A recent update to Pages Manager for iOS has returned detailed post insights to the product after a version earlier this month was released without them.

Facebook released version 2.0 of its Pages Manager app for iOS in early May to make the app faster and include new features like photo filters. However, it did not include the same level of per-post analytics as previous versions. Page owners could see how many people they reached but when they tapped the area that used to lead to more information, they were instead directed to a screen where they could buy Promoted Posts. Now, the additional metrics have been brought back.

Users can tap the “reach” metric to be taken to a new screen with an additional breakdown of how much of that reach was organic, paid or viral. They can swipe left to see details about engaged users, post clicks, link clicks and stories created. Another swipe will present People Talking About This, likes, comments and shares for the given post.

Page owners can still promote their posts from the app by tapping the “promote” button. Another feature that Facebook removed from Pages Manager a few weeks ago, but hasn’t brought back yet is the option to create an Offer post. Admins have to create those from Facebook.com.

Facebook also made some bug fixes and performance updates in the latest version of Pages Manager released this week.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Pandora has had a busy quarter. In March, the social radio company saw its long-time CEO Joe Kennedy abruptly step dow , leaving the board to scramble to find a replacement. On the bright side, Kennedy’s exit, while likely a result of stress, followed relatively good times for Pandora. And it’s continued to push forward since.

Pandora launched an ad-free version for Windows 8 in March, surpassed 200 million users (with over 140 million accessing Pandora via mobile) in April, then launched a “Premieres” station for U.S. users and deepened its Facebook integration with a new Timeline App.

Today, Pandora’s first quarter earnings reflected this flurry of activity, as the company saw GAAP total revenue increase 97 percent year-over-year to $83.9 million (with non-GAAP mobile revenue of $86.7 million), which outpaced mobile listener hour growth at 47 percent year over year. Meanwhile, total revenue came in at $125.5 million, representing 55 percent year-over-year growth and non-GAAP total revenue of $128.5 million.

What’s more, share of total U.S. Radio listening for Pandora grew to 7.33 percent in April — an increase from 5.86 percent in the same period last year.

This news followed a strong earnings report from Pandora for the fourth quarter as well, thanks chiefly to mobile revenue growth of 111 percent year-over-year (to $80.3 million), which caused the company’s stock to jump for joy.

Based on this performance, Wall Street expected the trend to (mostly) continue for Pandora in the first quarter, with forecasts pegging revenue at $123.9 million (on losses of $0.10 per share) for the quarter, compared to a loss of $0.09 per share for Q1 last year — and revenue of $123.5 in Q4. And so it did.

Of his company’s performance, Kennedy said:

Mobile listening hours and mobile ad revenue reached record highs, with growth in mobile ad revenue exceeding growth in mobile listening hours. During the quarter, we successfully implemented a mobile listening limit, enabling us to manage our content acquisition costs with minimal impact on listenership or revenue growth. Pandora’s subscriber base surpassed 2.5 million, adding more net new subscribers in the quarter than in all of fiscal 2013, giving Pandora the largest US streaming subscriber base of any music service.

It’s also interesting to note that Kennedy resigned after last quarter (as mentioned above), yet Pandora’s release today names him as Chairman and CEO. It seems either Pandora’s copy editors need more coffee or their communications team knows something we don’t. Perhaps Kennedy’s resignation (due, understandably, to heavy stress) was a bit more abrupt than intended and announced early. Although that’s not totally clear at this point.

All in all, it was a strong quarter for Pandora, with advertising revenue showing a 49 percent year-over-year increase to $105.1 million, with non-GAAP subscription and other revenue coming in at $23.4 million — a 114 percent year-over-year increase. Non-GAAP basic and diluted EPS were $0.10, right in line with Wall Street’s expectations, while the company ended the quarter with $75.4 million in cash, compared with $89 million after the prior quarter. (Cash used in operation activities came in at about $12.6 million.)

Some other notable metrics: Pandora’s total listener hours grew 35 percent to 4.18 billion for the first quarter, compared to 3.09 billion for the same quarter last year. According to Kennedy, this quarter Pandora’s mobile listening hours hit an all-time high, alongside significant growth of its subscriber base (which Kennedy claims above makes it the biggest in the U.S.)

As to guidance, non-GAAP revenue is expected to fall in the $155 million to $160 million range, while Pandora expects non-GAAP EPS to be in the range of -$0.02 and +$0.01.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Postmates is looking to expand its business and make mobile, on-demand deliveries a widespread thing throughout cities around the country — that we already know. The company has been operating in San Francisco for a while, and launched in Seattle about three months ago. But where will it land next?

All signs point to New York City.

Postmates has a mobile app that allows customers to get food from restaurants, groceries and even goods from retailers like the Apple Store or Nordstrom delivered within an hour for a low, fixed price. Thanks to a little scouring of the Internet and some clues that the company has left behind (as well as a photo from a local hipster tipster), we have reason to believe that the Big Apple will be the next city to have delicious lunches (or anything, really) delivered with just a few clicks of the Postmates mobile app.

For those of you in New York, don’t get too excited — yet. People who have downloaded the app there can’t quite use it yet, several of my friends sources have confirmed. That said, a tipster in New York swears that he saw a Postmates-branded bike courier tooling around the city, and sent along this photo. (Thanks, Jesus!*)

Anyway, if Postmates is about to launch in New York City, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Back when I talked to him about Seattle, Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann had mentioned it as an ideal market for future expansion.

Oh yeah, and the startup has been trying to recruit couriers on Craigslist for about a month now. The company has also recently been looking to hire an operations manager in New York over the last few weeks.

Want more proof that an NYC launch is probably coming soon? Well, Lehmann is in New York City right now as we speak. Coincidence? We think not.

@ded No idea. I'm in New York. Want me to look into it or is someone on its way?—
Bastian Lehmann (@Basti) May 23, 2013

(For what it’s worth, he hasn’t responded to our requests for comment.)

In March, Postmates announced that it had raised $5 million in funding led by Founders Fund as it looks to expand. Other investors include Crosslink Capital, Matrix Partners, SoftTech VC, AngelPad, David Wu, Thomas Korte, Naval Ravikant, Russell Cook, Russel Simmons, Walter Lee, Andy McLoughlin, Scott Banister, Paige Craig, and Jawed Karim.

==
* Tipster’s name was not actually Jesus.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Digital promotions platform Ifeelgoods today announced that it has been named a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer with an Apps badge.

The company offers customizable white-labeled Facebook apps that deliver digital rewards to customers. For example, a retailer could incentivize people to make a large purchase by giving them a $10 iTunes gift card in return. After the user completes a transaction, the Ifeelgoods integration will allow him or her to connect with Facebook and claim the gift card. Users will also be prompted to share back to Facebook or on Twitter. Ifeelgoods says 60 percent of customers do this.

In addition to digital gift cards, rewards can be air miles, e-magazines, mobile apps or other digital goods from more than 200 rewards providers. Ifeelgoods aims to personalize rewards and gather additional consumer insights by using social data from Facebook and transactional data from the client. The platform will also help businesses test and understand which rewards are performing best so that clients can optimize for both ad cost and cost of rewards.

Ifeelgoods has a unique history with Facebook compared to other PMD companies. Ifeelgoods used to help retailers give away Facebook Credits as rewards, starting in 2010. These “microincentives” became popular within games on Facebook.com. Some businesses also used them as rewards for Liking their Facebook page or taking some other social action. However, in 2012, Facebook moved away from offering its own virtual currency in favor of a payments platform that uses local currency. Ifeelgoods continued its business with other digital rewards and has since added other products to its promotions platform. Cofounder and VP of Business Development Suchit Dash says it was Facebook that encouraged the company to apply to the PMD program and formalize their post-Credits relationship.

In March, Facebook updated its requirements for PMDs, with a new focus on a developer’s ability to advise marketers on ad spend, even if they’re primarily focused on an area like apps or insights. Ifeelgoods fits right into this with consumers typically reaching its apps through ads in the News Feed, Facebook sidebar or other platforms. The company has also begun partnering with Ads PMDs to connect its clients with Facebook ad providers. Ifeelgoods has run promotions for over 150 clients, including Walmart, Coca-Cola, Universal Pictures, GAP, Paypal, Kimberly-Clark and L’Oreal.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Lambda Labs, an early stage startup out of San Francisco, is preparing to release a facial recognition API for developers working on Google Glass apps. The API will be available to interested developers within a week, company co-founder Stephen Balaban says. The move comes on the heels of a Congressional inquiry into Google’s new wearable technology, still very much in the prototype phase.

The startup’s facial recognition API, launched into beta last year, is already used by 1,000 developers, including several major international firms. It now sees over 5 million API calls per month, and is growing at 15 percent month-over-month. Balaban also says that the company has been cash flow positive since November.

Now that same API has been tailored specifically for Google Glass Apps to enable both facial and object recognition.

Applied to Glass, the technology will enable apps such as “remember this face,” “find your friends in a crowd,”  ”networking event interest matching,” “intelligent contact books,” and more, Balaban explains. (You can see what apps developers are tweeting about here.)

As potentially amazing / horrifying as that technology sounds, any apps using the technology couldn’t do so in real-time – that is, you couldn’t just walk around automatically recognizing people you see through Glass. The way Google’s Mirror API works right now is that you first have to snap a photo, send it to the developer’s servers, then get the notification back. The lag time on that would be several seconds at least, and would depend on how fast you could take a photo and share it. A forthcoming Glass software development kit (SDK), though, may change that.

“There is nothing in the Glass Terms of Service that explicitly prevents us from doing this. However, there is a risk that Google may change the ToS in an attempt to stop us from providing this functionality,” Balaban says. ”This is the first face recognition toolkit for Glass, so we’re just not sure how Google, or the privacy caucus, will react.”

The privacy caucus he’s referring to has to do with the congressional inquiry from earlier this month where eight members of Congress reached out to Google CEO Larry Page with over half a dozen questions about Glass’ capabilities and the potential impacts to user privacy. The Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, a group led by Texas Republican Joe Barton, wanted to know if Glass would collect data from users without their consent, whether or not Google would consider privacy before approving third-party apps, and a host of other things.

One of those questions was whether or not Glass would have support for facial recognition. That’s something Steve Lee, Glass director of product management has already answered. In a statement offered to The New York Times, he replied, “We’ve consistently said that we won’t add new face recognition features to our services unless we have strong privacy protections in place.”

That’s not a solid “no,” of course. It’s more of a “no, for now.” Glass is simply too new of a technology to begin limiting what it will or will not do, at least in such definitive terms.

Facial recognition, however, doesn’t appear to be specifically prohibited in Google’s API policies, which inform Glass developers what they can and can’t do in their applications. That means, for now at least, Lambda’s facial recognition API for Glass developers would be permitted.

The only cause that would impact its use, according to Google’s policies, is one that says Glass is “not intended for use in connection with applications and services that might be subject to industry-specific privacy regulations.”

Obviously, lawmakers could still enact such a policy, if they chose to do so.

“Assuming Google and Joe Barton’s Privacy Caucus don’t attempt to stop us, [the API] will be available to everybody within the week,” Balaban says.

Google, it should be noted, has long since had the technology to build apps capable of facial recognition itself, but has always tread very carefully to not incite a privacy backlash.

In 2011, there were reports that Google was developing a mobile app that would allow users to snap pictures of people’s faces to access their personal information. That app never arrived, but facial recognition has since made an appearance within Google’s photo-sharing service Google+ Photos (previously Picasa), where users can now opt in to have their face recognized. This makes finding “pictures and videos of you easy,” explains the company’s documentation on the technology.

Perhaps one day, users will be able to “opt in” to having Glass apps identify their faces, too?

Time – and Congress’s reaction – will tell.

Image credit: Glass concept from Jack Morgan on Dribble; Additional reporting: Frederic Lardinois

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It was just two weeks ago that fast-growing enterprise cloud storage company, Box, went out and acquired document embedding service and Y Combinator grad, Crocodoc. Apparently Aaron Levie sees what Yahoo is doing and he wants to show that Box is ready to do a little acquiring of its own.

Today, Box followed up with its second acquisition in as many weeks, scooping up the tech behind French mobile app and Box, Dropbox and Google Drive client for iOS, Folders. Developed by Martin Destagnol, Folders and its tech will be integrated into Box’s new iOS app, which is currently in development (now with support from Destagnol).

Again, Box already has a version of its storage service on the App Store, but like many other companies of its ilk, the service hasn’t necessarily been putting its best foot forward on mobile, so to speak. Folders, on the other hand, was developed by Destagnol exclusively for mobile and to simplify file-sharing and complementary functionality for users on the go. And it shows: Folders is a good-looking, elegant app. I say that in the creepiest way possible, obviously.

In its announcement today, Box revealed that it’s planning to release a new version of its iOS app “later this year,” and Folders’ design and optimizations appear to be a big part of the mobile revamp. Furthermore, the motivation behind the Folders (and Crocodoc) acquisitions is not only to upgrade mobile, but the big “impact they can have” on the overall “Box user experience.”

VP of Engineering Sam Schillace explains:

I’m a firm believer that even applications developed primarily for the enterprise, like Box, need to be pushing the leading edge for user experience and design. They have to be ‘consumer-grade’ in terms of their usability, simplicity, speed and performance. This definitely raises the bar for enterprise software design and engineering, but there’s no doubt that the higher standards are a big win for users and a massive opportunity for Box.

With the service now used by 15 million people at 150,000 businesses across healthcare, financial services and retail, the company is at a key point in its growth cycle. (Though who isn’t, let’s be honest.) Thanks to building enterprise software “that doesn’t suck” (it’s a low bar in enterprise, people), the company is moving across industries and will probably show up on the public markets in the next year or so.

Box has established itself, but in doing so, it’s now competing with the big boys, and although innovation in enterprise tends to move at the pace of a speeding glacier, the company has to keep pushing forward if it wants to take that next step. The consumerization of enterprise is nothing new at this point; companies and, more importantly, end users expect applications and services that are easy to use. That look familiar and “social.” Whatever that means.

Levie is a champion of this new generation of usable, consumer-friendly enterprise tech, so Box needs to lead there. And, at this point, there’s nothing that embodies the consumerization movement better than mobile and the BYOD trend. Box has to work (and look) better on mobile than the old set of Enterprise leaders.

To wit:

When we saw Folders we saw a beautiful experience and set of design patterns that we had to bring to Box’s users. Adding the Folders technology and Martin’s expertise to Box will help us to continue to improve how people collaborate and engage with their content on Post-PC devices. In the near term, Box for iOS will become cleaner, faster and more beautiful throughout 2013.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Former Badoo COO and ex-Googler Ben Ling has joined Khosla Ventures, according to sources. Ling, who has held senior operations roles for a number of big companies in the mobile and Internet space, has been added to a growing team at Vinod Khosla’s venture firm. (Update: Khosla Ventures just confirmed Ling has joined, starting this week.)

Ling most recently served as COO of Badoo, where he was hired to oversee product, engineering, partnerships, and business operations at the company. Ling joined Badoo in May 2012, but he left after only about six months.

Prior to Badoo, Ling spent a number of years at Google, where his last role included overseeing images, videos, books, news, and finance as its senior director of search products and local business products. At YouTube, Ling was senior director of partnerships and platform, where he was responsible for music, movies, sports and news, as well as mobile, TV and API partnerships. In his first role at Google, he oversaw the company’s e-commerce products, including Google Checkout and Product Search.

At Facebook, he served as the director of Facebook Platform, working on developer relations at the fledgling social network. There he helped build Facebook Connect, which is the social network’s hook into a number of third-party websites.

In addition to his senior operations roles, Ling has also been an active angel investor and advisor to startups. Recent investments include Fab.com, Palantir, Square, PracticeFusion, and Quora. Ling has also held an advisory position at Pinterest and Pulse.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Ling told us that most of his experience as an entrepreneur has been in operations roles, helping companies like Google and Facebook scale their businesses both in terms of users and bringing in revenues. Meanwhile, over the last four years, he’s been working as an angel investor, identifying great products and teams and helping them to scale.

“In terms of thinking about my next steps, and thinking about what I could do next, I wanted to maximize the impact I could have by helping entrepreneurs to grow their businesses,” Ling said. He said that the opportunity at Khosla Ventures enables him to do that, since there are a lot of “parallels and similarities” to what he was doing as an angel investor — evaluating teams and talent, helping companies scale and with their hiring strategies.

Ling said that we can probably expect to see him make investments in a lot of the same areas that he’s worked in previously — that includes companies focused on e-commerce or shopping, developer networks, search, finance, and local. He’s also had some experience with three-sided ecosystem businesses, such as the Facebook platform’s network of users, developers and advertisers.

Of course, Ling isn’t the only operations specialist to join Khosla Ventures. His hire comes just a few months after former Square COO Keith Rabois joined the firm.

Part of the reason Khosla Ventures has been interested in bringing on entrepreneurs with that type of experience is that they can provide guidance for startups who need operational experience. Rabois, who is now 10 weeks in at Khosla Ventures, said, “Our organizing philosophy is to provide assistance to entrepreneurs and help them to build the most interesting companies they can… It’s about understanding what entrepreneurs need is less capital and more formative advice. Every time we evaluate a company we ask whether we can help this entrepreneur build something special.”

Both Ling and Rabois say that they’ve been impressed with the quality of entrepreneurs and the quality of the Khosla Ventures team as it works with those startups. With that in mind, Rabois said he’s really excited about building several big businesses as part of the Khosla Ventures team.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Toronto-based startup MyShoebox is facing a time in which photo sharing announcements are thick and deep; Google unveiled its updated Google+ photos experience last week at I/O, and this week we seen pretty big announcements from Yahoo! around Flickr. Does that intimate MyShoebox, a photo-focused startup launching its version 2.0 product on the tail of those bits of news? Not really, says MyShoebox founder and CEO Steve Cosman.

MyShoebox is a service that scans a user’s entire offline photo collection, uploads it to cloud storage and applies organization algorithms to automatically categorize pics and provide different ways of viewing them. The cloud-based computational stuff is similar to what Google unveiled last week, though Google’s product is more advanced in terms of being able to identify “keeper” shots and automatically enhance uploads, but Cosman says his company isn’t worried about lagging behind giants like Google in terms of computational power.

“I’m envious of the tech they’ve got,” he said in an interview. “We’re not about to catch up to Google in terms of cloud computational power and sophistication… [but] it’s much more interesting when you apply it to 10,000 photos than to the ones you upload piecemeal. If your photos are still sitting on the hard drive, there’s not much you can do with cloud computing editing tricks.”

MyShoebox’s strength is in getting the pictures from storage and sources that aren’t connected, to the web, as quickly and painlessly as possible. It’s a shotgun, not a scalpel, and it’s very good at what it does. Now, the version 2.0 update introduces features that make that wide-cast net even wider, since it allows for sharing with friends and family. The new Shared Gallery feature means you can swap photos with small groups of friends, each dumping into the same pool. Cosman says that where you’d normally only get the one or two photos with you in it your friend chooses to upload, with this new system you’ll end up with thousands of photos added to your collection. His own nearly doubled when beta testing this feature, he says.

Also new with this update is a dedicated iPad app, as well as rebuilt mobile apps for browsing your uploaded photo collection. The whole point of the update has been on taking the MVP that MyShoebox launched back in October, which saw tremendous demand, and bring it up to a level of performance that could better wow users. Cosman says that interest and engagement continues to be consistently high for MyShoebox, but says we’ll have to wait a while longer for updated hard numbers on its user base.

The company may be a small fish in a big pond, but it’s looking to be the service that’s first to solve the problem of not what to do with your photos once they’re online, but the one that gets them there in the first place. That will put it in a perfect position to leverage the cloud computing tricks that are making photo editing and sharing great once they’re there, Cosman believes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LoyalBlocks, a startup that makes a mobile-focused technology platform for brick-and-mortar businesses looking to encourage customer loyalty, has raised $9 million in new funding.

The round, which serves as LoyalBlocks’ Series A, was led by General Catalyst Partners with participation from Founder Collective and existing investor Gemini Israel Ventures. This brings the total investment into LoyalBlocks to $12.2 million. As part of the funding, General Catalyst’s Adam Valkin, who joined General Catalyst from Accel Ventures late last year, will join LoyalBlocks’ board.

LoyalBlocks, which is headquartered in New York City and has its engineering operations in Israel, says it will use the new funds to further scale out its operations throughout the United States — at the moment, it’s got a solid foothold with over 1500 locations using the platform, CEO Ido Gaver tells me. The company has a full-time staff of 18 that could also grow with the new funds.

LoyalBlocks is essentially a platform that lets small brick-and-mortar businesses easily create their own customized app experience to give incentive for customers to spend more money and make return visits — it’s like a modern version of the old fashioned punch-cards and reward cards handed out by small businesses of yore (or, well, 10 years ago.) LoyalBlocks turns a business owner’s venue into an “automated zone” that lets companies interact with customers as soon as it detects that they walk through the door, by sending them offers and promotions automatically.

Of course, there are many other players that have emerged in this space over the past several years, taking hold in certain regions and eyeing expansion to take the larger market. LoyalBlocks is in part differentiated by the fact that there’s an intellectual property play here, too. LoyalBlocks says it has the “only patented technology that enables automated hand-free punch cards and customer rewards.” It will be interesting to see which ones end up dominating as the next-generation customer loyalty space evolves.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter today made the latest push in its bid to cozy up to Madison Avenue and the world of big-budget advertising, by tapping more into the kind of mainstream mediums where advertisers like to spend their money. In New York, during Internet Week, the company announced Twitter Amplify, a way of bringing real-time video into the site, with initial partners including the broadcasters BBC America, FOX, Fuse and The Weather Channel. It is part of the company’s bigger push that its calling Twitter4Brands, which first kicked off almost year ago exactly, also at an event in the Big Apple.

The instream broadcasting clips will be very closely tied to ads. This is something that it has already been doing with partnerships with, for example, the NBA, where a video also features a link to an ad:

Speaking at the New York event, CEO Dick Costolo talked about how the company has made advertising a more “frictionless” experience because of its emphasis of real-time updates. It’s clear that adding more broadcasting-like experiences into Twitter will further that concept.

The company threw in some fun ad-land perks: a Q&A session with Glee actress Jane Lynch and a Tweeting vending machine churning out swag.

Twitter has been making increasingly strong moves this year to get its platform to be more ad-friendly (and revenue-friendly). That kicked off in February with the launch of an advertising API so that larger advertisers can better manage their campaigns on Twitter; an improved advertising analytics dashboard; and Google AdWords-style keyword targeting (TC coverage here, here and here). Just earlier this week the company also unveiled the official launch of Lead Generation Cards, something Twitter had been testing for a while already, which lets advertisers include actions like requests for more information that users can get automatically by clicking a button in an advertising tweet. (You can see how this last one also sets the stage for Twitter making the leap into commerce, with one-click purchasing.)

While Twitter has not provided any official public guidance on how much it expects to make in advertising this year or in the future, there has been a lot of speculation about the number because many expect Twitter to go public, with a likely date in late 2013 or 2014, according to observers. A report from eMarketer in March noted that it was raising forecasts for the company to $583 million in 2013 and $950 million in ad sales in 2014, 60% coming from mobile.

The stats that Twitter’s president of global revenue, Adam Bain, provided last year shows just how much the company has grown over the last year. Bain noted at the time that Twitter had 140M+ active users; now that figure is estimated to be closer to 300 million.

Bain also had noted that 55% of users access Twitter on mobile, with 40% growth quarter over quarter, and that among Twitter’s active users, only some 60% actually tweet, but all of them “listen.” And in a sign that Twitter was always going to figure out a better way of leveraging ads on the platform, even a year ago, some 79% of people on the site were already following brands.

More to come.

Image: Jim Prosser

Article courtesy of TechCrunch