Facebook just announced that it is indeed launching ability to follow conversations via hashtags, as was reported in March.

To be clear, there was nothing stopping you from including hashtags in your Facebook content before — it’s just that they didn’t have any real functionality. In its blog post announcing the new feature, the company acknowledges that this isn’t exactly a new idea, noting that it will be “similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest” — when you click on a hashtag, you’ll get a feed of comments using the hashtag. Facebook says its capabilities will include searching for hashtags, clicking on hashtags that come from other services, and writing posts directly from the hashtag feed.

Here’s how Facebook explains the reasoning behind the addition:

Every day, hundreds of millions of people use Facebook to share their thoughts on big moments happening all around them. Whether it’s talking about a favorite television show, cheering on a hometown sports team or engaging with friends during a breaking news event—people on Facebook connect with their friends about what’s taking place all over the world. …

To bring these conversations more to the forefront, we will be rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics. As a first step, we are beginning to roll out hashtags on Facebook.

Note that Facebook says it’s only “beginning to roll out” the feature, so you might not see it right away. (The company generally doesn’t turn on features for its entire user base at once, but instead rolls them out gradually.) Note also that the company says it’s going to be introducing more features in this vein.

To illustrate the scale of the conversation on Facebook, the company notes that between 88 million and 100 million Americans are using the service during primetime television hours. Game of Thrones‘ Red Wedding last week was mentioned 1.5 million times, while there were 66.5 million interactions (which include likes, comments and posts) around this year’s Oscars.

The blog post doesn’t go into something we wondered about when we started hearing about the feature in March — privacy. The idea of a “public conversation” works differently on Facebook than it does on a service like Twitter, since many Facebook posts have some degree of privacy restriction.

A company spokesperson told me that from a privacy perspective, hashtags will work similarly to Facebook Graph Search. In other words, you’ll only see the comments that you’re authorized to see. So if I include a hashtag in a friends-only post, then my friends will still be the only ones who can see it in a hashtag search.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In Q4 of last year, Facebook’s mobile MAUs surpassed desktop for the first time in its history. That trend continued in Q1 2013 with 751M MAUs. This is what we learned with today’s release of Facebook’s Q1 results.

Despite claims earlier this month, Facebook didn’t lose users, but gained 2M. Asia continues to be the largest area of user growth, according to the slides provided by Facebook today. During the earnings call, COO Sherly Sandberg mentioned that mobile ads are performing well particularly in Asia.

Here’s a full rundown for Q1 year-over-year user growth:

- Daily active users (DAUs) were 665 million on average for March 2013, an increase of 26% year-over-year.
- Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.11 billion as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 23% year-over-year.
- Mobile MAUs were 751 million as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 54% year-over-year.

As you can see, the overall growth of monthly active users is incremental from the past quarter:

Something we’d like to find out is if certain age groups are growing faster than others. Some feel that even though the social network is an essential utility for many all over the world, the younger crowd might be starting to spend time socializing on other platforms. This was of course one of the reasons that Facebook acquired photo-sharing app Instagram last year, since the younger crowd had flocked to it as their sole social network. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that Instagram’s community is growing faster than Facebook did when it was at a similar size. There’s another reason.

The mobile user growth kicked up its ad revenue numbers as well, accounting for 30%, or $375M.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fast fashion has become a huge force in retailing, as seen by the increasing ubiquity of stores such as H&M, Forever 21, Zara, TopShop, and the like. But while those companies are clearly dominating High Streets all over the world, their chief focus is in the brick-and-mortar realm, and the web has been an afterthought at best.

A Los Angeles-based startup called DailyLook is setting its sights on being the go-to fast fashion brand based completely on the web — the e-commerce answer to H&M. To do that, the company has raised a healthy $2.5 million seed round from a number of investors, including GRP Partners, RRE, SV Angel, Novel TMT Ventures, Matt Coffin, Thomas Mclnerney, and Rachel Zoe.

DailyLook, which carries items from other brands and also produces its own label through relationships with many of the same manufacturers used by the big fast fashion retailers, has been around and quietly building an audience since its bootstrapped launch back in 2011, founder and CEO Brian Ree told me in a recent interview. Through word of mouth, the company, which has a full-time staff of 20, has grown its user base to some 400,000 members that subscribe to its email newsletter.

DailyLook’s first business model was a “flash sale” type deal, with items from one new head-to-toe look sold each day for a limited period of time. Now, DailyLook is de-emphasizing the daily sale angle and shifted its strategy to a more standard e-retail model, offering a variety of clothes and accessories at all times on its site (though certain complete looks are offered at discounted prices for limited times.) Through it all, according to Ree, curation is still a key part of what the site aims to do.

“A lot of the fast fashion brands have gotten so big that their selection is overwhelming for the customer. The store is so huge, there are so many trendy styles, and it’s difficult for the average shopper to put together a beautiful curated outfit,” Ree said. “Our core concept is to be this brand that offers a styling experience, head-to-toe, with all of the actual products you need available right there.”

Right now those styling tips are offered by the site’s staff, which pulls together suggested looks. Another new feature called “Community” lets DailyLook customers share photos of how they wear items bought from the site. Going forward, Ree said, the company plans to build out more personalization technology to help target specific looks and styles to individual customers. Also on deck are plans to expand internationally within the next year.

While a key part of the consumer market seems to be gravitating more toward slightly more expensive, often American-made “investment” type pieces when it comes to clothing and accessories (see Everlane, Shinola, and the like), fast fashion has certainly been in high demand for a number of years now — and realistically, it will probably not slow down any time soon. DailyLook seems to have a smart angle to catch that wave from the web side, and it will be an interesting brand to watch in the months ahead.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

[Editor's Note: This is a weekly series. If your company is doing something amazing to help a charitable cause or doing some good in your community, please reach out.]

It seems like every time we make purchases online or in a store, we’re collecting some sort of points or rewards. For the most part, those points go unused, mostly because the companies who give them out don’t do a great job of explaining what you can actually do with them.

You know the drill, you purchase a video game and you get some GameStop points that you can use after you purchase three more games, or something along those lines. Inevitably, you forget to use them when the time comes or you refuse to sign up to get their card.

A company called KULA Causes wants to point those points, rewards and frequent flyer miles to good use — for charity. KULA converts those points into actual currency, spreading goodwill all over the world.

According to the research firm Colloquy, at least $16B worth of reward points and miled went unredeemed in 2011 alone. KULA has built a service to turn those unused rewards into cash contributions for over 2.5M causes around the world. By working with brands on building this three-way bridge between companies, causes and consumers, KULA is making a real difference in over 80 countries all over the world. Since there are so many causes in KULA’s database, it’s easy to find a few that you really care about, and then you’re motivated to put your unclaimed rewards to good use.

KULA calls the process “democratized transactional giving,” which the company hopes will build goodwill between companies and consumers, even if the reward points that someone has collected aren’t used by them for in-store purchases. The company was founded in 2010 and has raised $1.6M to date.

It’s up to the companies to integrate KULA into their reward offerings, but it’s a win-win for everyone involved.

The company also has a great blog called “The Currency Of Giving” that is worth a read. The mixing of companies focusing on both profitability and non-profit programs is an important one, as consumers do care more about companies that do social good.

Would you give your points and rewards away for charity?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Video conferencing startup Vidyo continues to grow, thanks to the help of service provider partnerships and through sales to various enterprise, government, and health agencies. The company claimed another record year for 2012, as it competes against traditional video conferencing solutions. It’s trying to make adopting its technology easier and cheaper, especially for large resellers and enterprises, with the introduction of products that work through a new, virtualized infrastructure.

Vidyo claims to have grown billings by 68 percent in 2012. A lot of that has come through partners: Vidyo says business through its top 25 reseller partners ha expanded 435 percent over the course of 2012. Partnering with service providers has the benefit of recurring revenue and being in new markets. Now more than half of billings come from international markets, according to the company.

Hoping to further capitalize on that growth, Vidyo will soon make available a new virtualized infrastructure that will lower the cost for enterprises to deploy video conferencing services. The new products, the VidyoGateway and VidyoPortal Virtual Editions (VE), should provide video conferencing services at the same price as audio conferencing.

Rather than deploying expensive, hardware-based equipment, the virtualized architecture will allow clients to quickly According to Vidyo CEO Ofer Shapiro, will also help enterprise customers to cost-effectively manage conferencing across multiple sites. There are huge benefits Vidyo’s service provider partners as well, as they can make those services available in geographies all over the world.

For Vidyo, introduction of its new infrastructure follows a broader trend toward virtualization, rather than running on traditional server hardware. It also provides more flexibility for clients who will be able to run either on-premises equipment, private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud offerings. The VidyoGateway VE and VidyoPortal VE will be available for sale in the second quarter of this year.

Vidyo is based in Hackensack, N.J., and now has more than 250 employees worldwide. It’s raised about $100 million to date, with investors such as QuestMark Partners, Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures, Four Rivers Group, and Juniper Networks.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

MYO, the gesture control armband from Y Combinator-backed Waterloo startup Thalmic Labs, has managed to rack up over 10,000 pre-orders over the course of its first two days of pre-order availability. At $149 a pop, that means the young company has already managed to secure around $1.5 million in gross revenue, so long as they actually ship hardware.

The MYO, as Ryan pointed out on Monday, is a wearable control device for smartphones, PCs and other electronics that uses lower-power Bluetooth 4.0 to connect, which also has a boatload of sensors on board to help it detect electrical activity in arm and hand muscles to detect movements at the earliest possible stage. It’s the latest in a series of devices trying to make sci-fi type interfaces a reality, and could be among the most accurate yet.

Thalmic Labs co-founder and CEO Stephen Lake explained in an interview that while the team expected some kind of response to its launch, there was no way they could have anticipated quite this level of interest.

“I think we knew that there was going to be a lot of people interested in the technology, since it’s such a cool technology, and there are so many good potential applications for it,” he said. “We’re not completely surprised, but the amount of attention it’s got is more than anyone could’ve expected.”

Lake had some ideas about why people are so interested in traditional modes of interaction for computers. He said he believes people are looking around for something different, and that MYO is a case of the “right technology at the right time.”

“There’s a lot happening right now with the form factor and how we’re connected to technology,” he said. “A lot of the technology that’s coming out, and Google Glass is a perfect example in the realm of wearable technology, is really going to change not just how we input information into the computer, but just how we interact with technology, and make our devices an extension of ourselves instead of an outside thing you’re interacting with.”

The interest from consumers eager to try out the MYO has likewise attracted a lot of interest from distributors and retail partners, Lake said. His inbox has been flooded with “thousands” of emails from companies wanting to be a distribution partner for MYO all over the world. He wasn’t at liberty to share any details on early stage discussions at this point, but it seems reasonable to expect the MYO will get a splashy launch when it’s ready to come to market.

Developer interest has also grown by leaps and bounds thanks to the initial response from buyers and media, Lake said. Building out that community is key, just as it is for other innovative input and interaction hardware like the Leap Motion Controller, and Lake says Thalmic will have a dedicated developer website with support forums and more information up and running as soon as possible to help deal with the influx of attention.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As you may well know from Twitter (or the inordinate amount of heels clacking through a snowy New York this morning), Fashion Week is underway. It’s like the Superbowl for designers, retailers, and everyone in between.

But the fashion industry is ancient, and is thus quite averse to new technology of any kind. However, a company called FashionGPS has chipped its way into the world of fashion offering a one-stop destination for designers, editors, retailers, etc. to communicate during the most important week of the year.

“We’ve been working on this for seven years,” said founder and CEO Eddie Mullon. “But only recently has the fashion industry become ready for this kind of tech.”

FashionGPS is broken into several different iOS apps and web services that follow a product throughout its entire life cycle. First, GPS Events lets designers (who essentially coordinate the entire week) manage their runway shows directly from an app.

Designers can send invitations to everyone important, track RSVPs in real time, and use an interactive seating chart to make sure everyone is in their proper place. If someone cancels or doesn’t show up, the designer can immediately give the seat away to someone else.

In the past, this has been done with paper invitations, calls for RSVPs, and taken between four to eight weeks.

When attendees arrive at the show, they can then check into the show with GPS Events (effectively skipping the line).

From there, the process changes from coordinating an event to coordinating the various product samples going out to different blogs, magazines, and department store buying offices.

Using GPS Radar, buyers and editors can have access to a lookbook immediately, and request which samples they’d like for advertising purposes.

Again, what once took between six and eight weeks can now be done directly from the runway show.

After samples are requested, the process gets even more complicated. Everyone from magazines to department stores need access to a single prototype before the collection goes on sale in stores. Tracking that sample across various locations and countries is almost impossible, and many samples are lost because of this.

Fashion GPS offers an app called GPS Samples to solve this problem. GPS Samples lets editors and buyers scan the barcode of a prototype so that the designer can track it as it goes all over the world.

But not all brands have fashion shows, samples or lookbooks. Mass market brands like H&M or Forever 21 turn around product so quickly that runway shows are almost out of the question. But GPS Styles lets those mass market brands upload their entire collections online (what could end up being thousands of products) so that various blogs and magazines can find and request certain pieces to be featured.

Mullon tells me that over 95 percent of the shows at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York are using the Fashion GPS platform as we speak, but that’s no reason to rest on their laurels. “Our roadmap focuses on fixing communication issues between buyers and vendors, and eventually we’ll work our way into the B2C space as well.”

GPS Radar is available exclusively in the Apple App Store here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Over the years, Google has introduced input tools to allow you to interact with its services in a multitude of languages and non-Latin characters and today has introduced a whole new set of tools to take that to the next level.

You should be able to use any Google product, no matter what language you speak or where you’re located on the planet, and that’s exactly what’s happening with today’s announcement.

The company says that it supports 65 languages, with alternative input methods being extremely limited up until now. For example, only one of four popular input methods for Chinese was previously available. Great, but not for everyone.

Here’s what the Google Translate team had to say about it.

We believe that your choice of input tools is important, because the best way to input text with a keyboard varies from language to language, and even from person to person. Every language has its own set of popular input methods, each familiar to its own subset of users. For example, the Portuguese keyboard has two common layouts, one popular in Brazil and another in Portugal. In addition, given the popularity of Latin-alphabet keyboards, a transliteration input tool is often the preferred input method for many languages, allowing users to convert Latin-alphabet input into the proper written script. (Chinese has over 80,000 characters. Try fitting them all on a keyboard.) With the right transliteration input tools turned on, you can simply type “privet” to input привет, “tieng chao” for tiếng chào, and “nihao” for 你好.

It’s easy to start using our new input tools. Once you have chosen your input language, you will see the input tools icon at the bottom of the text area. Click the icon to turn on the input tool or switch to another input tool in the drop-down menu.

Here’s a look at these input tools in action:

By making all of this information available in every language, Google is facilitating an ongoing conversation with people spread all over the world. With the data that it collects in say, Russia, it is learning how to serve its users in New Jersey. It’s hard to comprehend because we see language as a barrier, but with tools like this, that barrier has been knocked down, if not out.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Jelle Frank van der Zwet is Segment Marketing Manager, Cloud, for Interxion, and David Strom is a freelance writer. 

Do you ever encounter delays in loading web-based applications and get impatient? Resulting from poor network latency, or how fast data is transferred from one location to another, these delays are frustrating to as end users, but are far more costly to Internet businesses that depend on lightning-quick web experiences for their customers. With the proliferation of cloud computing placing added demands on Internet speed and connectivity, latency is becoming a more critical concern for everyone, from the end user to the enterprise.

Pre-Internet, latency was characterized by the number of router hops between you and your application, and the delay that packets took to get from source to destination. For the most part, your corporation owned all of the intervening routers, so network delays remained fairly consistent and predictable. As businesses migrate and deploy more and more applications to the cloud, the issue of latency is becoming increasingly complex. In order to leverage cloud computing as a true business enabler, it is critical that organizations learn how to manage and reduce latency.

The first step in reducing latency is to identify its causes. To do this, we must examine latency not as it relates to the web, but as it relates to the inherent components of cloud computing. After some analysis, you’ll see that it isn’t just poor latency in the cloud but the unpredictable nature of the various network connections between on-premise and cloud applications that can cause problems. We’ve provided below five layers of complexity that are unpredictable in nature and must therefore be considered when migrating applications to the cloud.

• Distributed computing is one component adding to cloud latency’s complexity. With enterprise data centers a thing of the past, the nature of applications has completely changed from being contained within a local infrastructure to being distributed all over the world. The proliferation of Big Data applications using tools such as R and Hadoop are incentivizing distributed computing even more. The problem lies in the fact that these applications, which are deployed all over the world, have varying degrees of latency with each of their Internet connections. Furthermore, latencies are entirely dependent on Internet traffic, which waxes and wanes to compete for the same bandwidth and infrastructure.
• Virtualization adds another layer of complexity to latency in the cloud. Gone are the days of rack-mounted servers; enterprises are building virtualized environments for consolidation and cost efficiency, and today’s data centers are now a complex web of hypervisors running dozens of virtual machines. Unfortunately, virtualized network infrastructure can introduce its own series of packet delays before the data even leaves the rack itself.
• Another complexity layer lies in the lack of measurement tools for modern applications. While ping and traceroute can be used to test Internet connection, modern applications don’t have anything to do with ICMP, the protocol behind these tracing devices. Instead, modern applications and networks use other protocols such as HTTP and FTP and therefore need to try to measure their performances accordingly.
• Prioritizing traffic and Quality of Service (QoS) delve deeper into cloud latency’s complexity. Pre-cloud, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and QoS were created to prioritize traffic and to make sure that latency-sensitive applications would have the network resources to run properly. However, cloud and virtualized services make this a dated process, given that we need to now differentiate between certain items like an outage in a server, a network card, a piece of the storage infrastructure, or a security exploit. Different cloud applications have different tolerances for network latency, depending on their level of criticality; while an application controlling back-office reporting may tolerate lower uptime, not all corporate processes can allow for downtime without having a significant impact on the business. This makes it increasingly important for SLAs to prioritize particular applications based on performance and availability.
• Evasive cloud providers, who sometimes neglect to inform you about where their cloud data centers are located, can also complicate latency. To really understand latency, you should know the answers to the following questions:
  • Are your VMs stored on different SANs or different hypervisors, for example?
  • Do you have any say in decisions that will impact your own latency?
  • How many router hops are in your cloud provider’s internal network and what bandwidth is used in their own infrastructure?

Despite latency’s complexity, it provides a great opportunity for innovative cloud-based solutions, such as the Radar benchmarking tool from Cedexis, which provides insight into what goes on across various IaaS providers, as well as tools like Gomez, which are helpful in comparing providers. While tools are of course helpful in providing insight on trends, the overarching solution to measuring and mitigating cloud latency is providing more consistent network connections.

The best available option is to connect to a public cloud platform. Amazon’s Direct Connect is the best that we’ve seen in providing more predictable metrics for bandwidth and latency. [Disclosure: Interxion recently announced a direct connect to the AWS platform in each of its data centers.] Another viable option is Windows Azure – both products are particularly useful for companies looking to build hybrid solutions, as they allow some data to be stored on premise while other solution components can be migrated to the cloud.

Finally, by colocating within a third-party data center, companies can rest assured that their cloud applications are equipped to handle all of latency’s challenges and reap extra benefits in terms of monitoring, troubleshooting, support, and cost. Colocation facilities that offer specific Cloud Hubs can provide excellent connectivity and cross-connections with cloud providers, exchanges and carriers that improve performance and reduce latency to end users. Furthermore, colocation data centers ensure that companies not only have the best coverage for their business, but also a premium network at their fingertips.

In this connected, always-on world, users increasingly demand immediate results for optimal website and application performance. For businesses looking to boost ROI and maintain customer satisfaction, every millisecond counts. While several dimensions and complicating factors of latency can introduce a number of disturbances for users and providers of cloud services, having dedicated network connections can help avoid these pitfalls and achieve optimal cloud performance.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter’s new video-sharing service, Vine, launched a few days ago, which we’ve covered extensively. My main complaint after a couple days worth of use is that I simply can’t find enough vines to enjoy. But a “Friday project” out of product incubator PXi Ventures could change all that, as they’ve launched a service called VinePeek.

VinePeek is a website that pulls in the latest vines one after the other. It doesn’t matter who you follow, who you know, or if you’re even on Vine or Twitter.

A similar site, VineRoulette serves up random vines around the world and lets you view tagged vines in a fairly unique interface.

Both services offer real-time streams of all the latest vines from all over the world, and as you’ll learn once you click the link, video certainly brings a whole new level of awesome to the notion of social video.

“We thought it would be cool if you could see the latest vines from around the world in real time, so as a ‘Friday project’ we put together a quick web application to string vines together in a continuous reel,” explained Peter MacRobert, creator of VinePeek. “We were immediately struck by the mesmerising and addictive effect of watching several seemingly-disconnected vines in quick succession: a ‘peek’ into people’s lives all over the world.”

The app uses Ruby, Redis and the Twitter API to find new tweets containing vines. These are shown to viewers using HTML5 video. Since launching a couple days ago, the site has seen over 2 million views. The web app is “best viewed in a browser,” but it seemed to do just fine on my iPhone 5, especially with a 4G LTE connection.

As it stands now, no Vine post is private. Twitter plans to add more layers of control to where you post and who can see what, but for now everything’s public property.

However, your personal stream on Vine is only comprised of the Vine users you follow. Similarly, vines will only appear to you on Twitter if they’re posted by someone you follow, or RTed by someone you follow. VinePeek and VineRoulette throw the whole idea of “following” out the window and simply present the latest vines in real-time, to the possible chagrin of folks who might be sharing private or semi-private moments with the service.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some random videos of dogs snuggling on overstuffed couches to watch.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch