During our Disrupt event today, New York City company Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley spoke about how people are talking about the company these days. One of the interesting things about the company is its strategy to be the “location layer” of the Internet. For four years, the company has been trapping all of this location data, tips and social graph information.

On its location data, Crowley said that the company is generating all of this information that will be important moving forward, like finding all of the interesting places on say, a Monday morning in New York City. These are the bits of data that Foursquare has just started leveraging in its own app and it’s only going to get better.

Crowley says that its API is underutilized by partners and people aren’t “leaning” on them as much as they could be, as of yet. He says that in the next year you’ll see more apps that use Foursquare’s location data get smarter about the world around it. This means that the company has a lot more evangelism to do to educate companies on how their data is best used. I can’t think of many services that do a really good job of it right now. Sure, apps like Flickr let you add a Foursquare venue to your photo, but that’s all. It would be nice if Flickr could suggest places to visit and shoot photos based on other interesting places are close to your current location, and those are the types of applications that Crowley suggests when saying that its API isn’t used to its fullest potential.

When asked about how the company is viewed from the outside, Crowley said Foursquare is going through a period of time that other big startups have gone through:

We’re not the shiny new thing anymore, we’ve been around for four years. People are understanding what we’re trying to do, become the location layer. We’re in that interesting hazing period where people are skeptical on whether we can be success or not. Facebook went through it, now we’re going through it.

“The biggest haters and critics of Foursquare haven’t used the app in the past six months.” Crowley continued. He went on to call some of the predictive modeling that Foursquare is doing for users is somewhat like “rocket science.” However, getting people to stop thinking of Foursquare as the same company that it was in 2009, focusing on badges and leaderboards, is a hurdle, Crowley admits.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The problem with most video apps is that they don’t allow viewers to have much of a clue about what a video is actually like. Too often, video publishers pick a thumbnail that is misleading or only shows a small bit of what their content is about. That can leave viewers frustrated if they invest the time to actually watch a video. And for publishers, it means lost views, if they don’t choose correctly. Cinecraft’s Videogram technology seeks to solve this problem by creating thumbnails that provide more context.

Cinemacraft CEO Sandeep Casi believes there hasn’t been a so-called Instagram for video. Video thumbnails simply don’t provide enough context for what’s happening in a video, and so potential viewers will choose not to click through.

So Cinemacraft has designed a solution: It’s built technology that scans videos and creates a pictorial summary of their content. With both a platform API to look into publisher videos and an iOS app to display them, Cinemacraft’s Videogram products give publishers a better way to display their content and gives viewers more insight into what a video is actually about. Videogram breaks videos down into chunks that it displays so that they can quickly get an idea of whether or not they will want to watch the whole thing.

But there’s other interesting stuff happening on the back end: For instance, since the video previews that it generates are created dynamically, the platform knows not only where users are most engaged, but which moments they are most likely to click on. That enables it to provide more compelling previews as time goes on.

It also provides analytics into what viewers are watching and engaging with within the video. Trending moments can be highlighted, and publishers can use them to better target pre-roll or impression ads.

Right now, more than anything the Videogram app is a showcase for what publishers can do with the technology. It curates content from multiple providers and displays them in its own Videogram format, providing a few other features — like the ability to comment within the app, or share clips with others on social networks. In fact, they can share specific moments, not just the entire video. Videogram users can also upload or capture their own videos within the app and get the same preview thumbnail treatment.

But really, the Videogram technology is best for publishers, as a way to show off their videos. On that front, the company is running pilot programs with 10 publishers, including the likes of Sony, Collective Digital Studio and Big Frame, among others.

The core technology is licensed from Fuji Xerox Labs, where Casi helped develop it. Cinemacraft is based in Tokyo, with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The company has received seed funding from 500 Startups and other angel investors.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, Google quietly ushered in a new application built on top of its nonprofit arm, Google.org. The app is called One Today, and it’s currently invite only for Android users at this time. The aim is to get people to donate $1 to different organizations, while getting the complete information about how your donation will be used upfront. This is a huge stumbling block for nonprofits usually, as people are afraid that their money won’t actually get spent on making a real difference. One Today aims to change that.

Additionally, One Today has a social component to it, letting you set a cap to how much money you’ll match if your friends donate to a cause. By using Google Wallet, you can simply pay off your “donation balance” once all of your friends have used up your cap. It’s a pretty interesting way of crowdsourcing donations. When I talk to people about giving money to causes, the first problem they have is that they can’t find one that they’re passionate about. By allowing you to put the choice of who to donate in your friend’s hands, this problem simply goes away and there’s no excuse not to give. You don’t have to involve others though, as you can participate by yourself or interact with the app’s community.

Currently, the landing page allows you to request an invite, even though the app itself is available for download on Google Play. If you open the app, you’re shown the invite screen yet again and there’s no word on when One Today will start opening itself up to users and donations.

Some other interesting aspects of the app is that it’s populated only with nonprofits that Google.org is currently working with, so you know that they’re pre-screened. Other sites, such as Causes, are filled up with organizations that have little or no information about itself or what is done with the money that they’re raising. That’s clearly not the case with this app according to the programs that will be pre-populated:

Organizations can also register to be included.

From the looks of the app screenshots, One Today seems extremely polished and well thought out. This is an app that Google hopes that you use daily:

The reason for putting this together is addressed in the app’s FAQ:

Google has a long-standing commitment to supporting nonprofits and to do doing good. One Today makes fundraising easy for nonprofits, it also makes giving simple and fun for users.

But yes, Google does collect a 1.9% credit card fee, but that’s not much considering that it takes care of the processing and donation routing for you. These donations are also tax deductible, of course.

The idea of accepting one dollar at a time is easy enough for anyone to bite off and chew, and get into the rhythm of daily giving, which could be a more rewarding experience than giving a lump sum to just one charity every year, for example. As you donate more, the app will start recommending other organizations that might interest you, which is a Google Play app-like purchasing experience. When you tap “give,” it’s actually a pledge, and you’ll be notified to settle your balance once you’ve pledged to a few organizations.

With this approach, micro-donations could actually catch on and raise more money for these nonprofits than ever. In many situations, it’s not the actual amount that you donate, it’s the awareness that your social actions bring. One Today is definitely an amplification tool, and it will be interesting to see how the project evolves once it opens to the masses.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Private company M&A and venture capital database CB Insights has issued its Q1 2013 report on venture capital and deals. According to the report, VCs invested $6.9 billion across 841 Deals (eclipsing a Q3 2012 high), which is the highest level since dot come days, says CB Insight. You can find a full copy of the report here.

Deal volume was up 7 percent from last year, and funding, relative to Q1 2012, was up 17%. Seed VC activity was fairly flat on a sequential basis (194 seed VC deals in Q1 2013 vs. 190 in Q4 2012) but year over year VC seed deals are up 31% (148 in Q1’12). Internet deal activity climbed to multi-year highs hitting 379 deals (best since Q1 200) bur social as a category made up only 4% of deals. CB Insights attributes this jump to the boom in enterprise deals. Clean tech deals and dollars also hit multi-year lows.

Investment dollars within mobile hit $718 million in Q1, a high beat only by Q3’12, which saw $968 million in investment. The actual amount of deals dipped to 106 from 122. As a sub-industry in mobile, security is seeing a boom, with over 30 percent of funding dollars for the quarter.

ANother interesting data point noted by CB Insights was that Series C, D and E all saw an increase in shares of funding dollars while Series A & B both saw declines. Seed funding continued relatively the same despite concerns about a Series A crunch.

Specifically for internet companies, deal activity and funding to internet companies increased 10% and 12% from Q4 2012, respectively, and climbed 16% and 35% on a year over year basis.

In terms of by state for the second time in the last 2 years, New York beat out Massachusetts on overall number of deals and funding in a quarter (behind California). In fact, CB Insights says Massachusetts hit a 5-quarter low for deal share. As CB Insights reports, “The holy trinity of California, New York and Massachusetts was disbanded in Q1 with Mass. falling out of the top 3 for both deals and dollars.” Utah replaces Massachusetts for the third spot.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Lulu (formerly Luluvise), the controversial mobile app that lets girls anonymously review and recommend guys, is seeing some pretty decent traction since it rebooted in February to focus on launching across U.S. college campuses, early Facebook-style. The London/U.S. company, backed by Passion Capital, PROfounders and a host of prominent angels including Yuri Milner and Dave Morin, has garnered 200,000 users in 8 weeks across the five U.S. universities where it’s actively been marketed.

That’s out of a possible market of 6 million female U.S. undergraduates, while at the current trajectory Lulu reckons it could be on track to reach 1 in 4 female undergraduates in the U.S. by the end of the year, something which it then plans to use as a springboard to target the U.S. female market as a whole.

Pitched as a “girls-only app for dating intelligence” or an anonymous database of guys, created by girls — men are strictly prohibited from joining via Facebook login and other checks — Lulu has, perhaps understandably, received its fair amount of criticism, even though it initially stalled before take off. The main charge being that the same concept if applied to guys rating girls would be frowned upon, not least by investors, though in actual fact there are a number of similar startups targeting males.

The other, more legitimate, charge levied at Lulu is that the men reviewed have little right to reply due to being locked out of the app, even if there is a limited accompanying app that lets them edit their basic profile. A lawsuit waiting to happen, maybe, though the app’s ToS clearly puts the onus on the women asked to upload reviews, suggesting slightly disingenuously that they must seek the permission of the guy they are reviewing first if they choose to post information about them that may contravene any data-protection laws.

All of which hasn’t put off the startup’s backers. In February, Lulu announced it had added another $2.5 million to its coffers, bringing the total raised to $3.5m.

Of course, controversy has also undoubtedly brought lots of PR, including a fair amount of mainstream media coverage in the UK and U.S., such as on Ryan Seacrest’s Virgin Radio show, so it’s not so surprising to see some traction happening stateside.

Interestingly, I’m told that overall Lulu’s U.S. college campus traction is coming at an acquisition cost of $0.07 per user, while in the first 5 universities where the app launched, it achieved 35-40% penetration within 2-3 weeks. It’s now scaling this approach nationwide.

Other interesting stats that have been shared with TechCrunch: 50% of new users come back weekly, visiting 8 times per week on average, spending 45 mins in the app per week. In addition, 52% of users create content. Overall, Lulu has seen 57 million profile views, 4 million user sessions, 5.2 million reviews read, and 10 million searches.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for every three women that join, one guy tries to — unsuccessfully — sign up.

Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After debuting its in-store mobile payments technology PayPal Here in the U.K. two weeks ago, the payments giant is announcing another set of news around the product: an iPad app. Not only is this the first iPad app for PayPal Here, but it’s actually the company’s first native app for the tablet ever.

Last year, PayPal launched Here, a triangular dongle that plugs into an iPhone or Android device to read the magnetic strip on the back of a card — similar to the square-shaped dongle produced by rival Square. PayPal says that an iPad app was a hugely requested feature from its “hundreds of thousands” of merchant users. In fact, many users were simply magnifying the iPhone app to fit the iPad. Today, the iPad app will compete with the likes of Square’s iPad register app, Square Register.

The app’s design is different from its iPhone cousin and has been optimized for the larger touch screen of the device. It allows for multiple employee logins within one account, which is a key feature for any larger merchants or chains. Once you log in, you are taken to the register, which allows you to enter the total into the keyboard and take a payment in a variety of ways, including swiping the credit card using PayPal Here, entering the number manually, scanning the card using Card.io’s acquired technology, accepting a check, or using cash.

Once the transaction is approved, you can email, text or print a receipt. Merchants can also see which customers have check-in via the PayPal app.

There are a number of other interesting technologies built-in, as well. The app has integrated eBay’s RedLaser technology to allow users to scan barcodes to purchase items (which is not included in Square Register yet). Users can also use the scanning feature to add inventory to the app to allow for an easier checkout process. Merchants can also manually add items to the menu so cashiers can simply pick an item from a list to add to a bill amount.

In terms of backend technology, the iPad app shows merchants sales history, a daily summary of sales, gross sales to date, taxes, tips, discounts. You can also wirelessly connect the app to a cash drawer and printer. While the app could replace a register, PayPal says that it also is integrating into existing POS solutions from NCR, Vend, Kounta, Erply, Leapset and Shopkeep.

For now, the register only works in the U.S. with the PayPal Here dongle, but eventually the app will be integrated with the company’s international offerings, as well.

In late February, PayPal Here debuted its new hardware to accommodate the chip-based cards in the U.K. and other parts of the world, competing with some of the local payments companies like iZettle. But PayPal says the response to the U.K. reader has been positive, and already the company has had 11,000 merchants express interest in using the technology. As mentioned above, the company says PayPal Here in the U.S. is being used by hundreds of thousands of merchants, and is growing at a fair pace in terms of usage (which is still less than Square).

That being said, Square and Square Register has had a leg up on this market in the U.S. because it has been out for longer, and in that time has updated its iPad app several times. But the market is huge, especially among small- to mid-sized chains and a little competition should be interesting and help push companies to innovate faster.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is testing a new option in the status update box that lets users share what they’re doing in a more visual and structured way.

When users go to create a post, Facebook asks “What are you doing?” and includes a drop down menu of options, such as “feeling,” “watching,” “eating” and more, according to TechCrunch. These feelings or actions are then appended to the status update, along with an emoticon or link to the page users mention. This feature is a clever approach to get users to share their activity in a way that can be later used for ad targeting or indexed in Graph Search.

At f8 in 2011, Facebook introduced the concept of Open Graph applications, for which developers could create custom verbs and publish structured stories about what users did in their apps. Thousands of apps have integrated with Open Graph but few besides Spotify have taken off in such a way that truly builds a graph of users’ online and offline actions. Some users were put off by how many apps shared their activity without them realizing it and Open Graph got a bad reputation for “frictionless sharing.”  Now it seems Facebook’s taking matters into its own hands to accelerate the amount of Open Graph stories users create. The more users become familiar with this type of sharing on Facebook, the more comfortable they may end up being with third-party apps that help them tell similar stories.

Even if this doesn’t help the broader ecosystem, it helps Facebook collect important information while giving users new ways to express themselves and learn about things through their friends. Facebook says this information isn’t being included in Graph Search yet, but it’s only natural that it will one day. We can also envision Facebook using these structured status updates in new types of feeds that focus on a particular category. We’ve seen the social network adding features to its music dashboard and have wondered whether similar products could be made for movies, books or news. There are other interesting displays that could be created, such as a look at how your friends have been feeling lately. Based on these sentiments and a user’s Likes and actions, Facebook could recommend who to buy gifts for and what those users might want.

Images via TechCrunch

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

First Round Capital is releasing its 2012 year in review, which delves into hard data, such as how much the seed fund invested in the year and the most common CEO name within the firm’s portfolio.

VC firms generally don’t reveal this sort of data, so it’s pretty interesting to get an inside look into First Round, which raised a $160 million new fund in 2012. The firm made 37 new investments, participated in 66 follow-on rounds, and invested a total of $23.1 million in 2012. First Round says that it companies raised a total of $910,000,000 in 2012.

Another interesting data point—2012 was the first year in the firm’s history where consumer companies represented less than 50 percent of its initial investment dollars. And 5.5 percent of all dollars invested in Tech/IT companies by every venture firm in the country went to a FRC company. The First Round Capital companies that exited (through M&A or IPO) in 2012 were worth 2,500,000,000+ at the time of exit.

Every dollar First Round initially invests in a company is typically followed by $36 of follow-on capital from other VCs.

The most common CEO name in the First Round Community is David – there are 11 Davids. The First Round Capital infamous Holiday Video was viewed over 100,000 times.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is making quick progress in growing its mobile advertising business, according to major ad platform Kenshoo. It sees 20% of all Facebook ad spend going to mobile. That’s a big boost from October when Facebook said 14% of its ad revenue came from mobile. Meanwhile, 71% of Facebook ad spend targeted to mobile phones goes to Android, further proving Facebook has to focus more on Google’s OS.

Facebook only began showing ads on mobile at the beginning of March 2012, and its unproven ability to profit in the space has made investors hesitant to bet on it. But over the last few months, studies are beginning to show that Facebook mobile ads work and could keep the company successful as its user base shifts away from accessing the service via desktop.

In September we reported that five major Facebook advertising platforms said there was high demand for mobile ads promoting Pages, and that these ads performed up to three times better than desktop Page ads. Then just last week, studies from AdParlor and Miso showed Facebook mobile app install ads that drive people to the app stores were performing well for developers, delivering high click-through rates. Facebook has also been focusing on improving the design of its mobile ads so they describe what’s being promoted, stay fresh, and don’t get tuned out.

Kenshoo’s data shows that Facebook mobile ads are currently priced at a 70% premium over desktop ads. That makes sense considering Facebook often shows seven or more ads per page on desktop. That means users are less likely to look at any single ad. On mobile, though, a single ad can take up most of the screen and therefore may be more likely to make a real impression on users.

Kenshoo collected its data during November and December 2012 from clients across a variety of verticals, including games, retail, financial services, travel, and software. One other interesting stat is that Android’s tablet offering is failing to gain traction with users, or at least advertisers aren’t buying there. Comparing advertiser spend on iOS vs. Android tablets, iPads received 97% of spend.

However, the fact that most smartphone ad spend on Facebook is going to Android underscores how Google’s OS is becoming a leading portal to the social network. Scraped stats from analyst Benedict Evans I published last week show there’s now 192 million monthly active users on Facebook for Android, and just 147 million on iPhone. If app growth trajectory continues, even with 48 million Facebook for iPad users, more people will come to Facebook via Android than iOS, or already are. This means Facebook may need to start prioritizing Android app development over iOS.

Kenshoo’s CMO Aaron Goldman expects more advertisers to dive into Facebook’s mobile placements, which could grow mobile spend from 20.3% to become a bigger part of Facebook’s ad pie. “The world’s top brands have embraced Facebook mobile advertising, and we expect the channel to become increasingly competitive as new devices, like those on display at the Consumer Electronics Show this week, deliver enhanced interactive experiences,” said Goldman.

As advertisers warm up to the mobile medium, Facebook needs to turn its attention to user reactions. The feed is starting to get a bit more cluttered with ads than a few months ago. If people start to feel stories from their friends are being drowned out with marketing messages, they may open Facebook less.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Three years ago Mario Romero Zavala and José Antonio Bolio decided to create a Twitter account in Mexico City to alert people to cumbersome police checkpoints that too often resulted in various forms of harassment to locals. This was the beginning of Ret.io, which has since changed tremendously.

Ret.io’s Twitter presence has grown across multiple accounts in every Mexican state to 27,000 followers. Its website has more than 100,000 monthly visitors, and its iPhone app has been in the top 10 in the App Store within the navigation category.

For the first year Ret.io was just one Twitter account that tracked and tweeted mentions and tips. The iPhone app was released in February of this year, albeit Romero Zavala admits that the core functionality still lies with Twitter.

Although the app originally was created so people could report the checkpoints, users eventually began using the service in different ways. Zavala points out that the site isn’t set up to fight narcos in Mexico per se, but there are tangental intersections.

“Some reports help citizens avoid dangerous situations, like shootings or roadblocks, some of which may be linked to the war on drugs; but these aren’t things we think the cartels would really worry about as they are pretty public incidents,” he tells TechCrunch.

Ret.io is used much more to receive reports of police abuse and corruption, to the point that some police have spoken negatively about the service, he said. However, in places like Cancún and Mexico City, local authorities have used Ret.io to respond to citizen reports on the service, he added.

Another interesting thing about Ret.io is that it’s run primarily on open source projects, Zavala says. “From our data stores (postgres, redis) to our front-end frameworks (jquery, bootstrap), our whole system really is based on open source and services like Google Maps and of course, Twitter,” he says.

Zavala and Bolio are interested in funding in the long run, but are currently working to streamline some things to turn Ret.io into a better service. Investment is tough to come by in Mexico, Zavala added, but he’s hoping that expanding the service outside Mexico will help Ret.io find investors more easily.

“I think widespread adoption of Internet technologies in México, as in other places, is making it very hard to paint a dishonest picture of the local situation, which can only be a positive thing,” Zavala says. “It is also resulting in a society which is already collaborating to stay out of trouble.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch