OtterBox, which makes the top-selling protective case for smartphones, has announced the acquisition of LifeProof for an undisclosed amount.

News of the acquisition comes one day after a lawsuit filed by OtterBox against LifeProof for patent infringement was dismissed. OtterBox told the North Carolina Business Report that the acquisition was not related to the lawsuit or any settlement. Headquartered in San Diego, LifeProof also makes protective cases and accessories for smartphones and tablets.

Over the next 30 days, OttberBox will beginning incorporating the LifeProof brand into OtterBox’s product lineup. More information about product availability and alignment will be available after that period. OtterBox currently has about 650 employees worldwide, while LifeProof, which was founded in 2009, employs about 250 people, who the companies say will remain in their San Diego location “for the foreseeable future.”

“Our strategy is to utilize our combined brand momentum, and world-class talent to create a great customer experience that generates OtterBox brand ambassadors for life,” Thomas said in the acquisition announcement.

In addition to its extremely durable smartphone cases, which are designed to withstand drops, water immersion and debris, OtterBox also makes protective coverings for other mobile devices such as tablets, as well as screen protectors and accessories. LifeProof’s cases are designed for people with very active lifestyles (or who are especially accident prone around mountains, concrete and bodies of water). Both companies’ cases performed well when they were subjected to abuse in the name of consumer research by TechCrunch during CES in January.

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Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For years, the iPhone has carried a small etching on the back that says ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.’

It’s fueled the stereotype that China is the world’s factory, but hasn’t had a flexible enough education system to produce R&D talent that can also design world-class products for a global audience.

But that’s a stereotype that isn’t exactly true anymore.

A small group of companies — both small, bootstrapped app startups and multi-billion dollar giants like Tencent — are showing that they can design apps or higher-end hardware with international appeal.

Tencent, one of the country’s gargantuan Internet powers with a market cap of $72 billion dollars, often likes to point out the international reach of its messaging app Weixin or WeChat. That app has blossomed to more than 190 million monthly active users over the past year and with about 40 million of registered users outside of China.

“I’m very glad to see the internationalization of Tencent,” said the company’s CEO Pony Ma this month at the GMIC conference in Beijing. He later added, “The manufacturing sector in China went globalized and the service industry can be internationalized as well…. It’s difficult, but if we can make it, it would be a revolution.”

Interestingly enough, WeChat’s growth abroad is being fueled by the Chinese diaspora — immigrants are taking WeChat with them to stay in touch with their families back home, according to app-tracking services like Onavo. They base this hypothesis on the correlation of WeChat active usage with that of other Chinese-language apps.

Younger Chinese startups are also building internationally as well. I met a Shanghai-based startup called Intsig two weeks ago that has a business card scanning app called Camcard with 50 million registered users and 10 million monthly actives, with half of them outside of China.

“A lot of people are surprised when they find out we’re a Chinese company,” said Louisa Cao, who heads marketing for the company. It helps that exchanging business cards is much more ritualized and formal in China and Japan than it is in the West, so that gives startups in Asia a competitive edge on understanding what consumers want in a product in this area. Similarly, messaging apps out of Asia like Line, Kakao and WeChat are leading the way, with Western startups like Path arguably borrowing some of their strategies like stickers.

Blux, another company out of Xian, the second-tier Chinese city that’s home to the famous army of Terra Cotta warriors, has built a higher-end photo app called Blux Camera that’s been featured by Apple more than 100 times on the iTunes homepage for global audiences. As the cost advantages that China has over Western markets narrows, the co-founder Jo Yin told me that it now can make economic sense to run global market-facing startups outside of the traditional hubs of Beijing and Shanghai (as they’ve become too expensive).

One of the reasons that all of these startups can built products for foreign audiences is because they’ve been trained either at Western universities or through working for multi-nationals. Some are run by “sea turtles” or Chinese who have returned home after years of working or studying abroad. Intsig’s CEO Michael Zhen spent years at Motorola where he picked up ideas on how to manage teams and think globally.

It’s also helped that the Chinese government has gone far in protecting and nurturing domestic technology companies and startups, a trend which continues with the government’s recent investment into a GPS alternative called Beidou and an Ubuntu-based OS that would help Chinese firms move off Western software platforms. Now that companies like Tencent have reached a certain prowess in domestic markets, they can look outwards.

To be fair, achieving global reach is something only a small fraction of local Chinese startups can do. It requires an international fluency; founders have to understand what kind of design and marketing attracts foreigners. Chinese web services can seem noisy and busy; they can be filled with more links and text as Mandarin characters are complicated to create on QWERTY keyboards.

There are even a few U.S. growth-stage companies that haven’t been dissuaded by Google’s very public about-face on the Chinese market and are hiring design and developer talent locally. Evernote recently launched a China-focused version of its enterprise service and they very intentionally took on local hires to develop product.

“It’s easy to sell your products everywhere. But when we say we want to be a global company, it’s because we want to make our products everywhere,” said Evernote CEO Phil Libin, when he launched Evernote for Business locally in China.

He went on to say that China’s copycat reputation is unfair.

“Chinese companies don’t have a good reputation for innovation in the West. The reputation that Chinese companies have is that they don’t really innovate. They just copy and I don’t think this reputation is right. It’s not a problem that Chinese companies copy. It’s that everyone copies. Chinese companies don’t just copy. They copy and improve. Copy and improve is what everyone does everywhere. That’s what Apple does. That’s what Microsoft does. That’s what Facebook does. Very few companies start with a first-of-a-kind idea.”

Indeed, probably the most interesting company to watch as it expands globally is Xiaomi, which did just that. They took Android and improved upon it.

They’re probably the best example of how China is moving up the value-chain from low-cost manufacturing into high-end design.

Just three years afters being founded, the company is on track to do $4.5 billion in handset and accessory sales. Some have made the metaphor that Xiaomi is the “Apple of Android” in that it’s an integrated hardware and software maker that has built its own special skin of Android and sells high-end hardware at or around the cost of materials. They compete head-to-head against Samsung in mainland China, and according to third-party mobile app analytic services like Umeng, they’re in second place.

Although Xiaomi will only publicly talk about its plans to sell handsets in Hong Kong and Taiwan, a source close to the company says it’s been on the lookout for a general manager that could bring their Android skin, the MIUI, to North American audiences.

They’ve been able to develop a rabid fan base locally in China because they allow people to participate in the designing of the phone by requesting features. Internally, they have small teams of engineers, product managers and designers that work alongside each other on a very fast cycle. They release a new version of the MIUI every week.  

But they don’t know if the model will translate abroad yet. Chinese consumers are very comfortable with paying for the full-cost of the phones upfront and buying devices online instead of through brick-and-mortar stores.

“We don’t know how developed regions like Taiwan and Hong Kong will accept products like Xiaomi,” said co-founder Lin Bin in an interview. “Greater China is just one step beyond mainland China.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

People are afraid that if they drive an electric vehicle, they’ll run out of juice somewhere. So to convince more people to buy electric cars and dominate the charging station locator market, Xatori and Recargo are merging. The combined charge finder developers will go by the name Recargo to promote their station map and trip planner app PlugShare.

Xatori and its co-founders Forrest North (CEO) and Armen Petrosian (CTO) had raised $400,000 in 2011 for its suite of apps. PlugShare is North America’s largest network of EV charging stations, boasting 15,000 locations and 100,000 downloads. GreenCharge lets Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt, and Plug-in Prius owners monitor their vehicles’ energy levels. ChargeManager lets businesses track the status of whole fleets of EVs. Recargo is a privately funded startup that runs a self-named charging station locator and Plugincars.com, a popular EV news source and community.

Recargo CEO Brian Kariger will be the chief of the newly merged company, and North will become COO. All their employees are staying on through the deal, bringing Recargo’s headcount to around 15. Both companies’ offices in Venice and Menlo Park, Calif., will remain open. “Our goal is still to do whatever we can to encourage the growth of EV and plugin vehicles,” North tells me. “We met Recargo, hit it off, found we had some of the same objectives, and decided to work together.” North called the merger a “small deal” financially but said that “investors were taken care of.”

Both Recargo and Xatori doubled their user base now, and will significantly grow their communities through the merger, as North says the companies only had about a 20 percent overlap in users. Beyond Recargo becoming a one-stop app for finding charging stations and EV news, the deal should boost its status with auto-makers. North tells me some car companies weren’t experienced working with tiny, nimble startups, but doubling its headcount will give it more clout. “We’re on a little more stable footing, have a longer runway, and a bigger team to help EV adoption.”

The fact is that gasoline is everywhere, but most people don’t realize that electric vehicle chargers are rapidly proliferating. The are more than 10X as many charging stations in the U.S. now as at the start of 2011. Domestically, there are now over 20,000 charges, and by the end of 2013 there will be over 170,000 EVs on the road. If Recargo’s PlugShare app for iOS and Android can instill confidence in potential EV buyers so they’re not worried about ending up stranded, sales could accelerate.

And honestly, that’s good for the rest of the tech world as well. Sometimes I worry that smart people are building frivolous apps and trying to get rich instead of tackling a serious global problem: climate change. If we don’t get the environment back on track, we might need to start factoring climate change into the valuations of giants like Apple. What happens to sales of iPhones if whole cities are consumed by the ocean as greenhouse gases from cars melt the ice caps and raise the sea level?

Recargo‘s charging station maps might not be sexy, but they could help save the world.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With years of digital exhaust now behind us – over 240 billion photos on Facebook, 8 billion on Flickr, and not to mention the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every month – we’re now transitioning to a time when we’re in need of smarter tools for organizing and accessing our personal data archives. Only a few companies, so far, have dared to step into this space because the technical challenges its presents. One which shows some promise is the stealthy Moju Labs, a new consumer “big data” startup, which is soon preparing to launch.

Founded by the former chief scientist at PayPal and current entrepreneur-in-residence at North Bridge Venture Partners, Mok Oh, Moju Labs is worth keeping an eye on for its team alone.  That team now includes ex-Google and Palantir engineer Justin Legakis and former Luvocracy product head Andrew Holt.

The company isn’t yet talking about its product details because, well, there isn’t actually a product yet. There are, instead, a handful of prototypes whittled down from around a dozen to start. But there is an idea. And there’s a funding round about to close.

Oh was with PayPal up until around six months or so ago. After leaving, he joined Northbridge as an EIR, which was where he began cooking up what’s now Moju Labs. He says his original inspiration actually came from his grandfather, who passed away about a decade ago.

“There are all these great stories. He lived a great life,” Oh says. “But at the end of the day, I wished I knew him more.” This sparked something in him, and he decided he wanted to build something so that his kids, your kids, and our kids’ kids, wouldn’t have to feel the same way.

“We’re always carrying around a device that’s called a smartphone, but it’s really a sensor device and we’re capturing so many things – not just photos, but audio and visual, too,” he says, hinting at what’s to come from Moju. “And on top of that, we’re wearing wearable computing stuff, and quantified self gadgets.”

All these things are constantly being used to capture and measure data about you, but this is “dumb data,” Oh explains. It’s information, but it’s not stories. “And what really matters is people’s relationships and stories,” he says.

Over the past few years, companies have been focused on building beautiful and simple mobile apps that allow us to easily capture and share our photos, videos and other data, but they’ve all been missing the “smarts” on the backend. So users have instead taken on the job themselves to tell the story they wanted to share, by organizing photos into albums, tagging people, adding captions, writing posts, etc.

This may not be a sustainable process, given the amount of data we’re now creating.

Another wave of startups will begin to solve this problem. Already, we’ve seen some progress. TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 finalist Everpix, for example, built software that analyzes the visual content of your photos, organizes them into “Moments,” hiding the bad photos, reconciling duplicates, merging corresponding metadata, and more.

And just last week, Google at its I/O developer conference, further legitimized this space with an updated version of Google+ Photos which automatically picks out your best images, fixes and enhances them – essentially putting the power of photo-editing software in the cloud, and then doing the work for you. A feature dubbed “auto awesome,” for instance, can automatically create a group photo from a series of photos by combining the ones where people were smiling and others were not.

Microsoft had launched similar technology back in 2010, but through its desktop software suite, Windows Live Photos. It never caught on.

To be clear, Moju Labs wants to do more than just automatically – or automagically – organize and manage your photo collection. That would be only one piece to its overall vision. Photos are a starting point, but the company plans to eventually support all your personal data, then create a system you can query using natural language.

So imagine that, one day, you could simply ask the service to tell you a story about a time when your family was on vacation, and everyone was happy. That sort of advanced query is Moju Labs’ end goal.

“The whole albums system is really, really stupid right now,” laments Oh.

But what’s the alternative?

Of what his company is building, Oh will only say that “it’s not you going through a ‘timeline’ – these are non-linear created stories that are very relevant and very contextual.”

“Photo albums are so stupid. Timelines are so stupid. Social media posts – not the content, but the way we consume them – are so stupid,” he adds. “It’s all very linear and time-driven, but it shouldn’t be that. It should be a collection, brought to together as a story.”

With Moju’s product, as you query these archives using natural language and interact with the system, the system then learns and improves.

As for what it will do when it launches, however, it’s probably going to look more like something that’s closer to Google’s product at first, but the team hopes to soon move beyond that. As impressive as Google’s advancements were to us, the end users, Oh considers them differently.

“In terms of the backend learning, we’re pushing that an order of magnitude more than what Google’s doing at this point – I think they have very simple algorithms,” he says.

Well, we’ll see…?

Moju Labs hasn’t launched a product to the public, but TechCrunch readers who sign up here can be first to join the private beta when available later this year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Truecaller, the Sweden-based creater of a crowdsourced phone directory app and online white pages service, has opened its API to a select group of “handpicked” developers. Truecaller said its directory now contains some 960 million phone numbers, either contributed by individuals or harvested through partnerships with  other directory services. The API covers only the numbers Truecaller has in its own datacase, i.e. not partner numbers, meaning it covers around 600 million digits.

Truecaller’s numbers are global in scope, and include landline, mobile and pre-pay digits — the latter category giving it an edge over other directory services, it argues. Being as phone numbers amount to highly sensitive data in the wrong hands, Truecaller is being careful about who is getting access to its API — hence no open API. Telemarketing companies are specifically barred from getting their wires in. Being the company that helped spammers is clearly not the kind of publicity Truecaller is hoping for here.

One scenario where it envisages its API being a benefit to others but also without causing irritation to phone number owners is for call centres to identify who is calling before starting a call. Truecaller’s API allows for reverse number lookup, meaning developers can attach a name to a known number. It also returns a ‘Spam score’ to indicate if a number is a likely spammer (e.g. telesales or robocalls) and — at the other end of the spectrum — a ‘True score’ to indicate how important the number is. This score is “the measurement of how popular a phone number is with our users over time”.

Name search is not included in the API but remains solely a feature of Truecaller’s mobile app. Truecaller is charging developers to use some of the features of its API, so this is clearly part of its monetisation strategy. Its free API includes only how popular a phone number is. Pricing for the more fully featured APIs starts at $299 per month, rising to $4,999.

Truecaller said cloud e-signing company Scrive has been trying its API — as a way to validate the identity behind a phone number.

Asked about the types of customers it is envisaging for the API, Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi told TechCrunch: “We’ve had more than a thousand applicants till now even as the API was unannounced. However, we evaluate all of them internally and in all cases test their application before given access. For the time being, the developers and companies that have been given access to our API are developing for B2B services.

“I believe the Truecaller API will benefit various companies such as major airlines like Delta Airlines to improve their customer support and experience (greeting by name, decrease waiting times by connecting incoming name to ticket information), but also identify well networked and loyalty members based on their True score.”

Last September Truecaller raised a $1.3 million Series A from Open Ocean, with the aim of expanding its footprint in its key markets of North America, Asia and the Middle East.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Features:

• Runs Ubuntu out of the box
• 13.3-inch screen
• 256 GB SSD
• Intel Core i7 Processor
• MSRP: $1,549 with rebate

Pros:

• Excellent Ubuntu performance out of the box
• Thin and light
• 12 second boot time

Cons:

• No SD card slot
• Limited software choices
• Graphics card slightly underpowered

Dude, you got a Linux-powered Dell! In all the years I’ve reviewed laptops I’ve never been as pleasantly surprised by an Ultrabook as I was with the Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition. This ultrathin, ultralight SSD laptop originally came in Windows flavor but, much to my surprise, I far prefer the Ubuntu edition of this device. It is solidly built, acceptably priced given the solid state drive, and surprisingly powerful.

Rewind

I’ve been using some form of POSIX-compliant operating system for over a decade but I must admit that I have been remiss in my Ubuntu installations. Whereas I was once a KDE kid with some Gnome leanings, my distro knowledge stopped at about Mandrake and picked up again as Ubuntu began its rise to glory. That said, I was curious to see what Linux looks like these days. In short, it looks great.

The laptop itself is well-made. An aluminum top and pane of Gorilla Glass protects the 13-inch screen and it weighs a little less than 3 pounds. The entire package is self-contained, solid, and quite portable.

The laptop, codenamed Sputnik, is a concerted effort by Dell to make sure everything on the device works well. It includes a number of Dell-specific packages – you can see a list here – but it supports most updates to the OS and attendant software and seamlessly upgraded to the latest version, 13.04, on top of the stock 12.04 Dell provides.

If you haven’t used Linux on a desktop you’ll be surprised at how uneventful it is. Everything “just works,” from the camera to the disk encryption to the update downloads, and there is little of the traditional futzing around with scripts and drivers when attempting to add hardware or fix broken peripherals. As a non-power-user who once wrote a script to re-initialize my audio chip every time I woke my computer from sleep, it was a pleasure to see the XPS 13 boot up without issue and worked quite seamlessly with most devices I tried with it. Arguably, with only two USB ports (one 3.0, one 2.0) and a DisplayPort jack, you’re not going to be adding much to the mix.

The GeekBench score for this particular model hovered at around 5,500, which is solid performance. The MacBook Air, for example, gets about 6,600 on a good day and the Core i7 hits about 7,000 although it can top out at about 10,000 depending on the machine. 5,500, while not ideal, is still solid. The laptop lasted for 7 hours of standard use, about par for the course for a laptop of this size.

Using the laptop was a dream. I was able to set up my environment quite quickly and seamlessly and after a few hours I quickly picked up a workflow that allowed me to write, edit photos, and post from the field. The lack of an SD card was quite disheartening, to be sure, but an external dongle helped me make short work of that issue. I used GIMP to crop and resize photos, Vim to edit my posts and writing, and connected to web-based versions of my favorite cloud services if I needed access to files or social media.

The best part about the XPS 13 Developers Edition, however, is Dell’s own support offerings. It’s clear that releasing an Ubuntu into the wild without good support would be suicide for the product. To that end, the company is offering one year of “ProSupport” that includes round-the-clock North American tech support and next-day on-site servicing. While Dell Hell is still a fresh memory in my mind, at least, this offering is more in line with corporate support than end-user Windows management.

Who is it for?

Designers

No. Unless you’re a GIMP master, this probably isn’t the laptop for you. To be fair it’s surprisingly thin and light but it has no SD card slot, making it a hard sell for the designers among you. Working solely on the web? Sure, you could feasibly get away with doing a little CSS or HTML on this thing, but you’re probably better served with a laptop running more photo-editing applications.

Writers will also be a little put off by the lack of native support for some of their tools. However, if you’re a markdown/plain text editor kind of person, this laptop connected with a revision control system could be a winner. It obviously depends on your workflow and, although I was able to pick it up fairly quickly, Ubuntu might not be the place to look for absolute ease-of-use.

Founders

Yes. To paraphrase Justin Timberlake, a laptop isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? An Ubuntu laptop. While you may annoy most of your co-workers with your insistence on running LibreOffice, this laptop is more than enough to run a few spreadsheets on and, in addition, build a business with. Seamless connectivity to most cloud services is a large benefit and thanks to Dell’s CloudLauncher app you can quickly and easily spin up nodes with a few keystrokes. Best of all, you’re not going to be another me-too entrepreneur with a MacBook Air and a dream (and you don’t have to use Windows 8), which is a great feeling

Programmers

Yes. This is a more-than-capable programmer’s machine and all of the care Dell put into this laptop really helps it shine as a developer’s device. For example, Dell has added Profile Tool, a method for “cloning” a workspace between laptops. This allows you to manage dependencies, preferred system tools, and tool chains. An Ars reviewer notes that these Profiles could become a way to “share” setups between programmers as well as a method to see how programming “superstars” have set up their machines. In short, Dell wants to make it clear that they care about developers with this device.

Bottom Line

It doesn’t get much cooler than the XPS 13 – and that’s high praise coming from an unreformed Apple addict. While I’m not sure this would become my everyday carry laptop, I could definitely see it replacing a similarly outfitted Windows machine and, if I ever felt the need to go full Doctorow when it comes to encryption, open software, and paranoia, this is the device I’d choose.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new report commissioned by research giant GfK claims that the growth of the high density cluster of technology companies in East London (dubbed Tech City by the UK government) is being “stunted” by a talent shortage and lack of access to capital. The ‘Tech Futures Report’ – commissioned by publishing company TechCityInsider and sponsored by accountant Grant Thornton, recruitment firm Vitamin T, City University London and Digital Shoreditch is based on 141 interviews of ‘tech’ company senior management. In fact, only less than half of these admitted to developing technology products and platforms. It’s simply the latest in a long line of reports that conflate consultants and digital advertising agencies with technology companies, leading to yet more confusion about the state of the cluster.

When quizzed by TechCrunch, the reports authors admitted that only 41% of those surveyed made apps, while 21% did social networking, 17% retailing/ecommerce, 12% publishing, 12% IT consulting and services, 8% data processing/management and 7% were in gaming – though it’s not clear whether than meant games or gambling. And of those 141, only 77% of respondents were CEO/Founders of the business they represented.

As a result of this over-sight, an important opportunity has been missed to find out more of the needs of real high-growth technology companies in the cluster, rather than normal growth advertising agencies.

But for what it’s worth we present the rest of the reports findings below. Make of them what you will.

Among the reports key findings:

• Nearly a half (44%) find a shortage of skilled workers is the biggest challenge they face
• Over three quarters (77%) say a lack of skilled workers is restricting their growth
• A third (33%) believe a lack of access to capital is hindering their business.
• In terms of the businesses represented, 30% had an annual turnover of <£200k, 34% £200,000-£999,000, 17% £1-£5m, 7% £5-£10m and 12% over £10m. 24% said their main location of business was London, 44% UK, 17% Europe 14% North America and 1% ROW.

The report says the 141 executives surveyed had “mixed feelings” about the the effectiveness of government support, with some liking it, others not. Not eactly ground breaking news then.

Clearly, despite the 'glass half empty' tone, the situtation is in flux. Ryan Garner, Research Director for GfK said: “Our research shows Tech City is at a tipping point, and hopefully this report will help it find its way in spearheading that economic growth.” Indeed, the reports authors could equally have spun the situation as a 'tech hiring boom'.

Unfortunately, the report struggles with some of the common terms of the technology world. The top skills most in demand are said to be “coders and developers” and something called “research and development” leading one to wonder if the reports authors could possibly be more vague. The others skills said to be in short supply (again, not news) are marketing and PR, business development, web design and user experience specialists. Someone is hiring. Hold the front page.

The report claims that staff retention remains a challenge, though is not clear on whether that is because it's a booming startup market generating more spin-out startups, or if people are leaving for big corporate jobs.

As for accessing capital, a third of those surveyed said their businesses are hindered by a lack of capital, whether sourced from investors or banks. Once again, because the report conflates technology businesses that might be fundraising with digital agencies that might just want a bank loan, the picture here is vague. Of course, it's common knowledge that most startups fail to raise external funding anyway.

If there is a gem of new information here it's in the finding – which has been largely anecdotal till now – that there is a growing gap for businesses requiring investment of £500,000 to £2 million. The “Series A gap”.

However, the report mistakenly thinks that all startups which can't raise a Series A in London will skip of to bag “the Silicon Valley dollar” when doing so is far from a simple move or likely.

TechCrunch is hereby placing a ban on all reports about London's Tech City from now on unless they actually talk to 100% tech companies with an actual product or platform. Not guys coming up with a new hip flash site for Coca Cola or selling tech support to banks.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Pinterest announced two new features today that will help make the Web site more attractive to potential advertisers. The first is pins embedded with additional information about products, recipes and movies. The second is a Pin It button that is now available on nine mobile apps.

The company says that its new features are a “first step toward making pins more useful.” The move, however, won’t just benefit users. It will also make the site potentially more attractive to advertising partners as Pinterest, which currently does not make revenue, hashes out its monetization model. Sites Pinterest has partnered with on its “more useful” pin initiative include retailers and publications popular among Pinterest’s users, such as e-commerce sites eBay, Etsy, Modcloth and Overstock; magazines like Martha Stewart Living and Real Simple; and entertainment sites Flixster, Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes. The first crop of mobile apps to get Pinterest’s new Pin It button are Behance, Brit+Co, Etsy, Fotopedia, Jetsetter, Modcloth, Snapguide, TED, The North Face and Zulily.

The new pins are only available in Pinterest’s new look, which began rolling out in the middle of March. The new version of Pinterest was designed to increase user engagement, which in turn will help the company decide how much to charge for services like analytics and marketing opportunities.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Oh HTC. You’ve produced one of the finest Android smartphones ever (seriously, just look at all these reviews), but you’ve faced more than your share of challenges when it came to actually pumping your top-tier One smartphone. As it happens, that may all soon change.

FocusTaiwan reported earlier today that HTC is preparing to pump out more of its wonderful Ones in short order — Jack Tong, the company’s North Asia president, noted that this month’s production capacity for the flagship device is twice that of April, and that surge will only continue into June.

Sounds pretty yawn-worthy, right? Normally I would spend too much time dwelling on the finer points of production capacity, but here’s a device that was launched to widespread praise by an underdog smartphone company some people have written off, and HTC has basically been getting screwed thanks to part shortages for the One’s Ultrapixel camera and a brief injunction due to the HDR microphone it uses. It’s like a perfect storm of headaches for a company that really, really doesn’t need it — one look at its Q1 financials and it’s clear that HTC needed this launch to go as smoothly as possible. It didn’t.

For what it’s worth, HTC hasn’t disclosed how many Ones it’s shipped since it launched earlier this year. Meanwhile, rival Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has become the Korean electronics giant’s fastest moving smartphone — Samsung shipped 6 million units in just over two weeks, and it hopes to cross the 10 million unit threshold by the end of this month. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that Google’s Hugo Barra showed off a version of the S4 at the company’s I/O developer conference that runs a version of Android that’s unfettered by the software bloat that many a reviewer took umbrage at. Company representatives were careful not to call it a Nexus — even though it seems to harbor many of the advantages inherent to the Nexus line like a clean Android build and access to frequent software updates.

As I noted towards the end of my HTC One review, the wireless industry isn’t a meritocracy — the well-executed device doesn’t always wind up saving the day. Hopefully now that some of these production woes have been ironed out we’ll see HTC live to fight another day, but that’s still far from a given.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Triggit

Facebook Exchange retargeting partner Triggit today announced that it has secured $6 million in additional funding led by North Atlantic Capital along with existing investors Spark Capital and Foundry Group. Triggit says it will put the investment toward engineering and other talent as it focuses on improving products for advertisers retargeting users on the social network, particularly as Facebook evolves the exchange to include News Feed inventory.

Compass Labs

Social marketing platform Compass Labs today announced a new dynamic campaign solution, The Social Advertising Optimizer, which automatically manages an advertiser’s bids. The tool can identify and optimize campaigns by ad placement, targeting and creative combinations based on different weighted actions and goals. Compass Labs says The Social Advertising Optimizer has helped clients achieve a 17 percent decrease in conversion costs. It is available as a standalone product or integrated in Compass Lab’s main platform, the CLIQ Ads Manager.

Optimal

Social advertising and analytics company Optimal, Inc. has launched Optimal Analytics, an audience analytics dashboard for demographic and engagement statistics, as well as competitive analysis across sources like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. The tool looks at historical engagement data for top brands and daily interactions among millions of demographic and interest-based segments to give marketers key insights about their competitors and target audience. Marketers can get daily or weekly emails about the most engaging content from competitors or visit the tool directly to generate new consumer insights or build lookalike audiences for ad targeting.

Viralheat

Social marketing suite Viralheat today released a mobile app version of its platform, including the Viralheat stream and publishing tools. The app lets users manage multiple Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts from their iPhones. They can schedule posts, monitor conversations, respond and check analytics.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook