As millions of 20-somethings defy the age-old tradition of young marriage for another decade of baby-less romance, one study suggests that the Internet is responsible for boosting holy matrimony 14% among 21-30-year-olds. In a deliciously dry economic assessment of romantic partnering, University of Montreal Professor Andriana Bellou finds a surprisingly strong relationship between broadband Internet penetration, dating website use, and youngins gettin’ hitched. “Exploring sharp temporal and geographic variation in the pattern of consumer broadband adoption, I find that the latter has significantly contributed to increased marriages rates among 21-30 year olds,” she writes [PDF].

Two graphs, in particular, help explain the boost in digitally facilitated permanent hookups (the first figure is a poll of spouses the second figure the linear trend between broadband and marriage)

Econometrics For Novices

How do we know these marriages wouldn’t have happened anyways, regardless of whether residents had Internet access? Internet service providers roll broadband around the U.S. for mostly business purposes, provided that local bureaucrats don’t make deploying it a regulatory nightmare. Unless regulators were snuggling with young lovers as they teased their marriage intentions with each other, there’s no reason to believe broadband deployment was following regions ripe for lots of marriage.

So, if we see a see a spike in marriage rates in only states with ubiquitous broadband penetration, the Internet is probably playing some role (econometricians call this an Instrumental Variable). Of regions with similar composition in race, socioeconomic status, population density, unemployment, and age, the author finds the Internet is associated with a sizable 13-30% boost in first-time marriages.

The Hottest Marriage Talk You Can Handle

Readers can imagine how an available pool of hot-and-heavy eager singles facilitates marriage, but the way in which an economist describes romance may just be the hottest thing ever. Nestle an ice-pack between your legs, because this is NSFW.

1. Dating sites increase the chance you’ll find your one true love.

“In a basic infinite horizon search model, individuals search for suitable marriage partners and receive offers drawn from some known distribution. Search continues until a partner is found whose “quality” equals or exceeds an endogenously determined reservation value…Standard search theory predicts that, all else equal, higher search costs lower the reservation value and increase the probability of marriage”

2. It’s hard to meet people in a new city.

“In an offline, decentralized environment searching for a suitable partner can be a lengthy process accompanied by uncertainty regarding match quality and psychological costs associated with personal encounters and potential rejections. An online centralized marriage market instead has the potential to resolve a number of these issues. This is because it allows for targeted search along certain desirable characteristics while the users retain a degree of anonymity”

3. Sometimes, a girl just needs to be asked.

“greater exposure to potential mates will increase the frequency of offers and therefore the likelihood of marriage”

4. Yo, it’s a sausage fest out there.

“The potential of the Internet to affect matching is probably the greatest for those perceived as facing thinner markets or those who experience difficulties in meeting potential mates”

A Word of Caution

A few cautionary notes before we all hail Match.com as the savior of the institution of marriage.

First, these are a percentage of a percentage. Marriage rates increased about 5% for 21-30 year olds, but it went from 0.36 to .412, or a 14% relative increase. This jibes with a 2005 Pew Poll which found that 5% of all marriages began online.

Second, this study says nothing of the quality of the marriage. As I personally investigated, hyper-focused romantic searchers are a mixed blessing. Sometimes we find that the person we thought we wanted is actually the worst possible match.

The truth is, the Internet is probably playing some role in boosting marriage. Speaking as a guy who is part of the new 20-something trend of moving away from home and delaying domestic life to focus on career, online dating helps me sort through the sea of strangers. Now, if it could only make those first dates a little less awkward. Get on it, Internet!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Docurated is a enterprise tool targeted towards enterprise users — it is publicly launching onstage at Disrupt NY. It aggregates all your documents in one place, turning them into a beautiful searchable and customizable database. Docurated will now provide Dropbox integration as well.

“We don’t need any more 20 file sharing solutions,” co-founder and chief product officer Irene Tserkovny said onstage. “We just need one place that are worthy of their idea,” she continued. After installing Docurated, the file and folder metaphor disappears. It’s all about searching for the documents you need and collecting them.

For example, if you want to prepare a presentation on one of your products, you first do a search query. Not only will it return relevant documents, it will search for text inside the documents and show those passages as well. Then, you can pick paragraphs, graphics or entire files to add to a collection. You will then have all the information you need in one place. Finally, you can export this data in a single PowerPoint presentation or PDF file.

Docurated users can choose to host their files on Docurated’s servers or to install the product on their private servers. After this simple installation process, you can start adding files and using the visual search and curation tools to create collections.

Now that it integrates with Dropbox, Docurated can become a powerful search and curation tool for your Dropbox-hosted files as well. Docurated competes with Sharepoint or Autonomy, and in some way Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. The main difference with the file-based alternatives is that Docurated does not host any file, it only crawls content to make it searchable. The company counts on its curation features as well to set it apart from the competition.

One of Docurated’s key advantages is that you don’t need to maintain a folder hierarchy or to tag files. Everything is automatic and transparent.

The New York-based company received $1.6 million in funding from David Eisner, James Lyle, Leon M. Wagner and Elliot Wagner.

“We are currently selling directly to enterprises,” co-founder and CEO Alex Gorbansky said. “We are also looking at building out our reseller partner program and are exploring OEM opportunities,” he continued. Enterprises can sign up right now for Docurated or the Dropbox vertical.

Questions & Answers

Judges: Heidi Messer (Collective[i]), Peter Pham (Science), Dave Samuel (Freestyle Capital), Scott Stanford (Sherpa Foundry)

Q: How did you come up with the idea?
A: I kept losing time by searching for a PowerPoint presentation. We started prototyping and here we are.

Q: Where do you get the content?
A: We have a sync tool that auto-crawls anything. There is an email bot as well.

Q: How much do you charge?
A: This is a subscription model. It depends on the number of users. It’s $80/user/month. And we have an enterprise account as well. We sell to people that consume the most data.

Q: Those testimonials… Are these from actual customers?
A: We have a pilot at Netflix, Coca-Cola is using it pretty widely.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At Disrupt NY 2013, Glider unveiled its SaaS for corporate teams to bring structure, clarity and reporting to the contract process much like Salesforce.com did for the sales funnel. The visual analytics tool should help shed light on the number of contracts closed, those outstanding and a host of other metrics to help executives get a better view of deal flow.

The service is meant to replace the massive “reply all” email thread and the Excel spreadsheets that have dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of rows listing the tasks necessary to complete a deal. With Glider, companies can manage sales contracts, non-disclosure agreements, partnerships and any contractual process used by the organizations. The service lets users see all of their open contracts in one place, request documents from legal teams, get quick approval from managers, sign documents and see exactly who and what is holding up any given deal.

Glider demonstrated onstage how an employee can import contracts into the Glider platform, track versions of the contract, manage approvals and collect digital signatures. The highlight came with the deal flow analytics. This showed how a larger organization can quickly see how the quarter is progressing, what deals look like, what will close and what will not. The service n users people to sign a contract and tasks that the individual and group members have completed or still need to do.

Glider supports most major file formats and is compatible with services, such as Box, Dropbox, Gmail and Google Drive. Contracts get emailed to other people on the team. Recipients can then view the document in a secure web link or download it as a Word file or PDF.

Glider uses password-based security, tracks the IP address of the user and serves a cookie to verify the signer’s identity. Documents are encrypted and the service uses SSL for communication security. The company says two-factor authentication is on the roadmap.

“We have modeled ourselves after Box,” said Co-Founder Eli Rubel. “Ninety percent Fortune 500 companies trust Box to use Box.

The company has initially built an HTML5 app for mobile, said Co-Founder Justin Thiele. The roadmap includes plans for native iOS and Android apps.

Co-Founder Eli Rubel said Glider, which took about four months to build, targets customers who have a deeper deal flow and need a better picture to help prepare for the end-of-quarter reporting to management or investors. They are still working through the cost, but it will most likely charge a monthly fee for unlimited users and additionally based on the number of contracts the company is processing.

The company has $1 million in seed funding from True Venture Partners and is seeking a Series A.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google isn’t the only company working on mapping out the entire world with satellite imagery and detailed information about every nook and cranny in the universe. Two companies are teaming up to create publishable information on your site or news article using detailed satellite imagery and advanced publishing tools.

Skybox, a company that has raised $91 million to launch its own satellites into outer space to capture detailed imagery of our streets and buildings, is working with MapBox, an OpenStreetMap contributor, on some pretty sweet analysis and publishing tools. Two Skybox satellites will be launched this summer, so the tools are coming at the perfect time.

One of the examples of analyzing all of the images that Skybox captures, is a “change detection” system that focuses on one area and builds a playlist of photos that you can go through to detect changes in the area. Why would something like this be useful? Well, say you’re a company that has a fleet of ships and wants to know when they dock and leave. This tool could help track that:

Additionally, MapBox provides tools that allow anyone to annotate imagery. In the example above, you could easily add notes to each coming and going ship that you’ve detected, with important context that will help you go back in time to make sense of all of the imagery you’ve collected:

When I spoke with MapBox’s founder, Eric Gundersen, about the project, he pointed out that what you can do with maps is very limited right now, which is what makes this partnership important:

You can’t annotate images, you can’t zoom in, can’t interact on your tablet. This is our first experiment of “how do you package up information along with data,” that would usually be a PDF.

As Gundersen pointed out, the information that the tools above allow you to surface and track would normally be passed around in a huge Word document or PDF, which is a pretty rough and manual process for people who are analyzing thousands of images a day.

MapBox, which is fully bootstrapped, is working on some other really neat tools on their own, which should be available in the coming weeks. Think Google Map Maker, but easier to use and more available to the community that is already participating on the OpenStreetMap project.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The European Commission believes that, alongside the rise of smartphones, tablets and other TV replacements, by 2016 connected TVs could be used in the majority of European homes — up from around 40.4 million today. Today it released a Green Paper to lay the groundwork for how it might cope with that.

To be clear, this is not a re-writing of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, the basic set of rules first introduced in 2010 covering areas single-market convergence, although it could lead to that. Initially, the purpose of the Green Paper will be to get a better handle on an area that is rapidly changing with the boom in mobile broadband, the rise of tablets and video apps, those connected TVs and more. It’s part of Kroes’ wider Digital Agenda strategy, which has covered areas like addressing the digital divide, the role of regulation in childrens content, cybersecurity, tech brain drain and more.

As part of the Green Paper, the EC seeks feedback on things like how TV is watched, the limitations of digital content distributed on a per-country basis, exclusivity deals for films and other media, and whether self-regulation (used widely today) is doing enough — issues that could potentially impact, among others, device makers like Samsung, LG and (perhaps!) Apple; streaming companies like Amazon and Netflix; and publishers/creators.

Neelie Kroes, the outspoken Commission VP who oversees this area, focuses her attention on connected TVs specifically today: “Connected TV is the next big thing in the creative and digital worlds,” she is expected to note in a statement today.

But Kroes also acknowledges that even if it’s not a huge LG set in a TV room that will be the lever for how things transform, the evolution is certainly an issue regardless. “Convergence between sectors means people can enjoy a wider choice of great content – but it also creates disruptions and challenges. We need a converged and EU-wide debate to help deal with these changes.” Indeed, figures from Cisco’s most recent Visual Networking Index, a huge study it puts out annually, mobile video consumption worldwide exceeded 50% for the first time last year and shows no sign of slowing down, with Europe accounting for over 20% of all global mobile traffic.

Part of the issue in Europe is that, at the moment, there are some cross purposes at work.

For example, when it comes to content, deals are often cut on a per-country basis, which makes it hard to then charge and consume content across borders — let alone license content. On another level, there are national regulators trying to tackle issues of cross-media ownership that may not harmonize with those of other countries. There is also the thorny issue of standards. Is it really the role of the EC to get involved in areas like whether we should be sold HbbTV or MHP hardware? The endorsements that regulators once made years ago for mobile TV seemed back then, and especially now, pretty hollow considering that nothing took off, and in fact what people love to use today are apps that stream on iOS, Android and other platforms.

Still, given that we are slowly marching to a new era of content consumption it’s useful to start laying some ideas on to the table, and if it means that I might be able to watch the latest series of Borgen, with subtitles, right when it gets released in Denmark, all the better.

(Link to the Green Paper will get posted here)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple today posted Q2 earnings that beat estimates at $43.6 billion in sales, which illustrates that, while the Americas — led by the U.S. — remains the company’s single biggest market, Asia, led by sales in China, continues to show the strongest growth amidst weakened demand at home and in Europe. Overall, international revenues outside of the Americas were $24.3 billion, or 56 percent of the total for the quarter.

International has been and will continue to be a focus for Apple. Cook cited worldwide smartphone figures from IDC that predict shipments of 1.4 billion units annually by 2016; and tablet figures of 375 million units by the same year, according to Gartner. While the U.S. continues to be a strong market for sales today, much of the future growth in mobile devices will be happening in less mature markets outside of the U.S.

On the earnings call earlier, the biggest focus for what is happening internationally was Greater China, a hotly contested market that has been largely dominated by Android device makers. In Greater China this quarter, Apple has had a mixed picture. On the one hand, its revenues of $8.2 billion, sequentially, made Greater China its biggest market in terms of growth, increasing by 20 percent, while all other regions declined in the holiday aftermath. Compared to the same quarter a year ago, however, China was less impressive. It grew by 8 percent, putting it just one percentage higher than the U.S., its slowest-growing market at 7 percent.

Is Apple hitting a wall there? asked one analyst. No, answered CEO Tim Cook, “We had our best quarter ever in China.” In total, he pointed out that including retail store sales, Apple had $8.8 billion in China ($8.2 billion on the PDF posted by Apple, which does not include retail sales). That is up 11 percent year-on-year, Cook said, “the same rate Apple is growing.” He also noted that iPad sales grew by 138 percent with new records getting set for iPhone and iPad sell-through. He also noted that while a year ago, Apple launched the iPhone 4S with two different operators, at two different periods, in the quarter, with the iPhone 5 this time around, the launch fell outside of the 12-week period covered by today’s earnings.

“We still see a very significant opportunity in China,” he said, noting that there are now 11 stores open in the country with plans to double that. Although Apple still does not have a local iTunes store in the country, Cook promises that it is innovating online there and “adding different functionality.”

He also dug in a little on how Apple is tackling the cheap smartphone trend in China. Although the company has long been rumored to be working on a low-cost iPhone for now the company continues to use its older models as its “low cost” devices. He noted that it is selling the iPhone 4 as its low-cost device for first-time buyers. “We are hoping that will help iPhone sales in the future.”

This quarter, Apple faced a tough PR push in China over its warranty policy. The negative comments, which extended into nightly criticisms on national evening television news programs, even prompted an apology from CEO Tim Cook on the company’s Chinese site. That did nothing to help Apple, which is already facing strong price pressure from smartphone makers building locally focused handsets on versions of Google’s Android. At the end of December, it was estimated by analysts at Informa that Android devices were approaching two-thirds of all mobile phones (not just smartphones) sold in the country, compared to just 5 percent for Apple.

In other international regions, Europe continues to be Apple’s second-largest market after the Americas at $9.8 billion in revenues (without retail calculated in). That’s growth of 11 percent over last year but down 21 percent on last quarter, giving it just a $1.6 billion lead ahead of Greater China.

Meanwhile, Japan and the rest of Asia-Pacific saw the very strongest growth, but the proportion of sales in those two regions continues to be relatively small. They were up respectively at 19 percent and 26 percent over the same quarter last year, working out to around $3.1 billion in each of those markets. Adding that together with Greater China, it has yet to outweigh the combination of Europe and the Americas, but is definitely bigger than either one taken on its own.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Just in time for Earth Day, Google just launched version 7.1 of Google Earth Pro, the professional version of Google’s desktop based mapping tool. The new version adds a number of map making and advanced printing tools that will make it easier for business to create legends and scales for their maps and to add titles to them. The new Viewshed tool now also allows users to identify and calculate viewpoints and sightlines from any placemark you set in Google Earth.

Google Launches Google Earth Pro 7.1 With New Viewshed Visualization Tool And Improved Printing Options

As Google notes, the Viewshed tool allows users to, for example, see the visual impact of a building project on surrounding properties or to evaluate the coverage area of a cell phone tower. The tool simply covers areas that can be seen from this spot in green and marks everything that’s not visible from there in gray.

The new advanced printing option, Google says, give users more control over the layout and style of the maps they create. Users can now, for example, add title and description boxes to their maps, as well as a north arrow, legend and a legend. Users can now also add an HTML area to their maps, which allows them to add images, text and other additional information to their maps. All of this, of course, can also be exported into a PDF file.

Also new in this version is the ability to desaturate the base imagery or make it black and white to draw more attention to your own icons and paths.

To celebrate Earth Day, Google is making this new version available for $199 instead of $399 for the next 24 hours (promo code: EARTHDAY199).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Penguin has offered, and has confirmed to us that the European Commission has accepted, a settlement with the EC over the agency pricing model for e-books — a case the stretched back to last year and involved Penguin, along with Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, as well as Apple. The other four publishers and Apple settled with the EC in September 2012. The deal will mean that Penguin can proceed with its merger with Bertlesmann’s Random House, first announced in October 2012, and approved by Brussels earlier this month, so that the two publishers can better battle Amazon.

But in making the settlement, Penguin maintained “it has done nothing wrong,” and that that its position “remains unchanged…the company continues to believe that the agency pricing model operates in the best interests of consumers and authors.”

The full statement from Penguin:

“Penguin confirms that, subject to the market test currently underway, it has reached an agreement with the European Commission to settle its investigation into the establishment of agency pricing agreements for eBooks. Penguin’s position that it has done nothing wrong remains unchanged and the company continues to believe that the agency pricing model operates in the best interests of consumers and authors. While we disagree with some elements of the Commission’s analysis, we are settling as a procedural matter to clear the decks in anticipation of our proposed merger with Random House.”

This also means that the EC’s investigation into agency model pricing will now also close. The full run-down of that case, as it has been played out with the commissioners, is here.

In essence, the publishers and Apple were being investigated over agency agreements signed between them that the EC believed prevented others (namely Amazon, but also Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers) from inking wholesale agreements with the publishers. The publishers would have looked for deals with Apple that it considered more favorable to the publishers, in light of the fact that Amazon regularly prices books at wafer-thin margins — and often at a loss — in order to drive more business overall.

The agency model lets the publishers set the price for books and offer resellers a fixed cut of that price (30% is a typical cut). The wholesale model sees publishers selling their books to distributors, who then sell them at whatever price they want. The latter is the route Amazon has used to great effect to grow its business, sacrificing margin on cheaper books for scale.

Penguin’s concessions in the settlement reached today are essentially the same as those reached by the other four publishers. According to the EC document outlining the case, they are as follows:

1. To the extent that they have not yet been terminated, Penguin will terminate the relevant agency agreements for the sale of e-books in the EEA concluded with Apple.
2. Penguin will offer each retailer other than Apple the opportunity to terminate any agency agreements concluded for the sale of e-books that: (i) restrict, limit or impede the retailer’s ability to set, alter or reduce the retail price or to offer price discounts or promotions; or (ii) contain a price MFN clause as defined in Penguin’s commitments. In case a retailer decides not to make use of the oppor­tunity to terminate such an agreement, Penguin will terminate it in line with the conditions laid down therein.
3. For a period of two years from notification of the decision to Penguin, Penguin will not restrict, limit or impede the ability of e-book retailers to set, alter or reduce retail prices for e-books and/or to offer price discounts or promotions. However, as regards agency agreements, the aggregate value of the price discounts or promotions offered by any retailer shall not exceed the aggregate amount equal to the total commissions Penguin pays to that retailer over a period of at least one year in connection with the sale of its e-books to consumers.
4. For a period of five years from notification of the decision to Penguin, Penguin will not enter into any agreement relating to the sale of e-books within the EEA that contains a price MFN clause as defined in Penguin’s commitments.

The newly formed Penguin Random House will be 53% owned by Bertlesmann and 47% owned by Pearson, Penguin’s parent.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s been a lot of excitement around the possibilities that smartphones and especially tablets offer to traditional publishers, but they also present a big challenge — the costs are often too high, said MediaWire CEO Clifford Hoffer.

That’s why MediaWire is launching a new product called MediaWire Mobile, which allows publishers to launch their own branded apps on the Apple Store, Google Play, and the Apple Newsstand. To release a new issue digitally, they just upload a single file. Pricing is based on the publication frequency, starting at $199 per month (for quarterly titles). And MediaWire doesn’t take a cut of the subscription revenue.

The company had previously offered a product specifically for launching apps on iOS. The new MediaWire Mobile is cross-platform, Hoffer said — as noted above, it supports iOS and Android, plus Windows and Blackberry are also under development. Eventually, MediaWire plans to merge this with its desktop product, so you can start reading an article on your computer and then continue on your phone after you head out on your commute.

Other startups like Onswipe have tried to tackle the cross-platform problem by creating mobile web experiences, but Hoffer argued that “the native experience is still the best way to appeal to the user and keep them engaged.”

He also acknowledged that MediaWire Mobile doesn’t have “a lot of bells and whistles and stuff,” but it’s not just presenting readers with a PDF either. Publishers can add hyperlinks, YouTube videos, bookmarks, and social sharing features. Behind the scenes, they get access to analytics with information like subscriber reading habits, geography, and demographics. Over time, Hoffer said he also wants to expand MediaWire Mobile’s ad targeting capabilities.

There are about 40 new MediaWire Mobile apps in development, he said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The U.S. Senate dropped an 844-page immigration bill on America’s shoulders today [PDF]. For decades, the tech industry has been begging for more immigrant engineers, researchers and investors. Here are five essential changes proposed in the United State Senate’s draft of comprehensive immigration reform.

1. Visas For Startups and Investors – A new visa unchains immigrants from U.S. employers, permitting them to found and support their own companies. INVEST visas are open to startup entrepreneurs and angel investors who can prove they’re creating jobs, have a significant stake in the company, and raising (lots of) money.

2. More High Skilled Visas – As expected, the cap on H-1B visas (high-skilled employees) is nearly doubled, from 65,000, to 110,000, with a maximum of 180K in the future.

3. Unlimited Brainiacs – The U.S. is inviting an unlimited number of certain physicians, professors, researchers and other people of “extraordinary ability.”

4. STEM Grads – Up to 25,000 more visas are alloted to immigrants who have earned a master’s degree or above in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM).

5. Employers Gotta Pay Up – New fines for H-1B-dependent employers. For instance, there’s a $10,000 application fee for organizations of less than 50 people, where 50 percent to 75 percent of their employees are visa-holding immigrants (H-1B and L visas). There are also wage requirements for H-1B workers, which may alleviate concerns that tech firms are exploiting immigrants for cheap labor.

Many household-name tech companies, from Google to PayPal, were founded by immigrants. This new bill, however imperfect, attempts to bring in more of that international brain power.

[Image: Sun Microsystems (That's co-founder Vinod Khosla on the left)]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch