Have you ever wished that you could navigate through the apps on the phone as easy as clicking links on the web? Such a thing may now become a real possibility thanks to a new service from Cellogic, called Deeplink.me. In a nutshell, it’s a bit.ly for mobile app deep linking – meaning not necessarily just linking to the app itself, but to a specific page, section or  - in the case of a mobile game – a specific level, within an application.

The link (deeplink.me/yourname), meanwhile, works from anywhere, whether web, mobile web, or any other native mobile application.

It can automatically detect where an end user is coming from and whether or not they have the necessary mobile app installed on their device. If the link is clicked on the web, it would simply point the user to the developer or publisher’s web version of that same content. If on mobile with no app installed, it could be configured to point to the app store or mobile website instead. And if the app is present, it could take you right to the relevant screen.

All of this is configurable, of course.

The idea came about as an offshoot of what Celllogic is currently building with Nextap, a content discovery network for mobile applications. Nextap is a much bigger product built on top of this deeplink technology, and, even pre-launch, it has paying customers. These include several large news publishers and a few big-name app and game developers.

During the development process for Nextap, the team decided to spin off the Deeplink tool, which will allow end users to move horizontally through apps.

As Cellogic CEO Itamar Weisbrod explains, Nextap’s customers wanted to use the technology as something of a “bit.ly for deep linking” so they could tweet out links, share them on Facebook, email and elsewhere.

“One of their biggest issues is that they’ve invested so much in these native apps, but they’re still silos,” says Weisbrod. “So we said, well, we have the analytics, we have this platform, we could just give you this one URL and you can generate the links for your apps, and you could then link to specific parts in your apps.”

The implementation requires minimal configuration on the app developer’s side since the function the link is calling is already present. Developers only have to add a few lines of code, Weisbrod says. And on Android, the company offers a sample “Intent” filter, as well, to help developers get started. (Intentions let Android apps kick off a specific action. They’re a part of the Android operating system, which handles deep linking fairly well, in comparison with iOS).

As you may know, the technology which enables app deep linking itself is not new.

In terms of simply opening up apps for you, Facebook has long since pointed its mobile users to apps on their phone from its own mobile application. It has now turned its ability to connect users to apps into a potentially strong revenue stream, as well. And with the debut of new Twitter “Card” types, it, too, has begun to explore how it can move users more seamlessly between Twitter apps and and content found in the broader mobile app universe, including products, photos, videos, articles, and more.

These are only the more recent efforts, however. A lesser-known example called PhotoAppLink, is an older open source initiative aiming to simplify photo editing by tying multiple photo-editing apps together using similar app-linking technology. Plus, an even earlier example came from a company called Zwapp, which tried to solve the problem by launcing OneMillionAppSchemes.com, a database that tried to open source the unpublished custom URL schemes for iOS applications.

Facebook and Twitter’s moves are still somewhat limited, however, and none of those earlier efforts really took off.

Weisbrod says the reason why those initial efforts failed is because there was no impetus for developers to use them. ”This is an actual service,” he says of Deeplink.me. “There’s value on top of just being database.”

With Deeplink.me, developers will have access to analytics, which details things like clicks per platform, the click-through rates, where users are coming from and more. This analytics feature will be improved in time, and the service will support plugging into other app analytics platforms in the future, too, like Flurry or HasOffers, for example.

Pricing for Deeplink.me has also yet to be set, but it will be a freemium service after the beta period completes.

A handful of Nextap’s customers are already using the platform, after joining a private test a few months ago. Now the beta is opening up a bit further: 100 beta accounts have been reserved for TechCrunch readers who sign up using this link.

This service could help solve some of the problems facing the ecosystem today – namely app engagement and usage rapidly declines after install, as apps are tucked away off of users’ homescreens in forgotten folders. Developers in turn, have to use increasingly spammy push notifications to encourage re-opens. Frustrated, users simply delete the apps bothering them. Having specific, deeplinked app content appearing when users click links they actually wanted to follow could instead be a more natural way to draw users back in to apps.

Though the details of how all this works is technical, if the company can spur adoption – still an unknown – the end result could be something which would allow a more natural way to move through apps on our phones and tablets, as well as from the mobile web to apps. Using apps could even begin to feel more like the web itself – that is, less isolated, more connected.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Jolla, a Finnish startup formed in response to Nokia’s decision to ditch MeeGo in favour of Windows Phone, has finally taken the wraps off the smartphone hardware that will be paired with its “unlike” Sailfish UI. Being a startup is challenging enough in any business sector but Jolla is seeking to compete in the fiercely competitive smartphone space, going up against giants Samsung and Apple who hold the majority of the market in a pincer grip. So it’s hard not to dismiss their efforts as too late. But it’s a lot harder to accuse them of doing too little.

Jolla’s strategy for fighting the mobile industry’s Goliaths is all about standing out by doing things different. Today’s hardware underlines how this startup is hoping to disrupt the concept of a single flagship device — such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 — that’s hankered after and owned by millions yet with only a little variation in case colourings to tell the difference between each one.

In seeking to break down software homogeneity with its Sailfish UI and a business model that encourages working with third parties to develop new types of smartphone experience that loop in others’ data, Jolla is also taking aim at hardware commoditisation via a cross-over feature in its debut device that it’s calling the Other Half. The Other Half refers to removable hardware shells that snap on to the back of the handset and can be changed and customised by the user. But the feature goes further than interchangeable shells — which is not at all new, dating back in spirit to early Nokia mobile phones of the 1990s with their removable facias, and more recently to a device like Nokia’s Lumia 820, which has a coloured and swappable backplate.

Jolla’s Other Half isn’t just decoration but links to the software on the handset — using an unconfirmed bridging technology that sounds to my ear like NFC — allowing content on the phone to be tied to the addition of a new shell, or even for new physical features to be incorporated and supported.

Jolla’s Marc Dillon, now head of software but until recently CEO, gave some examples of how the Other Half feature could be used — noting that this is about opening up the back of the device for others to come in and augment.

“You have the processor side of the device, the power side, the engine, and then the Other Half is about adding to that. This is a new kind of media where it could be anything from your favourite artist could release their latest album on the other half of the Jolla device, and then when the user buys this they have a physical thing from their favourite artist then when they snap it on to the other half of their Jolla device, then everyone can see it, that they support and love their artist and then on the inside they could get the content. They could get maybe special content, that could only be released in this format like videos or links to websites or tickets or special offers, things like that but because of this interface between the two halves,” he told TechCrunch.

“It can not only be media, it can be very simple things — so maybe you have a colour palette, so when you go out of an evening you might have a different colour depending on your outfit and that colour then carries through to the software updating the Ambience of the device. So you might have — if you have a green dress, you might have a green device and then you have green icons and green Ambience [Sailfish UI theme] on your phone. But it can also be more interesting — you can add features. Like the camera is a good example, the native camera of course has a flash but maybe you’re going to a party and you want to have a big flash so you can take pictures in the dark at a nightclub. So really the imagination is the only limit here.”

“Instead of having a device with some bulky things attached to it or some things sticking out the side of it to extend the capabilities of the device, or to add content, we’re giving a new way for users to actually design and co-create with us new ways of using the device,” Dillon added.

“Of course we will be offering a choice of Other Halves for the user to buy but this is a place where we want to see others get involved. Designers can design Other Halves for the device, engineers or hackers or techies can design new interfaces and maybe add physical hardware features that they wish they had on their device but might have a smaller market than to deserve having a whole entire device,” he said. “We talked about 3D printing them today. So it could be those kinds of things, but really we’re offering a new kind of interface for a device so that people can really take their imagination, and I believe there will be a lot of third parties and a lot of people who have a lot of great ideas in order to help you use the Other Half of the Jolla device.”

The Other Half may be a bit of a clumsy name but it’s a savvy move that taps into the custom hardware trend that’s growing off the back of the rising profile of 3D printing. That said, it does of course remain to be seen how much interest Jolla can spark for others to get involved in co-creation with only one device to its name and that device not launching for another six months. It will need enough traction to get the co-creation party started.

The idea to link the hardware and software has been part of Jolla company discussions and plans since the beginning, according to Dillon. “It’s been something that we’ve been planning and working towards the whole time. The Ambience was a hint of how this can come together,” he noted, adding: ”Hardware like many things, it’s become a commodity, so the problem with commodities is it generally forces things down — things become kind of lowest common denominator… We set out to make the greatest device that we could, and we understood that the software and the user experience is key because that’s where the value comes from in the device and the hardware is the realisation of that, it’s a productisation of the software.

“So we kind of took this tack, then of course the hardware has to be fantastic it has to support the software and support the user and be something the user can be proud of and my belief is that when people see the Jolla device they want to see what’s inside.”

“This iteration, the direct stuff here, has been about a year in development. It started getting really good for me about six months ago and I’ve been using the device for a while now, and it’s really started to feel fantastic, when the hardware and the software have come together. They were done by the same designers and the same people so it has been kept in mind that the two go together, that the two have a synergy the entire time. We’ve had a roadmap the entire time as well so we’ve had a set of hardware specifications to work with,” he added.

It’s worth flagging that Jolla is not the only mobile maker to take an interest in 3D printing and custom hardware, even if it’s taken that further by creating a link between custom hardware and phone content. 3D printing is something Nokia has done with the Lumia 820 shell, for instance. Dillon said Jolla may also look to open source the 3D design of the Other Half, telling TechCrunch “I could see that happening”.

Asked specifically about the bridging technology between the hardware shell and the software, Dillon declined to give specific details, saying: “There’s a number of options here but there is a connection between the Other Half and the software. And of course all of that needs to be open as well.”

Asked whether the device will launch in the U.S. he said Jolla is looking at other markets but opting for Europe and China first. ”We’re starting with Europe and China and we will be extending to other markets as we go. We’re in the delivery phase at the moment so we’re building the infrastructure, and the logistics in order to be able to deliver and care for the users of the device, and we’re of course going to look at other markets as we go.”

“It’s the target to get the Christmas market in Europe, Chinese New Year. That’s the big milestones,” he added. “The most important thing is we come out with a fantastic product… When we’re shipping at the end of the year if it’s a fantastic product then it’s really going to resonate and I think we’re really going to have a lot of demand.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Joshua Pearce, PhD, is a researcher at Michigan Tech who rearches open source and low-impact solutions to engineering problems. He is also the founder of the Printers For Peace contest, an effort to bring together clever 3D-printed ideas that have loftier aims. You can win one of two 3D printers if you submit a winning project.

We asked Pearce a few questions about his goals for the project and about the future of 3D printing.

John Biggs: Why Printers For Peace?

Joshua Pearce: I think it is clear that low-cost open-source 3D printing has enormous potential to do real good for the world – particularly for the poor as it radically reduces the cost of high-value products like scientific tools and consumer goods. This threatens a lot of entrenched interests because the average Joe can fabricate extremely complex products at home for pennies, which is disruptive to say the least. I have noticed a clear bias in 3D printing news coverage – any advances on the low-end of the spectrum are generally ignored or vilified. The media frenzy about 3D printed guns is actually having terrifying consequences – and I don’t mean the guns. A California senator has already proposed registration, background checks, and licensing for 3D printers!

Michigan Tech and Type A Machines sponsored the contest to get the more positive truth about 3D printers into the conversation. There are over 90,000 open-source 3D printable designs available and only one low-quality gun. We do not want to lose the baby with the bathwater. Our aim is to raise awareness of the power of 3D printing to change the world for the better.

JB: What do you think will happen now that the 3D printed gun is out of the bag? It was inevitable, obviously, but what does it mean?
JP: The 3D printed gun is a red herring. Anyone who wants a gun can make a much better one using more traditional tools found in any machine shop and many garages — or just buy one. I am, however, very concerned that the debate about 3D printed guns will be used to squash the incredible technological development we are seeing in the open-source 3D printing community.

JB: What’s the coolest Printers for Peace project you’ve seen so far?

JP: The contest just opened, but there are some really cool designs already developed that I think would make good starting points for derivatives. I really like some of the small-scale 3D printed windmill designs – and there is a graduate student working on what looks to be a printable recyclebot. I would love to see a reliable 3D printed treadle pump as this is one of the most successful appropriate technologies for lifting rural farmers out of poverty in the developing world.

JB: What’s next? 3D printed bazookas? 3D printed heart stents? Where do you see this headed, in either direction?

JP: I think it is clear that existing manufacturers will continue to move from using high-end 3D printing for rapid prototyping into actual manufacturing creating entirely new classes of jobs (e.g. automobile parts, human body parts, etc.). This is exciting, but not nearly as exciting as what is happening on the low-end of the spectrum. As open-source 3D printable designs continue to grow exponentially the value of owning a 3D printer is climbing as their quality improves and actual costs continue to decline. Thus, low-cost open-source 3D printers will become ubiquitous household items, which people use to make a wide array of consumer goods, replacement parts, and highly customized products. Following shortly after I hope to see recyclebots become similarly widespread – with people recycling their waste plastic inhome to make their own products. The implications for improving human well-being are staggering.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

500 Startups today is announcing the next 28 companies to take part in its Accelerator program, unleashing a largely international class of startups who have come to Mountain View to accelerate their startup progress. There are 28 companies in this Accelerator class, and as usual there’s a bunch of diversity there. (And, as has become tradition, the class made a ghetto fabulous music video to accompany the announcement.)

The group is more than 70 percent international, with 20 companies coming from outside the U.S. That’s no big surprise, as about 15 percent of the 500 Startups portfolio in general is made up of companies outside the U.S., but over the last several batches, the accelerator has skewed heavily toward overseas and non-Silicon Valley companies.

This class includes startups from Brazil, Chile, China, Ghana, India, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine and Vietnam. With Dropifi (Ghana), as well as Dakwak and Tamatem (both from Jordan), the 500 Startups Accelerator has added its first companies from Africa and the Middle East.

Notably, this batch was the first which was chosen entirely through applications posted to AngelList, so it no doubt includes a few startups that 500 Startups founding partner and Sith Lord Dave McClure probably wouldn’t have heard about otherwise.

The program began mid-April, and 500 Startups expects to have its Demo Days in Mountain View, San Francisco, and New York City sometime in July. In the meantime, enjoy the music video they put together to announce themselves, below. Oh, and here’s the list of startups:

• AppSocially – Make your app’s Viral Loop awesome with an API that lets you track activity and conversion – allowing you to take action using customer data.
• BinPress – We increase adoption of open source in SMBs and enterprises.
• BoxC – We make buying directly from sellers in China as fast and safe as buying from Amazon.
• Credii – We arm businesses with all the intelligence they need to make smart software and service choices.
• Dakwak – Effortless website translation technology.
• Dropifi – An intelligent replacement for mailtos
  and dumb contact forms. It makes customer support more effective, increases lead generation and generates valuable business insights.
• Feast – The online cooking school for the common man. It offers simple cooking guides that teach impressive techniques and recipes with an online community where you can ask questions and get feedback as you cook.
• Floqq – Makes it easy for anyone anywhere to learn the skills they need.
• Flyer – We empower commercial real estate agencies to create beautiful property flyers online.
• Geekatoo – We offer local and onsite tech support at a great value. Customers receive competing bids on tech support needs from verified providers.
• GreenGar – Seamless realtime collaboration on mobile devices. We’re building a platform that enables apps to intuitively connect people together.
• InstaGIS – Geographic information system that allows retail stores to target their audiences.
• KiteReaders – Publishing platform for publishers & authors to create, distribute, and market their children’s picture books for iBooks, Kindle, and Nook.
• Koemei – Algorithmic transcription of videos for search and accessibility, helping education and large enterprises gain value from their video investments.
• Mayvenn – Empowers the 95 percent of African American salons that do not retail products. Our mobile commerce solution eliminates a salons inventory cost and opens a new revenue stream for their business.
• PinMyPet – Social-based software for monitoring and improving the experience between pets and owners. It works with powerful, small and low-cost hardware for realtime health and location detection.
• POPAPP – App to fast sketch app prototypes.
• PriceBaba – PriceBaba is a product (re)search engine that lets you shop in your vicinity.
• Reesio – Turns the real estate transaction process into one beautiful flow for agents, clients, and third parties.
• School Admissions – Making school admissions and education tension-free. Disrupting the process of choosing the right school for your child and parents.
• Seat 14A – A complete and affordable ensemble for the discerning man every week.
• SeMeAntoja – We empower restaurants to accept orders online.
• Sverve – Sverve is a self-service influencer marketing platform for small businesses. We connect small businesses with female social media influencers to promote their products and services on the social web.
• Tamatem – Tamatem is a mobile gaming development studio and publisher focused on creating culturally relevant games for the huge unaddressed Arabic gaming market.
• TRDATA – We are the Bloomberg for emerging markets. We collect accurate real-time market information from remote places from scattered and illiquid markets.
• Tushky – Self-service online platform to monetize free time by offering interesting activities.
• WHILL – Next generation of personal mobility for wheelchair users and the elderly.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

To paraphrase Cracker, I would wager what the world needs now is another content management system like I need a hole in the head. However, I’m pleased to note that I will allow Ghost a pass.

Ghost is an open source publishing platform with Markdown compatibility and a real-time preview features as well as a very robust statistics-gathering system. It is on Kickstarter now and is fully funded. Funders will get early access to the platform which will be free. $16 gets you access to the service.

“I came up with Ghost due to the frustrations of trying to manage both small and large blogs with other platforms. They generally fall into two categories. Either complicated content management systems which can “do everything” – or overly simple social networks which are pretty much just for sharing photos of cats. Ghost is about bloggers, it’s about publishing, it’s about journalism, and it’s about promoting and enabling real writing for the web,” said the founder, John O’Nolan. O’Nolan worked as Deputy Head of the WordPress UI Group until he decided to strike off on his own.

“Ghost is different from competitors in that it’s open source, completely focused on publishing (not content management like Squarespace/WordPress), and non-profit. And it’s lead by a designer (me) as opposed to most open source projects, headed up by devs,” he said. O’Nolan has built websites for Microsoft, Nokia, and Virgin Atlantic. He is working with Hannah Wolfe, senior developer at Moo.com, and Rob Hawkes of Mozilla.

The product allows WordPress programmers to convert their code quickly and easily into Ghost’s native framework. The open source version of the software will launch in September 2013, a month after the launch of the Kickstarter version.

The real value of the platform isn’t quite ready to demo but thus far it looks quite promising. The Markdown compatibility is obviously important as is the multi-user features that O’Nolan is building in. Furthermore, any new publishing platform is worth a second look – or a $16 investment – especially when it looks so darn beautiful.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google has become the king of maps because of the technology that it has developed over the past eight years. One competitor, OpenStreetMap, has developed its own tools and built a community of map enthusiasts that now powers services like Hipmunk, Evernote and Foursquare. Today, as promised, the company has released a brand new map editor, code-named “iD,” which was built from the ground up by MapBox.

The editor will allow its community, and those who have never edited a map before, to plot out roads, landmarks and everything in between. I’ve had a chance to play with the editor over the past few weeks, and it’s amazing. Google has its own community tool, dubbed Map Maker, which helps the company get into the nooks and crannies of the world that it hasn’t gotten to yet.

Now that OpenStreetMap has its own set of tools which makes map editing easy, I expect the service to ramp up the quality of its maps, making it a real alternative for apps and services looking for a service provider. Here’s what OpenStreetMap US Foundation Secretary, Alex Barth, had to say about the release of the editor:

Starting today 1 million community mappers gain access to this new editor. It radically flattens the learning curve for existing users and for the two thousand new ones OpenStreetMap adds every day. Investing in core infrastructure like this is a game changer for OpenStreetMap and legacy proprietary data companies won’t be able to keep up with the combination of top notch editing experience and openly licensed database. In short, we will get more people adding more data, faster.

Adding and changing roads in an existing map is as simple as dragging and dropping, using iD:

The editor itself is open source and built in pure JavaScript with the d3 visualization library. As MapBox has been building the tool, its had involvement from coders around the world already:

The editing tool below, which has been what OpenStreetMap has had for its community to use, was not so easy to get the hang of:

MapBox CEO, Eric Gunderson, thinks that that the iD editor will kickstart the community, which will lead to more content: “This editor is so easy to use, anyone can start mapping in minutes. This is going to increase both data quality and quantity in OpenStreetMap and that means MapBox is going to have the best map in the world.”

The “best map in the world” would mean that it surpasses both the quality and breadth of Google’s offering. That’s no small feat, but we’ve seen open source products in the past reach millions…just ask WordPress.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

While Defense Distributed, the Thingiverse for gun parts, has been working on a 3D-printed lower receiver for the AR-15 for some time now, they’ve finally announced that they’ve completed a real 3D-printed handgun called the Liberator. Made entirely out of 3D-printed ABS with the exclusion of a single nail used as the firing pin, it looks to be the fruition of DefDist’s mission to open source the gun-making process.

Forbes has an actual hands-on and has said that the founder, Cody Wilson, will release the open source plans on his site. It fires handgun rounds and can be modified to shoot different calibers.

They have also added a piece of steel so that the gun will be detectable by metal detectors, ensuring it complies with the Undetectable Firearms Act.

It’s hard to say how usable or how reliable this firearm will be, especially when ABS quality is iffy when it comes to various types of printers. However, with a good printer, good plastic, and a little luck this thing may not explode in your hand.

We’ll have more information as it emerges, but until then, get ready for some interesting discussions about gun rights this weekend.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Recently, consumer electronics have tended to be more about closing things down then opening them up, but New York-based Adafruit is working to help reverse that trend, and to make it so that people aren’t afraid of what’s inside their devices, and instead become more comfortable with electronics components and the concepts behind how gadgets actually work. Adafruit founder and CEO Limor Fried was on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today, and talked about how her company is going about achieving that goal.

The mission helps the company generate revenue, by priming an audience early on to become buyers of the components, DIY kits and open-source devices Adafruit sells through its online store. The key is to start young, Fried says, and to take advantage of urges that children already have around exploring their environment and the things around them.

“At a certain age, they just want to be comfortable with it, and everyone here probably liked to take stuff apart,” he said. “That’s how we learn, we take stuff apart and then we learn from them. That’s how software works, too.” With software, we pull apart the code to find out how it’s put together, she said, and we should be doing the same thing with hardware.

“We open the box,” she said, referring to our instincts when young. “The gadgets you have now, tablets and smartphones, theyr’e not easy to open anymore, so we provide that.” The idea is to make sure that if the need to break something down and repair it does arise, we aren’t afraid of it, and we don’t feel like we need eight years of specific education just to replace a broken capacitor.

Adafruit recently launched a video series for children called Circuit Playground to help familiarize them with electronics at a very early age. The company also put out a coloring book for electronics, which you can print out and use under a creative commons license. This is designed less to provide a rigorous early-age electrical engineering education regimen, and more to help get kids comfortable with terms, designs and shapes early on so that they’ll find it easier to pursue that kind of formal training later on. Basically, it’s about planting the seed for a generation of makers to come.

Asked about Adafruit’s identity, and whether it’s an educational organization or a business, Fried said her company is an ‘educational, tutorial company” that then has essentially a gift shop at the end. The model works in the same way that art supply stores functions; you could technically make your own paint, she says, but most people don’t because it’s easier to buy. Budding electronics hobbyists can likewise build their own PCBs, but they instead turn to supply stores and pre-fab components like those supplied by Adafruit. But in the end, the emphasis is on education and open source.

Fried envisions a world where people treat hardware the same way they do software, by mostly leveraging open source tools to quickly start up their own companies. But that change represents a major shift that will require fundamental changes in how we think about hardware, and Adafruit is trying to bring that about starting as early in our educational lives as possible.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Donay, a Dutch startup that’s officially launching at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 NY, wants to make it easier for companies and users to provide incentives to open source developers. Say your company is using a popular open-source application, but you find a bug or need a new feature. Currently, there is no easy way to pay open source developers for their work and, Donay argues, that makes it hard for companies that don’t have in-house development shops to get bugs fixed or new features added.

The service, which was co-founded by Jan and Corne Blok, can already be integrated with a number of popular bug-tracking systems like JIRA and Bugzilla, as well as Redmine, Mantis, and Trac. In the long run, however, as the founders told me last week, the plan is to work directly with large sites like GitHub or SourceForge and open-source focussed organizations like Mozilla or even Google and have them put Donay’s incentive widget on their sites.

Setting up an incentive on Donay is pretty easy. Users just add the incentive to the system and set the award amount. Optionally, the can also add an expiration date to their rewards. Once a developer has resolved the issue or added a fix, the bug tracking system will automatically notify the company and they will have ten days to inspect the solution. If the issue remains unresolved for 10 days, the money is released and put into the developer’s PayPal account.

It’s worth noting that sites like Github could also use Donay to create a new revenue stream. They could, for example, put a Donay link on every issue page and then ask users to chip in to get this issue fixed, for example. To make this easier, Donay offers a link and widget builder for potential partners sites. One other option for Donay would also be a to partner with app stores and allow them to give their users an option to report bugs and maybe crowdsource funding for bugfixes.

For now, the team is almost exclusively focusing on open source, but the company’s ambitions are obviously larger and will likely expand to internal bug tracking systems and maybe even commercially available software, too.

By default, Donay takes a 6.9% cut from every transaction, but its partners will be able to set additional fees on top of this.

As the founders told me, there is currently no single system for releasing open source bounties. The sites that use bounty schemes all use different systems and, Donay says, their reach is often limited because all of the source code needs to be hosted on their sites. The team came up with the idea for Donay in 2008 because the founders tried to figure out a way to get beyond the “bounty” model and figure out a better way to find developers who could fix bugs in the software they were using in their day jobs.

The two founders bootstrapped the company in 2010 and have been working on it as a side project ever since. Jan is currently the CTO of business application platform Servoy and Corne is the financial controller there.

Disrupt Q&A:

Q: What size incentive would developers need to start fixing a bug?
A: For bugs, we are thinking $40 to $50 and for new features, we think developers will want around $200. (The judges think this is too little money.)

Q: Isn’t contributing for free part of the open-source ethos?
A: You should think of the system as a way to bring attention to a bug.

Q: How do you do distribution now and why would I allow you to add your system to my issue page?
A: Plugins for some open-source bug tracking system are already available.

Q: Are you using this for your own projects?
A: Not yet – just launched today.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

During the Disrupt NY Hackathon, we heard from a guy who didn’t exactly hack anything, but who wanted to give you back the control over your private data. A TC (design firm Triple Canopy, not TechCrunch) Labs project exhibiting today in Startup Alley at Disrupt NY 2013 is actually doing that. It’s called Occupy.here, and it’s an open-source project to essentially give users access to a private Internet where your content remains available to exactly the people on your local network and no further.

Occupy.here is a peer-to-peer network of virtualized digital sharing spaces where you can use a shared message board to post and have discussions, but only for those within range of the local network. It’s easy to set up once you program your own Occupy.here Wi-Fi router, just by joining the network and navigating to http://occupy.here.

As you might have guessed from the name, the Occupy.here project grew in tandem with the larger Occupy Wall Street movement. TC Labs Director Sam Frank explained that he started the project around 2011 during the height of the Occupy movement, and developed the idea by talking to Occupy protesters who all expressed a need to connect and communicate in a way that would be both social and also truly private. Hence the idea for an Intranet-like project that’s easy, portable, open source and takes no time to set up. Still, as of right now the hardware component it uses is a router with firmware that’s only available in Chinese, so it’s not exactly a walk in the park getting it going.

“I think the grand design is to figure out ways of making the hardware easy to use and turning it into something that a non-technical person can comfortably set up and operate,” Frank said. The code for the project is available on GitHub, Another larger goal is to set it up as a distributed network of Wi-Fi locations that can be used as a second sort of shadow Internet where the information is kept private to those who have access. There would be a syncing mechanism that allows the content stored in the forum to follow a user to each hotspot, but also to go no further.

Occupy.here was built with activism and organizing a social movement in mind, but Frank says there’s really no limit to who could find it useful, including businesses and other users. Asked whether or not TC Labs will ever consider consumerizing the product, he wasn’t sure yet about what the future would hold. It is still a Labs experiment at Triple Canopy, but it also has much broader implications beyond its current, fairly simple incarnation.

“I kind of envision a future where we don’t entrust our data to corporations that are handling the data ourselves,” Frank said. It’s a big shift from where things stand now, but this is an interesting experimental project working in that direction.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch