Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

One of the hottest areas of tech right now is the Internet of Things, wherein everyday objects communicate with each other. As doorknobs and clothing learn to communicate, we can only hope that they will protect their language better than the humans who have seen English reduced to abbreviated gibberish in the face of texting and Twitter. If Kickstarter campaigns are any indication, though, objects have a lot to say without speaking at all.

Whacked: Lively. As kids age into teenagers, parents often face the dilemma of balancing supervision and independence, a fine line that their children may increasingly find themselves karmically walking as those parents age. Placing security cameras around the home of an independent elderly parent seems too intrusive while relying on an emergency alert may provide critical indications too little too late. Lively strikes a great middle ground. In the tradition of Kickstarter-funded connected sensors such as Twine and Ninja Blocks, Lively makes use of vaguely cat ear-shaped sensors that serve as proxies for the fulfillment of routines when creatively deployed. These can indicate activities, such as eating meals, taking of medications and going outside. It’s sensors for seniors.

Lively isn’t just a one-way communique either. The offbeat part of the offering is a weekly printed LivelyGram that includes photos and updates from preselected loved ones. It’s somewhat like what was tried by the Presto printer, but without the local hardware (well, at least bulky, ink-consuming local hardware). Like the seniors it seeks to support, Lively is independent, relying on an integrated cellular signal like the original Kindle instead of a home network connection.

Lively raised less than $14,000 of its $100,000 goal, but little was ever at stake as the company had secured millions of dollars in funding prior to the Kickstarter campaign, which includes the confident phrase, “When we launch Lively…” And when they do, the basic set will go to $149 with a $20 per month fee, which includes a twice-monthly delivery of LivelyGrams.

Whacked: Good Night Lamp The backers of Good Night Lamp would likely argue that a house is not a home without a house that is an Internet-enabled light source. Consisting of a basic set level of a bigger and smaller lamp, the lamp lets distant friends and relatives send subtle signals to each other; up to four little lamps can be connected to a master big lamp. Turning on the big house light turns on the smaller ones. It’s a bit like having your own personal blinking red phone like the kind that connects Commissioner Gordon to Batman or Presidents Obama and Putin without the threat of the Joker or nuclear apocalypse.

The Good Night Lamp had a large funding target of £360,000, of which only about £40,000 was collected, but the team refused to go gently into that good night. Publicity from the campaign led to much exposure for the team, which found an alternate route to production. Preorders at eponymous Good Night Lamp Shop began in February for £99 and are expected to start shipping in September.

Whacked: TeleSound Not the most directly connected of Internet objects, TeleSound sought to be a small speaker closely resembling the speaker end of a classic desk phone handset connected via Bluetooth to an iPhone. Those with the appropriate companion app would be able to send sonic emoji to remote TeleSound devices via the recipient’s smartphone, promulgating the renaissance in flatulence simulations that we all miss from the golden age of fart apps.

Unlike Lively or the Good Night Lamp, the TeleSound team packed it in after reaching less than $15,000 of its $100,000 goal. Rewards for non-backers apparently included a free guilt trip as TeleSound’s website sounds off, “[I]f you wanted TeleSound to happen, you should have backed the project. If enough of you and your friends did, we would have been able to make it.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Jared Zoneraich and Nick Joseph are two high school students who’ve spent the night here at the Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon coding an in-car app for learner drivers using GM’s API. The pair got a great reception on stage during their  presentation for Learn to Drive – not least for the in-car dashboard app’s killer feature: a voice warning that booms out when a learner is going too fast — which saves having a blow-out argument with mom/dad over who is right about the speed. Update: Learn To Drive has just been announced as runner up in the Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon competition.

The basic idea is to provide voice guidance to help learner drivers when they are practising with a driver other than their instructor, providing easy to follow voice instructions for a variety of driving manoeuvres including parallel parking and perpendicular parking. 

The app also keeps a count of how many times the learner has performed each of the manoeuvres, based on how many times they have requested voice guidance, and tracks other data — such as how many hours and miles of driving the learner has clocked up, and at what time of day. Using this data, the app also indicates how much more practice they need as they work towards taking their test by displaying a progress bar plus percentage to show how close they are to hitting the minimum required amount of hours.

During a back stage interview the pair told TechCrunch they hope to submit Learn To Drive to GM’s app store once they’ve added a few finishing touches — such as the ability to pull driver data off to Microsoft SkyDrive. Learn To Drive is actually a four-strong team: the two other members are Kenny Song and Jemma Issroff.

Back stage interview follows below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Let’s say we build a phone, theoretically. We’re not! But if we did, we could get maybe 10 million people to use it. 20 million. That doesn’t move the needle for us.

-Mark Zuckerberg, Disrupt SF 2012

With today’s leaks, it’s looking like Zuck was being almost completely honest.

Facebook isn’t building a Facebook Phone. They’re letting HTC do it for them.

But that’s seemingly not the end goal, here. Don’t worry too much about the Facebook Phone, as in whatever hardware might get announced at the event on Thursday. It is, at best, a test bed. Facebook does want an Android phone. They want all of the Android phones, including the ones already out there. And they can get a whole bunch of ‘em, too.

You see, today’s leak signals something rather crucial to Facebook’s Android strategy. Contrary to a thousand reports leading up to Thursday’s announcement, Facebook doesn’t seem to be forking Android. They’re not breaking Android down to its stack, adding the features they need, and rebuilding it from the source up into something that has to replace the entire OS.

Instead, they’re building a launcher. A launcher that can, like the dozens of launchers already on the Google Play store, be installed on any Android phone once Facebook flips the switch.

Facebook isn’t reinventing the wheel. It’s more like they’re getting ready to sneak up in the middle of the night and strap shiny blue rims onto everyone else’s wheels.

For the unfamiliar, a launcher lays on top of an Android build, rather than replacing it. It boots when your phone boots. It can completely overhaul the device’s built-in homescreen, add functionality, and determine both the general look and the way you launch apps.

To 90% of users, what else does an OS even do?

If Facebook wants to add fancy, built-in-house Messenger functionality to the home screen? Sure, a launcher can do that. If Facebook wants to do away with the standard bucket-o’-icons-and-widgets design of the home screen entirely, and turn the whole thing into what is essentially an always-on Facebook app that just happens to have a drawer for other apps? Sure. Any phone that Facebook can stick this launcher on becomes “the” Facebook phone.

All those Google Apps? They’d still work. And you know what Google could do about it, even if they cared to? Not a whole lot.

Facebook just needs to get people to install it. If only Facebook had some way of reaching a few hundred million Android users. If only they could shout to the Android masses, “Hey! You! You like Facebook? Make your phone a Facebook phone! Click here!”

Oh, wait.

Of the 750 million-or-so Android devices out there, Facebook is regularly used on around 200 million of them. Not just installed. Used.

Let’s say Facebook decides to push this launcher out to everyone, and sends out a note like the one above the next time a user opens their app. If two out of ten people already using Facebook on Android go along with it — bam, that’s 40M “Facebook Phones”, not a one of them built by Facebook.

And two in ten is probably low. Sure, you might not install it. You’ve probably got a rooted HTC Butterfly imported from Japan running a nightly build of Cyanogen. But how many people will install it just to give it a try? How many people — the little brothers and sisters of the world — already see their Android phones as Facebook-in-a-box?

Lots. Lots and lots and lots.

So why might Facebook even bother working with HTC, as today’s leak suggests they are? Because they can. It gets the ball rolling, and works out for everyone. HTC gets to launch “the” Facebook Phone (and maybe, just maybe a bit of exclusivity with Facebook Home), and Facebook gets a free test bed and an example handset to convince other OEMs to ship with their launcher out of the box.

“The strategy we have is different from every other tech company that’s building their own hardware system, like Apple. We’re going in the opposite direction.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After the initial success of the Kickstarter campaign for a movie based on the TV show Veronica Mars (with a goal of $2 million, it has currently raised $3.9 million, and there are still 17 days to go), I had a chance to interview the show’s creator Rob Thomas and his agent Julien Thuan about what’s next for the movie, as well as what the campaign’s success means for other TV shows and films.

There’s been some speculation about whether this could change the funding model in Hollywood. Thomas said the campaign should make things easier for people who want to do something similar, but they’re “guinea pigs” for just “a specialized subset of projects” — namely, cult TV shows with a fan base that wants to bring them back.

“Is Veronica Mars destroying the Hollywood business model?” Thomas said. “I don’t think so.”

I’m a fan of Thomas’ work, particularly Veronica Mars and Party Down, both of which were prematurely canceled. When I asked whether Thomas could see himself running a similar campaign for a Party Down movie, he replied that he’s still pursuing a “traditional path” on that front.

“I will say this about the path that we took [on Veronica Mars] – it is labor intensive,” he said. “It took me a year and a half to get to this point. … To pitch a movie to a studio that buys it is clearly the simpler way.”

Thuan told a similar story, saying that Thomas called him up a 18 months ago, reported that he’d heard about crowdfunding, and asked, “Do you think that’s crazy?” Thuan didn’t think it was crazy, and in fact he said the United Talent Agency (where he’s a partner) had been looking for ways to experiment with marrying crowdfunding and “a branded, preexisting property.”

Of course, once they actually decided to put pursue the campaign, they had to put a plan together, get people on-board, figure out the prizes and how to fulfill them, and get approvals from the various departments in Warner Bros. (which owns Veronica Mars).

As for whether Thomas was nervous about the campaign’s success, he said he was “ridiculously confident” until the night before it launched, when he and star Kristen Bell tweeted at each other with hints about their plans. That didn’t seem to start much discussion, prompting Thomas to wonder, “What if it has just been the same 20 fans talking about it all these years, and I’ve allowed them to talk me into this?” (Thuan compared the experience to taking a “a trust fall” into the arms of the show’s fans.)

Naturally, Thomas is relieved that the movie campaign didn’t just reach its goal, but is already exceeding it by a healthy margin. Apparently he outlined the script based on a budget in the $3 to $5 million range, so if he had only raised $2 million, he would have had to cut back.

And yes, there’s been some criticism of the campaign, much of it boiling down to the fact that fans are being asked to bankroll a studio movie – the Kickstarter funding is supposed to cover the production budget, while Warner Bros. handles the marketing and distribution. For example, Alyssa Rosenberg at ThinkProgress wrote that she would have been more excited if Thomas was was looking for funding to buy the Veronica Mars rights from Warner Bros.

“It’s not on the table,” Thomas said when I asked if he’d considered that. However, he said that before he reached the current deal, he had initially proposed a more independent production, where the studio would grant him a one-picture license to make the movie on his own. He also noted that without the Kickstarter campaign, the film would not happen, because Warner Bros. doesn’t normally make movies for this small a budget. (My two cents: A certain amount of skepticism is healthy when it comes to the movie studios, but I’m also part of fan communities that have been asking for years to get opportunities like this to support work that they care about, so it’s hard for me not to get excited. And yes, I did back the campaign.)

Finally, I asked Thomas if the movie could lead to sequels. He said he’s trying to have it both ways, writing the script so that it’s a satisfying conclusion to the story, but also leaving the door open for more movies or another TV show: “Spoiler alert: Veronica survives the movie.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In mere weeks, the TC juggernaut rolls into New York for Disrupt, and that means we’re going to be giving hackers all over the East Coast (and beyond) an epic platform to show just how amazing their tech scene is.

When it comes to Hackathaons, the N.Y. scene has traditionally put Silicon Valley to shame. Everyone remembers GroupMe, born at Disrupt in 2010, who then went on to kill at SXSW a year later and exit to Skype six months after that. But is it really a surprise that the City That Never Sleeps does so well at Hackathons?

Of course not. And now it’s time to do it all again, with ticket sales for the New York TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon opening today.

This year we’ve lined up a panel of amazing API partners who’ll be on hand to give you inside running and unprecedented access into many of the platforms that power the web today (we’ll be announcing them in a few weeks). As always, we’ve used the power of the TechCrunch brand to attract the smartest minds in technology, investment and media to judge and join in, and the event will be stocked with enough pizza, caffeine and Wi-Fi to keep you going all through the night.

Spaces are limited, so to reserve your space at the event, click here.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our amazing sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Another day, another acquisition in the education technology market. As the old, familiar names in publishing and education move to get in line with the digital revolution, they’re finding plenty of opportunities amidst today’s growing roster of young EdTech startups.

Last summer, Macmillan, one of the oldest publishing companies out there, created a $100 million fund to use to scoop up promising EdTech startups. The fund, now known as Macmillan New Ventures, has been looking to add 10 to 15 companies to Macmillan’s portfolio before 2015.

Prep U and i-Clicker were the first startups to be acquired, followed by EBI Mapworks Sapling Learning in November. Today, TechCrunch has learned that virtual science startup and EdTech veteran, Late Nite Labs, has become the newest addition to Macmillan New Ventures’ portfolio.

While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Late Night Labs’ VP of Business Development Harris Goodman tells us that the startup’s 12 employees will be joining Macmillan and re-locating to MNV’s offices in Union Square in New York City. Macmillan has been looking to build a portfolio of education startups that can demonstrate product-market fit and actual traction among both end-users and schools — something that’s been difficult for many of the new generation of EdTech companies to manage.

Late Nite Labs raised $1.1 million in late 2011 from a handful of angel investors, which included former Chancellor of New York City’s public schools and Kaplan EVP, Harold Levy, and Disney Education’s former head of business development, Don Burton, among others.

At the time, Late Nite Labs had expanded into 150 schools (a number that has grown significantly since, Goodman says), including Arizona State, Penn State and MIT. More recently, the startup has managed to use this traction to push past a $1 million annual run rate and has been growing steadily since.

But why, you ask?

While there is growing pressure across the country to raise the quality and consistency of STEM in both primary and secondary education, the fact of the matter is that federal funding for public universities and colleges has been in a steady decline over the last two decades. Combined with increased spending and rising institutional debt, many state schools and public universities have been forced to make cuts across the board, from faculty and courses to core, student learning programs.

Science resources, specifically wet labs, are often the first to go — if they even existed in the first place — the same laboratories where students learn how to use Bunsen burners, mix chemicals and measure boiling points. Officially launched in 2011, Late Nite Labs set out to solve this problem by providing schools with a web-based platform that allows students to take part in virtual chemistry and biology labs.

The New York City-based startup has origins that date all the way back to 2001, which make it one of the older and more familiar startups in the EdTech market, though it really began to pick up steam more recently, beginning with its more “official” debut in 2011.

Over the years, the startup has grown its virtual lab platform to include several hundred experiment simulations, which allow schools to provide their students with a fully-equipped, virtual science lab — complete with the same containers, compounds and instruments one would find in a real, live wet lab. Teachers can create and manage their coursework through the platform, distribute assignments and so on, including expository videos and images, while students get to follow along and keep track of progress in their own digital notebooks.

The drag-and-drop, interactive platform now includes microbiology, general organic and biochemistry alongside the basics, and Late Nite Labs is currently in the process of working on a physics lab as well.

While exits can be disappointing conclusions for entrepreneurs, Goodman says that the team as a whole will stay together and is looking forward to continue building and expanding Late Nite Labs, especially with the broad support that Macmillan can now provide. Hopefully that remains true. Because the company (as a whole) owns science education brands like Nature, Scientific American, Sapling and Hayden McNeil, Goodman says that the team wants to help create the “ultimate digital science company.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’m at Founders Den Demo Night, where seven startups are making their pitches to investors, press and other members of the tech community. As with most other demo events, these aren’t launches per se (we’ve covered most of the companies already), but it’s a good opportunity for us to highlight these startups and the fact that they’re part of the Founders Den community.

Founders Den describes itself as a “clubhouse” for entrepreneurs. In addition to the offices and co-working desks that it offers startups in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, it does indeed have a clubhouse-style space. It’s also club-like in the fact that it’s invite-only and is usually looking for experienced entrepreneurs/more established startups — in fact, a number of the companies demonstrating today went through other incubators.

Here are the seven companies that are on-the-record (there are two that are still in stealth mode, so I’m not allowed to write about them yet). I’ll update with more details from their presentations.

Survata offers a “SurveyWall” for publishers, so that they can monetize their content without putting up a paywall, and in doing so it finds survey respondents for brands, agencies and universities. It was incubated by Y Combinator.

From the presentation: The company says that more than 1 million survey questions have already been answered.

Rollbar is an error-tracking product for developers. It was co-founded by Brian Rue, former CTO of Lolapps.

From the presentation: Rue said that there are already 200 companies actively using the product.

vidIQ offers analytics and other tools for video producers on YouTube to improve their distribution. It recently raised $800,000 in funding.

From the presentation: Customers already include a number of high-profile publishers, including TechCrunch-owner Aol and Revision3.

Clothia allows users to mix-and-match different outfits through its fashion website and iPad app. Users can also browse the outfits created by others in the community.

From the presentation: The iPad app doesn’t include many of the social features (they’re coming in April), but nearly 60 percent of users are already creating content, and 46 percent of them stay engaged from month to month.

Archy is a management and collaboration system for all your cloud storage services. It allows you to import your contacts and to share documents with them.

From the presentation: The current version is Google Drive only. It has 15,000 users, and 30 percent of them are sharing more fields through Archy than through the native Google app.

MOVL offers tools for creating content for multiple screens, particularly smart TVs. It launched its Kontrol.tv system last fall.

From the presentation: Movl showed off a number of products created on the platform including Swipe-it, which has been downloaded more than 300,000 times.

Namo Media aims to build better mobile advertising by focusing on “native” ads that appear in apps’ streams of content. It has raised $1.9 million from investors, including Google Ventures.

From the presentation: Co-founder Gabor Cselle was actually the only presenter tonight to take the stage for the second time — he presented an app called DrawChat at the last demo day, which he has since auctioned off.

Update: Managing partner Michael Levit also offered a “Founders Den report card,” where he said that in total, Founders Den companies have raised $140 million. However, he was only able to get data from 43 of the 85 total companies, so he estimated that the real number is probably “zeroing in on $200 million.” He added that “not all companies are created equal,” and in fact the top five companies (Dotcloud, Tout, Kaggle, Wanelo, and DataSift) account for more than half of the reported results. As for exits, he said that there have been five successful exits so far, including the $60 million acquisition of Socialcam by Autodesk, and three shtudowns.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

One of the problems with fashion magazines is that they lack the element of personalization and curation that is entering the online fashion industry and retail world. Kendall Herbst, a former fashion editor at InStyle and Lucky magazines is hoping to change that with a new fashion startup launching today. YC-backed StyleUp is a daily personal fashion recommendation service for women that takes into account your location (i.e. weather) and personal style to give you stylized outfit suggestions each day.

On StyleUp, you sign up for the daily email by taking a 30-second survey to determine your style. You are shown various pictures of styled outfits, and you choose which outfit identify. You also include your location because each outfit recommendation is tied to the weather where you are, and you pick when you want to receive each email (i.e. in the morning before work, or the night before so you can plan ahead).

So there are four components to each StyleUp email. The first is what the weather is in your location, as mentioned above. The second is the actual outfit for the day. The third is a rating feature, where you can say whether you like the outfit within the email. And the fourth are clickable links to shop and buy the outfit.

Monday through Friday, you’ll receive outfit recommendations that you can create from your own closet. StyleUp also includes links to each part of an outfit and where they can be purchased from in case you want to buy any of the items. Herbst says that outfits are curated from affordable sites like J.Crew, but if you want an outfit recommendation for a more high-fashion event, you can actually visit the site and put in the details for your event (i.e. black tie) and the startup will give you a recommended outfit.

The startup takes the technology side of things a step further by adding a Pandora-esque feature that will actually take your feedback into recommending outfits that you will like in the future. If you don’t like an outfit, the service will take this into account as well. This system was built by co-founder and CTO Ryan Choi, who was the 7th engineer at CRM giant Salesforce.

Through word of mouth (and little marketing) the startup has been able to create a loyal user base that spans college students to stay-at-home-moms to corporate professionals. StyleUp has tripled its user base since joining Y Combinator.

User Adelle McElveen, who also happens to be Google’s Shopping Editor, says of the startup, “StyleUp inspires me to think about what I’m going to wear the next day, and how to not just dress for the weather, but to dress stylishly for the weather. It also reminds me of what I have in my closet.”

StyleUp has delivered over a quarter of a million outfits to their users, and the startup’s e-mail open rate is over 70%, compared to the industry average of 14%.

Herbst explains that the startup now makes money from affiliate links to purchase parts of an outfit, but the longterm vision is to be a channel to connect women to brands they love.

I, for one, spend at least 20 minutes in front of my closet each day trying to figure out what I should wear based on the day’s weather. It would be great to have a daily service that not only saves me this time, but also allows me to discover new brands and clothing items that fit my style.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sure, some last minute leaks may have ruined Samsung’s big surprise, but that doesn’t mean that there still won’t be plenty to talk about when the Korean electronics titan shows off its flagship Galaxy S IV later tonight.

As usual, Samsung will be streaming the event (both online and in the heart of the city), but Jordan Crook, Michael Seo, and I will be liveblogging the event too in case you aren’t set up for video or would prefer to digest the night’s events with a heaping dose of personality.

In case you’ve somehow missed the deluge of Galaxy S IV information that has inundated the geekier districts of the web, here’s a quick rundown of what we expect to see tonight. If a slew of recently leaked photos are any indication then the Galaxy S IV won’t stray very far from the design language Samsung has grown fond of with devices like the Galaxy S III and Note II, and the love-them-or-hate-them plastic bodies don’t seem to be going anywhere. Meanwhile, people’s eyes will likely gravitate toward a 5-inch Super AMOLED screen and one of Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa chipsets (though it could be swapped for a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 when the device makes its way Stateside).

And of course, new hardware is only going to be part of the equation — Samsung appears to have baked nifty software features like Floating Touch and Smart Pause into its highly customized Android build. It won’t be long until we finally see how the device matches up to the rumors, so stay tuned.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A routine sever firmware update resulted in an anything but routine outage for Microsoft’s Outlook and Hotmail. On March 12, Outlook.com and Hotmail were unavailable to some users, and as Microsoft details in a blog post, a firmware update caused servers to overheat and go offline for 16 hours. Apparently similar firmware updates had been successfully deployed in the past but something went haywire this time.

Most accounts housed on these servers were unavailable for nearly a full day. Thankfully, the outage doesn’t seem widespread. Barely any of our readers confirmed the outage affected their accounts. The Microsoft team started restoring access in waves on the night of the 12th with the task completed by 5:30AM on the 13th.

Of course any outage is bad for business, but this one is particularly bad. Microsoft is currently running a massive marketing campaign for Outlook.com, its rehash of Hotmail and answer to Gmail. Hotmail users are being migrated to the new service and the company has taken to the offensive, directly attacking Google and its service in video ads – presumably with no mention of their latest snafu.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch