if anything hundreds of rail and bus providers… And we need to bring all of them on the same platform.” “The new funding will allow us to expand into all the new markets — but also the [new investors] bring a lot of previous experience,” he added. Currently GoEuro’s platform does not supportSingapore Online Grocer RedMart Raises $5.4M From Investors Including Facebook Co-founder
Jan 23, 6:37AM
RedMart, an online grocery service based in Singapore, announced today that it has closed a $5.4 million bridge round led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin; Property Guru founders Steve Melhuish and Jani Rautiainen; Meng Weng Wong, the co-founder of incubator JFDI; Wee Teng Wen, founder of The Lo & Behold Group; and Lion Rock Capital. The round was oversubscribed and brings RedMart's total raised so far to $10 million.Renew OnDemand Provider ServiceSource Acquires Scout Analytics For $32M
Jan 23, 2:27AM
ServiceSource, which provides recurring revenue management software for businesses like Renew OnDemand, announced today that it has acquired Scout Analytics, a Seattle-based provider of predictive analytics for subscription businesses. The terms of the deal were $32 million in cash.Ominous Text Message Sent To Government Protestors In Ukraine
Jan 23, 2:15AM
Someone is broadcasting creepy messages to defuse violent protests against the Ukrainian government. “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance,” is a text being sent to protesters, reportedly near the Parliament building. Protesters are, in part, angry over anti-demonstration laws passed by the heavy-handed president, Viktor Yanukovych. We’ve reached out to experts to see what company may have enabled the Ukrainian government to send the mass message — or whichever actor was trying to intimidate them. The protests, which have been raging since last year, are in opposition to the Russian-friendly policies of the current administration and the dubious circumstances of its election to power. Governments around the world, including the U.S. government, are increasingly brazen about their use of location tracking of dissidents and protestors. According to the USA Today, Miami-Dade police told the city council they had purchased a location-tracking system specifically to monitor protesters. Until recently, the Saudi government had kept a digital leash on women trying to leave the country, notifying their male guardians when they left. In 2012, digital rights watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation brought attention to companies selling technology to authoritarian regimes, including from a Nokia subsidiary, Trovicor. We will update readers as we learn more about this incident.Eyeing International Growth, Stripe Raises $80M From Founders Fund, Khosla And Sequoia At A $1.75B Valuation
Jan 23, 12:52AM
The payments industry has a new billion dollar company. Online payments company Stripe is announcing more than $80 million in Series C funding, at a $1.75 billion valuation. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the round with new investor Khosla (Keith Rabois) and existing investor Sequoia joining, with Allen & Co. also contributing. This brings Stripe’s total funding up to over $130 million. To understand why Stripe is and had been disruptive, it’s best to go back to the mission behind the company from a few years back. In 2011, the company, which is the brainchild of brothers Patrick and John Collison, stated that its mission clearly: “We believe that enabling transactions on the web is a problem rooted in code, not finance, and we want to help put more websites in business.” While PayPal and others existed at the time to allow websites to set up e-commerce and payments, these offerings were clunky and not developer-friendly. Moreover, they had not adapted to new technologies and user interactions. In 2010, the Collison brothers set out to change this. They had come to the U.S. from Ireland and became affiliated with Y Combinator very early on when their company Auctomatic was sold in 2008 (they were only teenagers at the time). In terms of the competition, Stripe goes head to head with PayPal, which also boosted its processing with the recent acquisition of Braintree. But the signal of investment from three out of five PayPal co-founders and now early PayPal employee Rabois shows that there is an opportunity for multiple players in the space, and that Stripe has huge potential for growth, especially globally. Patrick explained us that he sees some overlap with PayPal but fundamentally the two companies have different approaches to how they are tackling problems in the space. PayPal has moved into the offline world, and for now, Stripe isn’t heading in that direction. One of the main differences Collison explains, is in Stripe’s approach to create a real platform around the company. The Collison brothers see Stripe as having the same opportunity that AWS has when building a hosting platform. They want to create the infrastructure that surrounds payments on the web and mobile, the way AWS has changed the way people build websites, says John Collison. The opportunity here is to further expand the payments API into mobile, checkout, fraud and more. A huge infusion of newVMWare's $1.5B AirWatch Buy All About The Mobile Workplace
Jan 23, 12:22AM
In the latest salvo in the battle to reshape the architecture by which business works VMWare, a multi-billion dollar server virtualization company, just spent $1.5 billion to buy AirWatch, which sells technology to secure data and applications on mobile devices like tablets, smart phones, and laptops. The acquisition, and the hundreds of millions of dollars venture investors and corporations have spent on new storage technologies, databases, and security, are all trying to find ways to bring more business applications and services to mobile devices like smart phones and tablets. With the acquisition of AirWatch – which had previously raised $225 million from investors including Insight Venture Partners and Accel Partners – VMWare can now sell security services that make it easier for professionals to do more work outside of the office. “AirWatch provides real, important value now. They’re right there when an enterprise says we need to get this stuff [i.e. data and applications] under our control,” said Richard Wells, a managing director with the technology focused growth capital and private equity firm Insight Venture Partners, which led a $225 million financing for AirWatch back in 2013. That Series A round was one of the single biggest first round financings for a technology company in years, and netted AirWatch a valuation of roughly $1 billion, according to several sources familiar with the deal. That’s pretty big money, and the AirWatch deal is all part of a wholesale re-evaluation that companies are doing of the basic technology infrastructure that employees use to conduct business every day. Venture investors and companies like VMWare have spent steadily increasing amounts on mobile security hardware, software and services so that people can do more work from more places – and do it securely, according to data from CrunchBase. Other big enterprise companies are buying into mobile security too. Citrix, which bought the venture-backed Zenprise in late 2012, and IBM, which paid an undisclosed amount for Fiberlink Communications, a mobile device management are two examples. Venture capitalists have also backed independent private companies like MobileIron with $124 million in financing to pursue the same market in securing mobile business. For its part, AirWatch sees the VMWare acquisition allowing it to take on a new set of competitors, like venture-backed companies Box and Dropbox, which have raised a combined $350 million from investors in the past two months. “We see the enterprise content space as an extension ofiPhone 5s Owners Gobbling "Unprecedented" Levels Of Data, Study Finds
Jan 23, 12:05AM
A large-scale survey of mobile data consumption in 2013 conducted by JDSU has found flagship smartphone device users are continuing to outpace the data consumption rates of tablet users. But the most data thirsty phone users of all have an iPhone 5s burning a hole in their pocket -- and they are responsible for "unprecedented" levels of data gobbling.Microsoft Earnings Preview: The Surface Question
Jan 22, 11:37PM
Tomorrow afternoon Microsoft will report its fiscal third-quarter financial performance, detailing how it fared during the critical holiday season. The company is working to revamp its key operating system, become an OEM, and grow its mobile presence. That confluence of efforts makes tomorrow's report quite important.Microsoft Gives Its Office Web Apps A New, Flatter Look
Jan 22, 11:27PM
Microsoft is giving its Office Web Apps a new look today, it seems. While the company hasn’t done all that much to promote its Office Web Apps lately, they are pretty capable online versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote that are free for anyone to use. Today, the company is giving all of these apps a user interface overhaul that brings an even flatter design, some new features and easier navigation. While Microsoft hasn’t officially announced these changes, the company has confirmed to us that it did indeed launch these updates earlier today. “We did introduce some Office Web App updates earlier today,” a Microsoft said. “As we’ve said in the past, we’ll continue to bring the Office features that you value most to the Web and this is just one example of that.” The most notable change – or at least the first one I spotted – is a new navigation for the OneNote note-taking app. It now uses two columns on the left to help you navigate between the different sections of your notebooks. Previously, that was a bit of a hassle. Microsoft has also changed the design of the top menu across all the apps and cleaned up the design of the Ribbon menu across the board. The occasional semi-skeuomorphic icon remains in the Ribbon, but for the most part, the Office Web Apps have now gone completely flat. As part of the update, Microsoft has also changed the header UI to include a switcher that offers access to other online Microsoft experiences. One other change I noticed was that the Word and Excel apps now features a “Tell me what you want to do” search bar that lets you search across all of the app’s tools and invoke actions, such as bolding text or find and replace right from the search results. It uses type-ahead, so it generally just takes a few keystrokes to find the function you need. Microsoft says this tool will soon arrive in the PowerPoint web app, too. Microsoft tells me that it also now allows users to add “polish to reports and papers with new footnotes & endnotes.” Overall, the new design makes the Office Web Apps feel a bit more like the recently updated Outlook.com, which also features a similarly flat menu bar. For comparison, here is what the old user interface looked like: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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