Whom do the idols idolize?

Lei Jun, the CEO of Android handset and OS maker Xiaomi, is arguably the face of tech entrepreneurship in China as a long-time angel investor and serial entrepreneur behind companies like Amazon-acquired Joyo.cn and the recently IPO’d YY.

He’s been called the “Steve Jobs of China” in the sense that Xiaomi is an integrated hardware and software maker that has altered Android for Chinese tastes. They sell high-end Android phones at or slightly above the cost of materials and profit through accessories and eventually, software and services. While the country has been known for lower-end hardware makers, Xiaomi is pushing the idea that world-class products can be both made and designed in China.

The company has its own fanboys to prove it. Just two years after launching their first device, Xiaomi plans to sell 15 million devices this year, bringing the company $4.5 billion in revenue. Last year, they sold 7 million phones. Sales in batches of 200K to 300K phones on their website regularly sell out — sometimes in less than an hour.

But Xiaomi also has incredibly high expectations to realize; the company’s valuation is not just predicated on raw hardware sales, but also on the idea that Xiaomi will eventually be able to monetize software services — something it has yet to prove against giants like Alibaba and Tencent in the ridiculously competitive Chinese market.

While founding the company three years ago, Jun thought about the history of Chinese business and entrepreneurship to find role models.

“What kind of company in China can last for a century?” he asked at the GMIC conference in Beijing this week.

He said he ultimately looked up to two companies: a 340-year-old traditional Chinese medicine company called Tongrentang and hot pot chain Hai Di Lao.

He said Tongrentang’s mission taught him two things — never produce lower-quality products for the sake of cost and never spare any effort in creating the best quality products.

Hai Di Lao, which is indeed a delicious hot pot chain (yes, I’ve tried it), taught him about the value of customer service. In a separate interview, co-founder and president Lin Bin suggested that I order items not on the menu or even praise the dishware in the restaurant.

“They take customer feedback very, very seriously and always leave you with a surprise,” Bin said.

In a way, Jun is critical of the prevailing business culture in China. “There’s a big problem with integrity in China,” he said. “People sell pigs but you’re not eating pork,” he added on-stage, alluding to recent health scares where rat meat has been marked as lamb.

Appealing to a Fanbase

Paired with this focus on high-quality parts is a marketing model that’s unusual for any handset maker globally.

Xiaomi sold 72 percent of its phones directly through its online store last year, bypassing the costly logistical headache of dealing with brick-and-mortar retailers. Right now, they have two models: one that retails for 1999 renminbi ($326) and a more basic version that goes for 1499 renminbi ($245).

They can do this because the company has cultivated a unique participatory model of designing phones. Every week, the company releases a new version of its customized Android experience: the miUI.

Of their millions of customers, there are a few hundred thousand “hardcore” fans who do the teardowns, scrutinize every spec and offer suggestions on how to change the phone.

“Chinese consumers are actually very critical in the sense that they compare not just the build and look and feel of phones, but also everything that goes inside — the CPU, memory, speed, the specs,” Bin said. “They are pretty savvy about the money they pay for these phones.”

Jun uses Weibo, the public Chinese social networking platform that sometimes draws comparisons to Twitter, to solicit advice and communicate with Xiaomi fans. He’s offered different levels of hard drive storage based on user feedback. He said they even added a sound recording app at the behest of a reporter.

“We co-develop the phone,” Jun said in another interview. “I’ve used more than 70 phones in the last couple years. I have lots of suggestions, but will they change their phone? Even Nokia? Most likely not. So I created a model where I’ve invited all of my fans to be involved in designing the phone. It’s one of the most exciting things for them.”

He says this is a key part of why Xiaomi spends less than its peers on marketing.

“If you invented a feature in the Xiaomi phone, will you tell your classmates and friends that you invented a feature? Most likely you will.”

Their approach ties into a big trend that is fueling a hardware Renaissance globally: the ability to feel out product-market fit through social media before a capital-intensive manufacturing process — be it through Twitter, Weibo or a Kickstarter campaign.

Through that feedback and Xiaomi’s own in-house engineers and designers, miUI includes improvements over the standard flavor of Android. Jun says that they’ve tweaked how applications run in the background so that a Xiaomi phone can go up to six or seven days without a recharge. (I’ve been carrying an older Xiaomi around and it has held up for a few days at a time, unlike my iPhone, which needs to be recharged every day.) There are also lots of UI flourishes that are, frankly, Apple-like.

Software For Profit And As A Protective Moat

While Xiaomi has done well at positioning itself as much more than a commodity hardware maker, one of its next challenges will be to prove that it can make money off software and services. Because it sells phones at or near the cost of the build of materials, Xiaomi will rely on accessories and services to boost its margins.

Jun is reluctant to say whether Xiaomi is at heart more of a software or hardware company (a question that has also perplexed analysts of Apple).

“We positioned ourselves as triathlon athletes,” Jun said. “We do software, hardware and Internet services, so if you would ask which part of the three is stronger, my answer is: would you ask a triathlon athlete whether they are best at running, swimming or cycling?”

They’ve shared some vanity stats showing traction, although it’s hard to understand what they mean. Xiaomi’s app store sees 3.5 million app downloads a day, 3.5 million photos uploaded to its cloud service a day and has seen 2 billion messages uploaded cumulatively. Its messaging app MiTalk is way behind Tencent’s WeChat, which is the other big China tech story of the year with 190 million active users.

There are some promising metrics, though. Bin says Xiaomi’s customers are twice as active on the mobile web as those of other manufacturers. That sort of engagement could lend itself to interesting revenue opportunities down the line in gaming and e-commerce, although the company declined to share specifics.

Two other growth areas for Xiaomi are international markets and in other types of hardware. The company is expanding to greater China — or Taiwan and Hong Kong. Bin is reluctant to talk about even more international markets, saying that the company just wants to prove itself in these two areas first.

There are unique challenges. For one, these markets rely on more of the subsidized model that’s common in the West where carriers lower the list price through post-paid plans. In China, many consumers pay for the full cost of the phone upfront. They also don’t know whether the marketing model where they heavily engage a core set of fans will work outside of mainland China.

The other growth area is with Xiaomi’s new set-top boxes.  It was a rocky start with the initial sales of the set-top boxes blocked by Chinese regulations around TV content. But they re-launched two months ago. Bin and Jun declined to share figures on sales so far, except to say that Jun has seen second-hand models show up on eBay and Taobao for $90 (which is about twice the list price of 299 renminbi).

Bin is hesitant to share too many targets, because he claims that Xiaomi doesn’t really even have that many internally. Even the goal to get to 15 million handsets is to produce that many, not necessarily to sell that many (although they invariably sell out).

“We don’t have any KPIs (key performance indicators) — not even internally,” Bin said. “Our KPI is to get handsets to everyone who can place an order online and make a full payment.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Page views served to #Syria via @CloudFlare over a 15-minute period an hour ago: 6628. Page views served in the last 15 minutes: 3.

—
Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) May 07, 2013

War-torn Syria is reportedly experiencing massive Internet outages. Both Google’s transparency monitor and security firm Cloudflare are reporting near zero levels of traffic out of the area. This isn’t the first time the beleaguered nation has experienced Internet issues. Back in 2012, the Syrian government, in attempt to paralyze opposition rebels, cut the entire country off from the rest of the world.

“Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet,” writes security firm, Umbrella, about the abrupt traffic stop today.

Umbrella describes how such a cutoff is possible, “Routing on the Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP distributes routing information and makes sure all routers on the Internet know how to get to a certain IP address.” Continuing, ” Shutting down Internet access to and from Syria is achieved by withdrawing the BGP routes from Syrian prefixes.”

Last December, we interviewed Cloudflare about how exactly a government can cut off its citizens from the web. Watch the interview below:

This is a breaking story and we will update readers as more information comes in.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you aren’t at Disrupt NY or watchin’ the livestream back at home, you just missed something … pretty special.

Our own Josh Constine took the stage with the co-founders of Rap Genius, the text annotation service that recently raised $15M from Andreessen Horowitz, for a conversation that quickly went from talk of metrics and browser extensions to talks of adderall, an impromptu beatboxing session, and a founder’s apology for telling Mark Zuckerberg to fellate him.

Rap Genius started out as a site meant to allow hiphop fans to annotate rap lyrics to explain their meanings. Over time, it’s expanded to other, non-lyrical texts; just this morning, they disclosed plans to break into annotating breaking news.

The company’s three founders — Mahbod Moghadam, Tom Lehman, and Ilan Zechory — are nothing if not controversial. Today alone, I’ve heard them referred to as “lunatics”, “bonkers”, and “completely insane”… and yet, their panel seems to be all anyone here is talking about. Say what you will about these guys (they probably won’t care anyway), but they know exactly what they’re doing.

I’ve pulled a few choice quotes out of the interview for the sake of everyone at work — but really, you should probably just watch the video.

On Why Rap Genius Works:

“Rap Genius is not just crowdsourced. It started with us and like, six of our homies. It was homiesourced. We opened it up to the masses so it became crowd sourced. Then we decided we wanted it to ‘ballersourced’, [so we got a bunch of these huge stars verified on the site]“

“The secret ingredient of Rap Genius is love. We often tell people that Rap Genius was built on Love on Rails”

On Working With Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who funded their entire $15M Series A:

“We said we wanted such and such millions of dollars. [Marc] asked what we’d do with it; I said something really stupid, like we’d buy a bunch of companies. He just totally lost it, tapping his leg all over the place. I thought we’d totally tanked the meeting, but that’s just his way of showing love.”

“Ben is a real rap fan. He’s like the rap genius god father. We consider him a bro… What people don’t know is that he’s a marketing genius. He came up with the idea to call users ‘Scholars’, and ‘TopScholars’. He came up with NewsGenius. Ben, we love you dawg.”

On Rumors That The Team Used Drugs To Focus:

“Yeah, we would do naked adderall. This was before Y-Combinator. We’d do naked adderall [when we needed to turn out something] because that way we couldn’t leave the house [and would work on the site all day].”

On The Time When Co-Founder Mahbod Moghadam told The New York Times Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckerberg Could “Suck [His] Dick”:

“I’ll say it: to the Oracle of Omaha [Warren Buffet], to the Oracle of… wherever Mark Zuckerberg is from — I’m Sorry Zuck, I love you dawg.”

On What Factors In Life Lead To Them “Not Giving A Fuck”:

“Er, the series A? I dunno. We could sell this shit, we could go be alcoholics on some island. [But we're building something here.]“

On Their Notorious Personalities:

“I just met up with my old boss at Google. I wanted to convince him to come work at Rap Genius, and he was like ‘If I went to Rap Genius, the first thing I’d do is get rid of that Jean-Ralphio lookin’ guy.’ I was like: ‘uhh, which one? We’ve got two!’”

“A lot of people think we need to change. I… dont think that’s going to happen.”

“Yeah. If you want to ball major, you gotta drink the kool-aid. You gotta be more loose, but you gotta live the life 24/7. I don’t feel free. I gotta be the Rap Genius guy.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s possible that you are an incredibly organized person who remembers everything important from your meetings, and you’re part of an incredibly organized team where every post-meeting task is communicated clearly. But … maybe not. Maybe stuff slips through the cracks. That’s where Retrace, an app that just launched at Disrupt NY’s Startup Battlefield, comes in.

Co-founder and CEO Austin Marusco told me that Retrace is “the best way to remember and organize everything about the meetings you have.” It’s an iPhone app that integrates with your Google Calendar or Calendars, creating a shared workspace around each meeting where participants can share notes, photos and tasks. It also displays contact information and profiles (you can pull in data from LinkedIn and Facebook) for everyone in the meeting.

A number of smart calendar apps also aggregate information about meetings, but they’re mostly aimed at helping you get prepared for or get to the meeting on time. Retrace, on the other hand, is more about what comes after the meeting (though preparation is part of the app too). ”These [smart calendar] apps make you more punctual,” Marusco said. “We help you do your job better.”

For example, during my interview with Marusco and his co-founder/CTO Kenan Pulak, they created a task for later — sharing their screenshots of Retrace with me.

During their on-stage presentation, Marusco and Pulak walked through the entire meeting process and showed how Retrace can help. Beforehand, users can set up meetings, invite others, view profiles, and save the location to find directions later on. During the meeting, or right afterwards, someone could create a meeting summary and post follow-up tasks in the App. People to review those notes whenever they want, including their preparation for the follow-up meeting.

To a large extent, Retrace is aimed at replacing the notes that people take during meetings and the follow-up emails that they send afterwards. That’s a system I’ve become quite used to, and one that more or less works. Marusco pointed out, however, that the notes you take are often only useful to yourself, and that email inboxes are a pretty cluttered place for the assignments, reminders, and additional material that is sent afterwards.

Oh, and if you’re meeting with people who aren’t already Retrace users, the app should still be useful because you can store information for yourself, or share the content in the app with other people via email.

The company has raised $100,000 from CrunchFund, Archimedes Labs, and MkII Ventures. (CrunchFund was founded by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, while Archimedes Labs’ Chief Product Officer Keith Teare was Arrington’s co-founder at TC.)

I was a little surprised to see Marusco and Pulak, who only recently graduated from Virginia Tech, working on this type of problem. It seems like this idea would come more naturally from an experienced sales type. And while they do expect salespeople (along with anyone else who has a lot of meetings) to be early adopters, they also argued that, as relative newcomers to the business world, they’re in a better position to recognize how clunky the current processes are.

This is the pair’s second trip to Disrupt, having participated in the Startup Alley last year with their previous company, Roundpop. Marusco said that he and Pulak didn’t go to bars for a year beforehand in order to save the money to attend.

As for Retrace, they’ve been working on it since June. Pulak said it was initially more of a contact-sharing product, but they decided that meetings were a bigger opportunity. And naturally, they’re heavy users of the app themselves — Marusco said that a few minutes after each meeting, the app reminds him to upload notes, and that he’s also making heavy use of the ability to create tasks.

Retrace is launching today in a limited beta that you can sign-up for on the Retrace website. For now, it’s limited to an iPhone app, a decision that Marusco justified by arguing that fewer and fewer people are bringing their laptops to meetings. That said, the company does plan to launch eventually on other platforms, including the desktop web. It also plans to integrate with Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive for document-sharing.

The business plan is to keep the basic app free, but to charge for premium features like profile customization and integration with other services like Salesforce.

Q&A With Judges

Nicole Glaros: It sounds like you’re making this for someone who’s super-disorganized. How are you going to convince them to change their behavior?

Marusco: A lot of enterprise tools are terrible, whereas Retrace “spent a ton of time making sure that every interaction we do is as seamless as possible” — for example the automatic syncing with Google Calendar.

Matt Brezina: Have you guys done enough customer development to figure out who the target user for whom you’re filling a real need?

Naval Ravikant: Yes, you need to dive into a vertical case. “I don’t think the concept of meetings actually exists.” Meetings are too nebulous: “I can’t think of single app or device that exists around the word ‘meeting.’”

Marusco: Agreed, but there is already specific interest from VCs and salespeople.

Glaros: We should be able to record the meeting and Retrace transcribes the notes.

Ravikant: Yes, this should be more passive. “The only work you should make me do is invite people.”

Glaros: What about search?

Marusco: We have it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins seems to be among the most transparent executives in tech in terms of showing his hand regarding future product plans, which may be partly because he doesn’t have much to lose at this point. In an interview yesterday, he downplayed tablet computing in what looks to be an indicator that BlackBerry will drop the PlayBook, its own lame duck tablet and the first of its devices to sport a QNX-based operating system.

Heins should’ve stuck to specifics, however, as he went way overboard and came off as though he was losing touch with reality in the interview as quoted by Bloomberg, with broad sweeping statements like “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” and “[t]ablets themselves are not a good business model.”

Tablets may not be a good business model for BlackBerry, which took huge writedowns on BlackBerry PlayBook inventory, were forced to run massive fire sales with price cuts of up to $400 to clear out inventory, and even finally discontinued the entry-level 16GB version entirely. By any real measure, the PlayBook was and is a failed product. But to say tablets won’t last five years, or that they aren’t a good business model requires that you completely ignore Apple’s tremendous success with the iPad, including the 19.5 million iPads it sold last quarter, an all-time record that came in well above analyst estimates.

Heins has recently made remarks that indicate BlackBerry may be experimenting with alternate device form factors, possibly taking a cue from hybrid gadgets like the Asus PadFone which combine a smartphone and tablet or mini-notebook style device in one. Once again, Heins said that he would need a BlackBerry tablet to be a unique device in an increasingly crowded market.

BlackBerry may have blown it on the PlayBook, but trash-talking tablets in general is worse than sticking your head in the sand: it makes the company look hopelessly out of touch. There’s definitely a lesson to be learned in the fact that Apple is the only company that’s really been able to succeed with a tablet device, but that lesson isn’t that the tablet market is a write-off entirely.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I took a few minutes to sit down with Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed, at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today. I wanted to ask him about how we, as humans, were changing due to new pressures on our brains and bodies associated with hanging out too much on sites like BuzzFeed.

Peretti noted that the way we manage and quantify media reach has changed completely over the past few years, and now that they have all the data it’s easy to create compelling content based on what people want.

We also discussed the strange habit some BuzzFeed readers have of complaining about entertaining posts pushing out the long-form journalism on the site. Jonah’s advice? “Just don’t read them.”

Take a look at our interview below and keep an eye on TC Disrupt 2013 in New York.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter is great if you’re famous. But Jawbone’s founding CEO Alexander Asseily thinks everyone deserves a powerful voice online, so today he’s launching State, a structured opinion-sharing network where people don’t need to follow you see your posts. You can get an early State invite now and start contributing to an opinion graph where what matters is what you believe, not who follows you.

An Equal Opportunity Opinion Graph

Let’s be honest. Twitter seemed like it would host a global conversation, but it’s evolved into a one-to-many broadcast network. In fact, Twitter’s about page touts “You don’t have to tweet to get value from Twitter.” Or, let experts, artists, comedians, and celebrities tweet, you just sit back and take it. And in practice, you don’t have much of a choice. Unless you have some special way to gain followers, your audience will remain some subset of your friends on Twitter. Barring the rare tweet that goes viral in a big way, the average user’s voice doesn’t travel very far.

That doesn’t mean Twitter doesn’t have it’s place. As a journalist it’s a vital tool, but there’s a need for a more egalitarian way to share publicly. That’s what State could be. The service launched today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY conference, and you can see State’s loud and proud launch video here.

State co-founder Alexander Asseily explains to me, “The Internet would be better if it was organized around what people think instead of who they are, or where they shop, or what they browse. All the intelligence that’s gathered online today is gathered by following people. It’s not very empowering to people, and it’s not a precise way of getting insights about what people think.” Luckily, Alexander and his brother Mark, who was formerly head of product at VOIP startup Rebtel and is now State’s CEO, have $14 million in seed funding to reorganize the web.

Structure Plus Speed

Organization is actually one of State’s key differentiators. Rather than start with an open text field, when you “State” an opinion, you use type-ahead boxes to pick a topic or paste in a link and choose several words that describe it. For example you could pick the portable stereo Big Jambox and call it “Amazing” and “Loud”, Bitcoin and describe it as “fad” or “misunderstood”, actor Christian Bale as “talented” or “deteriorating”, or TechCrunch’s article “Google Now Launches On iOS” and call it “overdue” or “inferior”.

This typeahead system makes it extremely quick to share an opinion. Alexander tells me “The objective is to make it accessible in practice to everyone ,which means making it so easy that you can use it for both serious and frivolous opinions.” If you want to leave more complex thoughts, you can always tack on a longer text description.

Instead of these posts going just to your followers, State surfaces them to anyone interested in the topic you’re talking about. The homepage shows popular topics and sentiments you can respond to. State also focuses on showing them to people the minute you publish, so there’s a feeling of real-time feedback and community. That’s why State’s structured data is so important. It creates a precise, interconnected graph of thoughts, while other social networks are more scattershot. There’s still some interface quirks that could cause confusion, and you can’t delete posts just yet, but the publishing system is strong for version 1.

State also shows you what the world thinks about a certain topic with a slick word-cloud visualization, as well as where you stand compared to everyone else. Structure begets aggregation, which reveals insights.

And beyond what you do on State, Alexander wants its data to be valuable elsewhere. Along with its bookmarklet for importing and posting about websites, State wants to eventually serve as a replacement or supplement to blog comments. It could replace swarms of trolls drowning out sane ideas with a structured view of what people thought about the article’s content. This could also draw more traffic to publishers because it exposes their articles to the State network alongside opinions.

Finally, Alexander hopes to release a State API that gives open access to its structured data. For example a politics site could employ State data to show off a synopsis of perceptions of different politicians or legislation. Alexander says “we could potentially monetize that somehow.” API apps and publisher integrations could also solve State with its biggest problem.

Revealing We To We

Proving its unique value and gaining traction will be the real challenge for State. If you asked most people where they share their opinions, they’d tell you Twitter or Facebook. It’s no easy task explaining why structured data and nerdy aggregations are reasons to add another web service to their lives. But State hopes to wake the world up to what they’re missing. If it succeeds, there’s a second-order benefit for us all. Alexander concludes, “The ultimate goal is much self-awareness in society — products that are built with the opinions of the market in mind, or political and cultural decisions made in the same way.”

Visit State to get an early invite, and watch my interview with Alexander Asseily about how State answers what broken with Twitter

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Hot damn, the Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon was great. Even with the hackathon over and the winner declared (Way to go, Rumbler!), we keep finding more projects we want to highlight.

Built in just 24 hours, Game Of Tones is a proof-of-concept game that, with a bit of work, could teach you to play the actual guitar (versus, say, Rock Band — which, while a great game, is about as effectiv

Game Of Tones works in unison with a real-life electric guitar, paired to the computer through a line-in converter. As you strum, notes are fired from the neck of your on-screen hero’s guitar. Different chords result in different attacks, currently represented as notes of different hues. Strum an A, and blue notes fire out; strum an E, and red notes are fired.

In its current, proof-of-concept state, Game Of Tones is a bit simple, but the team says they want to build it out into something bigger. Right now, your character (modeled after the game’s co-designer Jeff, which fellow co-designer Roman says was a change that came “while he was in the bathroom”) stands in place, firing notes to blast away at a pile of physics enabled boxes. The focus of the first 24 hours was to get the game’s engine (Unity) recognizing the guitar input and differentiating the different chords.

The team says they’d like to expand the concept into something more, mentioning the possibility of some sort of forever-runner platformer with enemies vulnerable to different chords, or a multiplayer shredding battle.

Check out the team’s on-stage demo below. While Murphy’s Law went into full effect when a wiggled cable lead to some technical woes, I made sure to pull ‘em backstage for a better look — be sure to check out that video, as well.

Game Of Tones On-Stage:

Game Of Tones Backstage Interview:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Telefonica’s TokBox announced a huge upgrade to its OpenTok on WebRTC service today. TokBox’s new cloud-based Mantis media distribution framework is designed to overcome some of WebRTC’s limits with regard to video distribution. By default, WebRTC is a peer-to-peer platform, but that makes it hard to scale video chats beyond two participants. With Mantis, TokBox essentially puts its own cloud infrastructure in the middle of these calls and is then able to route and manage calls that include multiple participants without using a prohibitive amount of bandwidth and using a complicated mesh-based architecture.

In the future, as TokBox CEO Ian Small told me earlier this week, this will also enable TokBox shape video streams according to the different users’ bandwidth conditions and the developers’ needs. “With Mantis, what we’re doing putting smarts into the WebRTC infrastructure,” Small said. “Today, we’re routing traffic. Tomorrow, we’ll shape traffic.”

On cool feature Mantis already enables today is SIP interop, so developers will actually be able to write WebRTC-based apps that allow users to call in from their standard phone lines. This, for example, is useful for video conferencing services where you can now have a number of WebRTC-based video streams and a few participants on regular phone lines simultaneously.

Currently, Small told me, the system scales well for chats with up to ten users. In a webinar setting where just one user is broadcasting, it can easily scale up to more than a hundred users. The company beta tested Mantis with the help of LiveNinja and Roll20.

Current OpenTok developers won’t have to do anything to take advantage of the new system, given that TokBox already abstracts most of the WebRTC calls anyway. They will just have to create the topology they need for their apps (P2P, multi-party chat, etc.) and get started. It just “happens in the cloud automatically,” as Small noted, and now that it’s in the cloud, the company will be able to add many new features to its implementation in the near future.

WebRTC, of course, is still in its early phases, something Small also acknowledged in our interview. In his view, we are not even in the early adopter phase right now. Instead, he believes, WebRTC is still in its experimentation and early mover phase. Once WebRTC arrives in the stable release channel of Firefox (it’s about to hit the developer channels soon and should be in the stable release in about two months), Small believes we’ll see more developers go beyond experimentation and move to production.

For now, TokBox’s WebRTC service supports Chrome and Firefox on the desktop, as well as Internet Explorer through Chrome Frame. On mobile, it works in the browser with Chrome on Android and on iOS in native apps through the OpenTok SDK.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Crowdfunding has changed the game for many grownups who need money to achieve their dreams, whether that’s making a film, building a unique new gadget, or becoming president. But sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are for adults. When kids need to raise money for their schools or extra-curricular projects, they’re often still using decades-old methods like selling candy bars or wrapping paper.

A site launching to the public today called Piggybackr wants to bring kids’ fundraising out of the dark ages (or at least the 1980s.) Piggybackr is a crowdfunding platform that’s specifically targeted to the needs of kids, with educational tools, game mechanics, and age-appropriate directions, and parental controls. The site is focused on efforts, rather than physical products — kids ask potential sponsors for donations online and offer “thank you gifts” in return such as volunteer time.

Piggybackr’s founder Andrea Lo tells me that she came up with the idea for Piggybackr when helping her then 11-year-old sister set up a webpage to raise money for the rainforest by selling $1 bracelets.

“I saw how much more effective she was fundraising online, and how she became more confident. While crowdfunding is exploding for entrepreneurs and non-profits; it has not spread to young people and schools. With federal budget cuts hitting education, these are some of the people who need it the most.”

We first met Piggybackr in May 2012, when it graduated as a one-woman startup out of the AngelPad accelerator. Since then the company has grown its full-time team to three staff and run a private beta, which saw more than 1500 kids raise over $250,000. At its public launch today, Piggybackr is opening up to users throughout the United States with the support of ten partners including Tim Draper’s Bizworld Foundation, California YMCA Youth in Government, and others.

For its own financial needs, Piggybackr takes a five percent commission on its funding projects and collects a 30 cent fee on each transaction it processes. The company has also raised a seed round from “passionate investors,” but Lo is currently declining to talk specifics on that front for now.

What I like best about Piggybackr is that it is focused on the educational experience of selling, more than the money itself (even though the money tends to follow, as the online platform tends to get higher donations compared to your typical bake sale.) In our interview, Lo brought up a story told by Steve Jobs about when, as a kid, he reached out to tech magnate Bill Hewlett for guidance.

“There’s so much importance in learning how to ask for help, to take action, and be willing to sell at a young age,” Lo said. “Beyond just making this really inefficient industry online, we are excited to equip this generation with these skills early on: To learn to be self-starters, asking for help, being OK with getting nos, and funding their dreams.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch