Bloomberg, Lee and Jack Dorsey. vine.co/v/bl3dmAdeLTB—
Chris O'Brien (@obrien) June 14, 2013

Square CEO Jack Dorsey and the Mayors of New York City and San Francisco announced today that they will be collaborating on a digital technology summit, to be hosted on September 30th in the Big Apple. At a press conference at Square this afternoon, SF Mayor Ed Lee gave a few details about the upcoming summit, which will bring together industry stakeholders for a big-think meeting of how to solve social issues.

NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who is in town to give the Stanford commencement speech, stole the press event with a few jokes about Dorsey’s “plans” to run for his job. Talking about Dorsey’s hypothetical campaign, Bloomberg said he could have “”140 character campaign speeches. 6 second campaign videos, and your pledge that everyone can pay their taxes using square”.

For good measure, in response to Mayor Lee prodding New York City about snow problems, Bloomberg joked, “Climate change has taken away the snow so we really haven’t had much”.

In response to a question from me about New York’s legal warfare against sharing economy apps, such as Uber and AirBnB, Mayor Bloomberg responded that, ” regulation becomes a crutch… It’s the old entrenched industries, under the shield of regulation,” that prevent meaningful competition. No word on how exactly he’ll support them, other than wanting to “F***ing destroy” the taxi industry.

We’ll see if actions follow words. Or conferences.

Vine via @Obrien.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s been a big news day for all things Apple, and a lot of the buzz has been around the company’s renewed focus on American manufacturing. But one feature announced today in Apple’s new iOS 7 mobile operating system shows that Apple’s dedication to China — and specifically, the market of Chinese iPhone users which is growing at a “mind-boggling” rate — is only getting stronger.

Apple said today that a host of new features will be included in iOS 7 that should make the mobile operating system even more useful for the Chinese market, including a Chinese/English bilingual dictionary and handwriting recognition for multiple Chinese characters. But possibly the most significant bit of news in terms of iOS 7 and China is that Tencent Weibo, the microblogging site that essentially functions as a Twitter focused on the Chinese market, will be “supported” in iOS 7.

The integration received just a short mention in Apple’s official iOS 7 announcement, so the extent of the support is not yet clear. But the fact that the service has been accounted for at all puts it in an elite group of third party players given priority on Apple’s mobile operating system — most notably Twitter, which was integrated into iOS 5 back in 2011 (and subsequently saw a huge bump in new user registrations), and Facebook, which was integrated into iOS 6 last year.

Tencent Weibo’s competitor, Chinese social networking giant Sina Weibo, was integrated into iOS 6 last year. Both platforms are massive, with user bases that reportedly exceed 500 million. It will be interesting to see what effect this has Tencent Weibo’s growth going forward.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Since it was founded way back in 2000, TripAdvisor has established itself as one of the web’s top go-to places for travel reviews — but its booking capabilities for hotels have notably lagged behind. The site has historically adhered to showing hotel prices in a series of early aughts-style pop-up windows from partner sites, rather than on one page alone à la Kayak hotel search.

That’s finally all changed. TripAdvisor announced today the worldwide launch of its all-in-one hotel price comparison search, putting an end to those pop-ups for good. The new one-page display is currently live for hotels all around the world, and active across all of TripAdvisor’s mobile apps and websites. TripAdvisor is still not a hotel booking provider itself, but it has now put price results from all of its booking partners on one page — you still click through to another site to ultimately purchase a room.

The company acknowledged how late to the game it’s been with a cheeky press release entitled “TripAdvisor Apologizes To Travelers Around The World.” It’s a pretty refreshing way to handle the launch, and frankly a bit unexpected coming from a 13-year-old publicly traded company worth some $8.8 billion.

Here’s one bit:

“‘Our bad,’ said Steve Kaufer, co-founder and CEO of TripAdvisor. ‘We want to help travelers plan and have the perfect trip, not drive them crazy with endless annoying pop-ups before they’ve booked it. We are excited to offer real-time hotel prices and availability in one convenient display.’”

Amid the jokes, though, TripAdvisor is also keen to point out that even though the launch is late, it is still powerful. That’s because the one-page price comparison is tied in automatically with the 100 million user reviews that are currently on the site. TripAdvisor’s size and scope may be part of why it’s been so slow to roll out this feature, but it could also work to its advantage going forward.

Ultimately, this launch could have a nice impact on TripAdvisor’s sales — helping the company capture more of a cut from the hotel stays that it has been guiding people towards for years now. Time will tell as the quarterly reports continue to roll in.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Samsung Electronics has developed core technology that will allow it to deliver high-speed 5G wireless data connections to consumers by 2020, the company announced today. The system allows data transmission up to several hundred times faster than current 4G networks.

5G mobile communications technology is the next generation of 4G LTE networks tech and can offer data transmission speeds of up to several tens of Gbps per base station. Once 5G networks are commercialized, they will allow users to transmit massive data files, including UHD movies and remote medical services, “practically wihtout limitation,” Samsung claims.

4G connections have gradually become available to consumers around the world since 2008, but many countries, including China, are still working toward launching their LTE networks. Samsung says, however, that its new adaptive array transceiver technology overcomes the limitations that millimeter-wave bands had when transmitting data over long distances. It transmits data in the millimeter-wave band at a frequency of 28 GHz at a speed of up to 1.056 Gbps to a distance of up to 2 kilometers.

“The millimeter-wave band is the most effective solution to recent surges in wireless Internet usage. Samsung’s recent success in developing the adaptive array transceiver technology has brought us one step closer to the commercialization of 5G mobile communications in the millimeter-wave bands,” said Samsung executive vice president and head of digital medial and communication R&D ChangYeong Kim.

Samsung isn’t the only company to announce that it has developed 5G core tech. In February, NTT DoCoMo confirmed that it had successfully conducted a 10Gbps wireless test.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

CapLinked, a startup offering workspaces for managing business deals, announced today that it has closed a $2.1 million Series A.

The company previously said that it raised a $1.6 million round from FF Angel (the seed-stage fund operated by Founders Fund), Siemer Ventures, 500 Startups, and others, so this is basically a $500,000 addition. The new investors include Conversion Capital, Inflection Ventures, The Artesian Group, Googler Chris Harris, and AccessDNA founder Lee Essener.

CapLinked pitches itself as an easier-to-use, cheaper alternative to the big providers of virtual data rooms. It creates online workspaces for managing deals, such as merger and acquisitions and investor reporting, where the various parties can communicate and exchange files securely. Customers include Thomson Reuters, Sun Capital, and NextView Ventures.

And yes, in the funding press release, co-founder and CEO Eric Jackson says he used CapLinked software to manage this very deal. The company has now raised a total of more than $3 million.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

ZooZ, a consumer-driven payment platform startup, announced today that it has closed a Series A funding round for $2 million. The investment round was led by XSeed Capital, and includes ZooZ’s existing investors lool ventures and Rhodium, both of which also contributed to ZooZ’s seed round. 

In a statement, Robert Siegel, the general partner of XSeed Capital, said “Our investment in ZooZ highlights the confidence we have in [founder Oren Levy] and his team and their vision to optimize and transform the entire checkout experience.”

ZooZ has now raised total funding of $3.5 million. The company will use its Series A funds to add new product functionality, increase traction with retailers, solidify new partnerships, and build its presence in the global payments market.

If all things go according to ZooZ’s plans, the startup will benefit from the rapidly growing mobile payments market, which Forrester predicts will see $90 billion spent in 2017, a 48 percent compounded annual growth rate over the $12.8 billion that was spent in 2012. The startup is currently based in Israel, but the founding team has plans to split operations, with some staffers relocating to an office in the U.S.

Founded in 2010 to tap into the mobile payments market, Zooz differentiates its services by focusing on creating a consumer checkout experience to ensure better conversion for retailers and developers while emphasizing security and fraud prevention (ZooZ’s CTO and co-founder Ronen Morecki was formerly a vice president of R&D at VeriSign).

The startup says that its user-friendly checkout platform helps prevent cart abandonment by frustrated mobile shoppers. Last June, the startup also teamed up with MobiCart, a platform that allows users to create m-commerce applications on iOS and Android. That partnership introduced ZooZ’s services to 10,000 merchants. The in-app SDK currently supports iOS, Android and HTML5, which the startup added last year. More information for developers is available here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Just 3% of small business ad spend goes online right now, but that’s going to change, and Facebook wants to become these merchants’ channel of choice. There’s already 2 billion connections between people and small businesses on Facebook, and their Pages get 645 million views and 13 million comments a week, Facebook announced today. The challenge for Facebook is now educating mom & pops, and simplifying its ad tools.

Facebook is entering the next phase of its small business education program that it launched in 2011 with the National Federation of Independent Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. This Saturday, Facebook’s Director Of Small Businesses Dan Levy will hit the street in the small town of Dixon, Illinois to raise awareness and spread understanding of Facebook’s marketing tools.

Currently Facebook’s ad businesses is predominantly supported by big businesses, who a recent BCG study said spend 16% of their budgets online. But that’s largely because enormous companies can afford to have dedicated online marketing teams who can learn the ins and outs of complicated tools.

But two shifts could change the balance. First, Facebook is aggressively pushing new ad tool developments that offer one-click targeting and auto-optimized A/B tests. Second, tech literacy is on the rise amongst small merchants. 15 million small businesses now have Facebook Pages, 8 million businesses use Facebook’s Page Manager app,  300,000 Pages have paid for Promoted Posts, and 2.5 million Posts have been promoted since the product launched in June.

Facebook hopes these trends can meet in middle and bring enough little budgets to the social network to make a huge impact on its bottom line.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yahoo! has acquired Jybe, the company announced today via a post to its corporate blog. Jybe is a startup founded in 2011 by three ex-Yahoo! employees, including Arnab Bhattacharjee, who was VP of Yahoo! Search Technology when he departed the company. The startup’s mission was to help connect people to the physical world around them, a mission for which it released an iPhone app late last year to help connect people with recommendations about things to do, stuff to eat, books to read and movies to watch.

I spoke with Jybe co-founder Arnab Bhattacharjee about the move, and he said that it basically stemmed from a desire on the part of Yahoo! to get into personalized recommendations in a big way.

“Basically we’ve learned a lot about how to use search scale techniques, both on the data science side but also large-scale engineering, and apply it to signals to really do personalization well,” he said. “We really want to take those technologies and apply that across most of the Yahoo! properties.”

The standalone Jybe app will be closed down as part of the acquisition, which seems mostly to be about getting the five member team (all ex-Yahoo!) back in the Yahoo! fold, but Bhattacharjee said that “the technology will live on inside Yahoo! as one of the core pieces that is used to do personalization for various things.”

Finally, he said that personalized delivery of various sorts of media will be “very important” to Yahoo! in the future, which is in part why the Jybe team got so excited about the chance to rejoin the company. Bhattacharjee couldn’t share any information about deal size with TechCrunch, and a request for that information from Yahoo! was met with a statement that the company is “not disclosing the purchase price or other terms of the deal.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Among the changes Facebook announced today regarding News Feed were a number of improvements for app developers, including larger feed stories, an updated games feed and app bookmarks that are visible from any page users navigate to.

The most obvious component of the redesign is how much bigger stories and photos appear in the feed. The example below is full size.

Then there’s the redesigned games feed, which includes activity from friends, such as completing a level, earning an achievement or any other Open Graph actions developers have integrated. The sidebar allows users to quickly access games they’ve recently played and includes suggestions for games to play or games-related fan pages to Like.

Although there isn’t a dedicated feed for non-game apps, stories from music apps can appear in the music feed and posts from photo apps in the photos feed. Other stories will continue to appear in the main News Feed at the same frequency as before, but with new prominence from the updated design.

A change that could increase re-engagement for games and apps is the new permanent bookmarks bar on the left-hand side of the page. Previously, the bookmarks bar on desktop only appeared when users were on News Feed or group pages. Now it remains even when users navigate to their Timeline or other pages, and it looks very much like the mobile bookmarks bar that users are familiar with. This could encourage users to return to apps they’ve previously added

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

“Cloud communications” company Twilio and startup accelerator 500 Startups today launched Twilio Fund Europe 2013, a new micro-fund for companies from Europe and surrounding countries being built on the Twilio platform. In addition, the existing US-based 2012 Twilio Fund finalists were announced, closing out last year’s fund.

The new Twilio Fund Europe, announced today on stage at London Web Summit 2013 by CEO Jeff Lawson, will provide seed funding to startups throughout Europe making use of Twilio’s cloud communication web service APIs. As with the original US-based fund it will be managed by 500 Startups founding partner Dave McClure. The Twilio Fund in the US was created with 500 Startups in September 2010.

McClure said “there is incredible innovation happening in Europe” but that “entrepreneurs in those countries often have limited access to venture capital” hence the need for the new fund.

In addition to the upfront investment successful applicant companies will also receive free Twilio credits, an all expenses paid trip to San Francisco to attend Twilio’s own annual conference, TwilioCon, and Twilio’s PR and marketing machine.

Twilio Fund’s 2012 finalists, announced Wednesday include Babelverse, Call Loop, Healthsouk, Sessions, and Wedgies. Previous recipients include TalkDesk, Mobonics, FastCall, Magnolia Prime, OrderMapper, Turnstar.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch