Rightware, a Finnish startup that sells embedded user interface software and performance benchmarking tools to car makers and consumer electronics companies needing to build graphical user interfaces has announced it has closed a $5.2 million Series B round. Investors in the round include Inventure and Nexit Ventures, along with new investor Finnish Industry Investment.

The startup, which was founded in 2009 has offices in Finland, Germany, China, Taiwan and the U.S., and counts Audi AG among the customers for its Kanzi UI creation tool, has raised a total of  €7 million ($9 million) to date, according to CEO Jonas Geust.

He said the Kanzi tool is designed to “close the gap” between the UI designer and the UI engineer, with both being able to work together using the same tool. Kanzi also includes a WYSYWYG feature to help cut development times. “As the design work is proceeding you can see on your target hardware exactly how it’s going to look as the work goes ahead,” he added.

Geust said the new investment will be used to expand Rightware’s global sales, and also to continue developing the tool itself. Rightware is not currently breaking out customer numbers but says it’s seeing “big growth” in uptake of its Kanzi UI — with traction in the automotive sector and consumer electronics companies in Europe, US and Asia.

“We are seeing that we have an explosive growth in the Kanzi UI business unit. We saw already during first quarter of this year… 100% growth and that seems to be continuing month-over-month,” said Geust.

“We are using [the new funding] partly to further develop the Kanzi tool and technology — that’s more an R&D investment — and then the other side of that is to build an even stronger market presence — basically opening sales and technical support offices closer to the customers.”

Geust told TechCrunch that the company believes there will be increasing demand for its tools, thanks to the rise of higher resolution screens. “The underlying theme that we are seeing is first of all that the demand for more advanced graphical or we could call that photo-realistic user interfaces is increasing, as the high definition screens become more of a commodity in different industries. It becomes the default use case that you actually have a very good-looking screen,” he said.

“That also puts higher requirements on the user interface — that it is actually living up to the standard that the hardware can deliver, and that is where we are expecting to see explosive growth in demand for the tool that can actually deliver on that demand.”

Rightware said its Q1 2013 UI business revenues were more than double compared Q1 2012. It expects growth to further accelerate towards the end of the year.

Commenting on the funding round in a statement, Jussi Hattula, Director, Team leader of Growth Capital at Finnish Industry Investment Ltd said: “Rightware leads the embedded UI industry with its innovative technology and market penetration.  The company promotes next-generation applications where integrated 2D & 3D graphics deliver better and faster user experiences. We are excited to be part of this round and to work with the company to fulfill its vision.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Silverpop, the marketing tech company that announced $25 million in new funding last month, is announcing a new feature to help customers adapt to all the different ways that people are opening their emails.

The feature, called Email Insights, accomplishes three main tasks, the company says. First, it allows them to preview how an email will look in up to 30 different apps across multiple devices. (It’s working with a company called Litmus to create those previews.) Adam Steinberg, Silverpop’s director of emerging apps, said that there was previously a lot of uncertainty and guesswork in the process — for many marketers, the testing process previously consisted of emailing people they knew with different devices then asking, “How does it look?”

Next, Silverop provides analytics about which devices and applications are being used to open those emails. Customers can then use that data to create emails that are customized based on a user’s “preferred device.”

“The marketer wants to know which type of device their customers are using so it can give them a device-centric marketing message,” Steinberg said.

For example, he told me that if an online retailer is launching a new iPhone app, instead of sending the same promotional message to everyone on their mailing list, they could create a special message for people who usually read those emails on an iPhone, with a direct link to download the app.

Email Insights is now available to all Silverpop customers with pricing that starts at $40 per month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

On-demand helper startup WunWun has for the past few months offered consumers the ability to get pretty much anything delivered for a flat rate. Now, the company is offering its service to businesses who want to make local, same-day delivery a perk for their customers.

WunWun, like Exec and Taskrabbit, enables customers to ask for on-demand help in a number of categories. Customers can ask to have certain services done or get something delivered, for instance. You could get basically anything delivered for a flat rate of $15, or you could have one of WunWun’s helpers perform a task at a rate of $2 for every five minutes.

But since launch earlier this year, the company has found that the vast majority of requests are deliveries, according to WunWun co-founder Lee Hnetinka. Knowing that, the startup has decided that, in addition to offering a consumer-facing app for on-demand services, it could use the helpers it’s signed up to offer same-day delivery in New York City.

The new offering, called WunWun Power, is designed to offer businesses a new way to please their customers. To take advantage of the service, local retailers need only added a line of code to their website for checkout, and connect with the WunWun API to initiate local deliveries. Rather than the flat rate for consumers, WunWun is creating custom pricing options for businesses because, you know, volume.

It’s also trying out a little thing called branded delivery services for one client in particular. For men’s skin care and grooming product company Anthony, WunWun will have its helpers make deliveries from the local retailer to parts of New York City. Called “Anthony On Demand,” products will be brought directly to a customer’s door by a WunWun helper decked out in Anthony garb.

For now, WunWun is only available in New York City, but as usually happens, the companies has plans to expand into other markets over time. The startup has five full-time employees there, as well as a roster of helpers to make things happen.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A few days ago I landed in England and, expecting little, slipped an old UK SIM card into my phone. I’d bought it when living in London five years ago, and hadn’t used it in more than a year. But to my amazement it was still active — as was the money I’d added to its pay-as-you-go account 16 months earlier…and then I received a friendly text message informing me that my data costs were now £1 per 100MB. Another SMS popped up when I emerged from the Channel Tunnel in France a few days later, informing me it would cost me 8p to send texts and 7p per minute to receive calls.

Can you imagine any of that happening with an American phone company? Or Canadian? North American carriers generally expire pay-as-you-go accounts after 90 days of inactivity, and it’s at best a struggle to get them to support data at all, much less seamlessly, much much less at that price. (Which isn’t even that great, by global standards; in India two years ago I was charged $1 for a full gigabyte.)

As for roaming, you’re very lucky to get American or Canadian pay-as-you-go accounts that can roam across that vast undefended border at all, and if you do, they’ll charge the proverbial arm and a leg. That same UK SIM card worked just fine in Kenya last year, and as I type this I’m about to land in Turkey, where I expect to receive another text informing me that my UK pay-as-you-go number continues to work just fine outside the EU, albeit more expensively. (Update: yep.)

What’s wrong with this picture? Why are America and Canada so unbelievably awful? Yeah, I’m being anecdotal, but there is all kinds of data to support the notion that cell service there is outlandishly expensive compared to almost all of the rest of the developed world. (And worse than a lot of the developing world, too.)

Part of it is laissez-faire capitalism run amok. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a staunch defender of capitalism…that is, well-regulated capitalism. Until 2008 that was a hard row to hoe among many of my friends, but that recent embarrassing spate of financial cataclysms have made it much easer. Why is my UK SIM card relatively cheap to use in France? Because EU regulators insisted on it. Why are America’s carriers so parasitical, predatory, gouging and user-hostile? Because they can be, which in large part means because their regulators (including, alas, Canada’s CRTC) don’t insist on much of anything.

Oh, sorry, no, my mistake. They do insist on perpetuating this state of affairs. Consider the recent breathtakingly wrong decision to make it illegal under the DMCA to unlock your phone. This was one of those classic bureaucratic catastrophes: every individual step that led to it doubtless made sense to the people involved, who were too close to their system to take a step back and notice that its actual outcome was complete insanity. If anything it should should be illegal to lock phones, not unlock them. This is regulatory capture taken to new heights of Stockholm-Syndrome madness.

And yet. At the end of the day the true power lies not with the carriers, but with their customers. Alas, American and Canadian customers seem to have been hypnotized into a kind of learned helplessness where they just sit there and silently accept locked phones, bloated Kafkaesque pricing plans, insane roaming charges, Android phones stuffed with crapware, and two- or even three-year locked-in contracts.

But they don’t have to. That’s what’s so infuriating. You too could buy an unlocked phone — an unlocked Nexus 4, which is a terrific phone, costs all of $299! (And I have high hopes that Google’s rumored new X Phone initiative will be even cheaper.) You too could switch to T-Mobile’s monthly pricing plan, or Straight Talk’s, instead of signing a contract. You’d more than make back the upfront costs of the unlocked phone in less than a year. And if enough people did it, the carriers would be forced to compete on quality and improve their pricing, rather than rely on their customers’ passive despair.

The logical conclusion is that if your phone is locked, or if you’re on a multi-year contract, then you have no right to complain about your terrible carrier — because you’re part of the problem. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” In fact, you’re ruining it for the rest of us. Thanks.

But it’s not too late for redemption. Just repeat after me: “I solemnly swear that I will never buy a locked phone or sign a multi-year phone contract again.” And when your current contract expires, do just that. Maybe, just maybe, with your help, we can finally defeat these gargantuan economic tapeworms called AT&T, Verizon, Rogers and Bell — and finally catch up with the civilized world.

Image credit: Tapeworm, by Rhys Ormond, on Flickr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tesco has launched a new social commerce site for wine, Tesco Wine Co-buys.

Using Buyapowa social commerce software, consumers can club together to buy wine in bulk at discounted prices. What we particularly like is that it appears to be demand led; customers are able to choose wines they want to buy together in bulk – and set a maximum price they’d be willing to pay.  The more people that sign up, the heavier the discount – with the person who recruits the most co-buyers – via social sharing – getting a case of wine for free.  Sweet.

In the PR blurb, Tesco director of digital and social Tom Daniell says: “This channel really puts customers in control – from determining the final price they pay, to telling us the products they’d like to see featured.” Now you know. But the point is well made.  This is social commerce for the empowered customer.

We think Buyapowa is one of the few social commerce software companies that really ‘gets’ social commerce. First, it’s about commerce – i.e. shopping, not conversations, And second, it’s social, and that does not mean social spam from retailers or their customers, but shopping together as a social activity. Buyapowa gets this, and its software delivers by helping people shop together to get value.   And that is what the Tesco brand is about – value.

But if the new site is to be a success, Tesco is going to have to brand Tesco Wine Co-buys better – it really should look more like this or this, and it needs to offer value in more ways than just savings – access, appreciation and advice – will be key.

Right now – the ‘site’ straddles two sites – with users having to flip between Tesco.com and Buyapowa.com site to participate.  Apart from burgundies turning blue and tahomas turning to helvetica, it’s unclear what’s happening where. If we were involved, we’d be recommending Tesco consider using their wine club, currently hidden on the site, with a fresh new feel (again – look at NakedWines – they get it) as a vehicle for this initiative.  The idea is good enough to warrant this.

Whatever Tesco decides, they’ll need to avoid making this initiative look like a temporary promotion – and steer well clear of Groupon-style promotional cues – we’ve been there before and it didn’t work. Instead it should be looking at the new generation of e-commerce wine site like NakedWines 0r ClubW, which just raised $3.1M. But if Tesco decides to develop social commerce for wine, it has the muscle to trail blaze, and grow the site into a major e-commerce wine destination.

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Path hasn’t had a particularly smooth road in terms of PR lately, but today brings some good news from the social networking app.

Path will announce today that its app will be built in for one-touch downloading as a featured app on several new Sprint devices: The Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and Torque. The app will be featured along with a handful of others that have been selected for Sprint’s “Discover-it” widget.

A Path spokesperson would not provide details about how long the Sprint partnership will last, or any financial terms associated with the deal. In a statement, Sprint’s product VP Kevin McGinnis indicated that there’s more to come:

“Sprint and Path are finding ways to collaborate to enhance our customers’ experience. This is a first step. We’re excited to work with a mobile-first, best-in-class design company like Path.”

For years, Path as an app and its founder, Facebook alum Dave Morin, have been known quite well within tech-savvy circles. But now the company is focusing on more widespread adoption. This could be a key introduction to a more mainstream audience that might not have otherwise sought out and downloaded Path on the Google Play store.

Moves like this are not a guarantee of app success — it was almost exactly a year ago that the now-defunct Color inked a big partnership to come pre-loaded on all Verizon devices, for example. But then again, many app-device partnerships, such as the one Twitter formed with Apple back in 2011, have been major wins.

Either way, for now it’s clear that Path, which has a user base that’s currently reportedly adding 1 million users per week, continues to aim for big growth — and is inking big partnerships to pursue it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The distinguished tech inventor, entrepreneur and writer Jaron Lanier is nostalgic for the future. In his acclaimed new book, Who Owns The Future?, which is out today, Lanier takes Silicon Valley to task for monopolizing ownership of the future.

Explicitly comparing the “extractive” business models of Wall Street with Silicon Valley’s “free” content economy, Lanier told me that we are “pulling the value out of bits”. “Free” is the big problem, Lanier says. This Facebook/Google model is “not a sensible way to run the world,” he says, because it takes advantage of naive consumers, thereby impoverishing them and shrinking the economy.

But Lanier, for all his criticism of Silicon Valley, remains an optimist about the digital economy. “Work your f$@king butt off,” the inventor of virtual reality advises startup entrepreneurs. And, in what may be the best free advice anyone gives you this year, he tells entrepreneurs to focus on making your customers wealthy.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Amazon’s business model, CTO Werner Vogels reminded us today, is based on “low margins, high volume”, and today the company announced a development on how it’s applying that principle to its enterprise services. From today, AWS is expanding to Europe its Redshift data warehousing service and its EC2 High Storage service. Amazon first announced the intention to take Redshift global in February; it’s actually turning on Europe today.

The news of the international expansion was made this morning during the Amazon Web Services Summit in London, part of a wider roadshow for AWS. Redshift, Amazon’s petabyte-scale solution to better manage huge backlogs of data, was first announced in November 2012. It is very competitive on price: traditional data warehousing solutions can cost between $19,000 and $25,000 per terabyte while Redshift charges $1,000 per terabyte per year.

Big data, Vogels said in a speech today, will be the crux of competitive advantage in the future, but also, it can be the biggest stumbling block. “The database will be the bottleneck,” he said.

Vogels also took the audience through what he sees as the cloud services to watch in the future — a primer, of sorts, for what we may expect to see from AWS in terms of its product roadmap.

Internet of things: “To me it’s much more important that you see these devices as part of a wider strategy.” He described how Shell, an AWS customer, has plans for hundreds of thousands of sensors; and larger consumer developments around wearable technology like the Nike Fuelband and connected everything. “All of these devices in the hands of customers will need to have their data stored somewhere.” Is that a sign of more security services coming from AWS?

Security and privacy: If I had to put some money on it, I think security and privacy are two areas where Amazon will be looking to do more, not just to protect its own cloud platform from attacks, but also because tech companies whose services are based on cloud infrastructure, and who may already be customers of Amazon’s (or a competitor) are also increasingly becoming targets for attacks. “Encryption will be the most important tool to protecting your customers,” he predicted. “It’s important to realize that encryption will be a really important tool.”

Other areas where we might expect to see more AWS developments are more competitive price reductions (unsurprising, especially considering Microsoft Azure’s recent overtures for competing on price).

And there will be more sophisticated ways of manipulating big data, in ways that are perhaps more self-service and less technical. “At this point, the cloud is the default environment for big data,” Vogels said. “But much of big data processing is still pretty raw. What we’ll see is that there will be targeted solutions for you to do customer targeting. You will no longer look at analytics but what you really use for things you want to do.”

The rest of this morning’s presentation was focused on showing off just how much AWS has exploded in growth since first being launched in 2006.

As Amazon noted last week during its AWS Summit event in NYC, it now stores over 2 trillion total objects in S3, and processes 1.1 million peak requests/second as of Q1 2013. (These and other numbers may well get updated when Amazon announces its quarterly earnings later this week.)

Vogels describes AWS Marketplace, launched almost exactly a year ago, the “Amazon.com for enterprise software.” It’s seen a 102% rise in active customers in the last year, he noted.

This is likely to be the lever for much of AWS’s growth as it matures as a platform. AWS Trusted Advisor has made 329,000 recommendations (and now over 330,000 he says) across $22 million in cost savings.

Vogels defended how the company has been slow to date in adding more features to AWS overall. “We bring out limited feature sets because we do not pretend to know what our customers want,” reminiscent of Jason Fried’s idea of big ideas needing to be cut in half in order to execute them well. “We had no idea how this space would develop but this way we can react immediately.”

But as the popularity of AWS and cloud services (and competition to Amazon) continues to grow, the pace of development has accelerated from its introduction of nine AWS products in its first year. “Last year we launched 159 new features. And this quarter alone we’ve launched 53 new features and services. We’re on track to roll out more this year than last,” he noted.

AWS, as Amazon likes to remind us, has had 31 price reductions since 2006. Vogels’ take on this is not unlike that of Amazon as a whole: “We believe that if we can help you drop your costs down you will be more successful in the long run. For us it’s a high volume, low margin business and we really know how to do that well.”

Amazon eats its dogfood. Vogels says that on a typical day 40% of your capacity is unused but some months worse: in early November nearly 80% of traffic is unused. In November 2010 Amazon.com swapped out the last of its physical services, and then a year later did the same for its international operations.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Cloud-based inventory and sales management developer TradeGecko has announced that it is now integrated with online accounting system Xero. The Singapore-based company says that the partnership will allow its clientele of small- and medium-sized businesses to monitor financial transactions in real time.

The integration links invoice, stock and customer data automatically, and allows businesses to save time by eliminating manual data entry and reducing the risk for errors between separate IT systems.

“Xero inventory management has been one of our most requested features, and anyone whose run a growing business will understand why,” said TradeGecko CEO Cameron Priest. “Linking TradeGecko and Xero makes staying in control effortless and means our customers can grow without needing to increase headcount in the back office.”

Based in Singapore, TradeGecko launched in September and was founded by former clothing designer Carl Thompson. Its cloud-based inventory and sales management system was developed to emphasize user experience with intuitive data displays. The company’s investors include WaveMaker Labs, Golden Gate Ventures, and the Singapore National Research Foundation.

Xero’s partner program gives developers access to its API and connects them to Xero’s 150,000 customers, as well as the company’s network of accounting and bookkeeping partners.

“Any small business can run their accounts on Xero, but to get real value, we want to allow our customers to connect all their other applications: CRM, e-commerce, stock, job management etc. If it touches finances or your customer and supplier data, then we want to help developers integrate it,” said Xero Developer Partner Program manager Ronan Quirke.

TradeGecko will continue to integrate with other cloud services this year to allow businesses to connect their back-end systems and automate their administration process.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’re running a WordPress site, now would be a good time to ensure you are using very strong passwords. According to reports from HostGator and CloudFlare, there is currently a significant attack being launched at WordPress blogs across the Internet. For the most part, this is a brute-force dictionary-based attack that aim to find the password for the ‘admin’ account that every WordPress site sets up by default.

HostGator’s analysis found that this is a well-organized and very distributed attack. The company believes that about 90,000 IP addresses are currently involved. CloudFlare, its founder and CEO Matthew Prince told me earlier today, thinks the hackers control about 100,000 bots. As for the scope of the attack, Prince says that CloudFlare saw attacks on virtually every WordPress site on its network.

If somebody guesses your WordPress password, that’s obviously a big problem, but attacks like this then open up ways for the hackers to take over your server – and that’s what whoever is behind this attack is clearly after. The CloudFlare team believes that the attacker is currently using a network of relatively low-powered home PCs, but the aim is “to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack.” Home PCs can be the staging ground for a large denial-of-service attack, but servers have access to far more bandwidth and can hence push out far larger amounts of traffic.

This currently attack is similar to an attack in 2012 that was also aimed at WordPress sites. That attack, however, was looking for outdated versions of TimThumb, a popular PHP-based image resizer that is often used as the default by many WordPress templates.

Both CloudFlare and HostGator, as well as a number of other hosting providers, have taken measures to protect their customers. Besides choosing a very strong password – which is always a good idea – you can also install a number of WordPress plugins that limit the number of login attempts from the same IP address or network to put a stop to these brute-force attacks.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch