Tag Archive | "products"

E-Commerce Startup Monogram Launches A Publishing Platform For Shoppable Fashion Magazines

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Last fall, fashion commerce startup Monogram launched an iPad app that was aiming to be kind of like a mobile, shoppable magazine for those hip to fashion. It had all the makings of a great mobile commerce app: It looked good, it was easy to use, and it allowed viewers to buy all the latest fashions really easily.

But it didn’t catch on the way that the team had hoped, according to founder Leo Chen. One of the reasons he believes the app didn’t resonate with users was that “the motivation to share individual products wasn’t strong enough.” And there just wasn’t enough content. With the launch of Monogram 2.0, the startup hopes to solve both of those problems. So the team went back to the drawing board.

Rather than position Monogram strictly as a platform for consuming content and maybe buying some stuff, the team decided to leverage the huge existing world of fashion bloggers to help create and share content through its platform.

As a result, the new Monogram provides a full web editing tool suite, which will allow bloggers to publish and share their favorite fashions with others. Bloggers can create posts, or full “magazines,” of all their favorite content, which readers can browse or subscribe to. Each post provides shoppable links to products either featured in, or similar to, the clothes and accessories that are being shown off on the page.

For bloggers, the simplicity of the Monogram platform comes primarily in the tools that it provides for enabling easy purchases through their pages. Not only is the publishing part of the tool beautiful and easy to use, but the ability to add clickable items for purchase is just drop-dead simple. Rather than having to scour the web for the items they want to add, and putting in affiliate links, the Monogram platform provides an integrated search functionality within the platform, which scours the web for the products bloggers wish to share.

On the viewing side, the new version of Monogram enables easy to read and share versions of bloggers’ posts and magazines. Monogram is built as a web app with responsive design that can be viewed on PC, tablet or mobile device. The startup has also built a native app with all the same viewing features. However, users who wish to publish need to do so from the web.

Individuals who are logged in can repost the content of others, kind of like you can do on Tumblr — but all links go back to the original post. The idea is to build a sense of community within the platform, but also to provide the original publisher with the credit for creating the post.

The company is working on adding more features for bloggers — like, for instance, advanced reporting. It’s also working on figuring out an affiliate model so that they can get paid for the products that are sold thanks to their magazines. Chen tells me that he’d like to see the bulk of affiliate revenues go to the bloggers, while the company will take a small cut.

Monogram can afford to do that, he says, because the company’s R&D team is based in Shanghai, which means a low burn rate. The company has raised about $1.25 million led by Quest Venture Partners, with participation from Great Oaks VC, Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan’s Initialized Capital, 500 Startups, Chinese seed fund Innovation Camp, Yintai.com CEO Robin Liao, Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra, Decide.com’s Brian Ma, and angel investors Jared Kopf Christina Brodbeck.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Luvocracy Raises $11M From Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures And Others To Master Ecommerce And Social Recommendations

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Luvocracy, a recently launched, Pinterest-like social marketplace where people can buy products recommended by friends and other tastemakers, has raised $11 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Marissa Mayer, Ali Pincus, Jim Lanzone, Tony Robbins, CrunchFund*, RPM Ventures and XG Ventures. Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon is joining Luvocracy’s board.

Sharing products has become mainstream thanks to Pinterest and Facebook. But Pinterest lacks the ability to actually buy many of the products curated on the site by friends, and there is too much noise on Facebook to make it a dedicated e-commerce platform for recommendations. Enter Luvocracy, a startup co-founded by Nathan Stoll and Roger Barnett.

Stoll was an early Googler who ran and expanded Google News. The last company he co-founded, social search service Aardvark, was acquired in 2010 by Google. Barnett was the founder and CEO of Beauty.com and the CEO of Arcade Marketing, the largest perfume-sampling company in the world. He is also the chairman and CEO of Shaklee Corporation, the leading natural nutrition company in the U.S.

The premise around Luvocracy is to be the social marketplace where people can buy products recommended by those they trust. At a macro level, the startup is bringing the power of recommendations, which have driven purchase decisions for centuries, into the world of online shopping. Stoll recalls the story of his grandmother, who was a longtime Avon lady, as demonstrating the power of human recommendations. Even today, nearly 90 percent of all online and offline purchases (or 8 billion transactions) start with a word of mouth recommendation.

But there hasn’t been a streamlined way to easily share, discover and buy great products recommended by the friends you trust and tastemakers whose styles you admire.

Once you register for the site, you can check the products you are interested in (i.e. home goods, men’s style, women’s style), import your Facebook friends, and more. You can filter your shown product feeds by trending (by recommendations), the people you trust for recommendations, the latest product added, and featured products and tastemakers. When I first registered for the site, I immediately made my first Luvocracy purchase, a “Shopping Is My Cardio” sweatshirt.

Luvocracy lists a maximum you will pay for the product. To make buying a recommendation dead simple, Luvocracy created a “Buy It For Me” service. When there is something you “luv” from a trusted person, it’s as simple and easy as clicking the “Buy It For Me” button, and Luvocracy takes it from there, locating and purchasing the item and even dealing with any shipping or return issues on their behalf.

The startup will manage merchant returns for you, and offers a 30-day return policy.

Similar to Pinterest, Luvocracy also lets you easily create collections of products that you adore and want to recommend, so that others can discover and purchase from you. All recommenders receive a portion of the sales in Luvocracy (and Luvocracy makes a cut from each purchase) as well.

The challenge Luvocracy will face is to create an audience in a social commerce world that is already being dominated by Pinterest and the most recent up and comer Wanelo. But my immediate impression by Luvocracy is that it could accomplish this among the design-focused audience that e-commerce standout Fab has been able to tap into. The quality of the products posted on Luvocracy is high, and I had not seen most of the items I browsed through on other e-commerce sites (and as my purchase indicates, shopping is my cardio, especially online). Even the user experience itself of Luvocracy and the presentation of products is sleek.

If Luvocracy can maintain this quality and design-focused brand even as it grows, the site could create a loyal (and high-purchasing) user base. Based on my intial purchase, the startup already has my attention.

*TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is a General Partner of CrunchFund.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Groupon Rebrands Mobile Payments Biz As Breadcrumb, Adds iPad Merchant App And A $5k No-Fee Deal To Bring On New Users

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A day after Groupon released (and then pulled) an iPad app with a new mobile payments dashboard for businesses, today the company is taking the wraps off a bigger piece of news around its larger plans to expand its commerce services for local merchants. Building on its Breadcrumb payments and commerce service for restaurants, which Groupon acquired last year, the company today is rebranding its wider payments service — and the final version of that free iPad app — under the same name.

The new iPad app for merchants of all stripes is called “Breadcrumb POS,” while the old Breadcrumb app for restaurants will now be called “Breacrumb Pro.” Both will be here when they go live on the app store.

Sound confusing for both to be called Breadcrumb? Streamlining names is usually meant to simplify things. Groupon says that in fact this is what is happening here: “As it turned out, when we spoke to merchants at salons and other retailers, they were fine with the name Breadcrumb,” says Mihir Shah, VP for Merchant OS at Groupon. “It was about how good are the rates, and the quality of the actual POS product and software.”

Indeed, it makes sense for Groupon to address these things, considering that the marketing play of targeting those who have never been able to process credit cards before is now a little me-too. “We’re not just targeting simple paymet solutions for those who didn’t take credit cards before,” says Shah. “We’re offering a better service to them.”

Both the app, and Groupon’s wider payment services — they also include the Groupon Merchants apps that sit on iPhone and Android handsets, which turn them into credit card readers — are U.S.-only for now. The company is still working on expanding this internationally to the 500,000 merchants it says already use Groupon’s platform for daily deals and other offers. As we noted yesterday, expanding payments services is part of the company’s bigger ambition to take its business beyond daily deals and into other revenue streams.

But, because Groupon is coming into the market of mobile payments and local commerce relatively late — Square, PayPal’s here and others have already been here for a while scooping up business – Groupon is being aggressive on both the rates it charges, and also in making the service as easy to integrate as possible into a business.

To attract new payments business from among the 100,000 merchants in the U.S. that already sell daily deals and other products through Groupon’s platform, as well as those merchants who do not, Groupon is targeting lower, and sometimes no, rates. Those who sign up now get the first $5,000 of payments processed through the service without being subject to any fees. After that, Groupon offers a guarantee that its fees are lower than any one else’s: Shah tells TechCrunch that Groupon will match its competitor’s rates if a merchant can submit proof of those rates being better.

Groupon charges merchants 1.8% on Visa, MasterCard and Discover swiped transactions, 2.3% when keyed in, plus $0.15 for each transaction. American Express pricing is more complicated as it is “determined by American Express based on your industry category.” The rates range from 2.3%-3.5% (swiped) and $0.00 to $0.15 per transaction, says Groupon. For non-Groupon Merchants, the fees are higher: 2.2% when MasterCard, Visa and Discover are swiped, plus $0.15 per transaction. As a point of comparison, Square has two options: a flat 2.75% fee per swipe, or $275 per month with no fees per swipe — with the latter aimed at higher-volume users, or those who like to gamble that they might be.

Groupon also says that it is halving the time for payment deposits to appear in a merchant account, to 24 hours from two to three days.

In addition to competitive commission and deposit rates, the company is also taking a leaf from its Breadcrumb launch last year and bundling the app with some of the physical hardware that will help people run it.

It calls this service the “Bread Box” and typical packages range in price from $246 (iPad stand, cash drawer, a reader dongle for a mobile device) through to $914 (all three of those, plus a printer for receipts and an iPad 2). Groupon is also selling these a la carte (by the slice?) on its web site in the Breadcrumb Store, with other products including the iPad Mini, and other products.

With Groupon currently beating analyst expectations but still searching for a new permanent CEO after the ouster of founder Andrew Mason, it’s moves like this one that are signals to the market that it is trying to get itself into fighting fit shape, cutting away some of the excess and focusing its products and execution. Whether merchants will buy into the deal being offered by the company — lower rates and all — and whether Groupon will be able to extend this to its still-fragmented but huge international business, are the two big questions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook’s Recent Acquisition Parse Launches Hosting For Developers’ Web Presence

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Parse, the mobile back-end startup that Facebook recently bought to set up a new developer-focused business, just launched hosting. Parse  It’s meant to help mobile developers that have a desktop web presence or companion experience on the web. The acquisition has already given Parse a boost, with the number of apps it hosts up 33% to 80,000 since the deal was announced.

“People were building mobile apps using Parse. But when they wanted a web presence or a dot-com landing page, they were using the Parse for the log-in, but the website was being served from something else like Heroku or App Engine,” explained Parse co-founder Ilya Sukhar. “So we’re launching a fully featured web hosting platform.”

Sukhar said the project has been in the works for the last four to six weeks, even while the Facebook negotiations were going on.

The new hosting service lets developers host landing pages, and display user data retrieved using the Parse API. Say if a developer wants to show a leaderboard for their game on the web, they can do it using both the new hosting service and the standard Parse data product.

Parse Hosting comes on top of other products that help mobile developers manage push notifications and user identities and log-ins.

He added that the Facebook deal, which we had independently heard was worth $85 million excluding retention incentives, hadn’t scared away developers. They’re at 80,000 apps now, from the 60,000 apps they said they had when the Facebook deal was announced. “There was an interesting debate about whether people would move off Parse, but all of our metrics are up,” he said.

Facebook had won the deal to buy Parse even as many of the Valley’s best known companies like Apple, Yahoo and Dropbox had looked or expressed interest. They’re starting their very first business-to-business revenue stream through the Parse acquisition and had — like in the case of Instagram — promised the team a fair amount of autonomy to grow their products as they see fit. They’re not tampering with Parse’s SaaS-based revenue model.

He also said that the company hadn’t celebrated the deal yet. “We have a lot of stuff on our plate,” he said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the Wake Of Funding, Skimlinks Launches New Products To Face Off Opposition

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Last month Skimlinks, the platform that allows publishers full control over affiliate links and content monetization, completed a growth financing round led by Greycroft Partners and others, while expanding into Asia. This month it has new products to roll out, launching two major initiatives. The question is, how does it stand up to the competition?

The first new product is called Showcases, which is a visual alternative to the in-line-text offering its had for some time.

Showcases are ad units that sit alongside content and populate automatically based on the products mentioned in an article, geo-targeted to the user. It means publishers don’t have to manually add an image to illustrate an article, like this.

Secondly, Fashion Engine, instead of identifying products that include model numbers or brand names, finds product references that use entirely normal English words, e.g. “Kim Kardashian was seen wearing a black leather dress.” This vertical-optimized semantic engine is thus aimed at fashion publishers, such as here and here.

Alicia Navarro, co-founder and CEO, says competitors don’t offer these kinds of products: “Both VigLink and RewardStyle don’t offer an accurate automated in-text/near-text solution geared towards fashion publishers. It is really hard to do well in non-techy verticals, and we have built the means to do it, at scale, in real-time.”

They also plan to expose the API behind this new service. It sounds bold but Navarro says they want to become the “Twilio of e-commerce with our path towards open APIs for all our products.”

But competitors have a few words to say about these moves.

When asked, Oliver Deighton, VP of marketing of Viglink, takes slight issue with this. He says VigLink Insert has been optimized since 2012 for over a dozen categories and the VigLink catalog API already enables publishers to “create custom and highly visual shopping experiences.”

Oliver Krohne, Founder & CEO of Yieldkit says “Alicia is right that verticals beside tech are different as you don’t have proper names like “iphone” or “galaxy tab”… However, approaching the standard ad spaces means also facing harder competition in terms of CPM rates, which you receive from all ad networks or Adsense. So it will be a challenge to exceed those.”

Navarro, however, has words for these guys. “VigLink Insert was launched a while after our SkimWords product, but their solution has never been real-time… and it is a simple word match solution, rather than ours which is a trained natural language processing engine… we don’t know of a single fashion site running VigLink Insert.”

“YieldKit’s comments are true, some publishers do place us in standard ad unit places, but we encourage publishers to create new real estate for Showcases alongside content, rather than placing them in peripheral ‘ad’ spots. As we evolve Showcases we will weave in behavioural optimization and even richer content so we achieve comparable earnings to traditional ‘ads.’”

Whatever the case, the race is on to capture this market, and Skimlinks seems to be making most of the running right now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Games Company Releases Version For Pirates That Forces Them To Fail Constantly, Irony Lost On Pirates

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This is a fascinating little blip that popped up this morning and bears a mention. Games company GreenHeart released a $8 game called Game Dev Tycoon. He sold a few hundred copies and, as a special treat, released a torrent of the game with a special feature built-in: after hours of play, the little virtual game devs would get a sales report that said pirates were stealing the game so much that the company was going under. Hilarity ensued.

Gamers with the pirated version resorted to complaining about the product on various forums, wondering why their choice to pirate a $10 game was coming back to bite them. To wit:

Sadly, all of this irony still didn’t make GreenHeart games much money as over 90% of the users downloaded the pirated version and the creator made $2,140 as of yesterday. Hopefully all of this attention is getting creator Patrick Klug a little more cash but it’s a sad situation when an industry that lionizes the indie refuses to pay for the products they champion. Information wants to be free, to be sure, but Krug needs to eat.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook Buys Parse To Offer Mobile Development Tools As Its First Paid B2B Service

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Facebook has just acquired Parse, marking its entry into a whole new business category: paid tools and services for developing mobile apps.

The company is buying the mobile-backend-as-a-service startup (yes, the industry acronym is mBaaS) in a deal that we’ve heard is worth $85 million. Neither company is commenting on the size of the deal, except that Facebook said it’s not “material.”

Parse was founded about two years ago by a small group of seasoned Googlers and Y Combinator alums who got together to build a useful set of back-end tools for mobile developers. They originally called their back-end service, the “Heroku” of mobile in a homage to what was one of YC’s biggest exits to date — the $212 million sale of Heroku to Salesforce.com. They offer services that help mobile developers store data in the cloud, manage identity log-ins, handle push notifications and run custom code in the cloud.

Facebook won the deal amid what we’ve heard was a competitive process with many of other Valley’s other biggest potential buyers. Parse CEO and co-founder Ilya Sukhar said that he chose Facebook over other suitors — without naming names — because the company was a better cultural fit.

“I don’t think any of the other conversations created anywhere near the excitement level that we had for Facebook,” he said in an interview.

Why Parse? Facebook is in a big push to become more relevant than ever to mobile developers. It doesn’t own its own mobile OS like Apple or Google. It doesn’t make its own devices.

Instead, it’s a horizontal social and identity layer that runs through thousands of apps of iOS and Android, in deep custom integrations in devices made by hardware makers like HTC, and in its latest project, Facebook Home.

In that sense, Facebook has to prove value to mobile developers in other ways. Facebook integrations can make apps stickier when users add friends, and the company’s mobile app install ads help developers acquire new users.

Now through the Parse deal, the company will be able to offer back-end services for data storage, notifications and user management. This is a brand new kind of revenue stream for Facebook, as the company is keeping Parse’s freemium revenue model. Parse currently has over 60,000 apps and roughly the same number of developers. They focus on monetizing the top 10 percent of their clientele.

“This fills out one of the pillars of Facebook platform that we’ve been thinking about for awhile,” said Facebook’s Director of Product Management Doug Purdy. “Since 2007, the Facebook platform has been about being an identity mechanism with sharing. But over the course of the last six months, we’ve been thinking about how we can help applications get discovered and how they can be monetized.”

He added, “In order to provide the best experience possible, developers also need to build a whole host of infrastructure. Parse is a natural fit. They’ve really just abstracted away a lot of the work necessary to get an app up and running.”

The deal is a big exit for Parse, which had raised just $7 million to date from investors including Ignition Partners, Start Fund, Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Aaron Iba, Garry Tan, Chris Fanini, Sean Knapp, Don Dodge and David Rusenko.

As for Parse users, the company says apps won’t be affected in any way, that developers won’t have to integrate Facebook and that existing contracts will be honored. Parse has a freemium model with a basic free version for up to 1 million requests or pushes per month and a limit of 20 bursts per second. A lowest paid version is $199 a month with 15 million requests a month, 5 million pushes per month and a burst limit of 40 per second. Then there’s an enterprise version where the rates are negotiable.

In the long-run, by getting closer to the development process Facebook could increase the likelihood that third-party apps integrate with them and buy their ads. When added to the direct fees Facebook will collect from Parse subscribers, the acquisition could become a critical part of how Facebook earns money from the burgeoning app economy.

Here’s the post from Sukhar:

Parse has come a long way. In just under two years, we’ve gone from a rough prototype to powering tens of thousands of apps for a very broad spectrum of customers.

Some of the world’s best brands trust us with their entire mobile presence, and a growing number of the world’s brightest independent developers trust us with their next big thing. We couldn’t be happier.

As stewards of a good thing, we’re always thinking about the next step in growing Parse to become a leading platform in this age of mobile apps.

These steps come in all sizes. Most are small and incremental. Some are larger. Today we’re excited to announce a pretty big one.

Parse has agreed to be acquired by Facebook. We expect the transaction to close shortly. Rest assured, Parse is not going away. It’s going to get better.

We’ve worked with Facebook for some time, and together we will continue offering our products and services. Check out Facebook’s blog post for more on this.

Combining forces with a partner like Facebook makes a lot of sense. In a short amount of time, we’ve built up a core technology and a great community of developers. Bringing that to Facebook allows us to work with their incredible talent and resources to build the ideal platform for developers.

We think this is the right way to accomplish what we set out to do. We’re excited about the future of Parse!

Ilya, Kevin, and James

And here’s Facebook’s statement from Director of Product Management Doug Purdy:

Last week, we hosted our first Mobile Developer Conference, where we launched several new products to help mobile developers integrate Facebook: Open Graph for mobile, better Facebook Login, and new developer tools. Today, we’re making it even easier to build mobile apps with Facebook Platform by announcing that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides scalable cross-platform services and tools for developers.

By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices. Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management, and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences.

We’ve worked closely with the Parse team and have seen first-hand how important their solutions and platform are to developers. We don’t intend to change this. We will continue offering their products and services, and we’re excited to expand what Facebook and Parse can provide together.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mulu Combines Content And Commerce With ‘Shop This Page’ Plugin

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Online commerce still isn’t as easy as it should be. That’s because many times, consumers find something they want while browsing a publisher site online, but then have to search for and buy it elsewhere. Well, that’s a process that Los Angeles-based startup Mulu wants to change, with an ad plugin that allows users to buy the products they’re reading about directly on the page.

Mulu enables that kind of shopping experience with a plugin for publishers that works by scanning the content of the page and providing links to related products which can be purchased directly. Clicking on a product that’s displayed within the ad unit will take users directly to the product page on any of a number of third-party sites that Mulu has integrated with.

But beyond just providing a better shopping experience for users, the plugin makes life easier for publishers. While linking to products related to the content on a page is nothing new, the “Shop This Page” feature drastically simplifies the process of enabling commerce on publisher sites.

Previously, publishers would have to keep track of multiple affiliate codes and often create links manually to products that they refer to. Not only does the plugin enable one-click commerce on the site, but it enables publishers to benefit even if they haven’t struck up a direct relationship with an advertiser.

“Online content pages are becoming the new retail store,” Mulu CEO Amaryllis Fox told me. She envisions a world where users no longer have to go through the two-step process of finding an object they want to buy in an article online, and then having to search for it through an e-commerce site or *gasp* by shopping in a brick-and-mortar store.

As for advertisers, the “Shop This Page” feature is driving more clickthroughs — and that, in turn, is driving more sales. Since the products that are shown on any given page are relevant to what end users are reading about, they’re much more likely to buy something.

The plugin works with pretty much any type of content, and on any platform. The “Shop This Page” plugin — which is really just a few lines of code — is optimized to be viewed on various different displays, whether on a traditional desktop web browser, or on a mobile- or tablet-optimized website.

With that sales pitch, Mulu’s gotten a good number of lifestyle and fashion brands on board. Clients include Hearst, Conde Nast, and Food Network, with the plugin being featured on publications such as Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, Country Living, and others.

And it seems to be working pretty well. A representative from Hearst says that in the publisher’s initial implementation on Seventeen’s site, Hearst Digital Media was seeing click-through rates close to 13 percent. While that is at the high end of the spectrum — Mulu claims click-through rates between 2 percent and 13 percent with its publishing partners — it’s an immense upgrade over the sub-1 percent click-through rate of most standard ad units.

One reason for that might be the social good component of Mulu’s business model. While commerce is at the forefront of its offering, the company also ensures that all publishers give a percentage of the cost-per-click payment to a charity of their choice. Those charities are displayed along with the products, giving consumers an easy way to give back.

Now that it’s gotten a good number of customers on board, it’s looking to accelerate its growth with more tech and sales people and a bit more funding. The Los Angeles-based company currently has 14 employees and is in the midst of raising a Series A round of financing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Keen On… Intel: Why 3D Visualization Is Now A Reality [TCTV]

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Intel is one of those rare tech companies – IBM also comes to mind – that has successfully reinvented itself with each new wave of technological disruption. So, in our post-PC, networked age, how should we define Intel now? According to their new CIO, Kim Stevenson, Intel is a “computing company” that is now trying to be “startup-like”. And one disruptive area that Stevenson believes is “unexploited” is 3D visualization  applications – products which make visual sense of big data. There’s a “market gap” here, Stevenson told me.

3D visualization is “for real”, she explained, because 3D camera costs have come down and because so many of our products are touch and gesture enabled. This may be one reason why, as Stevenson reminded me, Intel is getting into the device business. And it’s certainly one area that intrigues their investment arm, Intel Capital. I suspect Stevenson is right. Since the late nineties, when I ran business development for Pulse3D, 3D has always been the product of the future. But this future has finally arrived and I suspect that Intel’s latest reinvention will be to ride this immersive wave.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Designer Nicholas Felton Leaves Facebook After Pioneering Timeline Overhaul

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Nicholas Felton, who came to fame through many super-detailed infographics and reports about his life as quantified through data, is leaving Facebook almost two years after being acq-hired to work on projects like Timeline.

His early work, which compiled data on things like all the songs he had listened to or everywhere he had been in a single year into a “Feltron Annual Report,” became the basis for Timeline. In a sense, all the profiles of Facebook’s roughly 1 billion users are all like living, breathing annual “Feltron” reports.

He posted on his page today:

On April 19, 2011 I walked into the Palo Alto Facebook office and began contributing to the timeline project. Two years, many late nights and a few launch celebrations later I will be moving on.

The opportunity to help mold a service of such importance to so many people has been a high point in my professional career. I’m extremely proud of the projects I worked on, grateful to the teams that built them and confident in the products to come.

Facebook acq-hired Felton’s startup Daytum in April of 2011 and Felton and his co-founder Ryan Case moved from New York to Palo Alto.

When Facebook’s vice president of product Chris Cox unveiled Timeline, he said he was inspired by seeing Felton’s annual reports: “14 pages. One year. One book. It was hard to call it anything other than what it really was — art.”

He went on, “We had one reaction: we have to try to hire this guy.”

There’s no word on what Felton be working on next yet.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

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