We’ve been getting all sorts of new info since we first ran our story about Google dogfooding ”Google Shopping Express,” its same-day Amazon Prime and Postmates competitor. While we originally reported that the service would be $10 or $15 cheaper than Amazon Prime – so $69 or $64 a year – we’re now hearing that the pricing is still in flux.

While Google irons out the kinks, we’re hearing, Googlers are getting the product for free if they sign up for membership — with non-members paying $4.99 per delivery. The company has lined up eight stores in the Bay Area, according to our sources, and we’ve heard from two sources that omni-store Target is part of the coterie.

We were also forwarded the email below, supposedly from Google PR, that names Babies”R”Us and Nob Hill Foods as other Shopping Express partners, with the focus group including local stores of all sizes. I’ve emailed Google, Target, Nob Hill Foods and Babies”R”Us for confirmation. I’m pretty sure this will be the first and last time I email Babies”R”Us for confirmation for anything.

While we still have little idea when Google plans on launching the service, the below email does say that the test is now available for all Googlers. And might be coming soon to a Babies”R”Us near you.

Hi,

As you may have seen, there was a leak last night about Google Shopping Express, including several very specific product details. Our PR team is working to quiet this down, but we need your help — please don’t add fuel to the fire by discussing or even confirming Google Shopping Express. If you are contacted by a member of the press, please follow normal procedures and refer them to press@google.com.

But wait, you asked me to ship to my home to help you test … so what about spouses and roommates? We trust your judgement. If your roommate writes a tech blog or works for a company in this space, please don’t ship it home. But if you feel it’s safe, then by all means, we still really need your help dogfooding this.

Get free same day delivery with Google Shopping Express

After weeks of testing, we’re now excited to open Google Shopping Express to every Googler in the bay area including temps, vendors and contractors.

Save yourself a trip to the store and stock up at places like Target, Nob Hill Foods, Babies “R” Us and more. Googlers who sign up early for a free membership will receive free same day delivery for one year! Non-members pay $4.99 per delivery per store.

*************

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the 1940s, DC Comics gave Superman a new enemy. After WWII, the Ku Klux Klan was rising to power. They were gaining adherents in the south and the mystery and mayhem of their secret society was wildly frightening.

A writer named Stetson Kennedy had been researching the Klan and prepared a dossier on its wild hierarchy, passing it on to the writers of the Superman radio show. Over the course of two weeks, Superman took on bigots of all stripes, revealing Klan secrets and code words to the world. A short while later, folks would show up at Klan meetings just to laugh at the Grand Cyclops.

In short, sunlight (and Superman) reversed the darkness.

That’s happening now in North Korea. I won’t pretend that a club of goofy bigots is as dangerous as a nuclear tyrannical state, but the concept is at least congruent. At the risk of sounding like the Fake Jeff Jarvis, I will say that something is cracking in the North Korean facade and when it finally tumbles it won’t be pretty.

Jen H. Lee is the Korea bureau chief for the AP and spends time in Pyongyang. She now has access to a foreigners-only 3G network when she is in North Korea and has been tweeting and posting pictures from inside the country. I’d wager she is doing some of the most important strategic tweeting in the world right now. A sample:

It's true: @DennisRodman hung out with #NKorean leader Kim Jong Un tonight. Stay tuned. #WORMinNorthKorea @globies @VICE—
Jean H. Lee (@newsjean) February 28, 2013

Synchronized skating in #Pyongyang #NKorea earlier this month at a rink shaped like a winter hat. instagr.am/p/WRM5souCnt/—
Jean H. Lee (@newsjean) February 28, 2013

Package of #NKorean buckwheat 랭면 noodles ready for cooking. #pyongyang instagr.am/p/WQpKVkuChJ/—
Jean H. Lee (@newsjean) February 28, 2013

She is tweeting the mundanity of real life out of a country that is seen in the media as an iron-clad box filled with dynamite. She is proving that North Koreans are just like us, regardless of their failed ideology. It’s clear North Korea needs to be seen as less like the crazy man of Asia and more like a burgeoning third world economy. What better way to prove this than offer even a stab at true freedom to those most important members of the international community – foreign traders.

Her service costs over $70 a trip for a SIM card and 3G activation, so it’s not cheap. However, now Lee can bring her own phone and send data right out of the the country almost instantly. She wrote in a great essay:

There is nothing here that says North Korea isn’t watching these phones with a gimlet eye and is attempting to use the data collected for its own ends. They most decidedly are. But when the denizens of a country that ham-handedly steals blast footage from a video game to spread wonky propaganda are shown making a happy face in a cappuccino and walking morosely along a dead highway, perceptions change. Politicians can no longer pretend that this blustering mini-dump is more than a Potemkin village. We can finally appreciate that real people are dying in real gulags… real people who, one moment could be squirting an extra bit of mocha into your coffee and the next minute get trundled off to frozen wastes.

The easiest political ploy is to dehumanize your enemy. North Korea, in popular media, is seen not as a confusion of voices clamoring to survive – it’s is seen as a steel-eyed vulture intent on slamming missiles onto our shores. The more we see North Korea as a place of potential the more we can appreciate its place in the world – and work to ensure that the edicts of madmen don’t impinge on human dignity.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

[Editor’s Note: This is a weekly series. If your company is doing something amazing to help a charitable cause or doing some good in your community, please reach out.]

Disruption comes in all shapes and sizes, and benefits people of all shapes and sizes. When you think about global entrepreneurs solving hard problems, you might not think about creating hardware products that aim to save the lives of premature babies.

A company called Embrace, based in India, is doing just that. It sounds lofty, altruistic and extremely difficult. That’s mostly because it is, and Embrace is making a difference in the face of uphill battles that they see as completely solvable and surmountable. According to WHO, 15M babies are born premature throughout the world, with 1M of them never getting the chance to live a long life. This is a very real problem.

Breaking down the walls of personal healthcare sounds like something that goes on in an MIT lab, but it’s actually something happening in the city of Bangalore, and Embrace is doing it in extremely unique ways. Its product is an infant warmer that can protect a premature infants during their most vulnerable time after birth. Most of the time, these babies have to stay in hospitals, which can be extremely expensive, away from the parents.

The infant warmer that Embrace has developed allows families to take their precious newborns home and care for them in a safe and affordable way. Since premature babies cannot properly regulate their own temperatures, these devices help keep them warm while mom and dad introduce the new member of the family in the privacy of their own home. This is no small problem and this team is making it happen.

Embrace has developed an innovative, low cost infant warmer for vulnerable babies in developing countries. Over 20 million low-birth-weight and premature babies are born every year around the world, and over 4 million die within their first month of life. Temperature regulation is a key problem among many of these infants. Embrace has developed an infant warmer that costs a fraction of the price of existing solutions, and that functions without a continuous supply of electricity.

For reference, Embrace has taken this device built by GE, and made it cheaper, mobile and more personal:

The result? These items completely conceived of, designed and manufactured by Embrace:

This product requires no in-depth training to use, no electricity and no maintenance. It just works, as field tests have proved before launching its latest version.

The most interesting thing that I gleamed from talking to one of its co-founders, Rahul Panicker, is that its number on competitor, in theory, is GE. It happens that GE is a global partner for Embrace when it comes to distributing their product. For the for-profit arm of Embrace, this is a fantastic position to be in, business wise. After two years, grabbing funding from Khosla Impact and Capricorn Investment Group doesn’t hurt either.

Embrace started as a team project at Stanford and has evolved into its current iteration in Bangalore, drawing employees and volunteers from all over the world who are focused on creating change and disrupting emerging markets. I spoke to some marketing interns that had come from Palo Alto and Mountain View specifically to work on this problem. As the team walked through some of its design concepts, it felt like this would be the product that Apple would create if it were in the healthcare space…there’s that much attention to detail here.

Even though there is no medical device standard in India, the team has adopted the European standards, which is a forward thinking move to make its products available everywhere they are needed. The team sees huge opportunities for Embrace products in Africa, Ghana and Latin America with at least pockets from 30 countries total requesting the product to be launched in their back yard.

Until that expansion comes, which it most certainly sounds like it will, Embrace is focused on making a big difference where it is. The feedback that they’ve received and business they’ve gotten, mostly from word of mouth between families, is important lessons and feedback learned as a tiny group of people try to tackle huge markets like healthcare.

Since I’m on the Geeks On A Plane trip with Dave McClure, I’ve been bouncing some ideas off of him as far as what stories would be interesting for you, as readers, to read and learn something from. On Embrace, McClure says that their story is a perfect example of “India lifting India up and not relying on anyone else.” That’s pretty powerful.

You can participate by donating money to Embrace’s non-profit arm, or just sharing their story with friends. This company has made a product for hospitals that cost $250 and products for home that cost $80. When you stop and think about how impactful that is, it’s quite mind blowing. I walked away impressed and inspired, and I of course asked McClure if he’s invested in the company yet. His answer was “not yet,” which certainly doesn’t sound like a “not interested.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As a parent in New York, I’m often at a loss as to how to entertain my children. Do we shoot trap over the Brooklyn Promenade or hit the city dump to look at rats? Do we go for a swim in the Gowanus or do we visit the beach to dig up needles? With endless possibilities comes endless indecision! Thankfully, there’s Red Tricycle.

Founded by Jaqui Boland, an SF-based mom and marketing pro who worked at Meredith and Reed Elseveir, the site is a reaction to her new mom-hood and her desire to help other parents out there navigate the urban parenting jungle.

“I was pregnant with my first child, and was freaking out about how my urban lifestyle would change, so I started doing some research on kid-friendly music venues, restaurants, and museums,” said Boland. “I realized their was a whole new city to explore through the lens of new parenthood. I put my discoveries into an email and sent it out to friends. At the time, I wasn’t sure if I had found a new hobby, or was building a business to scale. It took several years before Red Tricycle evolved into a scalable business model.”

The $1.5 million is led by Maveron and angels include Bob Pittman, Jason Calacanis, Dave McClure, and Darrell Cavens at Zulily. Calacanis, for his part, became a brand evangelist after searching for email lists for parents and then approached Boland to invest.

“The common denominator in all these scenarios is that all of these people are moms and dads and have an amazing affinity for and loyalty to our product,” said Boland.

The company has seen 400,000 subscriptions in six cities and 1 million pageviews a month. National advertisers include Disney, Old Navy, and Microsoft. The company differentiates from all the other email newsletters by collecting curated content just for parents.

“Good local content is hard work, but as a parent, it’s priceless,” said Boland.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

White label social networking platform Grou.ps is the latest to join the increasingly crowded “private networks for posting about babies” space (we may need a better title for this…), which has been heating up as of late. The company has just launched a new mobile app called Babyzilla on both iOS and Android, which allows families to privately communicate, post updates, chat, and share photos, videos, stories and more.

The app is built on top of the Grou.ps social networking platform, a Ning competitor that’s grown from the 200,000 private communities it supported back in August 2011, to the over 400,000 communities it supports today. The company reached profitability in the third quarter of this year, and has recently been expanding into new areas. For example, in June, Grou.ps launched LoveBucks, a subscription-based monetization platform for online publishers – basically, micropayments for websites. That program now has over 200 publishers on board.

With Babyzilla (this name is incredibly appropriate!), Grou.ps is expanding its focus once again. Instead of merely providing the tools that allow others to make their own private networks, the company has gone ahead and used its mobile app infrastructure to build a niche social networking platform for families. The app, however, is entering a crowded space, as noted above. In addition to private, general purpose social networks like Path, startups have been busy launching apps specifically for families sharing updates about the kids. For example, we’ve looked at the launches of Care.com’s Karoo, Burst, Sidebark, 23Snaps, and Rootsy recently – and all these debuted between this summer and now!

To differentiate itself, Babyzilla offers support for push and email notifications, and will soon support SMS notifications for feature phone users. It also offers real-time chat, and tools to download all your photos and updates at year-end. This includes the option to order a print-out of those items, says Grou.ps founder Emre Sokullu. However, the biggest differentiator here is price. Babyzilla is not free. The app will be available as a $9.95 per year subscription service. (The coupon code LAUNCH1000 will allow you to take 40% off through the end of the month.)

“When it’s your family at stake, you care about privacy,” Sokullu says, explaining the decision to charge, “and that’s why we’ve made it subscription-supported. Our business model is not about selling your personally identifiable data to re-targeting companies or pushing ads all over. (It’s what a free service would do at some point, one way or another.)”

Sokullu, like most of the other founders in this space, was inspired to create this after becoming a parent himself. “Babyzilla is a project to which I’m emotionally very connected,” he says. “My daughter Defne came into the world a month ago, and I desperately needed such an app myself. It’s also the right step for our company as we continue to develop more meaningful private social networking applications,” he adds.

Babyzilla is available on both iOS or Android. The download itself is free.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If ultrasonic baby pictures aren’t enough, how about a resin-cast 3D model of your live fetus floating in clear lucite? An Ebisu health clinic, Hiro-o Ladies, is working with a 3D printer called Fasotec to create Tenshi no Katachi – Shape Of An Angel – so the entire family can see what that squirt is doing in your womb.

A company representative waxed all things baby love: “We actually got three expectant mothers to try this out. They said it felt great to see how their babies looked before birth, and to be able to actually hold the inside of their own body. They also enjoyed looking at the model after giving birth, thinking, ‘This is how my baby looked inside me’ and recalling how it felt to be pregnant.”

The service costs 100,000 yen (about $1300) and uses a dual-resin extruder to make the baby part and the solidified amniotic part at the same time. You can build the baby in multiple sizes and shapes and you can, using 3D imaging, focus on the whole body or just the face. You can even get little cellphone fobs with your baby floating inside of them. Seriously.

via Daddytypes

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Seriously, people? Unbaby.me? You hate seeing baby pictures on Facebook so much that you have to use a Chrome extension to block them? Look, I get it. Parents and non-parents sort of can’t stand each other. For god’s sake, we can’t even hang out at the same bar together without it turning into some kind of turf war. (Yeah, that’s right: bar. Apparently, it’s not totally irresponsible parenting to consume alcohol in front the kids. See also: my house, every Friday night).

But even though Unbaby.me is only the latest development in the whole us vs. them saga of breeders vs. non-breeders, it actually speaks to a couple of long-standing issues surrounding social networking services: that A) you’re either doing it wrong, or B) the social network itself has failed you in some way. In this case, I’m voting for A.

YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG, BABY HATERS

No one is twisting your arm to stay connected with us breeders here on Facebook. Too many babies? Feel free to “unfriend” at will. Alternately, if you can’t bring yourself to take that bold of a step for all the social repercussions it involves, there’s also another option: that unsubscribe button in your News Feed. Yep, you can actually tell Facebook that you would like to see no more of Jill-the-baby-picture-posting fiend, thank you very much.

Outside of not having a firm grip on Facebook’s settings, here’s another suggestion to save you from more baby-induced outrage in the future. Don’t friend people you don’t care about. Really. Facebook doesn’t get better the more people you add. It gets worse. And then you have to run off to hidey holes like Path just to avoid the mess you created.

BUT IT’S ALL FACEBOOK’S FAULT!

The other issue with this whole anti-baby backlash is that it implies that Facebook has somehow failed to serve up the right content that interests you. It’s a reflection of Facebook’s inability to properly reflect our real-world relationships. That’s sort of true. This same complaint has led Facebook to experiment with all sorts of filtering mechanisms, including lists, automatic lists, and even one-way subscriptions. None of them really work that well. Lists filter, but too rigidly. If you don’t look at the right ones, you miss things. Subscriptions don’t work because there’s always someone who still friends you because they feel closer to you than you do to them.

So yes, Facebook does have an obligation to stop serving up the endless baby-stream to people who never click on the photos, or engage with the proud parents to be. (I’d actually argue that, over the years, Facebook’s algorithm has gotten quite good at doing just that, but I suppose there are still some inescapable baby photos out there which Facebook insists you must see.)

IN CONCLUSION: WAH, WAH.

Facebook isn’t the only social networking platform where a supposedly infringed upon group wants to complain about one of its use cases. Twitter users have long been chastised for posting what they ate for lunch, tweeting too much from an event, posting their Foursquare check-ins automatically, not being “authentic,” only posting links, and other transgressions. Instagram, meanwhile, seems to encourage a community who post photos of sunsets, landscapes, nature, architecture, foamy lattes or hipsters out on the town (or at least that’s what this Twitter parody account implies.)

If anything, it’s a testament to Facebook that it has managed to expand beyond its own initial culture of students, then early adopters, and later, the rest of the world. It’s a testament that it continued to grow even after mom and dad and grandma and grandpa joined. And it’s a testament that it’s the one platform where even the dueling tribes of parents and non-parents can occasionally connect. Even if that means you have to Unbaby them from time to time.

Now excuse me while I go work on an app that removes those incessant pictures of your pets.

Image via foundshit. 

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With today’s launch of Dinda.com.br, the founding team behind Brazil-based Baby.com.br, is expanding into a new vertical following the success of its original, but more traditional, e-commerce offering targeting new parents. While Baby.com.br is like a Diapers.com for Brazil (and local competitor to Bebestore), with Dinda.com.br, the company is introducing Brazil’s first flash sales site for moms with kids and babies.

“Dinda,” which means godmother in Portuguese, is a popular word in Brazil, Baby.com.br co-founder Davis Smith tells me. “In the U.S., ‘godmother’ doesn’t mean a whole lot, but in Brazil, every baby has a godmother,” he says. “You hear the word constantly.” He says the “baby culture” in Brazil, as whole, is different, too. Expectant mother parking is as common as handicapped parking is here, and pregnant women get to cut in line everywhere they go. “It’s really fun,” he says, “they love children, they love babies, they love giving gifts…it’s pretty special.”

The new flash sales site Dinda has been operating in private beta for the past month, and the company has already grown its Facebook fan base to 125,000 users, Smith says. These were not users brought over from the Baby.com.br fan base, he clarifies, but represent an organically grown base.

For those unfamiliar with the company, Baby.com.br was started by Smith and co-founder Kimball Thomas last year – the same team who previously founded and sold PoolTables.com. The startup raised a $4.4 million Series A from Tiger Global Management, Monashees Capital, SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Chamath Palihapitiya and Thrive Capital in October. The investment was particularly notable because it was the first time either SV Angel or Felicis had put money into a Brazilian startup.

Since then, Baby.com.br has been growing quickly. TechCruch’s Rip Emerson reported that by its third month in operation, the site had reached one million visitors per month, had shipped 1,000 orders in a single day, and had been seeing double-digit growth every month since. It has now seen several days of over 1,000 orders and continues to see the same levels of growth. In six months time, the operation grew from a small team to over 100 employees.

Today, that number is 120 (60% female, says Smith), and it now has a Facebook community of 900,000 moms and dads. The company recently closed on an additional $16.7 million Series B from Accel Partners and Tiger Global, and that money is being used to fund the new venture.

For the public launch of Dinda.com.br, the company will launch one new campaign/brand per day, up from the one per week seen during its beta period. And this number will scale rapidly over the next few months, says Smith. Essentially like a Brazilian version of a Zulily or Totsy, Dinda’s primary target is moms – and of course, dindas. The site will feature mostly Brazilian-sourced items, including clothing and toys, and unlike Baby.com.br, it will also have items for older children.

Noting the popularity of Brazil’s two other top flash sites, Privalia and Brandsclub.com.br, Smith remarks that “they’ve shown that Brazilians really like flash sales model. Things in Brazil are very expensive…people want deals,” he says. “But no one’s really doing it in the baby space.”

The new site is live now at Dinda.com.br.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LocalResponse, a network that targets ads based  on social network data (such as check ins), is sharing some news about its growth. The big number: It says it’s serving more than 7 billion impressions per month.

To be clear, it isn’t actually filling all of that inventory, or even close to 100 percent, as CEO and co-founder Nihal Mehta admits. However, he says that if LocalResponse could fill even half of it, say at a $6 CPM (the rate for each thousand impressions), it would still be a big business.

Mehta argues that by looking at a social data, the company (which was formerly a location-based network called Buzzd) does more than just tell you someone’s location. For example, he says that if someone happens to be outside a Babies R Us, that’s a much weaker signal of their intent and interests than if they actually check-in to the store.

“We think that being able to create much more targeted ads based on social can close the gap between mobile versus desktop ad spend,” he says.

Mehta adds that LocalResponse  currently works with more than 75 advertisers, and that it has run campaigns for Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Walgreens. The company is “very close to profitability,” with revenue in the second quarter of the year four times what it was in the first, and he says he expects it to become profitable in Q3.

LocalResponse, which is headquartered in New York City, is also opening an office in San Francisco, led by newly-hired Jennifer Bennett, who previously worked at Google and Admob. The main focus of the West Coast office will be sales, Mehta says, though it may add some engineering team members too.

As for what comes next, Mehta says the company will be focusing a lot of its attention on its new pro version, which helps advertisers understand more about the impact of their ad campaigns, for example seeing “the secondary and tertiary effects of that campaign through the users’ immediate social graphs.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Two years ago, app developer tap tap tap launched Camera+ onto the App Store. For only a buck, users could get way more mileage out of the mobile photography experience, bringing 27 color effects and granular controls to their iPhone cameras. These features have made it one of the most popular camera apps out there. So popular, in fact, that Camera+ rang in its second birthday today with its 8 millionth download, tap tap tap founder John Casasanta said in a blog post.

As part of the celebration, Casasanta reflected on his company’s journey over the past two years. In his post, he reveals that tap tap tap received a handful of acquisition offers from several notable names: “It started with Adobe, then went to Zynga (for The Heist, not really for Camera+), then Google. And most recently, Twitter.”

The startup has also apparently had plenty of interest from VCs and was recently close to the finalizing its first round of financing. However, the team decided against closing the round, Casasanta says, because they “didn’t like the direction the investors were trying to push us in,” and instead chose to remain independent.

In a rallying cry for all those who forego outside investment, the founder then exposed his middle finger to the world’s venture capitalists, saying, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again … f*ck the VCs!”

In a post from 2008, which he links to, Casasanta outlines his quarrels with VCs, saying:

In a nutshell, VCs will give you just enough money to get the ball barely rolling, but then repeatedly force your hand in later funding rounds (if you even make it that far). They’ll have you by the cojones and you’ll have no choice but to give up more and more of what you’ve built through your blood and sweat. And what’s worse, VCs typically bet on a large group of startups with the expectations that one will hit big (the 1 in 10 guideline).

So what about the ones that don’t make it? Well, the founders may very well care about their creations deeply. But the VCs will be quick to amputate and cauterize. They’ll cut their losses in a heartbeat no matter how this would affect the people who’ve poured their souls into their babies. I’ve known many people who’ve been in this predicament over the years and it’s unfortunate to say the least.

He sounds bitter, like someone who’s been scarred by a deal or two with investors turning sour, but his note of encouragement are words for all punk and indie developers to live by — although it’s probably not advisable for all to follow the same path. Clearly, there are more than a few startups that would kill to have been in the same fortunate position, and would have gladly taken the money.

You most likely won’t have a runaway hit like a Koi Pond your first time through. But you’ll gain valuable experience. And you can’t put a price tag on that … Plain and simple: The more you work at it, the more you’ll learn. And the more likely your chances for success down the line. There’s almost nothing better than the freedom of not having to answer to some suits breathing down your neck and assing-up everything you’ve worked so hard for.

The post also shares the news that tap tap tap’s development team has grown to 17, and that the next major release for Camera+ is on the way, code-named “Darkroom,” which includes some “pretty substantial” updates that have apparently been in the works for “a very long time.”

Here’s some more of the founder’s comments on how Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram affected Camera+:

The proposed Facebook acquisition of Instagram fueled a lot of ridiculousness in the industry and the the number of zeroes that’ve come-up in these negotiations has been insane. These offers have been tempting … extremely tempting in some particular cases.

… Will the failure of the Facebook IPO change the climate here going forward? Possibly. But it doesn’t matter… we didn’t build this company with the intention to flip it. We’re in it for the long-haul and we’re committed to building a real business that makes great apps, not on selling-out. We’re doing more than fine on our own and we’ll continue to do do so on our own.

Find Casasanta’s blog post here. Camera+ here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch