ThisLife announced the launch of its online photo storage, management, and sharing service at Amazon re: Invent last week. The service, which raised $2.75 million from an impressive group of investors in June, is obviously not the first company to try to solve online photo storage, organization, and sharing, but it’s definitely one of the slickest ones I’ve seen in a long time. It’s also one of the first startups to use Amazon’s new Glacier data-archiving service in production, something that helps the company keep its prices down.

The service, which was founded in 2010, offers the usual features you would expect from an online photo service, but as the founders, husband-and-wife team Matt and Andrea Johnson, told me earlier this week, they decided to take a very different approach from the usual photo-sharing service. Instead of putting the emphasis on sharing, they realized that most people also want to upload all of their photos and find a safe spot for them. In addition, they decided to ensure that the service can help its users organize their photos without too much hassle.

ThisLife lets you import your photos from most of the popular online photo-sharing sites (Facebook, Instagram, Picasa, Shutterfly, Flickr, Twitter and SmugMug), but it also comes with a desktop uploader (Mac and Windows) for transferring your iPhoto galleries and uploading folders or individual files. If you decide to connect your account to other online photo services, ThisLife will also regularly import your images from there to make sure they are stored in a safe spot.

Once uploaded, the service displays your images on a beautiful timeline that scrolls horizontally. In addition, you can also organize your photos into individual “stories” with just a few clicks (and the team is working on making this even easier and more intuitive). You can, of course, also share these stories and individual pictures on Facebook, Twitter or by email, but by default, everything you do on the service remains private.

One of the service’s coolest features is its proprietary deduplication algorithm. As Matt Johnson told me, this algorithm always gives preference to the file with the highest resolution; it worked flawlessly in my own tests. The service also offers a powerful and easy-to-use facial-recognition tool that makes it easier to tag people in your photos (and which can get names and other data from your Facebook account if you connect the two).

Keeping Prices Low With Amazon Glacier

The service would be worth a look just because of its design and features alone, but what also makes it stand out is its pricing. As the Johnson’s noted when I talked to them at re: Invent, storage pricing is now so low that it only makes sense to develop pricing around features instead of capacity. Because it uses Amazon Glacier to store your original images and only uses Amazon’s more expensive S3 storage solution to hold your thumbnails and low-res images, ThisLife lets you store 25,000 photos (or 100GB) for just $3 per month in its Icebox accounts. The Icebox account doesn’t come with some of the more sophisticated features like deduplication, facial recognition, and the ability to create stories, but it does offer a good solution for somebody who is just looking to put their images in a safe spot. A full account, the so-called Super Box, costs $6 per month and also lets you store up to 25,000 photos or 100GB. Users who need more space just pay another $3 or $6 for the next 25,000 images.

Get A Free Super Box Account For A Year

ThisLife also kindly offered to give the first 250 TechCrunch readers who use this link a free one-year subscription to a Super Box account.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple’s retail stores are famous, taking on almost the status of local landmarks with their flagship locations in cities like New York. But how exactly did the Mac maker position their brick-and-mortar sales operations as something larger than life? A newly unearthed video spotted by 9to5Mac sheds some light on what went into evolving Apple Retail from its just-another-store-in-a-mall origins to its iconic present day status.

The video, produced by Washington Square Films and apparently finished around July 2011, features narration from Ron Johnson, who departed the company in November, 2011, to head up J.C. Penney as CEO, as well as Bob Bridger, Apple VP of Retail Development. Recently, Apple has had some turmoil in its retail division, following a lengthy search to replace Johnson, which led to the hiring of former Dixon’s chief John Browett, who departed the company less than a year after taking his position.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook will still push HTML5 innovation, but stripping it out to speed up the Facebook for iOS app has been very successful. Half of its iOS users updated their apps in just four days, and its App Store review average has risen from 1.5 stars to 4 stars in just three weeks since relaunch, Facebook told reporters at its headquarters today.

Mobile product manager Mick Johnson echoed CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s TechCrunch Disrupt talk, saying that iOS users with the update now consume twice as many news feed stories, and that means twice as many opportunities to show them news feed ads.

Johnson discussed the mistake of building Facebook’s mobile apps around HTML5. “When we embedded it in our native apps, the performance wasn’t what our users expected or what were happy with either. The features were there, but it didn’t feel like the experience we wanted to use, that wanted to build.” Still, he says, “I’m long-term bullish on HTLM5 for everything” indicating Facebook may come back to HTML5 once it improves, and will continue relying on it to reach the long-tail of mobile, especially abroad.

Facebook platform head Doug Purdy explained that “People think ‘it’s HTML5 or Native’, but its ‘And’.” That’s because the HTML5-powered m.facebook.com is critical for dealing with mobile fragmentation. “There’s no way we’re gong to build native applications for 7,000 devices,” Purdy said. That’s why it will continue pushing mobile browser vendors to use its Ringmark HTML5 testing standard and improve camera access, graphics, and speed.

But until the relaunch, the HTML5 slowness of launching the native iOS app, browsing the feed, and viewing photos was dragging down its review, but also frustrating users such that they’d exit the app prematurely or not open it when they only had a moment. That meant less content being generated, fewer notifications that drive return visits being sent, and less time spent viewing the news feed. Since Facebook is trying to become a mobile advertising company, and those ads are shown in the news feed, slowness translated into missing revenue.

The product manager for photos says users are happier and share more photos with the new iOS app, while Johnson says it feels much more alive. I feel it, too. I’m more likely to whip out Facebook when I’m standing in line at a cafe or have a spare 30 seconds somewhere else, not just when I know I have multiple minutes to wait for it to load up the news feed. Those extra sessions let Facebook serve me more ads about Pages my friends have liked or apps they’re using.

The feedback that Facebook is receiving has changed. Before people simply demanded the app get faster, and now they’re essentially saying that it works well, but here are the new features they want. That fresh insight will help Facebook continue to improve the app. In fact, Johnson said Facebook is now moving to a two-month release cycle for iOS and a one-month cycle for Android.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Trippy, the social travel planner which debuted last fall at TechCrunch Disrupt, is going to begin pulling in some additional revenue starting today, thanks to a newly launched feature: brand profile pages. The initial lineup includes roughly half a dozen brands such as Chase Sapphire Preferred, Thompson Hotels, Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Brides, Air New Zealand, and Forkly. However, Trippy founder J.R. Johnson says they’ve got about 20 more brands waiting in the wings, which will roll out over the next few weeks.

“A lot of companies want to engage around the idea of travel,” explains Johnson, and, he adds, “each one of their motivations for wanting to get involved is a little bit different. But it’s all designed around this idea of having their brand in the social conversation when people are thinking about and talking about travel.”

For some of the brands, it’s about content distribution, for others, brand distribution, or it’s about attracting new users. Or, more likely, it’s a good mix of all that and more. Some brand relationships here are more obvious than others, too. For example, hotels and tourists bureaus are obvious fits, while with Brides magazine, it can be about associating its brand with those who are researching destination weddings or honeymoons, perhaps, and with Chase it’s about highlighting their travel rewards. By including themselves in Trippy’s social travel planning platform, the brands are tapping into a tool for social distribution – that is, it’s a tool for getting their brand shared on Facebook, without the need for a “Like” or cut-and-pasted URL.

Instead, says Johnson, “anytime someone is using Trippy, and they say they want to go to any of these places, or they’ve been to any one of these places, with [Facebook's] Open Graph, that becomes a timeline story.” The post then goes to that user’s Facebook profile and gets seen by their friends. But Johnson insists it’s not just the Facebook effect at play here. “At this stage in the game, 90% of it is being on the site itself, and 10% is the Facebook effect,” he says. “And the reason I say that is because it’s a little unproven.”

If Trippy as a destination is the current draw, then we wanted to know what that platform looked like, in terms of users, visitors, and engagement metrics. However, Johnson declined to share these numbers for now, saying it’s still early for that. But other competitors have not been as shy. For example, Jetpac, which just closed a $2.4 million Series A, was seeing 18 actions per session at the time of its financing. Trippy is probably waiting to match or beat that.

Trippy, which offers Pinterest-like boards for travel inspiration, will begin seeding the brand’s content into both its web app and iPad starting today, but iPhone app users will only see the brands’ imagery and shared items if they first save it to one of their travel boards for now. This will change with a forthcoming update to the iPhone version. In the meantime, you can see some example pages here: Thompson Hotels, Chase and Brides.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Founders Den, the “private clubhouse for entrepreneurs” based in downtown San Francisco, celebrated its first anniversary back in January. Now that the invite-only tech startup coworking space is starting to see its third generation of inhabitants (Founders Den houses each company for six months at a time), TechCrunch TV headed over to the Den to get an updated first-hand look at how things are humming along these days.

In the video embedded above, you can get a look at the Founders Den space and watch our interview with Zack Bogue and Jason Johnson, two of the Den’s four managing partners. Bogue and Johnson are both entrepreneurs in their own rights, so it was interesting to get their insights on the vibe they’ve tried to cultivate at the Den, the current “fervor” around Internet startups, why experienced entrepreneurs who could easily afford their own office space are still drawn to coworking environments, and general industry news such as the new crowdfunding bill.

And in the video embedded below, you can see pitches from the founders of three current Founders Den companies — Ruzwana Bashir of stealth travel app Peek, Jamie Davidson of high-end restaurant reservation app PrimaTable, and Michael Seibel of mobile video shooting, editing and sharing app Socialcam.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

“In the Studio” approaches springtime by welcoming a city college dropout who went on to found and sell a mobile network startup, began investing that windfall in some of today’s hottest e-commerce companies, and after a stint in fashion for Bergdorf Goodman in New York City, has now co-founded a new web startup focused on building a community around beauty.

Nils Johnson is a hard guy to hunt down. While he’s a seed investor in some of today’s hottest early-stage brands, such as Wantful, Everlane, Warby Parker, Orchestra, and Airtime, among others, Johnson keeps a very low profile relative to the celebrity we see all around us. He’s rarely out at industry events, he doesn’t blog (though he should), and barely uses Twitter. Despite this, nearly every e-commerce founder angles to score a meeting with him in the hopes of landing a seed check with his name on it.

This began to change last week, however, after Britney Spears was spotted at Johnson’s new startup, Beautylish. Over the past 18 months, there’s been an increasing incidence of web entrepreneurs heading down to Tinsel Town, and of Hollywood celebrities making their way to Silicon Valley and New York City to invest in, promote, and scout hot new startups. Whether it’s Shoedazzle, Mobli, or something related to another celebrity with a big social media footprint, new consumer technologies and applications provide attractive, direct-to-consumer branding and distribution opportunities too ripe for the savviest celebrity markers to miss.

In this conversation, Johnson discusses these trends with the precision of someone who has been following the space from within for years. We talk about the connection between e-commerce, the Valley, New York, and Hollywood, as well as external pressures on physical retail and how that is forcing entrepreneurs online to experiment with new business models. Johnson also discusses the challenges and opportunities about creating entirely new brands online, how to nail customer acquisition, the importance of branding, and trends around holding inventory versus manufacturing supply in a vertically-integrated manner.

If you’re an e-commerce founder, thinking of starting a new company in the space, or investing in e-commerce at the later stages, Johnson’s insights on this topic are not to be missed. E-commerce is certainly a hot category, but when you spend time with Johnson, you start to understand how long he’s been thinking about these trends, markets, and opportunities. And while he’s certainly enjoyed success on the investment side, Beautylish could present Johnson with his breakout hit as CEO.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

On his second startup out of his incubator Founder’s Den, serial entrepreneur Jason Johnson is launching the first app out of his new utility app startup BlueSprig. An app for app lovers — and those suffering from app fatigue — AirCover is a security service for both iOS and Android that basically aims to replace another eight apps on your phone.

Johnson and Founders Den co-founders Zack Bogue, Micheal Levit and Facebook co-founder Jonathan Abrams [;)]have a rule that once a Den team gets larger than six it has to leave, so the majority of Johnson’s BlueSprig team is run out of Chengdu China by Johnson’s partner Hugo Dong. And because of the China connection, Accel-IDG China has put in $10 million into the startup, because it “leverages the best resources of China and Silicon Valley.”

(Picture of the Chinese team hard at work, below.)

Available in the Android market today, BlueSprig’s AirCover covers a variety of mobile optimizing functionalities provided by standalone apps like ‘Find My Friends,’ ‘Lookout’ and ‘Find my iPhone.’ The ‘Mobile Security’ function protects your phone from malware and spyware. ‘Family Safety,’ like ‘Find My Friends,’ allows you to track family members when you enter in a pin. Like Apple’s iCloud, ‘Cloud Backup’ lets you backup contacts and photos.

AirCover’s ‘Device Found’ feature, functions similarly to Find My Phone and allows you to track your phone if lost or stolen. ‘System Tuneup ‘allows you to shut off and wipe apps all at once for better battery performance and on that note ‘Battery Performance’ gives you granular stats on battery life (phone nerds rejoice!) — like how much battery you have left if you want to talk your phone on 3G versus use the Internet on 3G.

“I wanted to create a mobile utility app that every device should have,” Johnson tells me, touting BlueSprig’s first venture, “If there’s one app you should have on your phone it’s ours.”

In addition to AirCover’s launch, BlueSprig is also releasing PC utility tools JetBoost and JetClean. When asked about future product plans, Johnson said, “I don’t want to overpromise and under deliver. I’d rather just deliver.”

AirCover is available for free with a 2GB storage limit, and Johnson plans on monetizng the app by offering a freemium version with more storage among other things. An iOS app (with a little less functionality because of iOS constraints) is also in the works. Johnson hopes to also have the app on Windows Phone 7 soon after that.

Click to view slideshow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Guest contributor Joseph Puopolo is an entrepreneur and start-up enthusiast, who blogs on a variety of topics including green initiatives, technology and marketing.

Over the past year the WWE has continued to push the social media envelope by integrating Twitter and Facebook further into its regular broadcasts. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, now a cross-over star in both the WWE and Hollywood, cut a promo on WWE Raw to hype the upcoming pay-per-view “Survivor Series”. During that promo, the Rock quickly coined a new catchphrase “Boots to Asses” and said it was now trending worldwide. Before he mentioned it there was no mention of it on Twitter. Shortly after he said it, not only did it start a new chant throughout the arena, but it proved that Mr. Johnson was prophetic as minutes later the term “Boots to Asses” was trending worldwide. One might say this is a one off, but for anyone observing what the WWE has been up to this can be seen as only a small part of a much larger social media strategy.

In the last year, the WWE has bolstered it’s already strong web presence with a very savvy social media offensive. Now every performer who appears on WWE TV has their own Twitter handle which they use to build a fan following and actually continue storylines started from the show. During the broadcast, whenever a wrestler heads to the ring, their Twitter handle is prominently featured next to their name on the screen graphics. Their strategy is obvious and effective, providing a method to allow their show to be more interactive and leverage casual fans to tune in more regularly especially when something eventful is on the screen. Throughout the show, it is quite common to hear announcers talking about whether something is trending worldwide.

Some wrestlers who are trying to increase their standing in the company have actually taken to social media to build an audience. Zack Ryder and his self-styled ”Jersey Shore” persona created a series of YouTube videos to drive interest. To his credit, not only has he been successful driving nearly 100,000 people to become subscribers on Youtube, but he also has 300,000 followers on Twitter. He essentially went out and built a new fanbase for himself and received more airtime and interest as a result.

Wrestlemania is by far the biggest event held by the WWE. To hype the main event, they have already launched a separate site to highlight their main fight, John Cena vs. Dwanye “The Rock” Johnson, and to encourage fans to choose whose side they’re on. The site is integrated with both Twitter and Facebook pages. On each side they have attracted huge audiences. Here is the tale of the tape so far, and it is pretty impressive.

It begs the question why aren’t other sporting or entertainment broadcasts integrating social media as aggressively into their broadcasts or event marketing. WWE uses social media to increase controversy and drive further interest while others shy away from it. It’s obvious that WWE is Sports Entertainment with more of a scripted product, but why can’t other entertainment channels adopt some of these social media strategies to drive interest and live involvement in their product. Why isn’t Monday Night Football doing the same when a big game is coming up?  They could use this strategy to hype, drive interest and attract new viewership or followers. I would offer two rationales, either they are afraid of the spontaneity of social media or don’t feel like they need to adopt it.

Aaron Rodgers, who is having the season of his life for the Green Bay Packers, only has 385,000 Twitter followers and the defending Superbowl champions only have 160,000 followers. Surely there is a bit of a disconnect here if someone in the NFL in charge of marketing hasn’t been able to better connect and market this budding superstar and his team with fans in realtime. It seems like a missed opportunity, and while Aaron Rodgers is a huge WWE fan and loves to sport his “World Title” belt he does not have the social media presence of a World Champion.

On the other side of the spectrum, the NHL has banned players from using Facebook and Twitter on game days. Several traditional entertainment channels including the major 4 professional sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) have all instituted stiff penalties . Chad Ochocinco in 2010 was fined $25,000 for Tweeting during a NFL gam. Not only do the Big 4 lag behind, but they haven’t understood yet how to really leverage social media effectively for their product or audience, which is a bit of a shame when you think about it.

The UFC, like the WWE, on the other hand, is another example of a sport with real personalities that is leveraging Twitter to drive interest. They have adopted some savvy social media strategies including showing the Twitter handle of a fighter as they approach the octagon. UFC events often drive trending topics throughout their events. The UFC president Dana White is out in front tweeting his live reaction to the fights like other fans out there. And it’s a two-way conversation. He actually takes feedback from the fans directly and learns how to make his product better. By letting fans interact closely with the fighters, the UFC has been able to humanize, grow interest and significantly increase buy-rates for their pay-per-view shows.

Any entertainment brand that fails to interact with its fans is missing a huge opportunity. Especially in sports, it is really up to the brand or league to provide a proper outlet to hype and get their fans excited about upcoming events or games. The WWE, while an unconventional example, is easily leading the pack of this strategy to drive interest in their product and interact with their fan base. If you take a look at what the WWE is doing on social media compared to their counterparts in other sports, they are truly putting Boots to Asses.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Automotive parts and batteris manufacturer, Johnson Controls Inc., broke ground on a new, battery recycling plant in Florence, South Carolina, today. Local and national environmental groups there reached consensus with the company on air emissions standards in August 2010, allowing the company to embark on its plans to build a $150 million facility, taking up about 36 acres of a 270-acre property there.

The permits represent the first in about twenty years given to “a new, fully integrated battery recycling facility in the United States,” multiple spokespersons from Johnson Controls have noted.

The battery recycling center news follows Johnson Controls’ introduction (at the Detroit auto show earlier this month) of a new lithium-ion battery for electric and hybrid vehicles, which was manufactured in Holland, Michigan.

Johnson controls is producing the lithium-ion batteries, domestically, with French partner Saft. Ford agreed to buy the made-in-Michigan batteries for use in their electric and hybrid vehicles.

A $299.2 million grant in 2009 through the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act incentivized Johnson Controls to build its domestic factories that namely produce nickel-cobalt-metal battery cells and packs, and battery separators (with partner Entek) for hybrid and electric vehicles.

Johnson Controls’ battery recycling business in South Carolina was not subsidised by the same, federal stimulus grants, however. Of the $2.4 billion spent on the program to “accelerate the manufacturing and deployment of the next generation of US batteries and electric vehicles,” just $9.5 million went to a recycling business, TOXCO Inc. in Anaheim, California.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’ve been on Twitter at all lately you’re probably at least vaguely familiar with #LessAmbitiousMovies, which is a hashtag that exploded on Twitter on Monday night in what we thought was record time, judging by the fact that it seemed like our entire Twitter stream was at some point saturated with not so ambitious film titles.

Now the folks at Backtype (who track Twitter data) have provided us with more concrete stats on the meme, combing the hashtags #lessambitiousmovies, #lessambitiousmovie, #lessambitiousfilms or #lessambitiouscinema to come up with some pretty awesome data including the agent zero of the tweet, artist @Rob_McCallum and the tweet that started it all.

@Rob_McCallum
Rob McCallum

Scott Pilgrim vs The Room #lessambitiousfilms

January 3, 2011 9:57 pm via Osfoora for iPhoneRetweetReply

According to Backtype, McCallum sent this tweet out at 10pm PST on January 3rd and it then took approximately 15 hours for things to take off.  Some of the credit for the virality goes to Greg Hemphill whose 3000 followers triggered increased participation.

@greghemphill69
Greg Hemphill

A Bride for a Brother #lessambitiousfilms

January 4, 2011 3:10 am via webRetweetReply

Backtype defines the reach of a piece of content (a tweet, hashtag etc) on Twitter as “the maximum number of unique Twitter users’ timelines the tweets appeared in.” Total damage by the tail end of #lessambitiousmovies? 364K tweets using a related hashtag, from 81K Twitter users tweeting out an average of 4.5 less ambitious movies per user.

While not all Twitter accounts are necessarily active and many users may not have been logged in at the time, it’s still pretty crazy spread for something so random. When asked if this was the most popular Twitter hashtag ever, Backtype CEO Christopher Golda said that usually a hashtagasm like this one is centered around an event like the World Cup and wouldn’t be organic, “300,000,000+ impressions on Twitter is an impressive feat.”

The most popular tweet earned that distinction primary because it was retweeted by Katy Perry and reached her 5.2 million followers.

@OhFerras
Ferras AlQaisi

@miamoretti Desperately Seeking Slutzanne #lessambitiousmovies

January 5, 2011 1:21 am via ÜberTwitterRetweetReply

And the runners up were:

@JennyJohnsonHi5
Jenny Johnson

Being John Stamos #lessambitiousmovies

January 4, 2011 6:34 pm via EchofonRetweetReply

@kellyoxford
kelly oxford

Forgetting Sarah Palin
#lessambitiousmovies

January 4, 2011 7:47 pm via Twitter for iPadRetweetReply

@nerdist
Chris Hardwick

T: The Terrestrial #lessambitiousmovies

January 4, 2011 6:41 pm via webRetweetReply

@markhoppus
Mark Hoppus

Apocalypse Whenever #lessambitiousmovies

January 4, 2011 6:40 pm via TweetDeckRetweetReply

One thing people mentioned was the prevalence of repeat tweets (I think I even tweeted out #5 “Apocalypse Whenever,” thinking I was being totally original. Perhaps if anything we learned that we are less creative (and less funny) then we think we are.

At the post’s peak at 8pm PST, which TechCrunch contributed to (see above), 17 less ambitious movies were being sent out per second. It took 27 hours for the meme to die out after that, even though it’s still alive in our hearts.

In fact I think I’ll tweet one out right now, for old meme’s sake.

@alexia
Alexia Tsotsis

Eat Pray Like #LessAmbitiousMovies

about 1 hour ago via Seesmic DesktopRetweetReply

Article courtesy of TechCrunch