Mac app Minbox launches to the public today, attempting to differentiate itself from competitors through speed and ease of use. The app allows Mac users to send files directly from their desktops — either through attaching the files or through a very simple drag-and-drop feature through the Minbox icon in the top-right corner.

As you can probably tell from the demo video above, Minbox hopes to gain traction in the file-sharing space through being faster and more nimble than competitors. According to Minbox founder Alexander Mimran, the service is twice as fast as Dropbox for uploading and sharing files (you don’t have to wait for the file to upload to send).

“Our main speed difference is that we upload direct to S3 from the client,” says Mimran. “We use multi-thread file uploading, we compress files, and a host of other things.”

Although Mimran has no data for YouSendIt, Minbox is by default faster from this user’s perspective — YouSendIt basically forces you to log in to the web version to send something, makes you copy/paste your recipient’s contact information and, if you want to send a file larger than 50MB, you’ll have to plunk down $9.99 per month.

While YouSendIt does have a Mac app that ostensibly makes file sharing from your desktop easier, I’ve yet to figure out how to send a file from the app. I think I might have to pay it so the option to share isn’t grayed out, like below. Again, not particularly fast.

“The cloud-storage space is focused on ‘backup’ and ‘sync’, but a large component is neglected… that’s ‘send’,” says Mimran, whose background is in product and design, where speed of sending files is acutely important. “We all send files on a daily basis and believe there are still too many pain points associated with the process — we’re focused on easing that pain.” Mimran maintains that Minbox’s “killer feature” is the ability to share a file by right-clicking on it, a functionality that Dropbox recently axed.

The product, which began its life as a Mailbox-esque smart iOS email client, is free no matter how large the files you’d like to send are: “GoPro users love Minbox!” Mimran says.  He  plans on eventually charging users for any file storage beyond 30 days, which highlights that the startup wants to focus on file sharing and not storing. Mimran concedes that Dropbox handles storage better anyways: “We’re about the ‘Send’!”

Eschewing the idea of shared folders, Minbox does okay on the “Receive” part of the equation as well, with email notifications when something is sent to you and a mobile and desktop view that allows you to visually scan through sent photos in a grid format, even when RAW files, even without a Minbox account. If Dropbox is your favorite photosharing app, you understand how useful this is. Eventually he’d like to build a Minbox feature that allows recipients to browse inside a zip file without having to open it, so you can manage these sorts of files on your phone.

The company has already raised $900k to accomplish its goal of sharing files the fastest. Completing an angel round in early 2012 of $100k from George Babu (ex-Rypple) and friends, and then another round of $800k in May of 2012. Seed investors include George Zachary at CRV, David Cohen at Bullet Time Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Rho Ventures and angels Jeff Zucker, Matt Ocko, Tim Young (Socialcast, About.me), Ben Chestnut (Mailchimp) and others.

Mimran is also a hustler. Again, in case it’s not obvious from that demo video going straight for Dropbox’s jugular. He had a spreadsheet full of journalists he contacted for this launch, and cold-called Apple to get his app through the door, “Like up and down the [phone] directory.” He also showed up at random publications’ offices to pitch, though not ours. He was actually invited to ours.

Users can sign up for Minbox here, and the service will give you an ETA for entrance based on your time of entry and how well their servers are doing. Really.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When we first met the team from Zivix their wild MIDI guitar, the Jamstik, promised a unique music-making experience thanks to a tether that connected it to a computer or iOS device. In the few short months since CES, however, they’re now preparing to announce that Jamstik works nearly flawlessly over Wi-Fi with iPhones and iPads, thereby reducing the need for a physically tethered device.

The Jamstik, which has surpassed its Indigogo goal with 13 days to go, is the first product by Zivix that aims to make music education and composition far easier than on a normal guitar. Not unlike the GTar, the Jamstik outputs MIDI signals as you play. However, instead of electrical connections with the strings the Jamstik uses IR sensors to “see” where your fingers are on the fretboard, allowing for tricks like string bending and hammer-ons and -offs.

The new prototypes have full MIDI over WiFi support, allowing you to connect to an iOS device completely wirelessly. The Jamstik actually creates its own ad hoc network with your device, allowing you to maintain a connection to your favorite audio program without having to connect cables. In the demo I saw today the Jamstik maintained a solid connection for most of an hour and, using Audiobus, you could transmit audio from one program to another, allowing for some amazing mixed MIDI and audio recordings.

The company plans to go into production in 30 days and they have 17 days left on their Indiegogo campaign. The device itself is $299 and the company is in talks to get it into retail stores in Q4 for general consumers. It’s an exciting time to be a musician, that’s for sure.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At its I/O developer conference, Google just announced its new Play Games Services API, a new API that allows game developers to save game states and sync them between different machines. This service will be available for Android and iOS developers. The API will also include the usual achievements, leaderboards and multiplayer services that developers have come to expect from similar services.

This new API will roll out today to all Android users on Android Froyo and up. This new API, Google says, will allow for real cross-platform gaming experiences and ensure that users can easily switch between their phones and tablets without losing their game states.

The multiplayer aspect of the service will feature both a matchmaking aspect, but the focus is clearly on connecting you to your Google+ friends. The matchmaking feature, as Google’s Huga Barra noted, will match users automatically and the API in general will handle “all of the hardcore data” worked involved in building a multiplayer game.

Sadly, part of the demo failed at the keynote today, but this is obviously a service that game developers will latch on to. This move also clearly means that Google is getting serious about gaming.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sometimes the simplest product demos can be effective.

Take a new web editor called Barley. To show off the product, co-founder Colin Devroe opened me a regular old web page, then changed the wording of the page with just a few keystrokes. A small editing menu opened as he typed, but didn’t have to access an admin dashboard, open a separate editor, edit any HTML, or anything like that.

To be clear, there was more to the demo — but that was the heart of it. The point is to offer a web page editor with absolutely no learning curve.

When Devroe discussed the competitive landscape, he first mentioned WordPress, which can indeed be pretty complicated — and I say that as someone who’s writing and publishing this post through WordPress. There are simpler website building tools, such as Weebly, but Devroe pointed out that even in those cases, you still have to use a separate interface to lay out the page and edit the content.

With Barley, on the other hand, you just edit everything directly, just as if you were working with a document. And by using one of Barley’s templates, you don’t have to deal with layout at all.

“You should never have to learn HTML or CSS to be able to edit a website,” Devroe said. “We hope to eliminate the reason why anybody that owns a restaurant wouldn’t have their own site.”

Devroe said that the team is definitely aiming for a small business audience, but since a small company — Barley is the first project from a startup called PlainMade — he isn’t trying to sell directly to those businesses.

Instead, he’s working with companies that might want to offer Barley as part of a larger package of small business services, and with developers and designers who can create custom websites for clients, then allow the business owner to edit the website on their own using Barley. In addition to offering easy editing, Devroe said the service is helps those designers and developers because they can distribute templates and update designs using Barley’s Dropbox syncing, and because it handles all the hosting.

Pricing is based on traffic and starts at $18 per month. Devroe and his team started letting in 500 users at a time earlier this week — you can sign up here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the near future, the only difference between a smartphone, tablet, and a laptop will be the size of the screen. Hardcore gamers could play 3D intensive games in a smartphone, and Michael Bay could render “Transformers 4″ from his iPad. Otoy, an LA-based software company, has discovered a way to stream any application to any device, completely through a web browser. It’s difficult to overestimate the potential disruptiveness of Otoy, as a breakthrough streaming service could, in the near future, end the need for app stores and computer upgrades (see a demo below).

Otoy has a habit of impressing the tech press with its surprising ability to stream 3D intensive graphics to devices that shouldn’t be able to run them. Since Otoy’s 2009 demo, there’s been a rush of companies in the ever more crowded “cloud” services industry, such as Onlive’s streaming video gaming. Up until now, video games were shackled to certain consoles, mobile apps to particular app stores, and software to particular operating systems. If we didn’t own an iPhone, Windows, and or an Xbox, we couldn’t use a lot of cool applications.

But, every device runs Internet browsers, and specifically, the JavaScript which Otoy utilizes to render the software. Soon, the monopoly that iOS, Windows, and Xbox wields over users will end, and the freedom to use any piece of software on any device will become the norm.

Even cooler, we may no longer need to shell out $3,000 on a high-end laptop to run games or graphics software. At Otoy’s media event with Mozilla and Autodesk at San Francisco headquarters, we saw the graphics-hungry first person shooter, Unreal, run seamlessly on an iPhone. In essence, Otoy brings a supercomputer to your phone or tablet.

“That’s going to have huge implications in my business” said celebrity talent agent and Otoy investor, Ari Emanuel, who sees the ability of more filmmakers to make movies in less time and for less money. Currently, it takes an entire day to render movie-quality scenes. With Otoy, globally distributed teams could work in real time (some at the beach) without having to stagger their work for an entire day between revisions.

So, how much will it cost if Otoy completely replaces my computer needs? About $300, estimates Urbach, based on 8 hours of use per day for consumer applications (Otoy charges by computing power and is currently targeting artists).

There is one more implications of note: Otoy could dramatically reduce Internet congestion. Cellular networks are overloaded, in part, because multimedia takes up a huge chunk of the available bandwidth. Netflix, alone, hogs an estimated 32% of total U.S. bandwidth during peak hours. Otoy and Mozilla estimate that the enhanced streaming technology could reduce the total bandwidth needs by a sizable 25%.

In order for Otoy, or any cloud rendering service, to completely service all our computing needs, the Internet must get much more reliable. At the demo, a standard 4G cell network could stream a video game. But, spotty coverage around cities, on airplanes, and in rural areas will be a serious bottleneck for Otoy. Additionally, it’s unclear whether current U.S. bandwidth could actually handle everyone moving to the cloud.

So, while we don’t know the implications in the short term, the implications a few years down the road are very exciting.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With a plan of making product ratings social, Greentape is launching a new app that they hope will bring in-store product reviews to consumers while (hopefully) spawning more product purchases for merchants. The team is demoing this new app at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.

Greentape works like this: Consumers download the app, and as they move throughout a retail store the location aware app notifies them about products with the active user reviews as they pass by those products. It is accurate to about 3 feet or so, according to CEO Chris Daltas.

My first question of course was “how is this different from ShopKick”. Chris was quick to point out that Greentape is all about reviews and not rewards. It is purely about what user reviews exist for certain products, but tied to products in a local store.

For example, their demo on the Startup Alley floor included a faux shoe display. As a user comes within range of the display, a list of reviews for all the different shoes in the display pops up on the app. The product with the highest ratings, shows up on top. Users can view these reviews to make purchasing decisions, or leave their own reviews.

From a technical standpoint, Greentape’s system works with the help of a fixed number of hardware beacons that are installed within a retail location. Those beacons are linked with software, so that merchants can associate products with certain areas in the retail store.

From that point on, any smartphone using the app in an outfitted retail location can have access to leave and read product reviews.

So that’s how it is good for consumers — empowered shopping experiences. But how is it good for merchants?

It is good for merchants because, the reviews could trigger an engagement that leads to a purchase. Also, the merchant is capturing lots of data about consumers inside their stores.

Greentape will be deploying this service soon, in some capacity, with both Whole Foods and  Alex and Ani.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Startups still have a hard time finding the right applicants for their jobs. During our Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon, Codecademy engineer Bob Ren wrote a little web app that takes the Common Application for college admission as its inspiration. Just like high school students can use the Common Application to apply to multiple colleges simultaneously, Startup Common Application will take your application and then submit it to multiple startups.

Large companies typically have a huge pipeline with job prospects, but startups “naturally suffer from not having the big pipelines that big companies have,” Ren told me – and for a small startup, it’s even harder to find the right applicants.

Currently, startups either rely on email, Job Score or Resumator, but the system is still very inefficient, especially for the applicants. You often spend hours getting your applications ready and submitted, but a system like Startup Common Application could just automate all of this for you (and you don’t even have to pretend that you really personalized the system).

Common Startup Application runs on top of Heroku and Ren is working on a number of scripts that will take his users’ data and then auto-submit it to more startups. In the spirit of the Hackathon, Ren coded until 6 a.m. and then slept an hour before getting ready for his demo this afternoon.

Obviously, this is still a hack, so Ren will surely have to work on the design a bit more, but he’s definitely tackling an interesting problem. Given that he can automate much of it, what he really needs right now, of course, is support for as many startups as possible, but there are some pretty obvious ways he could monetize this service if he decides to continue working on it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Two weeks ago, Microsoft launched its Windows 8 Quickstart kits for web developers who want to test their web apps on Internet Explorer 10 and Windows 8 on their Macs. That offer sold out very quickly, but today, Microsoft announced that it is making another 1,000 of these kits available on Swish, with 10,000 more coming throughout the rest of the year.

The offer will go live at 2:30 p.m. PT today. Until then, it’s only available to DEMO attendees.

For just a $25 donation to either code.org, Khan Academy or Watsi.org, as well as $8 in shipping costs, these developers will get a copy of Windows 8 Professional, Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac, and “iOS to Windows porting support from top engineers.” The kits are scheduled to ship in early June.

The focus this time is on iOS developers, and anybody who wants to get one of these kits will have 60 seconds to get past a number of multiple-choice questions to prove that they are indeed developers. To get this offer, you will have to show that you know your way around UIView, UIViewController and similar topics that iOS developers are likely intimately familiar with. Last time, the offer and puzzle were geared toward web developers and was relatively easy to solve.

For now, just 1,000 of these kits are available, but Microsoft says it plans to make about 10,000 available at various app builder events in the U.S. and international dev camps throughout the year.

As Microsoft notes, the company is extending this offer because it wants iOS developers to “get started creating your own apps for Windows Store.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Following its beta launch at the end of January, just.me, the mobile messaging startup from Keith Teare, co-founder of TechCrunch and partner at incubator Archimedes Labs, has launched its first app, available initially for iPhones and iPod Touch. Just.me had planned on an earlier release of the app but said today it held back so it could launch at DEMO Mobile to garner more attention.

As with any messaging app, just.me’s usefulness is commensurate with the number of friends fully on board with the service so getting the word out to drive app downloads is now priority number one for its founders. Just.me does support messaging going outside its bounds, to non-app users, but to access the full suite of features conversation participants need to join in.

Just.me also has a more complex feature-set than the average messaging app, so arguably has more work to do to educate potential users and convince them it’s worth sticking with it through the learning curve. Rather than focusing on selling itself as just a (free) messaging service, as some of its messaging rivals have, just.me has grander ambitions: it’s agitating to replace centralised social networks with the contacts in your phonebook plus its tabbed sharing structure.

The app supports private one-to-one messaging; contained group messaging; and public broadcasts, the latter on a public just.me cloud (similar in concept to Twitter). It also allows users to talk to themselves by using the app as a private journal and/or storage service, a la Evernote. So it’s offering a spectrum of messaging types, private and public, all within the same service.

These features make it a lot more ‘high concept’ than the average messaging app — closer, perhaps, to the likes of NHN Japan Corp’s Line, which is also styling itself as a social network replacement and also offers multifaceted sharing options. Unlike Line, though, which is replete with stickers and cartoonish mascots, just.me is not so heavily targeting the youth market.

Just.me has a clean, professional look (see screenshot gallery below) with a focus on displaying users’ own photos that’s most reminiscent of Path or Facebook Home. Add to that its ability to function as an email-plus-multimedia-attachment replacement and just.me seems most likely to appeal to older, professional power users — who are seeking to collapse the functions of multiple apps into one low-friction interface.

Facebook Home is a step forward for mobile software… We can see the end of single use apps in this move.

Since just.me’s beta debut at the start of the year the competitive mobile messaging landscape has shifted a little, with Facebook launching its Facebook Home launcher on the Android platform. Home is a skin that sits between the OS and third party apps, pushing the latter outside the user’s main sphere of attention. Just.me is not currently competing with Home, since Home is not (fully) available on iOS. But Teare & co are working on an Android version of their app — due in six to eight weeks — so will be rubbing up against Facebook’s new-look mobile face soon enough.

Asked whether Facebook Home makes just.me’s user-acquisition task harder than it might otherwise be, Teare argued the opposite, telling TechCrunch: “Facebook Home really makes things easier. People will understand a user-centric approach with an app that caters for multiple user needs.

“Facebook Home is a step forward for mobile software. It represents an attempt to support multiple user goals on a single platform. We can see the end of single use apps in this move. just.me shares this vision of a combined messaging and social media app capable of supporting all of a users goals. We are happy to be in the same company as Facebook here.”

While conceding it’s an inevitable challenge for a 14-person startup to compete “in a field that contains giants”, Teare said just.me’s distributed openness vs the “walled garden clubs”, its range of sharing features and an initial rollout that encompasses “155 countries from day one, in 32 languages” (albeit, on only one mobile platform) will help it stand out. And rattle some cages.

“We do not see ourselves as competing with Facebook Home. We are far ahead feature wise and very different in that we are an open and distributed network, not a centralized one. We rather see ourselves as offering users features and controls that others have yet to build,” he said. “We want to be a major player in delivering multi-faceted messaging to users.”

Just.me raised a $2.7 million Series A back in 2011. Its investors include Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, Google Ventures, True Ventures, Betaworks, CrunchFund (which is of course tied up with TechCrunch in several ways, including the fact that our parent company AOL is an investor), and individuals including Don Dodge and Michael Parekh.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In a startup’s never-ending battle for new users, data is king. When the decision to put that shiny signup button down here vs. up there can mean the difference between 40 percent of new visitors signing up instead of 20 percent, good data analysis can be what puts food on the table.

YC-backed analytics service Heap wants to make analytics better. They want to help you to code less, but grow more.

Heap’s approach to analytics is, in a sense, backwards from what many web developers might be used to.

Check out their demo video, below:

With many analytics tools (whether its something built in-house, or something like Google Analytics’ event tracker), the decision to track a new metric can take days to implement. First, you’ve gotta decide what you want to track. Then you write and test the code — or, in the case of a bigger company, you wait for one of the engineers to write and test the code (a task that’s probably somewhere around 200 items deep on their to-do list.)

Then you wait. Since you weren’t capturing that specific data before, it’ll be a few days before enough data trickles in to be meaningful.

Heap, meanwhile, captures everything from the day you install it onward. If a user clicks on an image, it’ll log it. If they’re pressing keys on the keyboard because your UI incorrectly implies that’s what they should do, it’ll log it. Every click, every page view, every form submission — if it’s something their lil’ blurp of JavaScript can capture, they log it.

Because of that torrential stream of data constantly being logged, you’re able to come up with new questions and have answers immediately without writing a line of new code. So you made a surprise appearance on Reddit’s front page yesterday and want to know how many of those new visitors tapped your page’s drop-down “Share” button? The data is already there, ripe for the perusin’: just tell Heap which DOM element is the share button, then tell it to count the clicks based on Reddit as the referrer.

User groups (like, say, everyone who signed up after coming from Reddit) can quickly be bundled into “Cohorts” while “Funnels” allow you to measure metrics across a certain series of events. Want to know where you’re losing the most would-be users in your multi-page signup process? That’s what funnels are for.

There’s a matter of user privacy that’s worth discussing here, but it’s a tangled enough topic that it’s probably worth saving for another day — or, as it’ll probably get brought up down below, for the comments. As users, we all expect certain pre-set actions (page views, signups, etc) to be logged for later analysis, but isn’t logging everything just a bit… much?

As you might imagine, capturing this much data requires a pretty heavy amount of storage, so this thing ain’t free. The price scales based on the number of unique visitors a site has. Got 100 users? That’ll be a buck a month. 2,500 users? $25 per month. 200,000 users? $1,000 bucks. 500,000 users? That’ll be $2,000. You can tinker with the pricing scale right here.

If you’re interested in playing with Heap before tossing it onto your own site, you can find a sand-boxed demo right here. Otherwise, interested parties can find the beta sign up here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch