Bing‘s social sidebar, which shows relevant entries from your Facebook friends, Twitter, Klout, Quora and other services, just got a lot more interactive. You can now like Facebook posts in the social sidebar and add their own comments. In addition you can now also see all of the existing comments on a post right in the sidebar, too.

This, Microsoft believes, will make the social search experience on Bing even more interactive, engaging and helpful than before.

It also means users don’t have to leave Bing to engage with these posts. Chances are, after all, that they will get distracted by all of the other goodies Facebook has to offer once they leave Bing and won’t return anytime soon.

Personally, I’ve never found these social search results all that useful. Microsoft, however, clearly believes that this, in combination with what they are doing around semantic search, will allow it to continue to compete with Google, which seems to have de-emphasized social search over the last few months.

With its Scroogled campaign and “Bing It On” challenge, Microsoft has obviously been taking a far more aggressive stance against Google in recent months and it’s slowly adding new users. Currently, Google has a market share of about 67 percent in the U.S., and Bing is close to reaching 17 percent.

There have been some recent rumors, however, that Yahoo is looking to drop Bing as its search provider (Yahoo currently commands just under 12 percent of the U.S. search market with its Bing-powered search), but given the long-term deal between the two companies, that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Ashton Kutcher took the stage with Guy Oseary to talk about their A-Grade fund. Arrington started right away about a rumor that the fund is raising money at a $100 million valuation. The two partners confirm the rumors, saying that they are raising “enough money.”

It means that financial institutions and companies will invest a certain amount of money in exchange for equity in the A-Grade fund, valuing the existing investments and activities at $100 million. With three partners (Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary and Ron Burkle), the fund has been investing for about two and a half years. Until today, the three partners only invested personal money. It is still unclear how much money they put into the fund to date.

Among its portfolio companies, the A-Grade fund has invested in Spotify, Uber, Shazam, Soundcloud, Fab and Airbnb. It mainly takes part in seed and Series A rounds.

When asked whether it is bundling current investments or creating a new fund, Ashton Kutcher answered that it is doing both. “We’re just somewhat formalizing what we’ve been doing,” Kutcher said.

The new fund will keep the A-Grade name. While the new funding is not official yet, Kutcher and Oseary said that it’s mostly a one-time investment. “We are pretty well filled up,” Kutcher said. The partners will make an announcement when the deal finalizes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Search startup Leap2 is announcing that it has raised $1.6 million in new funding. It’s also releasing new versions of its iOS and Android apps.

Building a better search experience than the existing players is a pretty tall order. In Leap2′s case, it sounds like the focus really is on the experience, incorporating more images and social updates into a unified search result.

Mixing different media into one list of links may not sound particularly new, but founder and CEO Mike Farmer told me via email that Leap2′s goal is to give you “the whole answer,” so there’s one result with all the content you’re looking for, and you don’t have to visit a number of different sites to piece things together.

For example, Farmer said that if you wanted to search for a list of brunch spots on Sunday morning, Google will give you “a hodgepodge list of results,” so you’ll end up “clicking back and forth” between restaurant websites, Twitter, Yelp, and Google Images. He added:

Now let’s imagine you run the same search through Leap2. Rather than a returning a simple list of links, Leap2 pulls in content from all over the web, providing you with visually engaging, organic results relevant to your query. Using the same set of keywords, your results are now a combination of websites, social conversations and images. Instead of clicking back and forth through a list, you now have one-stop access to scroll through much more dynamic results.

The new round was led by Dundee Venture Capital, with participation from OpenAir Equity, Linseed Capital, and Wichita Technology Corporation. Leap2 had previously raised $280,000 in seed funding.

As for the new apps, they tweak the existing experience in a number of ways, most notably by adding a new Leap2 Live homescreen, which displays trending topics and articles. I played with the app a little this morning, and while I’m still getting used to the functionality, I’m definitely impressed with the design, particularly the way it packs a lot of information into the small screen.

Leap2 plans to launch web version soon too.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Chicago-based social gifting service Boomerang, which has been inching away from its consumer-facing product over the course of 2013, is now expanding its B2B platform with today’s launch of Boomerang Rewards. An extension of its previously launched gifts platform for business, the new Rewards service now brings similar gift-card sharing options to publishers, including those on web and mobile.

Boomerang arose from the ashes of Gtrot, a social travel planner later turned local discovery service, and then a consumer-friendly gifting service similar to competitor Wrapp. But while the Boomerang counterpart to Wrapp still lives on iOS, the focus for the business as whole is no longer primarily on being a consumer service.

Instead, explains CEO Zachary Smith, the consumer app is now “just another channel for distributing gift cards. Although, he adds, it helps to show Boomerang’s capabilities to the company’s B2B partners.

But the real movement now is in working with businesses, including as of today, publishers. With the recently launched business platform, brands have been able to send out gifts directly to their established customer bases via email, social media, or both. At launch, the company was working with around twenty businesses, including Ghirardelli, BeautyBridge, Diamond Candles, Vlado, City Winery, Urban Adventures, and others. Today, it’s grown to 60 businesses, adding Seamless, ModCloth, Shutterfly, ProFlowers, One Kings Lane, thredUP, MeUndies, and many more who are participating directly.

Now with Boomerang Rewards, the company wants to put the distribution of those same gift cards not only in the hands of the brands and businesses themselves, but also with publishers.

“We said, ‘if advertisers can use this, why can’t publishers use this as a way to better engage and monetize their audience?’ Instead of Ghirardelli Chocolates sending out a Ghirardelli gift card to their existing customers, why not go to ChocolateBlog.com and Foodie.com and get them to send out the gift cards to their customers?,” explains Smith. (Side note: sadly, ChocolateBlog.com is not a real thing.) 

Publishers who promote Boomerang Rewards – whether it’s in a blog post, a sidebar, or as a tool to get users to compete online surveys, perhaps – get a portion of the revenue share of the purchases made by converting customers. Smith says Boomerang passes back on average 4%-5% of the net sale.

While Boomerang’s business platform has been shown to boost campaign revenue by 80 percent on average, compared with an brand’s previous promotions, the company claims, not as much data was available regarding the new white-labeled Rewards option. Smith cited one case study involving Jebbit.com. where 10.5 percent of the publisher’s user base made a purchase on ModCloth. “On a CPM basis, they made 8 to 10 times the normal CPM,” he says. “That was really powerful.”

The site is now doing a full Rewards integration along with launch partners, Jebbit, Lab42, Squarz, and RIVS.

“Anyone who wants to monetize a user base can find an excuse to give away gift cards as a reward,” says Smith of the product. “It doesn’t feel like an ad – it’s not replacing any of your existing ad space – we’re simply providing you new tools to generate incremental ad revenue.”

Going forward, the focus will be on expanding distribution and improving the APIs for better use on mobile. Currently, the platform is mobile-friendly, but the APIs aren’t quite there yet. But the plan is to make it possible for mobile publishers to distribute gift cards via apps – for example, as rewards in a game for beating a level. That would put Boomerang up against others doing similar things, including Kiip and more recently, Gyft.

More details on Boomerang Rewards are here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Xerox PARC spinout company PowerCloud Systems is debuting a new kind of home networking solution today on Kickstarter, one that in some ways resembles the very successful Almond router, but one that also offers tremendous flexibility and granularity of control over home network access. The Skydog is a home networking tool that allows you complete control over who has access to your network, how much access they have, and what they’re allowed to access, and it can all be controlled remotely, too.

The Skydog consists of a router with 802.11n networking capabilities and simultaneous dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) operation. But the hardware is just one small part of the equation: it’s the software side that makes things really interesting, thanks to a powerful web-based dashboard that’s designed to be accessed from any Internet-connected PC, smartphone or tablet. The dashboard, unlike the firmware access panels of most routers, is actually a cloud-based service layer that provides simple, easy-to-understand controls for various network settings.

For instance, using Skydog, you can receive a text-based notification whenever a new device joins your network, complete with that device’s name. Skydog also shows you exactly how much bandwidth is being used by what device, and even lets you meter access by device or group, so you could allocate more bandwidth to a living room TV for video streaming, for instance, or limit the access of guests to prevent them running up your monthly traffic totals.

Skydog also has extensive parental controls, which allow for content filtering (you can tell it to block websites that fall into broad categories) and time limits on access to specific sites. Lock down Facebook during exam time, for instance, and have Skydog send you a notification when the user with the limit imposed hits their maximum allotted time. And if you need to diagnose a problem, there’s real-time monitoring, complete with remote outage alerts and remote router cycling, so you can spend less time on the phone with your ISP’s tech support department.

“In general, you can think about what we’ve done as taking enterprise-grade technology and making it usable for consumers,” PowerCloud CEO Jeff Abramowitz explained in an interview. “The idea for Skydog really came from employees of the company, friends and family of the company and even our investors taking our business products home, using them and realizing that they gave a level of visibility and control that no existing products really had.”

PowerCloud has been providing its CloudCommand technology for businesses, schools, hotels and other enterprise clients for a couple of years now, and the leap to the consumer market made sense in that it addressed a need that wasn’t really being filled by any competing products. Sure, Almond had simplified home networking by making its a process independent of computers, but in general home networking is still just about connecting devices to the Internet; there’s been very little innovation in terms of giving people more control over how and when they connect, which definitely seems like a missed opportunity given the explosion of the number of connected devices in any given home, and the changed role of the web in the lives of both children and adults.

Skydog is available as a $79 pre-order on Kickstarter, and will retail for $99 when it hits stores. The service it offers will be available free to users, though since it is a cloud service Abramowitz didn’t rule out the possibility of introducing paid premium tiers and features down the road. Asked why they went the Kickstarter route, he said that Skydog was looking for a new way to access the consumer market for this kind of product.

“Obviously Kickstarter is common for earlier startups, but not necessarily for a company that’s been around for a while,” Abramowitz said. “What we realized is that we’ve got a very disruptive and exciting product, but it really is a very large and mature space, and the existing paths to market are pretty well owned by the incumbents. Getting product on the retail sense is a very resource-intensive proposition.”

Going the Kickstarter route isn’t just about getting consumer backing, he said, but about promoting the Skydog community. The Skydog platform features a forum and is intended to promote sharing of network management strategies, so that people can exchange templates, tips and tricks for running their own household wireless. Kickstarter not only helps with funding, but gets that seeded early.

Skydog also works with your existing setup, as you can just plug in an AirPort Express, for instance, and get it running through the dashboard. The intended ship date is May 2013, so early backers won’t have to wait long for the device, which has already been extensively beta tested. If you’ve been looking for a way to make your home network easier to control and monitor, or you want to set your parents up with a networking solution you can manage completely even from across the country, this is a little project that could have a big impact on your lives.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

CircuitLab is coming up on its one year anniversary, and the startup (now part of Y Combinator’s winter 2013 cohort) now boasts 70,000 monthly active users, who run an average of one circuit simulation every six seconds. The phenomenal traction for the electrical-engineering-focused startup has a lot to do with the team offering up a tool that’s both free and particularly well-suited to educational use, and it bodes well for CircuitLab’s chances of helping early stage hardware startups get off the ground.

For CircuitLab, it’s all about taking up a place of primacy at the very outset of the electronics design chain. To that end, co-founders Mike Robbins and Humberto Evans designed CircuitLab to be a web app where electrical design engineers could draw and simulate a circuit without reading a single manual, and without using complicated, expensive legacy desktop software that was completely one-sided. CircuitLab makes it so that engineers can work together on simulations that are accessible via any browser, getting away from the existing practices in place around tools like PSpice, Multisim and LTSpice.

The open nature of the CircuitLab tool has helped it gain lots of early traction with academics and institutions, since it’s a free, accessible standard platform that teachers can use to help electrical engineering students get simulating without delay, and without having to worry about compatibility or platform lock-in. In a phone interview, Evans and Robbins said that they’ve reached out specifically to spread the word among educational faculty, but that they also often hear about the product being picked up in classes based on the recommendations of students.

“Our bigger user base so far has been in academic institutions, and we’re certainly replacing some of the desktop software that gets used in those programs,” Robbins explained. “The most direct problem we’re solving for them is that half of their students now come in using Macs, and the existing tools are ll Windows-only or even weirder software than that, and we’re hearing from Professors they could not support their classroom because everyone’s using different software.”

Getting students on board as a sizeable early user group is obviously a good thing: the current electrical engineering majors will go on to be the working engineers in half a decade, meaning there will be a generation of professionals whelped on CircuitLab and ready to act as evangelists. But in general Robbins adds that CircuitLab is seeing good use in a number of other scenarios, too, often with small pieces of a product that are simulated separately from the larger whole, like a power supply vs. an entire board. Robbins says that’s a “useful place” for CircuitLab to be, likely because it’s so broadly applicable.

CircuitLab has just nailed down a couple of key partnerships with Electronics.StackExchange.com, where it acts as the embedded schematic design and simulation tool, and with the publisher of EE Times and EDN, which is the industry leader when it comes to professional electronics publications. That, combined with the backing and support of YC, put it in a very good place.

Others like Upverter are out there operating in similar territory, but Evans and Robbins say that CircuitLab is targeting an earlier stage of the process overall, and they argue there’s still plenty of room for lots of competitive and complementary players in this space. Given that many of the dominant tools already out there are old and have changed little in the past ten to twenty years, they’re likely right, and their strong early traction backs that up.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s hard to find a compelling use case for the Philips Hue. But Jim Rutherford and his son hacked the wireless LED lightbulbs to be in sync with the day/night cycle in Minecraft. It creates an immersive setup and is actually useful as creepers start appearing at nighttime.

In Minecraft, 24 hours go by in ten minutes. It’s therefore fairly easy to program the Hue to progressively change color. But Rutherford had to find a clever implementation to sync time between the game and the light.

He developed an iPad app to adjust the position of the sun or the moon in the sky according to the game. You just have to pan your finger across the screen. Then, the app handles the interface to the lightbulb. You can see how it pans out at the end of the video.

At $199 for the Philips Hue starter pack, it sure is an expensive accessory. Only the existing Hue owners or hardcore Minecraft players should consider replicating this setup.

Rutherford said that he will release the app in the App Store so that everyone will be able to enjoy Minecraft’s virtual sunset. For now, you can have a look at the source code.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yahoo, which is now officially a technology company, just announced a Google-like spring cleaning campaign. Just like Larry Page started shutting down a number of under-performing Google properties when he took over from Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer is also in the process of shutting down a number of smaller Yahoo properties. According to today’s announcement, Yahoo will shut down its BlackBerry app, Avatars, App Search, Sports IQ and its Message Boards website on April 1st. In addition, it’s ending support for the Yahoo Updates API on April 16th.

While it is shutting down the Message Boards website, individual message boards on sites like Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Fantasy Sports will remain active. BlackBerry users will be able to continue to use the app, but it won’t be made available for download after April 1st.

If you have no idea what all of these products are, you are probably not alone. Yahoo Avatars, for example, as the name implies, allowed you to build you own avatar and then export it to Facebook and Twitter.

This is Yahoo’s second round of closures, following the demise of a number of Yahoo Messenger features at the end of last year.

Yahoo Clues, which never made it out of beta, let you analyze search trends and features riveting content like a Top Trends leaderboard that told you who today’s most popular celebrities are.

Virtually all of the other products Yahoo is shutting down were similarly underused, so chances are there won’t be a major outcry over today’s closures.

As Yahoo EVP of Platforms Jay Rossiter notes in the announcement, the company is making these changes ” in an effort to sharpen our focus. By continuing to home in on our core products and experiences, we’ll be able to make our existing products the very best they can be.”

Here is Yahoo’s full list of products that will get the ax next month:

Yahoo! Avatars
Effective April 1, 2013, we will no longer support Yahoo! Avatars across our properties. If you like your existing avatar and want to keep it, please go to the Avatars download page, pick a picture size and format, and click the appropriate download button. Similarly, if you want to edit your avatar, you can download the image and then use a photo editing service of your preference. If you want to continue using your avatar with our products, go toYahoo! Profile and upload the avatar you downloaded. For more details, please click here. Additionally effective April 1, we will no longer support the Avatars YQL table.

Yahoo! app for BlackBerry
Effective April 1, 2013, the Yahoo! app for BlackBerry will no longer be available for download. For those of you who have already downloaded the app, you can continue to use it but it will no longer be actively supported.

Yahoo! Clues (beta)
Effective April 1, 2013, Yahoo! Clues (beta) will shut down.

Yahoo! App Search
Effective April 1, 2013, Yahoo! App Search will shut down.

Yahoo! Sports IQ
Effective April 1, 2013, Yahoo! Sports IQ will shut down. Your final lifetime Sports IQ score and rank will be automatically transferred to and preserved within your Yahoo! Fantasy Profile.

Yahoo! Message Boards website
Effective April 1, 2013, the Yahoo! Message Boards website will shut down. Our message boards on individual properties (like Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Fantasy Sports) will remain active. We also encourage you to ask and answer questions on Yahoo! Answers, and discuss issues in the comments section on Yahoo! News.

Yahoo! Updates API
As of April 16, 2013, we will no longer support the Yahoo! Updates API.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new variation of the user Timeline design has been spotted this week, according to The Next Web.

The new layout puts a user’s About info in a box to the left of their posts instead of in the header. Like other designs we’ve been seeing since October 2012, it organizes posts in a single column instead of having posts on both the left and right side of Timeline. There is also an updated publisher box that looks a bit more modern than the existing design. Overall, the top portion of a user’s Timeline is more monochromatic than the design most users currently have.

You can compare this design to other versions we saw being tested last month and last year.

Image via The Next Web.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

In spite of the fact that we now use smartphones to do just about everything, a winner has yet to emerge in the mobile payments space. Unlike mobile photo and video, consumers have yet to get fully comfortable with the idea of turning their phone into a mobile wallet. However, considering that just about every carrier, credit card company and software giant (like Google) is in the process of developing its own mobile wallet, it seems to be a matter of when, not if.

In this fragmented and crowded market, LevelUp, the Boston-based mobile payment startup, is looking to position itself in such a way that it can survive no matter what system or technology wins out in the end, whether it be QR codes or NFC. To do that, the startup is attempting to remove the barriers that prevent consumers from using their phones to make purchases from local merchants — by offering a solution that is payment agnostic.

This fall, LevelUp began rolling out new point-of-sale hardware that supports NFC payments and eliminated the transaction or “swipe” fees that cost merchants $50 billion each year in an effort to reduce friction on both the consumer and merchant side. And, for far, it’s been working.

LevelUp founder Seth Priebatsch tells us that, today, the startup has officially crossed the one million user milestone and now has over 5,000 merchants on board. The startup has processed “nearly $50 million” in mobile payments to date and now has partnerships in place with over 20 point-of-sale companies, which puts it in favorable standing compared to its competitors.

With merchant adoption being critical to LevelUp’s long-term success, along the way, the startup recognized that if it were going to incentivize larger merchants to use LevelUp, it would need to provide them with a way to integrate its technology into their existing apps. In September, the startup launched a while label tool for businesses, which allows them to maintain their own branded apps, while still being able to take advantage of the quick deployment and loyalty infrastructure offered by LevelUp.

Sweetgreen, the first white-label app to launch on LevelUp, debuted at #7 in the Food Category in the App Store, Priebatsch says, and has quickly become “the second most popular payment type at their locations, just behind Visa.” Users can expect many more of these types of LevelUp white-label integrations with big-name merchants in the very near future, he added.

While LevelUp is beginning to find traction after intense focus on developing national distribution with local merchants and white-label functionality, to continue scaling, the founder says, “we need everyone in the payments space to be able to innovate with us and help propel mobile payments forward.” To do that, Priebatsch wants to help LevelUp transition from a product into a platform by way of public APIs and by offering an SDK for its white-label solution.

The idea is for LevelUp to eventually be able to power and feed a variety of apps, becoming the hub or platform around which the apps using its mobile payment technology revolve — in other words, through its APIs, to do for “the mobile payments layer” what Facebook did for the social layer, he says.

The startup is currently in the process of putting the last coat of paint on its API and SDK, which the founder expects to be live by next Monday. Through these tools, merchants will be able offer consumers their own mobile payment app that can be tailored to that particular business, while running on LevelUp’s core platform. In turn, POS players will be able to provide merchants with a solution that gives them updates that “keep pace with rapidly evolving payment technology,” he says.

Furthermore, online food ordering apps, for example, should be able to accept LevelUp as a method of payment, so their restaurants can easily reward customers, whether they pay for the food online or in-store. And, most importantly, the goal is to enable app developers to take the startup’s SDK and integrate it into their own apps or extend LevelUp’s functionality. As an example, Priebatsch sees this working well for fitness apps, which could reward users for hitting personal bests during their daily exercise routines by giving them LevelUp credit to a nearby health food store.

After all, as Paul Graham has said, APIs essentially serve as instant, self-serve business development tools for startups. LevelUp hopes that by encouraging developers to build its payment system into their apps or by giving local merchants the ability to integrate LevelUp into existing apps, it can reach a wider audience and scale effectively to a degree it wouldn’t be able to hit otherwise.

To break down the difference between LevelUp’s API and SDK, just in case it’s not clear — LevelUp’s API will open up the startup’s transactional services to developers, allowing them to use the API to log users in with LevelUp, complete orders, refunds, grab data, claim campaigns and so on.

The SDK, on the other hand, refers to the app-side codebase LevelUp is making accessible to the masses, which the founder describes as essentially “the un-skinned version of LevelUp for iOS and Android.”

Opting for the eat-your-own-dog-food approach, the LevelUp app now runs on its own SDK, Priebatsch tells us, and allows developers to take the core base of the app, skin it to look however they want, add features and modify — or just integrate it into their existing apps. “We like to think of it as a starter kit for anything to do with mobile payments,” he says.

Instant, self-serve business development? Time will tell, but it seems like a good start.

For more, find LevelUp at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch