Betaworks is a fairly unique entity, as a holding company that creates, acquires and invests in a wide variety of startups and products, including most recently Marco Arment’s Instapaper. Betaworks founder and CEO John Borthwick took the Disrupt stage today to talk about his company and its investments, as well as the products it has created in-house like Giphy.

Borthwich says he sees how the Betaworks approach is strange, but on the other hand, it makes the most sense versus other models of investment and startup financing. The idea for how Betaworks operates was inspired by Borthwick’s time as head of digital at Time Warner, a company which had varying stakes in a wide range of businesses, a minority share here, a majority there.

“When I was at Time Warner running tech there, I appreciated that not everything was a wholly-owned asset,” he said. “It’s kind of a combination, and that’s what I’m building at Betaworks.”

Betaworks is a “collection of things,” Borthwick says, some of which it owns tiny pieces of, some of which it has created in house, and some of which are full acquisitions. Most of the things it does it builds, he says, including Poncho, Giphy and a new game to be released mid-week. But all the properties, both those built by Betaworks itself, and those that the company takes on ownership stakes in, are part of a larger puzzle.

“If you look at the products out there I think of them more as ecosystems or clusters of things,” Borthwick said. “There’s a strong relationship between the products that we build or invest in at Betaworks, they all fit together like a puzzle [...] Thinking about the entire puzzle instead of trying to invest everything in the highest growth piece is what we’re doing.”

That’s why Betaworks was interested in building a Google Reader replacement, since it fits right between Instapaper and Digg in the content space. At the time, they couldn’t talk about the Instapaper piece since that was still in progress, but that was the thinking around that group of acquisitions; they make up a larger picture. In general, Borthwick says that Betaworks is concerned more with high engagement users than with pure numbers, and all those apps have that dedicated, impassioned user base ingredient.

Borthwick says that there’s a new game coming from Betaworks midweek, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of that. He also seemed to suggest that Betaworks is currently in the process of raising additional funding.

In general, the Betaworks approach seems like an interesting variation from the traditional VC investment portfolio, and you get the sense that there’s a grand design. As Borthwick puts it, “it’s the puzzle that fascinates.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Despite its potential, the jury is arguably still out on the best use-case for Augmented Reality. But one startup, Augment, thinks it has the answer: helping to sell products by letting customers see what they might look like in the real world.

A graduate of the Paris-based accelerator Le Camping, today the company is announcing a €220k (~$289k) funding round — capital it will use to take its offering to the U.S., where it has recently hired a biz dev and sales person, and incorporated a local subsidiary.

Targeting e-commerce sites, catalogs and sales people out in the field, Augment offers a platform where 3D models can be uploaded, and free apps for iOS and Android to let customers visualize products/designs embedded in their environment in “real size”. So, for example, you might be shopping for a new couch and by using Augment you’d be able to see how it looks and fits within your actual living room, through the view finder of your iPad.

The advantage of using Augmented Reality as a sales tool is that it increases engagement and conversion rates, and lowers the likelihood of a product being returned because it didn’t look how the customer had imagined. Or so the pitch goes. “In short, it removes the uncertainty from buying online or from a catalog,” says co-founder Jean-François Chianetta.

Competitors in the Augmented Reality platform space include Aurasma, Blippar and Metaio. “Our differentiator is that we provide the easiest platform to visualize your own 3D models in Augmented Reality,” says Chianetta. “We let people register to our upload interface, upload their models and share them right away.”

Furthermore, he says that unlike others Augment doesn’t do “games, dancing characters or advertising campaigns” and is 100% focussed on using Augmented Reality to help sell. “We provide augmented reality as a service so our customers don’t need to do big upfront investments to benefit from it.”

The company monetizes in a number of ways including charging to embed the Augment button on e-commerce sites, an “offline” mode for sales people taking the iOS or Android app out on the road, and print integration.

Today’s new funding comes from a group of Paris-based angel investors: Tristan Vyskoc, an active investor in startups in the Parisian ecosystem; Laurent Therezien, a web entrepreneur who was part of Lastminute.com and Voyage-Privé; Olivier Mathiot, co-founder and currently VP of Marketing and Communication of PriceMinister; and Nicolas Vauvilliez, who was COO at LeGuide.com and is now owner and CEO of 1001 Maquettes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Dust off that cheque book. Teddle, the UK startup that lets you easily find and book a home cleaner, has closed a £255,000 (~$391k) funding round from a group of entrepreneurs-cum-angel investors, including Open Table founder David Pritchard.

In addition, the Springboard alumni has managed to persuade Hailo founder and chairman Ron Zeghibe to join as non-executive chairman, although I’m told he hasn’t invested, but (as we’d expect) is taking a small amount of equity.

Founded by friends Jules Coleman, Alex Depledge and Tom Nimmo in March 2012 shortly before entering the Springboard accelerator program, Teddle represents a fairly typical “fail fast” startup story. It originally positioned itself as a platform for booking local services, and 8 weeks into Springboard, where it received £15k of funding, Teddle launched an MVP targeting West London. After graduation, the startup then set about fundraising while similtaneously trying to build out the product and grow its user base. But something didn’t click. By November 2012, Teddle was almost out of money and knew it needed to pivot. And to pivot fast.

“We were down to our last £100 and it was obvious that our product was too generic and broad,” says co-founder Alex Depledge. “You could browse around and maybe book a service if you liked the look of someone but the conversion funnel just wasn’t there.”

It became clear to Depledge and her co-founders that they were left with two options. Become an enterprise business and “flog the scheduling, CRM software we had built,” she says, or focus “exclusively” on the consumer. They chose the latter.

“We knew we had to take one thing and do it really well so we looked at all our services and picked domestic cleaning because it was the most popular on our site and had very little competition other than Gumtree and agencies,” says Depledge. “In 4 weeks we conducted focus groups and customer surveys and then built the product we felt gave the best possible customer discovery and booking experience. The new product went live on January 2nd and we haven’t looked back.”

Similar to a number of U.S. offerings, such as Homejoy, Handybook and Exec, the resulting site allows users to find, compare and book a cleaner, before paying online once they are happy with the work carried out. Cleaning is charged at a fixed price of £10 per-hour, and bookings can be made as a one-off or regular schedule. When searching, you’re presented with 6 potential cleaners matched to your request. Profiles include user-submitted reviews and ratings, while the first cleaner to accept the booking, usually in a matter of minutes, wins the job. In addition, Teddle interviews and vets all cleaners on its platform, so there’s a trust element, too.

Unsurprisingly, the company is already generating revenue, such is the advantage of actually having a business model from the get-go. It charges a small commission on one-off bookings and a finder’s fee for securing regular work for the freelance cleaners signed up. However, a model like Teddle’s doesn’t scale as gracefully as a pure online play — there’s quite a lot of up front labour involved to increase capacity — so today’s funding will come in handy. Its longer term plan is to expand into other services, such as personal trainers, tutors and gardeners, as well as take its offering beyond the London area.

Meanwhile, the appointment of Zeghibe does seem like a potential coup, and it’s easy to see synergies between the models operated by Hailo and Teddle. Both share a similar consumer proposition by making it easy to find and book a cab and cleaner respectively, coupled with a largely hidden B2B element in terms of recruiting, vetting and supporting the cab drivers and cleaners who provide the resulting services.

Alongside Open Table’s Pritchard, some of the other investors participating in today’s round are Chris Ash (Ash Gaming), Jonathan Quinn (World First Foreign Exchange), Ray Kelly (Chairman/CEO Aegis Media), Sarah du Heaume (Just Media), Chris Mairs (Metaswitch), and Neil Davidson (Red Gate).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Wealthfront is one of my favorite startups out there today — because it has actually made me money. I’m not alone. The automated investments company has been growing its user base by 20% every month because it cuts out traditional mutual funds and investment advisors, charging its users a very low fee for returns that have been beating the Street.

Now it’s aiming at the sluggish and shady finance industry with a $20 million second round of venture funding led by Mike Volpi of Index Ventures, Chamath Palihapitiya of The Social+Capital Partnership and Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners — plus a large group of angel investors including Matt Mullenweg, Andy Dunn, Adam D’Angelo, Michael Schroepfer, Hunter Walk, Cipora Herman and Satya Patel.

My personal story is pretty typical of why the company has been doing so well.

After Inside Network got acquired in May of 2011 — and after I’d paid off all the taxes and a scary credit card debt from my previous, failed startup — I was stuck trying to figure out what to do the money I had left. I talked to some financial advisors who recommended various packages that promised uninteresting returns, along with fees that looked to zero out any of those gains. I sat on the problem for months, unsure of what to do.

I’d seen Wealthfront launch at the end of 2011 and was curious (it was promising to solve my exact problem) but only I got around to trying it last November after it added an online wire transfer option that didn’t require me to spend hours filling out transfer papers at my bank. Well, and also, once I became confident enough in the direction of the US and world economies that I thought investing would be worth it.

I went through its onboarding flow by directing its software to follow a conservative investment strategy fitting to my situation. Wealthfront picked mostly exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for US, foreign and emerging market stocks, along with bonds, real estate and natural resources.

I began making money from it immediately, no doubt benefiting from the particularly positive mood that many markets have been in since late last year.

By February I was like, hey this is pretty great, so I invested a smaller amount and directed Wealthfront to max out the risk on that account.

Today, nearly four months after starting to use the service, my conservative investment is up 4.4% and my risky one 5.2%. This might not look as good as the crazy numbers you see on benchmarks like the S&P 500, but as the company discusses here, it’s basically impossible to benchmark diversified portfolios like what Wealthfront offers.

https://blog.wealthfront.com/benchmark-investments-portfolio-performance/

Founder Andy Rachleff tells me that about a quarter of its users added additional money last month. And these people aren’t just 20- and 30-somethings like me who are fortunate enough to have the problem of investing hard-earned results from their time at successful startups.

Wealthfront has been growing through word-of-mouth, he says, as well as a rewards-type program for users who get their friends on board. About a third come through the latter mechanism. If you get somebody in, you get $5,000 of your money managed for free and they get $10,000 managed free. Note that Adam Nash, a top Silicon Valley product manager who joined after a great run at LinkedIn, is going to be focused on growth going forward.

In general, the company’s fees are set up to undermine the models of incumbent investment services like Fidelity, Schwab, and any other mutual fund investor or financial advisor. It charges a monthly rate based on an annual 0.25% fee, which compares quite favorably to the quotes like I had gotten from professionals — along the lines of 2.5% for a massive minimum required investment.

The low fees are the start of what Wealthfront does. Another feature is automated tax-loss harvesting for any account worth at least $100,000, which it added last year — if you make a profit on parts of that account’s portfolio, it’ll reinvest it to and avoid taxes on the gains by doing so.

The company also sometimes makes larger changes to how it handles your money.

Earlier this month it adjusted all user portfolios to include a much broader range of bonds, as well as the addition of retirement accounts (allowing long-term investors to avoid yearly taxes). The expected gains from these changes, which were masterminded by the company’s legendary Chief Investment Officer Burt Markiel, come out to about 0.5% per year.

Where to, now? Rachleff thinks he can carve out a solid chunk of the approximately $12.5 trillion individual investor industry in the US, A founding partner at top venture firm Benchmark beginning in 1995 and a Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer since 2004, he’s also a student of the real disruption going on here. He’s really aiming for anyone who can’t afford the high requirements of most professional investors.

He says the company will be using the additional $20 million to invest in more improvements to the core product, as well as a major push for more growth.

The company previously raised a total of $10.5 million from a big group of angels as well as DAG Ventures, beginning in 2008 when it began life as kaChing, which Rachleff described in an essay for us as a not-so-disruptive social investing service. Check out the full story here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Now that Airbnb and Uber have dramatically changed the markets for providing rides and temporary space, it’s natural that we’re seeing variants of their models being applied in other spaces. Parking seems like a natural place, since there is plenty of unused inventory in urban cities. There have been a few attempts at the space in the U.S. through companies like Parking Panda.

A Swiss startup called Parku is also attacking the concept. Because their local market is so expensive and supply-constrained, they believe they have a good chance at making this idea work.

Co-founder Christian Oldendorff says there are as many as 250,000 privately registered cars that roll around Zurich every day. Even though there are 220,000 private parking spaces available, only 50,000 or so are freely available. On-street parking is almost fully occupied while the cost of renting a parking space per month can range from 250 to 1,000 Swiss francs every month ($273 to 1095). It’s a lot more than what you would find in a city like San Francisco, where parking spots in coveted neighborhoods range from $200 to $300 a month.

Like with U.S.-based rivals, you can book spaces on the website or through a mobile app for certain days and hours. They’re hoping to scale up to 400-800 parking spaces soon within Zurich, and then expand more broadly within Europe.

Because parking is so expensive locally in Switzerland, even as few as 350 parking spaces could produce a revenue run-rate of more than 1.3 million Swiss francs ($1.4 million) a year, the company says.

In the U.S., Parking Panda has worked with garages in 73 U.S. cities to offer up to 10,000 parking spaces.

Another earlier company, Hello Parking, shut down in 2011 after running into issues with scaling up inventory. That company ran into issues signing up huge garages, which had owners that were reluctant to dramatically increase local supply and drive down prices. Oldendorff says it’s too early to see if his company will run into the same dynamic in Europe.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google just announced that the Hyundai Motor Company, the corporation behind the Hyundai and Kia car brands, will integrate Google Maps and Places into its telematics systems. Both Hyundai’s Blue Link and Kia’s second generation UVO eServices will soon give drivers access to Google Maps and Google Places.

The first car to get access to these new solutions is the 2014 Kia Sorento CUV, with other models to follow in the coming months. It’s not clear when the first Hyundai-branded car with this new integration will be launched.

The system will feature Google’s Send2Car feature, which allows users to send POIs and other destinations from Google Maps on their smartphones directly to their car. This isn’t really a new feature, of course, as Ford, Audi and BMW already use this tool. It will also use Google Maps for directions and Google Places for providing POI information.

“We’re always looking for ways to make it easier for people to discover more relevant information to help them make informed choices — whether that’s where to go for a coffee, or where to take dry cleaning,” said Tarun Bhatnagar, head of Enterprise Geo at Google in a canned statement today. “It’s great to see that more drivers now have access to fresh, web-based content while on the go with the Hyundai Blue Link Google Maps integration.”

Google also used today’s announcement to highlight the Google Maps integration into other cars, including Audi’s use of Google’s local search, satellite and Street View imagery, Daimler’s integration of Street View imagery and Google local search and Zagat ratings and, of course, Tesla’s Google Maps integration with real-time traffic updates on the 17-inch screen in the Model S.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Metail, the virtual fitting room startup, has scored somewhat of a coup. Kicking off today, it’s partnering with the UK television broadcaster ITV as part of a fashion segment on the channel’s day time show This Morning. Along with potentially exposing the startup’s tech to millions of viewers, even if it is largely hidden behind the TV program’s own branding, the move suggests that Metail may have a ‘second screen’ string to its otherwise B2B retail bow.

The way the tie-in will work is as follows: In a segment called ‘Takeover the makeover‘, viewers of This Morning are being invited to style the two models featured in the show via a virtual wardrobe and fitting room — powered by Metail — on their PC, tablet or mobile phone and submit the finished look to the show, which will appear on an interactive wall ‘live’ on air and be commented on by the show’s presenters. The most ‘liked’ looks will then be paraded by the models on the catwalk at the end of the program.

“[The] big product innovation here is the live aspect, which as far as I can tell is a major first”, Metail co-founder and CEO, Tom Adeyoola, tells TechCrunch. “I can’t think of any [other] real-time real body shape second screen interactive styling experience – you can genuinely see how the different clothes work on the different body shapes of Becky and Charlie”.

A “real-time real body shape second screen interactive styling experience” it may well be (said with a straight face, I’m sure), but perhaps more significantly, it’s monetizable, too. That’s because users can click through to buy the clothes featured in the virtual wardrobe, generating revenue for both Metail and ITV.

Along with the obvious commercial benefits, Adeyoola says it should prove that the company “can handle high intensity capacity situations”, as huge numbers of viewers are expected to hit the Metail servers at once.

“We’ve delivered a super slick and fast application through work we have done server side, which means that we can deliver a max concurrent user capacity level an order of magnitude several thousand times higher for negligible cost, which was a huge technical achievement”, he says.

Famous last words — or at least let’s hope not.

Presuming all goes well, Metail and ITV are considering making ‘Take over the makeover’ a regular feature, meaning that the virtual fitting room can add a major broadcaster to its list of, otherwise, big name retail partners which include Tesco, Shop Direct, and Warehouse.

“It is a true connected second screen experience – the live show segment doesn’t work without the viewer and vice-versa”, says Adeyoola. “This is part of our strategy to proliferate the creation and use of MeModels beyond pure retail into media and publishing to drive use cases of the technology”.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Surface Pro launches in January, just after the holiday rush. It’s a pricey bauble at $899 plus an extra hundred for the Touch Cover. But everyone is excited. This is the model most of the Surface sympathizers are waiting for. It has the full Windows 8 experience, a capable Intel chipset, and an ecosystem two decades in the making. But here’s the problem: come January the Surface Pro could have serious competition from Asus, Samsung, Lenovo and maybe even HP. In short, what happens when the big guys finally catch up to Microsoft?

As of this writing, pickings for a Windows 8 tablet are pretty slim. To the rabid Microsoft fan, the Surface Pro looks like the second coming. It’s the tablet that will save them from the horrid iPad. But fear not, friend. The Surface Pro will be just one among many options soon.

The Surface Pro still has all the UX awkwardness of the Surface RT. As Sarah Perez aptly stated, the Surface is a tablet that’s actually a desktop computer. The addition of the Intel chipset will not improve the floppy connection between the Surface and the Touch Covers. It will still be awkward to use anywhere but on a flat surface.

CES kicks off in early January and every vendor will likely have Windows 8 tablets of all shapes and size. And the big boys will all be aiming for arrogant Microsoft and its darling Surface. And don’t forget Microsoft isn’t at CES this year.

Expect Samsung to roll out countless Windows 8 devices of all shapes and sizes. Samsung after all is riding high on the success of its mobile division. If anyone can take on Microsoft (and Apple) it’s Samsung. The Korean giant introduced several launch models at IFA in late Summer, but they have been slow to get to market. Likewise, the models introduced at CES will probably hit stores in the second quarter of 2013.

Asus should have a good CES showing. This is the company that practically pioneered the docking tablet. The Transformer Android tablet line is Asus’s recent claim to fame after the fall of the netbook. The Asus VivoTab looks like a fine compromise between portable a form factor and capable hardware. But hopefully Asus will debut a higher-end model that’s powered by something other than an Atom chip. Plus, since it’s from Asus, the prices should be rather competitive although, with that, comes piss-poor customer support.

Lenovo is gearing up for a big year as it is expected to surpass HP as the largest PC vendor in the world. The company has always found success with innovative, forward-thinking products. Look at the ThinkPad Tablet 2: Much of the magic of the Surface Pro including pen-based input and keyboard but for only $649.

Ironically, given the company’s past dominance, HP is the wildcard in the Windows 8 tablet game. HP is still the leader in PCs and has a massive manufacturing and distribution supply chain. The company could go all-in on a tablet, win CES and regain its spot as a leader in PCs. But that’s not likely. CEO Meg Whitman’s five-year HP restructuring plan doesn’t call for new products until financial year 2014.

It’s an exciting time for the Windows world but the Surface RT and Pro are poor standard bearers for the cause. It’s simply not a good flagship model as the shortcomings greatly outnumber the advantages. Thankfully, come CES, more options will surface.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Techcrunch recently ran a piece by Michael Wu of Lithium. The following is a response written by Ferenc Huszar, who, prior to joining Peer Index PeerIndex as lead data scientist, was was a PhD student at the Machine Learning Lab at Cambridge University.

Quantifying aspects of human behaviour and social phenomena has never been simple. But in today’s world, one thing is inescapable. We are creating a new market and ecosystem of personal preferences and patterns of influence. We are creating an exponential amount of data – 3.2bn likes and comments per day, over 400m tweets per day, and rapidly being joined by Pins and Cinema.grams. We are connected in some way to more people than ever in history – an average of 229 friends of Facebook, the ability to be magnified to hundreds of thousands or millions on Twitter.

And out that seismic, epochal change, social influence, a delicate concept, rises in importance. Why? Influence is that delicate concept which describes or predicts the behaviour embedded in these trillions of connections.

Intuitively, we understands social influence exists, and we all have some idea about what it means. We believe that people recommend things to their friends; and their friends act on those recommendations. We believe reviewers on TripAdvisor affect hotels people book. We believe that a friend who enthusiastically raves about a new shampoo, might encourage us to try it.

But of course, influence is a complex system of many moving parts, involving the relationship between people, fraudsters who try to game the system and so on. This complexity evokes a natural skepticism in people about whether these signals be meaningfully analysed and whether it is at all possible to build predictive models of influence.

We believe it is possible. Recent developments and interest in academic research confirm that the study of social influence is a well-posted scientific problem. As online social networks become mainstream, their data allows scientists and companies to gain previously unprecedented insights into social phenomena. Nine out of ScienceDirect’s top 25 academic papers in Computer Science study human behaviour on online social networks. This summer Science, one of the most prestigious and hardest-to-get-into academic journals featured an article on identifying influential and susceptible members in social networks. And in addition there is a growing number of scientific meetings devoted to the study of online influence.
While academic researchers have the luxury to focus on single challenges in isolation, public influence platforms like PeerIndex have to address many scientific challenges at once, while also maintaining a viable business model.

1. Rigour not instinct

A central element of science is in the application is real rigour to measurement and validation processes in favour of any gut instinct. Our methods should not based on gut feeling and intuition, and in the case of PeerIndex, we’re trying to limit subjective bias to the minimum and let the data speak for itself. With scoring methods based on a modern technique called statistical machine learning, the scoring formulae used to measure degrees of social influence are a result of an optimisation that seeks to maximise the predictive value of our scores.

Overgeneralisation on the basis of a sample is a risk, but more advanced procedures can tackle that. We use a technique called cross-validation which reports the predictive performance and generalisation ability of statistical models. All data is split into two non-overlapping sets: the training set and the test set. When the model is trained, a formula for quantifying influence is found, with the algorithm only having access to the training set. Then the performance of the method is evaluated only on the held-out test set. It’s like taking driving lessons in one city and then having to take your driving test in a different city you have never been to before.

This careful procedure makes sure that the formulae we find can generalise to previously unseen data, or even previously unseen users and it makes sure any circular reasoning is taken out of the picture.

Algorithms are also increasingly trained and validated using multiple independent data sources. While primarily based on social feeds, measurement companies also have proprietary data. PeerIndex uses information from audience experiments like the rate-my-mates Facebook app, and can use ‘preference learning’ methods to evaluate how well its ranking is aligned with a user’s intuitive expectations. Whilst this may not be the most important driver, it’s an important independent validation. Fuse that with the data gleaned from a track record of brand campaigns and external data from partners and the algorithms will only grow in power.

2. Transparency vs. innovation

Another area where social influence platforms have a hard decision to make is transparency. Users and clients want to know how exactly our formulae work.

What is the right level of transparency? From PeerIndex’s standpoint, we identify the principles we use to evaluate social capital and what we seek to predict. These principles are how you affect others, on which topics and with how much effort. We also describe our analytical methodologies, which are to use statistical machine learning to build an appropriate model.

Can you get more transparent than that? To a non-technical audience with limited time on their hands probably not. The maths is hard and the process by which the maths applied is hard. And the scoring is neither as simple nor as linear as saying “a retweet gets your 10 points” and an “a mention gets you 15” – it actually doesn’t work like that.

Additionally, the features and formulae used by the measurement platforms, in particular PeerIndex, are constantly validated, improved and modified, and signals are swapped in and out. The algorithms are constantly searching for the best, most predictive solutions, while work is ongoing with the academic world to devise new techniques for bringing further scientific rigour to the models of measuring influence.

I think the requirement of perfect transparency is at odds with innovation and experimentation which is needed to provide the best possible solutions, acknowledging that no-one yet has final answers to all the questions we ask.

3. Playing the gaming

The final thorn in the scientific side is gameability: the concern that people can become obsessed with their scores, and thereby change their behaviour to achieve higher scores. Gameability is a real problem, and there has been a fair amount of gaming happening already on Twitter and Facebook which date back to well before influence platforms became mainstream. Sure, follow people hoping they will follow you back then unfollow them. But the extent to which PeerIndex’s scores can be gamed is actually something we can rigorously analyse, address and to some degree control if we rely on science.

The relevant branch of science is called mechanism design, a sub-field of game theory, pioneered by John Forbes Nash, Jr, a Nobel laureate and also subject of the movie The Beautiful Mind. The same theory is used to examine the fairness of electoral systems, public auctions or speculation in financial markets, and can be used to analyse the extent to which our scoring scheme is gameable. We are a long way away from completely solving this problem, but we’ve started to do so, and we do everything to keep up with developments in academic research.

Crucially, most influence scores depend not only on your behaviour but also of those that interact with you. If we observe that you tweet more often, it is an indication of your increased activity, not authority within a topic. If this increased activity is not matched with an expected increase in responses, retweets, likes or other forms of interaction, then your influence score, if anything, should be diluted. You cannot really game your score by changing your own behaviour alone. You should also be able to change your peers’ behaviour and the way they interact with you – do that, and you’ll be influential regardless of the extent to which your influence is scientific.

And finally…

Social influence exists. We know it exists because we all recognise its patterns at work. We know it exists because we can see those patterns in data flows on social networks. And we can make pretty good predictions about those flows.

The science exists to model those flows and to give strong descriptive influence indicators on people’s influence in topics. That science is hard and ever changing, but the goal remains the same: to help users understand and benefit from their influence and social capital.

(Photo credit)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Ray Sobol is founder and CEO of EvidencePix, an enterprise-grade secure MDM service. Ray has more than 25 years experience in launching high-tech ventures and disruptive technologies.

No one likes to pay for things they don’t use. If you’ve ever grappled with the fact that you’re paying for 500 channels on your monthly cable bill when you only use a few, you know what I mean. The same problem holds true when it comes to software. An average business purchases more software than is actually needed, and we’ve all had software installed that we used sparingly. It’s time to let customers pay based on what they actually use.

The Evolution Of Software Pricing Models

The past two decades have brought significant changes to B2B software sales. SaaS upended traditional software licenses and made install disks an artifact of the 90s. Then, hefty annual SaaS subscriptions gave way to today’s more flexible, user-friendly monthly plans. Of course, evolution never rests, and consumers will relentlessly drive the market toward cost-efficiency.

With time-based subscription plans, software will always be underutilized. Obviously, annual subscriptions are the most egregious offender, but monthly subscriptions can be just as wasteful, particularly given the fluid reality of today’s workforce.

Employers are increasingly relying on a patchwork of contractors, freelancers, and project-based workers. As a result, it’s hard to predict exactly what resources will be needed on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis. Annual, even monthly, subscriptions can be overkill for a company that needs to get one worker up and running one week and another worker the next.

Even with a full-time workforce, nothing is static in business: Employees transfer departments; businesses pivot their focus; and projects come and go. Each change can result in unused software when subscriptions are purchased. The price of a single month’s subscription may seem harmless enough; however, monthly subscriptions accumulated across a large enterprise can take a serious toll on the bottom line.

The “Pay-Per-Use” Model

The most economically beneficial model for end users is “pay-per-use,” where customers pay based on what they actually use. For example, companies can pay each time an employee uses a service to run a backup, fill out a mobile form, or perform some other task. By forsaking licensing or subscription arrangements, enterprises are able to use any product, at any time, as much as they need, without having to pay for software they don’t use.

With this option, companies don’t have to worry about managing licenses and subscriptions across their pool of workers. They can equip each worker with the tools they need, when they need them, and monthly subscriptions no longer go unused for weeks on end.

Several software vendors are already moving toward this new model. With Windows Azure, Microsoft is offering customers a “pay-as-you-go” alternative to its six-month and 12-month plans. Companies like Twilio are serving up pricing based on the cent, and yet others offer micro activities at a fraction of a cent in combination with reduced monthly rates.

Pay-per-use is a bleeding-edge approach to SaaS revenue and may not apply to every business and software. However, if you think creatively enough, you can find opportunities to break down any software tool into smaller, billable units – such as creating/sending one expense report, playing an online game for one hour, or sending a visual report from a mobile device.

The pay-per-use movement is rooted in a core belief that people should pay only for what they need and use. It’s a radically different model than the original software license from two decades ago, and there will always be resistance to change, even in the fast-paced technology world. However, as the market is continually driving toward greater flexibility and lower costs, the day when you need to offer a pay-as-you-go option may be sooner than you think.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch