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Billionaire Jewelry King Launches TaskWorld, A Management Tool All About Performance
Feb 02, 7:00AM
Billionaire jewelry king Fred Mouawad has a different take on the world of task management. Most providers have some play on keeping a list or offer a schedule of reminders. But Mouawad, after hanging out at Stanford University to get in geek mode, has built something different. It's called Taskworld and it's a task-management app that is all about measuring performance.Perfecting The Enterprise End User Experience
Feb 02, 5:00AM
Everyone talks about user experience. It's often referred to in terms of how 'sticky' an app is for its users – how easy it is to use, how engaging it is, how relevant it is to what you're doing, etc. All are elements that contribute to a compelling experience, regardless of industry or app type. But while user experience is well understood and has always been core to the development and success of consumer-facing apps, the same is hardly true of in the enterprise world.Required Reading: The Economist's Special Report On Tech Startups
Feb 01, 11:00PM
It's not every day we here at TechCrunch just point to someone else's work and say, "Here, you should go read this." But today's an exception, because The Economist has put together a 16-page Special Report on the rise of technology startups around the world.Bitcoin's Emerging Price Stability
Feb 01, 9:20PM
Earlier in January Bitcoin, as it receded as recipient of an infinite press, began to see its trading range tighten after months of wild swings. I pointed this out as perhaps the start of new stability for Bitcoin, which in turn could help its platform mature, or indicate maturation thereof. There was some squawking that the time frame I had selected as ‘enough’ to indicate a trend was too short. It was a reasonable complaint. Happily, Bitcoin has behaved and exonerated me by tacking on another tranche of time of generally stable prices. The gist is simple: For nearly the entire month of January Bitcoin has traded in the 900s, with minor exceptions in 1,000s. For a currency that until very recently could see 50% of its value drop in a day and not have that day stand out all too much, it has been something of a calming of the seas. Here’s the D1 chart you need (Mt.Gox data via Clark Moody): Why does it matter if Bitcoin is seeing increasing price stability? Essentially the more wild the swings in its value, the less useful Bitcoin is as a tool of commerce. This goes both ways: The more real uses there are for Bitcoin, the smaller the percentage of speculative trades in the currency; and, the smaller the changes in its price, the more people may start to accept Bitcoin as a payment option. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. Marc Andreessen recently summed this well: “Bitcoin is a classic network effect, a positive feedback loop. The more people who use Bitcoin, the more valuable Bitcoin is for everyone who uses it, and the higher the incentive for the next user to start using the technology.” Marc’s piece — it’s mandatory reading, by the way — lays out a bullish case for Bitcoin arguing that its core technological tenets provide large incentive for its use, which will drive adoption and long-term use. Bitcoin volume on the Mt.Gox exchange is down sharply this year, a change I think that is roughly commensurate with the currency’s decline in media attention. If you were hoping for Bitcoin to shape up and fly right, it was a banner month. Top Image Credit: Flickr (Image cropped)CrunchWeek: Microsoft's CEO Hunt Heats Up, Google Says Goodbye Moto, Facebook's Paper App
Feb 01, 9:18PM
With the Super Bowl right around the corner, for many Americans this weekend is all about football -- but tech certainly gave sports a run for its money when it came to interesting news this week. So Ryan Lawler, Alex Wilhelm and I had a lot to catch up on in this week's CrunchWeek, the weekly show that brings a few TechCrunch writers together to chat about the hottest stories in tech.Peek Is A Playful Calendar App, From An Ex-IDEO Designer, For People Who Aren't Forever Busy
Feb 01, 8:00PM
Peek is a new (paid) calendar app for iOS that’s aiming to appeal to the social middle ground of people whose lives don’t consist of non-stop meetings from 9 ’til 9. So not a calendar app for professional calendar nerds, then. The app rethinks the calendar as a gesture-based playground, rather than a spreadsheet-esque chore. It’s an attempt at designed interaction, with a minimalist interface that incorporates a playful, gesture-based UI — itself flagged up by the cheeky name Peek. The look and feel of this calendar combines flat design — via rich blocks of colour — with a mischievous sense of dimensionality that allows subtly sign-posted calendar entries to fold open like origami when tapped on and hinge-closed again, simultaneously mocking the lie of flat design while embracing its seamless perfection. To the uninitiated user, Peek’s interface can appear enigmatic or even inscrutable at first glance — with a rack of icons swiping into view that look alien rather than immediately obvious, and a series of interface gestures required to navigate the app’s functions, which don’t immediately leap out as intuitive and absolutely do require a little poking and prodding around to get into the swing of. Yet, spend some time getting to know Peek, unlocking its finger signs and flat symbols, and the interface transforms — or rather unfolds, revealing hidden depths of fun and functionality beneath an intentionally minimalist exterior. “Instead of using the conventional navigational elements, we decided to build Peek from the ground up,” says Peek designer Amid Moradganjeh. “We believe interfaces can be more about the content. Focusing on the content makes the conventional navigational elements less visible, and using gestural control allows the design to be cleaner, quieter and more ambient. This can actually speed up the process of using calendar. “There is also an element of play in Peek,” he adds. “We wanted to introduce new behaviors that are more fun to use. We believe that fun does not necessarily have to be less functional.” Peek’s sense of fun can be summed up by a shake gesture feature that allows the user to ask the app to come up with an idea for something new to do in future — such as ‘read something inspirational’ or ‘call someone you miss’ — which they can then choose to add to their calendar at a random time ‘soon’ (or not at all). So, yep: Peek’s got serendipity diarized.GoDaddy Updates Its User Protection Policies In Wake Of Infamous Twitter Account Extortion
Feb 01, 7:24PM
GoDaddy has updated its account security policies in the wake of the now infamous extortion of a Twitter account. As TechCrunch previously reported, a hacker claimed to have gained the Twitter user’s last four credit card digits from PayPal, which was then used to convince GoDaddy to reset their account. The compromised GoDaddy account — and its requisite domain collection — was used as leverage to extort the user out of their excellent Twitter account, @N. In the wake of the hacking and ensuing outrage over lax security, denials of culpability, TechCrunch wondered out loud why Twitter itself hadn’t made @N whole. We spoke to @N, known to most as Naoki Hiroshima, after the fact and and he detailed a few things that GoDaddy should do to tighten its security, methods that might have helped protect his account: “[Two factor authentication] can’t prevent this from happening again,” says Hiroshima. “GoDaddy allowed the guy to reset everything over the phone. As long as a company only uses the last 4 digits of a [credit card] to verify [identity], this will keep happening. They should ask multiple questions.” GoDaddy has made steps that mirror what Hiroshima felt was needed. In a tweet today, the company said the following: @N_is_stolen Will do. We now require 8 card digits, lock after 3 attempts and deal with 2-factor authentication accounts differently. ^NF Requiring more credit card digits matters. If the hacker in question had been required to provide that quantity of information, the jig would have been up prematurely: The hacker claims that PayPal gave them the last four digits of Hiroshima’s credit card. If the GoDaddy threshold had been higher, we wouldn’t be talking about this now. It’s a bummer that GoDaddy was able to be compromised in the above way, but the new security policies should reduce future risk for its customers, of which I am one. I’ve reached out to GoDaddy for an explanation of the changes to its security policies and will update this post when I hear back. Top Image Credit: Flickr (Image cropped)Harvey Keitel, CEO, Or How To Pull Off The Impossible
Feb 01, 7:00PM
In many of the old war movies, every elite unit has at least one member that has the critical talent to make something out of nothing: the scrounge. You know this guy: when everyone is out of rations or ammunition and the truck is broken down, he quietly heads out. The next day, when all hope of completing the mission seems lost, the scrounge comes rolling up in a freshly repainted jeep, full rations, ammo, and, stereotypically, a case of cold beer. How did he do that? Where did it all come from? "Don't ask," he growls, "Let's get movin'."Gillmor Gang: Brand Royalty
Feb 01, 6:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — seem perfectly willing to predict the futility of the next Microsoft CEO, and even perhaps the next Bill Gates. But we can only successor-surf so long before returning to the more heady war of the social stream. You can decide for yourself, but this feisty show was supercharged by @jtaschek's minority report on the heir apparent and never really let up. From @kteare's posit of Facebook devolution to everybody's fascination with the mirage of brand loyalty, the emerging point is still elusive. Namely, that we'll know it when we see it, and reward each and every app that fits into the puzzle with a notification seat at the table.Boombotix Raises $4M For Its Wearable Action Speakers And Audio Sync Software
Feb 01, 5:46PM
Kickstarter funding will often lead to the more traditional kind, and in the case of Boombotix, that’s exactly what happened. The California startup raised $17,000 for its music syncing app, which allows people to synchronize playback of music across multiple devices using mobile networks, and nearly $130,000 for its Boombot Rex mobile Bluetooth action-ready portable speaker. Now, it has also raised $4 million in venture funding from Social+ Capital, Baseline, Red Hills and many others. May of its partners in this round are strategic in nature, and Boombotix co-founder Lief Storer says they were chosen for their ability to help build the brand. “The investors’ interest is vested in amplifying our brand through product development and strategic marketing,” he explained in an interview. “There isn’t a single expense [in terms of using these funds] that stands out, but having key human capital in place to continue building the talent in the organization will be essential to the long-term strategy.” Boombotix isn’t saying how many speakers it managed to see since its launch back in 2010, but it has seen its sales grow by triple figures since the debut of its Kickstarter campaigns, which also led to deals secured with retailers including Amazon, T-Mobile, Microsoft and Apple.com. The selling point of the Boombot REX is that it can stand up to mud, dust and some water exposure, as well as take spills, while providing quality sound, portability and also speaker phone functions, including the ability to use Siri on the iPhone from the gadget. Its audio sync tech was designed to be an answer to user requests to broadcast to multiple speakers at once, which isn’t supported with standard Bluetooth. It isn’t perfect, but the app gets around this by allowing multiple devices (i.e. smartphones or tablets) to sync playback of music perfectly over a mobile network, which means that each can output music to their own attached Bluetooth speaker for what is effectively multi-speaker sound. Of course, you need more than one device to make it happen, but it’s a step in the right direction. Boombot has begun to position its speakers as a wearable play, in part to capitalize on the growing interest in that device category. It’s true that they’re small and clip-mounted, and can be easily attached to clothing, but the key to growth will be holding appeal beyond the current action sports group of core buyers.Developer Behind "Flappy Bird," The Impossible Game Blowing Up The App Store, Says He Just Got Lucky
Feb 01, 5:00PM
Flappy Bird, a game you can barely play for more than a few seconds without throwing your phone across the room in frustration, is dominating the App Store and Google Play. In an App Store first, an indie game developer from Hanoi, Vietnam, Nguyen Ha Dong, has 3 apps in the top 10 rankings right now, which is not only odd because the publisher has seemingly come out of nowhere with these viral hits, but also because there’s no cross-promotion built into the games themselves. The other two titles, Super Ball Juggling (currently #2) and Shuriken Block (#6) instead seem to be benefitting solely from the word-of-mouth success of #1 free app, Flappy Bird itself. As for the Flappy Bird game, its deceptively simple appearance with graphics that harken back to the era of 8-bit gaming, is actually one of the hardest games you’ll ever play. And yet the gameplay involves nothing more than tapping your screen to keep a flying bird from running into green pipes that look like they’ve been snatched out of Super Mario Bros. Yes, that’s the extent of it. There’s no other challenge or story. But good luck, gamers, because if you can get a score in the double digits, you’re some kind of god here. In fact, it’s a game that’s so irritatingly impossible, and yet somehow so addictive, that it seems like it’s been designed more so to have its players run to tell their friends about it, rather than master the skill set it requires. (Though some, of course, have done that too.) After the hundredth time you play it, having only a score of, say, five, it’s like you’re unable to keep quiet about the darned thing. A simple built-in “Rate” button, one of only a few in the game besides “Start,” “Score,” and a pause button which you’ll probably die if you try to use, allows you to share your frustrations on the app store, while its “Share” counterpart helpfully lets you tell your friends on Facebook, Twitter, SMS or email. “This sucks! You have to try it,” is how those invites generally read. The game is not for everyone, to be clear. It’s kind of an awful little thing that you can even play in spare chunks of time when you only have seconds (maybe not even minutes!) to kill in between some other activity. As you quickly dieTo Succeed, Growth Hacking Has To Focus More On Product Development Than Marketing
Feb 01, 4:00PM
I can't think of a buzzier phrase in the tech industry these days than growth hacking, and in some ways I also can't think of a more dangerous trend to glom onto. Sure, growth is good. But only if it's real growth.Watch More Crazy First-Person Footage Of Felix Baumgartner's Space Jump
Feb 01, 3:34PM
There’s more eye-candy footage of Felix Baumgartner’s epic space jump. Sports video camera hardware startup, GoPro, released a 30-second Superbowl spot of first and third-person perspective of Baumgartner’s free fall from the stratosphere. Just to manage expectations, it’s not the full first-person perspective of his entire dive to earth that I think many of us have been waiting for. But, it’s still a human jumping from space to earth–which is objectively awesome no matter the perspective or length of coverage. What’s the business case for GoPro to shell out all this cash for a stunt that only one (freaking crazy) consumer will ever use it for? It’s more than just ad impressions. As CEO Nicolas Woodman explained at our San Francisco Disrupt Conference, crazy stunts are a big part of product inspiration. Experimenting with GoPro cameras in crazy scenarios early on eventually led to a major market opportunities, even though originally the ideas just sounded like a lot of fun. Watch his full interview on bootstrapping a startup and his own inspirations below:BuzzFeed Is The Future (Whether It Lives Or Dies)
Feb 01, 2:00PM
It's time for a little inside baseball! Be still your beating hearts. But admit it: secretly you want to know about the success/failure of the myriad news sources whose stories flit disconnectedly across your Facebook and Twitter feeds from time to time, if only so you can tell your friends that you already knew who was doomed, on the day that long-fabled Great Shakeout finally comes and half of the world's journalists find themselves surplus to needs.Adobe, WPP, Among Companies In Talks To Acquire Indian Social Analytics Startup Simplify360
Feb 01, 10:44AM
Indian digital media circles have been abuzz with rumors of potential targets being looked at in the social media analytics space by Twitter, Adobe and even WPP, the world’s biggest advertising company. The latest to join the list of potential targets is Simplify360, a Bangalore-based social media analytics startup that counts over 100 paying customers including big names such as Yamaha, Revlon, Target and Wipro. I reached out to Bhupendra Khanal, the startup’s CEO, who confirmed ongoing talks for strategic investments with several companies, but declined to elaborate any further. This is what he had to say: “At this stage I cannot accept or decline this news. Several companies have approached for strategic investment or acquisition, and serious talks are on. We will announce if something materializes.” The rumors of Adobe being in talks to acquire Simplify360 were reported by Indian social media blog, Socialsamosa yesterday. Simplify360 is among a growing breed of startups focused on gathering and parsing data from Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. A recent, notable acquisition in this space was that of Topsy, which was acquired by Apple for over $200 million last year. Simplify360 is similar to Topsy, except that it goes beyond Twitter and crawls through terabytes of data that include Tweets, Facebook posts, etc., to offer customized analytics. Founded in January 2009, Simplify360 has been bootstrapped so far with an undisclosed angel investment from Amvensys Capital in December 2012. The startup has 25 people on its payroll, and it currently sifts through around 5 million posts and tweets every day that generates around 5 terabytes of data every week. Another key differentiator for Simplify360 is that it now offers analytics in over 27 languages and has customers in markets like Korea apart from India, where around one-third of 200 million Internet users are increasingly posting social media conversations in over 30 languages. So why would an Adobe or WPP be interested in this little, unknown startup based in Bangalore? From what I gathered after speaking with several people in companies that could be potential acquirers, converting millions of Tweets and social media posts into real insights is the Holy Grail for marketeers, and tools such as Simplify360 help achieve that. As this blog notes, Adobe’s interest also comes from the fact that it really wants to compete with Salesforce better, especially in the social media analytics space. Both Salesforce and Oracle haveThe Alternative Commerce Recipe
Feb 01, 7:00AM
Alternative Commerce is a piece of cake, right? After all, while big box retailers are suffering, fun things like "the Internet" and "mobile phones" make it easier to sell stuff to customers without the expense of stores and make a bunch of money. Just ask WebVan, Kozmo, eToys.com, or Pets.com. Okay maybe it isn't that easy.Yahoo Could Do Search Because It Needs The Money
Feb 01, 2:27AM
Yahoo could be getting back into the search game. Its long-suffering deal with Microsoft has underperformed, making recent revelations that the company is working on building new search products hardly surprising.Sunrise Calendar Stops Sending iCloud Credentials Back To Their Servers
Feb 01, 1:35AM
The increasingly popular Sunrise calendar app faced a bit of a brouhaha last week, after a couple of well-respected developers (namely, Neven Mrgan and Instapaper creator Marco Arment) pointed out that the application asked the user to punch in their iCloud credentials with little indication of what happened to them next. Given the amount of sensitive data that tends to be transmitted over iCloud (iMessages, backed up photos, email, etc.), such a request was iffy, at best. It’s certainly not the sort of thing you want to become the norm. Making things worse, the company was in turn taking those credentials and transmitting back them to their server (though they note that they were not storing them.) They were sending the credentials in a secure way — but still: if it’s at all avoidable, sending important credentials back to the mothership isn’t good practice. This morning, Sunrise pushed out a patch that makes things a little better. They’ll still need you to punch in your credentials, which is a bummer — but now, at least, they’re handling authentication within the app itself. Instead of sending your username and password back to their servers, they send a unique token that allows them to access your iCloud data without ever sending your actual username/password off of the device. And if you decide that you don’t want Sunrise to be able to access your data? Just change your password, which renders the token useless. It’s not a perfect solution, as it does still require the users to trust a third-party with some pretty precious data. In this case, since Sunrise is now being quite transparent about how they handle the data, that’s fine. But it’s still not something that apps should be getting users comfortable with doing. Until/unless Apple builds in some sort of iCloud permissions dialog that allows for the user to grant a service like Sunrise access to data (sort of like the way Facebook handles Facebook logins within apps), however, this is the safest route they’ve got apart from.. you know, not existing. It’s been just 9 days since concerns about Sunrise’s methodology were raised; good on them for moving quick.
Ask A VC: Manatt's Peter Csathy On The New Golden Age Of Content
Jan 31, 11:30PM
In this week's episode of Ask A VC, Manatt Digital Media Ventures' Peter Csathy joined us in the studio to talk about the return of content, his firm's investment strategy and more.
Airbnb Is Testing Out An Affordable Cleaning Service For Hosts In San Francisco
Jan 31, 10:47PM
Peer-to-peer lodgings marketplace Airbnb has been focused on finding ways that it can help its hosts improve the quality of experience for guests that stay in their homes. As part of this effort, the company is trialing a low-cost cleaning service for some hosts on the platform.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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