As startups compete for the best talent, Homejoy is announcing a way for companies to offer employees an additional perk — a clean home.

Home cleanings may not be a standard perk yet, but they’re not an entirely new idea, either. Last fall, The New York Times wrote that in Silicon Valley, “the employee perk is moving from the office to the home,” with both Evernote and the Stanford School of Medicine experimenting with offering housecleaning to their employees. That can be especially appealing when startups ask teams to work long hours, so they don’t have time to clean their homes themselves.

There are, of course, other cleaning services, but Growth Manager Jeffrey Pang said that as with the company’s consumer product, the goal of Homejoy’s perks program is to make the process as convenient as possible. The company works directly with office administrators to set up Homejoy accounts for employees. Then, when an employee logs in, they should see a credit for their monthly cleaning, and they schedule a cleaning just like any other user. They can also see user ratings for their cleaners and offer their own feedback, and all of that data is also fed into Homejoy’s analytics system.

Homejoy charges the same as it does in the consumer version, $20 an hour — that’s significantly cheaper than most other cleaning services.

Pang said he’s already been testing the program out with some tech companies, such as Heyzap, and he anticipated that it will be startups that are most willing to adopt the program. At the same time, he said larger companies that don’t want to offer this to all employees (at least not initially) could also use it on a more limited basis, for example as a perk for the employee of the month or for expectant mothers.

“I think other industries have been slower to adopt something like this, but I could see it becoming more and more popular outside of tech,” Pang said.

Homejoy is now available in 19 cities, including he San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C. and Seattle. The perks program is available in all of those cities, and interested companies can sign up here.

The company is also promoting the program with a “dirtiest desk” contest, where people can submit a photo of, yes, their dirty desks. The winner will get a month of free home cleanings for their entire company — they’ll be selected via random drawing, but apparently getting people to like and tweet about your photo improves your chances.

Since I had Pang and Homejoy CEO and co-founder Adora Cheung on the phone, I also asked about something I’d been noticing as a Homejoy customer — so the wait times for a cleaning seem to be getting longer. (Maybe I was really just being a grumpy customer complaining about having to schedule cleanings several weeks in advance, but in my head, at least, it was a more substantive question about balancing supply and demand.)

“We want to bring on high-quality cleaners as fast as possible but not so fast that bad cleaners who don’t clean well come through our system,” Cheung said. “We’ve gotten better in recent weeks. We’re trying to balance supply and demand as much as possible.”

Pang added that the Bay Area is the only region where Homejoy has experienced “wait time issues.”

Also, in case it wasn’t clear, Homejoy is a startup itself, having been incubated at Y Combinator and raised funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s plenty of information swirling about the HTC One Mini thus far, especially considering it’s not an officially announced handset by any means. Still, we’ve seen pictures, learned about rumored specs, and today it would appear that we’re one step closer to confirmation.

The folks at TNW spotted a User Agent Profile that was published to a website owned by HTC, the Taiwanese htcmms.com.tw.

According to the User Profile, the new phone will be called the HTC One Mini. Not much else is glaringly obvious from the profile, save for the fact that the phone will have a 720p display and run Android 4.2.

Past that, there isn’t much else to be plucked from the page full of code. However, there have been numerous leaks and rumors that have surfaced over the past few weeks.

Just last week, we got to see a picture of the alleged device in all its glory next to an HTC One. The HTC One is the Taiwanese handset maker’s latest flagship, following on the successes of the HTC One X that came before it. The One Mini is expected to pack lesser power into a similar design, for those looking for a smaller or more affordable handset with the same style.

That leak also surfaced some rumored specs, including a dual-core Snapdragon processor and dual front-facing speakers.

Before that, early in June, we stumbled upon a whole bevy of photos of the HTC One Mini, or at least a phone that looks incredibly similar to the HTC One Mini.

Phone makers are clearly aiming to spread out the love in terms of phone sizes, with a number of “mini” handsets making their way into stores recently. The HTC One Mini, though unconfirmed, is expected to be the latest to join that category of smartphone.

Sometimes, small size matters in a big way.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Irish startup Galvanic has just launched a Kickstarter to crowdsource funding a wireless stress biosensor it’s calling PIP. PIP — which stands for ‘personal input pod’ — is a Bluetooth biosensor that monitors its user’s stress levels by measuring their galvanic skin response (GSR) as they hold the PIP pinched between thumb and forefinger. GSR means skin conductance — so basically how sweaty you’re getting and therefore how nervous you’re feeling.

PIP isn’t just a quantifiable self-tapping biosensor; it’s been designed to work in conjunction with iOS and Android phone and tablet apps to provide a gamification element. The company has created three games designed to be played using the PIP, which utilises Bluetooth as its data transport tech. The user’s stress level is then incorporated into each game as the core gameplay mechanic — with the ultimate aim being to help the player learn what they need to do to relax.

It sounds a bit counterintuitive, since competitive gaming can be synonymous with sweaty palms, which is presumably why Galvanic’s project extends to designing stress-busting games. It’s created three games to be used in conjunction with the PIP — a relaxing racing game, a seasonal mood game where  players meditate on a wintery scene to turn it into spring, and a more playful lie-detector multi-player game — but it does also plan to launch an SDK in future to get third party developers expanding the PIP’s gaming ecosystem.

With this initial handful of in-house games the PIP can only be so interesting, but if Galvanic can convince enough people to buy in to the gadget and thus lure enough outside developers to join in, there’s plenty of potential for other cool biosensing software ideas. The price per PIP is $79 for a limited number of early bird Kickstarter backers, or $99 thereafter. Presumably each new PIP-compatible game may also carry a consumer price-tag.

Galvanic is gunning for $100,000 in Kickstarter funding, with the money to be used for finalising manufacturing and readying its own apps. Assuming it hits this rather ambitious funding goal, the company reckons it can gear up for mass production by the end of 2013, and expects to be shipping in Q1 2014. In future it said it plans to expand platform support beyond Android and iOS, to add Windows Phone, Blackberry, Windows, MacOS and also game Consoles and set-top boxes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The upcoming death of Google Reader, mentions of RSS in Facebook’s code, and the addition of hashtags signal Facebook will likely launch a news reader at the June 20th press event it’s just sent out mysterious invites to. A news reader app and web product could take advantage of Facebook’s massive treasure trove of aggregate data on what people share to surface popular and personally recommended news articles.

The event invite, first spotted by Joanna Stern of ABC News, says “A small team has been working on a big idea. Join us for coffee and learn about a new product.” The conspicuously analog invite was sent out via snail mail instead of by email like Facebook usually does. There’s also a coffee stain on the invite. You know where else you find coffee stains? On the newspaper, while you’re reading it, over coffee.

When I asked Facebook about what more it could do with its data on what people share it initially offered to put me on the phone with someone, but then decided not to, and referred to the hashtag announcement from earlier this week. That blog post notes ”Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations. We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months.”

A reader could be the next step. In fact I’m pretty much positive it is, though I couldn’t get anyone to confirm on the record. A Facebook Reader could take advantage of hashtags to help people flag articles about a certain topic to Facebook’s algorithms.

Whether it will be a formal RSS reader remains to be seen. Facebook’s new product could include Facebook Page posts, but might certainly integrate RSS, allowing people to import feeds from blogs and other sites.

As our Ingrid Lunden wrote yesterday, “Lines of code referring to “rssfeeds” have recently started to appear in Facebook’s Graph API code (as spotted by developer and Facebook sleuth Tom Waddington). Linking the RSS feed to a user’s Facebook ID, the code schema also covers such aspects as title, URL and update time. Each RSS feed subsequently has entries and subscribers.” But there’s no product that seems to take advantage of that code…yet.

A Facebook news reader would come at a perfect time, just two weeks before Google shuts down Google Reader for good. The June 20th launch might give Facebook just enough time to help people migrate onto its version. Hopefully it won’t just be a clone, but something that augments classic RSS reading with the unique social signals Facebook has access to.

A reader would certainly qualify as a “big idea”, as Facebook is all about connecting you to people, things, and information you care about, and news is by definition what people care about. A successful launch could drastically increase time spent on Facebook, fill it with useful data about what topics people are interested in, offer new advertising opportunities around current events, and most importantly, make us all better informed citizens of Earth.

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T-Mobile and Verizon reportedly refused to kowtow to the National Security Agency’s demand to collect all phone call records. According to the Wall Street Journal, because T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless are owned by European parent companies, they were able to successfully refuse the NSA’s court order.

“T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless don’t participate in their own collection programs because of legal complications stemming, in part, from their foreign ownership. Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG owns 74% of T-Mobile. Verizon Wireless is a joint-venture of Verizon Communications Inc. with the U.K.’s Vodafone Group PLC, which owns a 45% stake,” explain Danny Yadron and Evan Perez in their article.
For those who aren’t fans of the NSA’s record-keeping, the Post says that the NSA can still likely capture 99 percent of the phone data anyway, since most traffic is routed through the U.S.

The Journal report is somewhat curious, since the original story from The Guardian was about a leaked court order specifically for Verizon. Only later did we learn that the U.S. was collecting call records from all major carriers. Ironically, it could be that the court order went through, but Verizon was successfully able to combat the NSA’s demands.

Either way, Europe could be a problem for U.S. spying ambitions, as the European Union has vowed to fight their attempts. As more facts come to light, things are going to get harder for the NSA.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

On the heels of eBay CEO John Donahoe’s statement at TC Disrupt in April that the company would be using mobile technology to push further into offline commerce, eBay’s Retail Innovation team unveiled its second project: four pop-up storefronts created for the fashion line Kate Spade Saturday that will be live from June 8 to July 7. Using a touch screen on the store window, shoppers can select a product and schedule one-hour delivery via text message.

The Kate Spade Saturday storefronts are something like a cross between a billboard and a vending machine, with a large touch screen built into the glass. They’re built to be noticed: the brick facade is painted a vivid yellow, and the DynaScan monitor on the touch screen, which is bright enough to compete with sunlight, is a total attention-grabber at night. And they’re noisy. Bells and lights go off at intervals to grab the attention of passers by.

A shopper steps up to the touch screen on the store window and navigates through the products available, which are on display behind the glass. If she wants to buy, she enters her cell phone number and receives a text asking to schedule delivery. In one hour (the promised time), a courier drops off the purchase and takes the payment through PayPal.

The touch technology, mobile, warehouse logistics, delivery, and mobile payments — that’s all eBay. The bags and jackets, obviously, are Kate’s.

It’s a cute shopping experience, if you’re into acting as a very public poster girl for the Kate Spade Saturday experience. The gimmick of stepping up to the plate and picking out a dress won’t form a local fan base of repeat buyers, but that’s not the point. It’s fun, you’ll do it once, and you’ll walk away feeling like Kate Spade Saturday gets your life… at least that’s what the brand is trying to do with this fairly obvious ploy to grab the casual shopper.

Kate Spade Saturday launched in March as an online-only business in the US (they have four stores in Japan). There is clearly a point to having their first American brick and mortar installation be such an expensive, circus-like show of screens: it wants to leave a good first impression of tech-savviness.

The fact that only 30 items are available for sale, a fraction of what shoppers can choose from online, makes the purchase much more symbolic. It’s not really about getting a great product — if it were, you would have the option to look through the entire stock to make sure you got the one you liked best — but rather about buying into a tech service show. This is a proof of concept and an effort by a traditionally low-tech industry – fashion – to dip a toe into something a little more electronic.

Keep in mind that parent company 5th & Pacific Cos Inc is going to be focusing a lot of effort this year on Kate Spade, now its biggest brand. Reuters reported on May 2 that 5th & Pacific’s net loss in the first quarter narrowed to $52.2 million from $60.6 million the previous year, largely because Kate Spade sales rose 63.1% to $141 million (Juicy Couture, also a major 5th & Pacific line, reported sales down 10.7% at $98 million).

eBay, for its part, is looking to get in on brick and mortar sales by showing retailers that they can incorporate technology into the in-store experience. TC reported in October that eBay would be focusing more on mobile, personalization, and PayPal, all of which fit in with the shoppable storefront concept.

Retail Innovation’s first project with Toys ‘R’ Us used an in-store touch screen as a search bar and a filtered gift finder, both of which led to a search results page of products in stock, sorted by what’s selling the best. It then gave users a map that they could push from the screen to their phone using a QR code, coupons included.

Of course, it’s not all about the customer. EBay’s head of Retail Innovation Healey Cypher said that these customer engagement tools function as a heat map: they can tell Toys ‘R’ Us where their customers are moving after they’ve left the screen and what they’re buying. Tracking shoppers’ behavior feeds in to the “personalization” prong of eBay’s plan. They can also create a picture of the “Kate Spade Saturday” shopper by filming the shoppers as they check out. Cameras in the glass (just above head level and very visible) record the sidewalk traffic.

“We know how many people are walking by, and of those people who turn up square and look at the glass, that’s a CPM. That’s an impression. Then if they touch it it’s a CPC. But then also the time that it takes to do these things, what happens between them, catalysts that get them to engage. If they buy it and schedule for delivery,” eBay’s Cypher said. “When in the history of retail has a retailer ever had info about what’s happening outside their walls, before transaction?”

In the end, this is a gimmick – but with a serious purpose. EBay knows it can’t cater to Beanie Baby fans and scammers forever and PayPal is up against plenty of real-world payment systems. By making these strategic partnerships they can, in the end, break out of the online and into the real.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Remember this ad? The ad where Microsoft attempts to position the iPad as a chopstick-playing toy and the Surface as a PowerPoint-editing machine?

Yeah, that’s why we can’t have nice things.

Microsoft just released Office the the iPhone. It lets users edit any Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. As the oh-so-catchy name states, Office Mobile for Office 365 subscribers is Office Mobile for Office 365 subscribers only, meaning the app is essentially $100 a year. It’s not “Office for iOS.” It’s just a way to open and partially edit Office files for those saps paying for Microsoft’s pricey cloud platform.

Judging from the screenshots, it looks like a quality application. It supports rich media content like charts, animations, SmartArt graphics and shapes. And since it works through MS’ cloud service, all changes saved on the phone updates the original, too.

But forget about a native iPad app. Microsoft can’t kill the only legitimate selling point of its struggling Surface tablet.

Microsoft might have moved enough Surface tablets to not call it a flop, but the tablet was far from a blockbuster hit. Ever since launch, Microsoft has supported it with constant ad campaigns touting the tablet’s productivity chops. The latest TV spot pits the Surface RT against the iPad, deeming its offering as the superior choice for those that need to get any work done. However, in Microsoft’s world “work” equals editing a PowerPoint deck. This is something you can do quite handily on the iPad using Keynote and, in fact, I suspect Keynote users are well aware of the benefits of their superior platform.

Middle manager infighting must be rampant at Microsoft. One on hand, the company has to properly support its Windows 8 ecosystem and that means position its tablet offering as the only MS Office solution. But then, likewise, a true mobile version of MS Office would better help fight Google Docs. In this case the Office team lost, relegating Office to just the iPhone and in a truncated version at that. Windows 8 wins, the Surface stays slightly more interesting, and everybody in Redmond wins.

Only the consumer loses.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg aren’t so bullish on the future of the film industry. At a talk at USC, the pair agreed that it’s on track to have a “massive implosion”. At the core of their argument: there just isn’t enough time in the day for consumers to support all the films released in theaters. Films are competing with all the content and options that the Internet provides.

Studios in Hollywood are the equivalent of venture capital firms of Silicon Valley. They live and die on the homeruns. Each movie could be thought of as a startup. It all starts with an idea and grows into a team that creates and releases some piece of content out into the world where it’s loved or hated. When loved, you get Christopher Nolan’s Batman, and when it’s hated, you get any Ben Affleck movie from 2000 – 2010.

The summer is filled with the biggest bets. The cost to produce and market a single film these days can balloon to over $300 million. The studios need a film to pull in nearly a billion in box office revenue, the same on DVD and have a good, multi-year sale to television for it to be considered a success. Sprinkle in some airplane viewing rights and that’s a win for them.

Lucas and Spielberg don’t think that’s a sustainable model. Soon, a couple of those megabudget films are going to nosedive, and everything will change.

They suggest the marketplace will contract because there isn’t enough time in the week for us to go to the movies anymore. With Netflix producing top quality content, and video games cutting into weekends, it leaves little room for date night out at the cineplex. It’s getting so bad that Lucas complains about how hard it is even for him to get a film in a theater. This should probably make producers of films nervous.

The duo says that the studios will be forced to reevaluate how to distribute films. Perhaps a film like Lincoln will cost less to see than, say Iron Man? Or perhaps, we don’t even get movies like Lincoln in theaters anymore. They will come straight to our homes. And actually going to the theater? It’s going to change to a model where a movie will cost $50+, but it’ll become a more high end experience with movies staying in the theater for a year or more. Or, just don’t make shitty films.

For over a decade, the films that can’t find an audience in the theater have found their niche on the internet where they can be marketed and sold on iTunes to those who will love them. Companies like Netflix and Hulu are able to focus on these niches and program specifically for them, for much cheaper than the $300 million it cost to release a summer film.

That translates to these Internet companies being able to take bigger risks on content, similar to HBO’s model. And technology winning.

Image via Francesco Dazzi

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When Dropbox bought Audiogalaxy late last year, industry observers wondered if the cloud music player startup could turn into a new audio streaming product. But Audiogalaxy was promptly shut down, and the team is rumored to be working on other Dropbox projects.

And so, a largish niche has emerged for apps that stream DRM-free music files for Dropbox users. DropTunes has a well-regarded web player, but mobile is the main use case for most people and Tunebox has been a standout among the eight or so apps available for iOS. Available since late 2011, it already streams songs automatically instead of requiring you to download files from Dropbox to your phone like most of the others.

The new 2.0 version completes developer Phil Kast‘s* goal of providing an iTunes Match-type service for Dropbox users, in that you can now save files to your device and play them in offline mode. Just tap the icon next to a song or album to save it, and swipe to remove if you want to free up storage space on your device.

Tunebox had already done a relatively good job of sorting through song metadata in Dropbox to organize files in its interface. But if you had more than a couple thousand songs, it had trouble displaying everything. Now it gets around that by sorting through albums first, allowing you to see your collection even if you have tens of thousands of files you want to listen to (inspired by this Lifehacker fix).

Of course, anyone with a large collection of DRM-free music files on Dropbox could dump them into iTunes, or Amazon or Google music products in order to press play on the go. But these giant tech companies appear to be more focused on streaming and internet radio, based on their recent product releases and what’s hottest with users these days.

They or Dropbox could still decide to focus more on cloud music players for the DRM-free users out there, but for now Dropbox users are looking like a backwater… where apps like Tunebox can get away with charging $4.99 for more features and a better experience.

*Kast is a personal friend but of course I have no financial stake in the app, and in fact spend most of my time on Spotify and Pandora.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

RingCentral has hired David Berman, a former high-ranking executive from WebEx, a move that shows the market significance of a cloud-based approach to routing calls to different mobile devices similarly if they were extensions on a phone tree.

RingCentral is one of those companies that fits into new world of the work place by automating the phone tree. It abstracts the PBX just as software and service providers are abstracting almost any hardware you can imagine, turning every mobile device into an extension designed in particular for today’s work. It helps remove the struggle that comes with typing in a password for a conference call while in the car or routing SMS messages to the right people.

Berman brings a certain high-powered image to the company that will have to appeal to corporate IT executives who still have deep relationships with the PBX vendor crowd. But more so, it’s my bet he will use the web more than taking CEOs out for steak dinners. He does have SaaS chops to make RingCentral work. At WebEx, he helped drive sales through a web-based approach — something that’s critical in today’s sales and marketing world.

In an interview, Berman said the PBX market is worth $100 billion. It’s that market opportunity that he sees opening and a big reason he joined RingCentral. Berman started at WebEx in 1999 and stayed until 2008. According to LinkedIn, Berman is also on the WatchDox and Oovoo board of directors. He remains as chairman of Affectiva, a company with facial recognition technology spun out from MIT.

In those first years at WebEx, Internet startups were getting battered by the market fallout and the overall economy suffered an overall malaise. Web conferencing, though, boomed, as it represented a way to cut down on the costs of travel. It was one of the first signs of a market that would prosper with the advent of a funky new way to work, using the Internet and a new breed of mobile devices.

The PBX phone system still was the way to communicate; it symbolized the office of the IT age. Cool in its capabilities at the time, an office jockey had commands, touch-tone sequences really, to orchestrate communication. Taking calls. transferring, forwarding, conferencing — master it and the corporate network would wake up.  The PBX served as the domain of the office admin — a seat of power, the CEO’s communications artery. But then came mobile and here we are. Google Voice acts as a way to filter calls. And there is an ecosystem of virtual assistants that have emerged. Dexetra, Indisys and Nuance Nina just to name a few. There are also more business focused services and voice technology suppliers that Opus Research covers.

Today’s workplace has a different reality. We live in a new world where the office metaphor is giving way to the virtual metaphor. No longer can we think of the office as the place of work. It’s everywhere that we are — just like the cloud.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch