Clueful, the mobile privacy app Apple booted from its App Store for being too revealing — or possibly because of its own behavior – is staging a comeback. This time around, Clueful’s maker Bitdefender is targeting Android users instead, with plans to reveal what the apps on your phone are doing, and how your privacy may be compromised in the process.

Bitdefender, a company that makes a variety of anti-virus, anti-theft, and other security applications for web and mobile, first launched Clueful a year ago as a $4 iOS app that detailed how the apps on users’ phones handle – or mishandle, as the case may be – personal data. The app launched in the wake of a number of high-profile security events, like address book-gate and locationgate, for example. (And you know they’re bad when there’s a “gate” attached, right?)

For “unknown reasons,” Apple removed Clueful from its App Store shortly after its debut. The company spins this as “we revealed too much!” of course, but the more informed answer points to the fact that, to work, the app itself had to pull a list of apps from a user’s device, send them to Clueful’s servers and then cross-reference those with the apps it had in its database. Apple might not have cared for this process, especially considering the end result may have discouraged app downloads. Clueful later returned in a watered down web version.

Apple mobile device users, of course, don’t have much to fear in terms of malware because of how Apple tests and approves apps ahead of making them publicly accessible in its iTunes App Store. However, Clueful still plays on the sometimes misguided fears some have, who believe that software makers are always purposely and maliciously trying to track your location, acquire your personal or financial data, spam you or your friends with unwanted messages or emails, and more.

Often, apps accused of doing some or all of these things are more the result of a rush to launch or shoddy coding, more so than malicious intent. And sometimes, they’re just early stage startups, making mistakes. Then there’s the fact that some apps are designed to work with this “sensitive” data in ways that help you – an app that wants to help you find nearby events or set geo-fenced reminders, for instance, needs to know where you are.

Yes, there are malicious, virus-laden apps as well as those over-reaching in terms of what they need to function, but many operate in a gray area. So to the uninformed, being told that some app is “tracking you” can perhaps cause concern when little to none is warranted.

To Bitdefender’s credit then, at least the Android version of the application now ranks applications as low, medium or high risk, based on their “danger levels.” And you can also filter to just see those with “intrusive ads” that “send unencrypted data,” or “are viruses,” for example, which could be useful if you’re not prone to being careful with your installs or are worried you have a problem app on your hands.

On Android, Clueful is available for free, with an option to upgrade for added security, including a real-time web scanner, on-install and on-demand app scanner, and more. This is provided by the company’s anti-virus app, which costs  $9.95 per year. That undercuts competitor Lookout’s Premium option, but it also lacks Lookout’s more comprehensive feature set which also includes remote wipe, lock, signal flare, locating lost phones, backup and restore, cross-platform support, and more. (Some of these options are available through Bitdefender’s other freemium apps, but not all.)

Clueful may find better footing on Android, though, where users do have to be more cautious because apps are not vetted ahead of launch. Plus, a good chunk of Android’s user base are those upgrading from feature phones to a low-cost smartphone, and are still technically unsophisticated when it comes to sorting the good apps from the bad.

The new version of Clueful is available here in Google Play.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Have a lot of stuff? Don’t have a lot of space to store that stuff? Don’t know how you’d get yourself organized enough to keep track of it, even if you did have the space? No worries. Urban storage startup Boxbee has the solution to all your too-much-stuff-having problems.

The idea behind Boxbee is simple: You put stuff in a box. Then Boxbee comes and takes the box and puts it in secure storage for $6 per month per box. If you want your stuff back, Boxbee will deliver it to you for $15 plus $2 per box. Boxes are 24 inches long by 20 inches tall by 12 inches wide, so they’re not HUGE. But they should provide ample space for users to keep their winter clothes stored away for a few months.

In addition to the storage service itself, Boxbee has a web interface and mobile app for keeping track of all the stuff you’ve stored. That is, you can take photos and categorize items that you’ve got in one box or another. That way, when you need items in a particular box, you can make sure that you get the right one.

On the storage side, Boxbee manages a network of commercial warehouses and keeps tabs on what goes where with the help of barcodes. Pretty soon, it’ll be moving to RFID tags, which should improve the process even more. Since it operates in a 15-mile radius of San Francisco, the company can make deliveries from its warehouses within hours of a request being made.

Boxbee hopes that by making storage more convenient and a little less expensive than renting out a whole unit, it will be able to tap into a new market of customers who should probably be storing their crap somewhere other than their tiny apartments, but don’t want to deal with the cost and hassle of doing so.

The company launched at um, LAUNCH, where it received the best new startup award. It has been operating in private beta since then, spending the last few months as part of the AngelPad startup incubator in San Francisco (which has its demo day next week!). The startup is in the process of raising a seed round, which it will use to make a few more hires and expand into new markets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Video is becoming an increasingly important part of news coverage online. But it’s also expensive and time-consuming to produce, and many publishers don’t have the resources to create them on their own. A startup called Wochit is changing the economics around video production for breaking news, and has raised $4.75 million to make their technology available to more publishers.

Wochit makes it easier for news organizations to have timely videos around breaking stories as they happen. By licensing raw footage from original sources, the startup produces videos that can be repurposed and embedded onto publisher sites. But the secret sauce is in how Wochit brings those pieces together — by automating the process of editing footage into watchable segments.

According to Wochit co-founder and CEO Dror Ginzberg, the process is about 95 percent automated, which drastically reduces the time and cost associated with producing timely news videos. For news organizations that aren’t local to where a particular news story is breaking, or for those who don’t have the resources or personnel to produce the content themselves, Wochit enables them to publish and monetize videos related to the news.

For each story, Wochit creates a template video that can be used by any news organization, but it can also provide more customized videos for individual publishers. That allows them to provide white-labeled videos with their own branding, incorporating their own media and basing content of the video on the text of their stories.

Altogether, Wochit is making hundreds of news videos daily, which can be embedded on publisher sites. Not only are they producing them, but they’re also updating them to provide new context and information as it happens. They also help publishers to monetize, allowing them to sell their own video ads along with or split ad revenues for ads that Wochit has sold.

To advance its go-to market strategy, Wochit has raised $4.75 million from investors that include Redpoint Ventures, Cedar Fund, and Greycroft Partners. The company was founded by Ginzberg, who previously founded image syndication platform PicApp, as well as CTO Ran Oz who was a co-founder and CTO of BigBand Networks. It now has 20 employees, with offices in Israel and New York City.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’re anything like me*, your calendar is a mess. You actually have multiple calendars through which you try to keep track of various different meetings and you’re always bouncing back and forth between your email and your calendar, trying to keep track of whom you’re meeting when, trying not to double-book — and more often than not, failing.

There have been any number of calendaring and so-called productivity apps which have emerged over the last several months — apps like Donna, Tempo, Fantastical, and whatnot. But each of them seeks to simplify the process of keeping track of and getting to all your meetings. Few actually simplify the process of setting them up.

That’s where Atlas comes in.

Atlas is a mobile app not just for notifying you of when and where you have meetings, but more importantly, for setting them up. The app works by getting you through the gnarly process of setting meetings with an easy, step-by-step process for connecting you with other people.

Instead of bouncing back and forth between multiple browser windows — one for email, one for calendar — and trying to schedule things that way… And instead of sending multiple emails back and forth between meeting participants, Atlas provides a simple way to create meetings on your mobile phone, and then have those meetings imported back into the calendar program of your choice.

With Atlas, users simply create an event, and then invite people to participate in it. If users are looking at multiple possible meeting times, they can send a few which work and have the other participant pick which one works for them. The originating meeting creator gets to see a matrix of when everyone’s available and can then pick a time that works for everyone. In the meantime, while waiting on a final meeting time, those times are blocked off so that you can’t accidentally double book. Participants can also counter offer places and times and stuff, because they might know of a better sushi joint than the meeting creator.

It’s kind of like Tungle.me before, well, you know. Oh yeah, and it’s mobile first.**

Atlas isn’t trying to take over your calendar, which is nice. Instead it works with the calendars you work with. That includes GCal, iCal, YCal, and Outlook. It also works with newer calendar apps — you know, the Tempos and Sunrises and Fantasticals of the world.

Anyway, while Atlas has lots of cool features and will unsuck your calendar if you’re a power user, it might not be the best choice for everyone. Still, might be worth giving it a try because hey, anything is better than two browser windows and back and forth emails, right?

==
* And by God I hope you’re not, if just for your own sake…
** Because we were all born mobile nowadays, y’know.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 Startup Alley audience choice for day two is ShipHawk, a Santa Barbara-based shipping startup that launched this week at the conference. ShipHawk, co-founded by Jeremy Bodenhamer and Aaron Freeman, is a fully-featured online shipping platform that takes care of everything from providing shipping estimates to handling package pickup, delivery, packing, insurance and more for both residential and commercial addresses, for small and medium-sized businesses.

While the key difference that ShipHawk has from other shipping services is that it provides estimates without having to see items packed beforehand, it also adds to the experience by allowing customers located anywhere to organize pick up and delivery from other locations, so that a client based in SF can ship an item from New York, without doing so much as cutting a piece of packing tape. And the process is made much more transparent, including packing (boxes, materials) and transport.

The company works like any other retail shipping operation, and charges the same as you’d find at any of those. It makes a referral-type commission from the businesses that actually handle fulfillment, including UPS and FedEx, as well as insurance companies and agencies that handle the packing. Right now, Bodenhamer says that they make their revenue strictly by collecting the finder’s fee for referring customers to the services of other companies, but they’re already talking to VP-level execs at FedEx about fostering a deeper partnership.

Both Bodenhamer and Freeman have previous experience in the shipping and logistics worlds. Freeman has 10 years experience in shipping, and Bodenhamer’s business recently acquired Freeman’s retail shipping store in Santa Barbara.

“We got together after I bought the business and we said ‘What’s broken around retail shipping?’ and we came with an idea to solve the problem,” Bodenhamer said. That involved looking at pain points for customers, which included the process mentioned above around assessing the price of a shipping job up front, and around getting the package to a shipper quickly and easily without having to resort to using yet another service provider.

ShipHawk has around $500,000 in seed funding so far, mostly secured from friends and families, as well as some independent angels and investment firms. Thus far, the focus has been on getting help to make sure the platform addresses the needs of actual users, Bodenhamer says.

“We have a network locally of people who are advising us and helping us to formulate the whole plan,” he said. “We believe strongly that this has the potential to grow into a household name-type business, just like Expedia or Kayak. So just like when you need a plane ticket, you don’t go to American Airlines, you go to Expedia.com, when you want to ship something you won’t go to FedEx.com, you’ll go to ShipHawk.”

At first, ShipHawk will be serving the Southern California area, with plans to expand across the U.S. after that. It’s a good idea to start local with a business like this that involves quite a lot of logistics, and coordinating with local companies and resources. It’ll also offer a “ship free” promotion that rewards people for recommending their friends, the same way that Dropbox has done to ramp up user acquisition as it expands.

The mobile app for ShipHawk, which is now on the web as an MVP product, is currently on the roadmap and will arrive sometime down the road once they have the product up and running smoothly in their initial launch markets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last September, we reported that VC firm Greylock Partners was planning on having a second Hackfest after the first one was a rousing success. The Greylock Hackfest will take place on July 27 at Airbnb’s office in San Francisco. The idea of this particular event is to bring a selected group of university students from around the world for a 24-hour hackathon. During the process, the students will be getting mentorship from some of Greylock’s partners and portfolio companies.

A new site, GreylockU, will be the host for all of the Hackfest information and the application. Additionally, students can submit their resumes for internships and full-time positions at Greylock’s more than 50 portfolio companies. By setting up this portal, Greylock hopes to feed its investments with the best and brightest talent from all over the globe.

The judges for this year’s Hackfest are: Greylock Partner and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Airbnb Founder and CTO Nathan Blecharcyzk, Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen and Google Ventures Partner and Digg Founder Kevin Rose.

The opportunity to apply for the Hackfest coincides with the admission of winning teams from campus hackathons that have already taken place at colleges like Princeton, Cal, Stanford, UPenn, CMU and MIT. The deadline for submissions is July 3, and Greylock would like students to come into the process with teams already created.

Last year’s winners included Toaster.js, a hack involving power strip censors and controllers, linked to a physical device; Assassins, a cloud-based multi-player mobile game; and Dance, a multi-player dance game using optical recognition.cal recognition to spot faces and hands to score players.

Other than being crowned champion, winning teams can grab free Amazon Web Services, Lytro cameras, office hours and a personal dinner with Reid Hoffman and DJ Patil from Greylock.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With the passage of the JOBS Act, the Crowdfunding Era began and since then these fund-raising platforms have been sprouting in every vertical — even education. Just two weeks ago, we announced the launch of AlumniFunder, which “gives alumni a platform by which they can invest in innovative projects created by students at their alma mater.”

Today, we have another entry into the education crowdfunding set — Houston-based startup, PledgeCents. But, rather than going after higher education, PledgeCents is launching today to help K-12, public schools raise the funding they need to survive as federal and state funding continue to dry up.

To do this, the startup wants to connect investors and corporations with schools that have exhausted traditional fundraising channels and are looking for alternative ways to offset funding reductions. The idea, PledgeCents co-founder Ricky Johnson said, is to allow public schools to keep the programs, supplies and services they need to maintain educational standards for their students amidst a slow economic recovery (and the thing that no one talks about in polite company in education, the unsustainable spending).

So, PledgeCents allows any K-12 school with funding needs (so, every school in America) to raise funding — for any type of project, resource or program. In canvassing schools to find out what their most pressing needs are, they naturally found that schools have a variety of micro-projects they’re interested in funding, particularly equipment, field trips, school security and supplies for science labs, art and theater.

The platform enables teachers to create projects, while administrators can oversee the process to ensure the funds are used in appropriate ways, and PledgeCents even sends out bracelets that students can wear (in school colors) to help promote the campaigns among their friends. The platform will also dole out rewards to the school campaigns that raise the most funds.

But, perhaps the biggest difference from other crowdfunding sites? The funds raised on the platform will be distributed to schools regardless of whether they hit their fundraising targets. In terms of differentiation from other fundraising startups out there like AlumniFunder, EverTrue, Donorschoose or AdoptAClassroom (and even Chalkfly, with its charitable spin or Crowdtilt) is that they tend to focus on alumni or raising funds for supplies, the co-founder says. Instead, PledgeCents wants to go broader to include supplies, teacher salaries and general education-related activities like field trips and band equipment.

“School funding in Texas has taken a huge hit of late so my son’s high school is actually in the process of setting up a PledgeCents project to fund the salary of one of the marching band’s instructors,” Austin-based brand strategy consultant Dave Manzer tells us. Plus, in light of AlumniFunder and EverTrue’s focus on fundraising at colleges and universities, PledgeCents is one of a very small number of crowdfunding platforms that exclusively serves K-12 education — in a broad way.

However, like many others, posting a fundraising campaign is free for schools and anyone can contribute (after signing up for an account). Users will also be able to search for campaigns by particular criteria, like school category, state, region or type of school (public/private/charter, etc.) Additionally, those who sign up for accounts will be able to select preferences and receive email alerts when projects matching their criteria are added to the site.

“The slow economic recovery continues to impact school funding across the United States,” Johnson concludes, “and many educators are waking to the realization that they have to find alternative funding for at-risk programs and services.” PledgeCents gives teachers the platform to do that, because, hey, every penny counts.

The one strike against PledgeCents? Selection. Only six campaigns are currently live. Next up, too, it should consider what Crowdtilt and others have done — offering tax-deductible donations, so that parents, friends (really, anyone) can donate to school projects they want to see funded.

For more, find PledgeCents at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Creative Market, the online store for creative digital assets, including graphics, themes, templates and fonts, this week introduced a new Photoshop extension that’s designed to preview the power of its upcoming API. Creative Market already offers a central web-based store that acts almost like an Amazon for digital creative professionals, but its ultimate vision is much broader – it hopes to give pros the opportunity to buy and sell their wares right where they’re already doing their work, which is what the API is all about.

With the Photoshop extension, people can browse and buy assets within the application itself, making them available instantly for use in their creative work. Installation takes only a single click, and regardless of whether users buy the assets within Photoshop or from the web-based marketplace, they’re instantly available to users within the extension itself once they’re logged in. It dramatically simplifies the process of starting on a new machine, or of wiping your hard drive for a fresh install, by making sure that your fonts, graphics and more are easily available on your fresh install without having to physically copy files over.

“The Photoshop extension was kind of the easiest way for us to paint the picture of how obvious this problem is, and yet it’s overlooked a lot,” Creative Market co-founder and CEO Darius “Bubs” Monsef explained in an interview. “Software that we use doesn’t actually have the assets that we use in the software, in the software. That’s something that we’ve wanted to do ever since we pivoted COLOURlovers to become Creative Market.”

Photoshop was a logical place to start, Monsef says, because Creative Suite alone represents a massive potential market. Creative Market recently conducted a survey of over 1,000 creative pros, and found that on average they spend around $150 a year, which, multiplied by Adobe’s reported paying user base of 40 million customers, adds up to a potential $6 billion in annual sales.

Of course, Creative Market isn’t without competition in its efforts to bring asset management and marketplaces direct to creative products. Adobe recently said that it will formally introduce and explain its own asset marketplace, Adobe Exchange, at its upcoming Adobe MAX conference. The timing isn’t ideal for Creative Market, but Monsef still thinks the approach his company is taking it better for both sellers and buyers.

“Adobe has released their Adobe Exchange in-app as an extension, too, finally allowing people to buy assets inside of Photoshop,” he said. “Unfortunately, like products built by large teams focused on other problems, it doesn’t work as well as I think it could. I’ve tried using it and it’s very confusing and I think not nearly as elegant as what we’ve built.”

The other big advantage for Creative Market is that once it starts working with the makers of other creative software products, assets purchased through its API and its web-based store will be instantly available within a wide range of apps, not just those from Adobe. Not being locked to a vendor in terms of where your assets are kept is a considerable competitive advantage. Plus, Creative Market plans to share its take of royalties with API partners, the first batch of which it’s in the process of selecting now.

Managing creative assets is not something everyone things about all the time, but it’s a necessary element of any creative professional’s job, and the way it’s handled online is largely unchanged in recent years. Creative Market offers creators a bigger percentage of the cut than they get elsewhere, and presents media and usage rights in a simpler way that’s easier to both use and understand. If it can pull of the feat of becoming the integrated creative media library where most professionals do most of their work, it’ll make a big dent in a strong and growing market.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

MkII Ventures’ Ron Palmeri joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for our Ask A VC series.

We chatted about the rise of rise of company builders, or “studios,” in the technology and VC world. Palmeri was one of the first participants in this movement while he was a managing director at Minor Ventures (GrandCentral (now Google Voice), OpenDNS and Scout Labs (acquired by Lithium). And now Palmeri is continuing this with MkII Ventures. The firm has incubated Prism Skylabs, and is in the process of launching a new stealth startup, which Palmeri reveals in the video above.

Tune in for more!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Percolate, a startup that helps clients create and share content, is taking a big step in what co-founder James Gross calls the company’s “visual strategy.”

Obviously, images are a big part of what businesses want to share on social media. While they could do that by sharing through Percolate already, the service didn’t include many significant features to make the process easier. That’s changing today, with the launch of integrations with Getty Images and Aviary.

Thanks to the Getty Images partnership, Percolate customers now have access to a broader library of photos, a library where they don’t have to worry about whether or not they have the rights to use the images (because they already know the answer is yes).

And that library is automatically sorted using Percolate’s technology, which tries to understand what topics are relevant to a company at a given time, and highlights photos based on those topics. Gross said the goal is to make the process as easy as possible, but if the algorithm doesn’t surface the image you’re looking for, you can also search the photos based on things like tags.

Once a client has found a photo that they want to share — either from the Getty Images library or from the images they’ve uploaded themselves — they can use Aviary’s photo-editing tools from directly within Percolate. Gross edited a couple of images for me, adding filters and text in just a minute or two, giving the photos a bit more flair as well as adding a relevant company or hashtag.

“Brands are trying to make photos look more and more organic, more and more like people are used to,” Gross said. “Adding any sort of filter can have a very powerful effect on what might be a very standard photo.”

In exchange for the simplicity of the interface, Percolate users are giving up some of the features included in a product like Photoshop, but Gross said, “They don’t need all the tools of Photoshop with 95 to 100 percent of these images.”

The Getty Images photo library and Aviary editing tools are now available to Percolate clients as part of the basic package. The company is also announcing that it has partnered with LinkedIn, so its clients can now share content on that network, as well.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch