“The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.”

— Andy Rooney

Yes, it’s become exceedingly clear that the Internet has entered into a prodigious, lascivious (and hilarious) relationship with cats. But, at the end of the day, when it comes to the title of “Man/Woman/Child’s Best Friend,” it’s the friendly neighborhood pooch that takes the cake. In my own experience, even when The World thinks you’re an idiot, life gets you down and you’ve forgotten to feed them, their tales are still going to wag — just at the sight of you. Sure, they may have questionable taste, but there’s probably no better representation of unconditional love than your local canine.

If what Rooney says is true, then it probably helps explain why some dogs have it better than some actual humans. (Exhibit A.) Lately, humans, at least humans in Silicon Valley, have become enthralled with wearable health tracking devices. So, considering there’s already a Birchbox for Dogs, it was only a matter of time before dogs got their own Fitbit. Enter: Whistle, a new startup launching today that wants to be the go-to activity tracker for dogs (and dog lovers).

Now, diligent readers of TechCrunch may say, “but, Rip, there’s already a Fitbit for dogs!” I’d advise them to go outside once and a while, but they’d also be correct. Last month, Jay Donovan wrote about a startup called FitBark (!) that is embarking (!) down a similar path. If nothing else, entrepreneurs take note: The emergence of a Facebook for dogs, a Birchbox for dogs, an Airbnb for dogs (times two), a “Find my iPhone for dogs,” and an Uber for dog walking proves we have an over-active dog startup market on our hands.

Next: DogCrunch? BarkMeme? (Yes, we’re hiring.)

Now, let’s just get this out of the way, since it’s one of the obstacles that a startup like Whistle is going to face: The idea of a Fitbit or a Nike+ FuelBand for dogs is ridiculous. Crying “Bubble!” or rolling your eyes for 10 minutes over the idea of a dog startup market almost goes without saying. No doubt there are plenty of people who will see this as a perfect example of Silicon Valley going too far. (Here’s Will Ferrell putting a fine point on the matter.)

And, yes, when one looks at Whistle, it’s easy to imagine a bunch of former VCs and private equity types sitting around a table, doing some market analysis and applying every successful tech company formula to the dog market in the hopes of raising a few million bucks. However, no offense to FitBark, but the Whistle founders want to go beyond just being a “Reasonable Device for Pet Owners” to build the next big tech-savvy pet brand around a killer line of devices and products — starting with an activity tracker.

As evidence of just how serious the company is (or, for naysayers, the growing “blubble”), alongside its launch, the company announced today that it has raised $6 million in Series A financing led by DCM Ventures, with contributions from a long list of investors, including Red Swan Ventures, Humane Society Silicon Valley President and former VP and GM of Intuit Carol Novello, Pinnacle Foods CEO and former Mars President Bob Gamgort and Rapleaf co-founder Dayo Esho, among others. Guitar Hero co-founder and Throttle Games CEO Charles Huang and former VP of Operations at Nest Labs, Sling Media and Virgin John Gilmore have both joined the company as advisors, along with several other prominent local dogs, and DCM partner and Sling Media co-founder Jason Krikorian joined Whistle’s board of directors as a result of the round.

Again, the real interest in Whistle (and in this space) can be found here and in one of Saturday Night Live’s best re-occurring sketches: Dog Show, which parodies the overzealous and obsessive dog owner. Jokes aside, today, not only does everyone have a dog, but people are willing to go to great lengths to spoil their dogs, especially if they don’t have kids. To that point, there are now more dogs in the U.S. than there are children, Krikorian explains, and Americans spend over $50 billion on their pets every year.

Whistle is going after this audience by branding itself as a company that’s dedicated to helping pets live longer and healthier lives — a mission that’s easy to get behind — beginning with its first (flagship) product, a wearable activity tracker that connects to your dog’s collar. Similar to other Quantified Self devices, Whistle’s circular, metallic gadget contains a three-axis accelerometer designed to measure a wide range of motion, and rest, which the startup believes can act as key indicators of canine health.

The gadget also includes both WiFi and Bluetooth capability, allowing it not only to record location-based activity data, but transmit that information to Whistle’s dashboard, which owners can access via the startup’s smartphone apps or via the Web. The device’s location sensing capability is fairly broad, but Whistle co-founder Steve Eidelman (Disclosure at the end of the post) tells us that it can pick up on whether your dog is at home, or, say, riding in the car with you, based on which network it’s accessing (Bluetooth or WiFi). And, by the way, health and activity tracking entrepreneurs, if a pet company can do auto, remote Bluetooth-powered data sync, so can you. Don’t launch without it, you’re insulting your users.

Like the better examples among the Fitbits, Basis(es), FuelBands and Ups of the world, the real key to Whistle’s concept is not its device or apps, but its cloud platform and the data crunching it’s doing behind the scenes. Eidelman tells me that the company has been working with a lot of the biggest pet companies, veterinary clinics and so on to aggregate dog health data and break it down into categories. The more data it collects, the more the startup can build an accurate picture of health patterns and where your dog should ideally fall on that map based on its age, breed, weight and activity.

As it pulls in activity data in realtime, Whistle then weighs those indicators against its dataset (and “doggie demographic information,” as I’m calling it) to see just how well Fido is, or isn’t doing. And, really, dogs could care less about how many miles they log each day chasing cars, it’s really about the owner. If we assume the average dog owner wants to treat their pet well, then Whistle provides them with the benchmarks from which they can glean their success rate. Activity levels looking pretty low? That’s on you, pal, not your dog.

Plus, dogs generally have to be in a lot of pain if they’re going to outwardly show it. Generally, they’re going to suffer silently. (See? You just unconsciously bought into Whistle at the thought of a sad, whimpering dog, didn’t you?) With the ability to track your dog’s general activity and health levels in realtime, there’s a better chance that you will be able to identify problems before they get out of hand — or so the thinking goes.

And, if you’re willing to go with it, the real genius here is that, because Whistle is really playing into the motivations of the dog owner (not Fido himself), if they can convince you to buy their health tracker, they can then up-sell you on a string of other dog-focused products and services. Since Whistle is just launching today, they haven’t gotten there yet, but plans are in the works. Eidelman wouldn’t say what they’re working on next, but it is clear that the startup intends to become a brand (with a line of products), rather than simply holding fast to the “Fitbit for pooches” space.

Unlike, say, Amazon which sells hardware at a loss to get you using its other services, at the outset, Whistle is giving its apps, analytics and cloud service for free to get you to buy its hardware. The gadget will run you $99, which although it may seem like a lot, really isn’t for avid pet owners who will spend ten times that in a couple of weeks. Whistle is taking the same approach as RunKeeper (or Runtastic) in that it wants to build a platform and eventually stake a claim to the “pet graph.” Though my eyes just involuntarily rolled, this means that as more of these devices pop up, if Whistle can be the data platform which they all connect to, it would potentially be holding the keys to the kingdom.

But that’s getting a little ahead of the tail. While companies can always generate a little revenue from selling to really passionate, committed audience on their own site, the real key for companies like Whistle is retail. More specifically, retail partnerships. Considering people spend $50 billion on pets every year, somewhat surprisingly, a small handful of chain pet stores own most of the marketshare. For Whistle to become a viable company, getting its products into PetSmart or the equivalent is critical. If they can do that, and even perhaps capture an entire aisle, they’ll be rolling in dog treats.

For more, find Whistle at home here.

[Disclaimer: Though all of my posts should be taken with a grain of salt, for sake of full disclosure, I should say that I have known Steve Eidelman for several years and consider him a friend. While I have no personal financial stake in Whistle, I do admit a bias insofar as I hope they achieve fame and glory, alhough, admittedly, this can be said for the majority of startups I cover.

Disclaimer #2: I like. DOGs.]

Image credit: Cleanme.us / Alan Lomax

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When we we last talked to augmented reality startup Dekko, back in September of last year, the company was building a platform on which it hoped to find developers to build a new generation of applications that blend computing with the real world. And, while it still hopes to be that platform, which it’s calling a ‘real-world operating system,’ the company is focusing its efforts on creating its own applications, in an effort to attract users and developers alike.

The startup has built technology which can be used to map the real world using a mobile phone or tablet’s camera. It does that by building digital grids through 3-D mapping. Once that is done, Dekko (and other developers) can layer games and other applications on top of it. For now, its app is focused on creating a grid of small, independent spaces. But there’s the potential for it to be used to map full-scale real-world environments as well.

Dekko co-founder Matt Miesnieks likened the company’s initial platform approach to selling shovels during a gold rush. That strategy, though, wasn’t going to help create the best applications on its whole new “real-world OS,” and so the company decided to take up shovels itself and dig in to create its own apps. And so it’s building its first game — which Miesnieks says is about 90 percent done — to showcase what developers can actually DO with its platform.

In that respect, the app that it’s building is kind of like how Microsoft built Solitaire for its Windows platform, Miesnieks said. More than just providing a free game for users of the new operating system, it also trained them how to use a mouse and to familiarize themselves with the control mechanism.

Dekko has also raised a bit more funding, adding an additional $1.3 million to close out a $3.2 million round. Investors include Echo Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Venture 51, Blumberg Capital, Launch Capital, Thomvest, Eniac Ventures, and Zig Capital, as well as angels like Howard Lindzon, Erik Moore, Dan Conway, and Raymond Tonsing. The company, which is based in San Francisco, now has ten employees with expertise in augmented reality, optical tracking, 3D reconstruction and user experience design.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’ve flirted with vegetarianism like I have, then you’re probably aware of a range of meat substitutes, all of which pale in comparison to the real thing. But now Beyond Meat CEO and founder Ethan Brown says that mock meat is about 80 percent of the way to being able to sub in for the real thing without anyone being the wiser, in terms of taste, texture and appearance.

Brown made that claim on stage today at the WIRED Business Conference, where he was discussing the role of proteins in our diet in general and how Silicon Valley investment-backed startups like his own are trying to shake up perhaps one of the oldest and most entrenched industries: the meat market.

Beyond Meat grabbed headlines as an unlikely target for investment by Obvious Corp., the investment vehicle/incubator/idea factory co-founded by Biz Stone and Evan Williams of Twitter fame. In a blog post from August, Stone outlined exactly why Obvious felt that Beyond Meat was a prime investment target, and how it aligned with the Obvious vision.

Beyond Meat will become the market leader in the development and introduction of new plant protein products. Together, we are focused on perfectly replacing animal protein with plant protein where doing so creates nutritional value at lower cost. Aside from the fact that the products are healthy, sustainable, kind, and delicious, we are involved because with one company, we have an impact on climate change, resource scarcity, human health, animal welfare, and more. With this company, we can move into new territory while staying true to Obvious’ mission.

The Obvious goal is to “build systems that help people work together to make the world a better place,” and Beyond Meat definitely fits within that broad aim. On stage, Brown talked about the time saved in raising non-meat protein versus that which comes from animal sources, which is a comparison of minutes for his company’s products to days for even the fastest-grown animal protein, which doesn’t even begin to get into ethical concerns.

For Brown, a big part of winning the war with the consumer over meat alternatives is convincing them to try it to begin with, and that starts with giving them a recognizable product. Already, he says people find it challenging to identify Beyond Meat’s own chicken substitute as something other than chicken, except when it’s placed side-by-side with the real thing. But the key to wide adoption, and winning over a much bigger percentage of the roughly $177 billion annual animal protein market that exists today, will be achieving full verisimilitude. And part of that means getting equal billing with the red and bloody stuff.

“The meat counter for me is about an unlevelled playing field,” Brown explained on stage at the Wired event today. “They should be selling protein, not meat and meat alternatives. So when you go back to that section in the store it should be about protein, because often when you go back and are looking for a meat alternative, those products are off in a penalty box in the corner.”

Many vegetarians claim not to want meat substitutes that look, feel and taste like the real thing, but there’s an even larger market of people who are trying to limit their meat intake for health purposes but don’t want to leave the satisfaction of biting into a chicken breast or flank steak behind. That’s what has helped Beyond Meat’s business grow at a rate of 60 percent this past quarter, and 30 percent in the last month alone, according to Brown.

Solving the meat eater’s dilemma is a tech problem, and so it makes sense that investors like Obvious Corp., Vinod Khosla, and many others are interested in the space. But will we ever really get to a singularity point where we can’t tell our turkey from our Tofurky? Or will we all fall down in the uncanny valley just short of finding a perfect copy? Either way, it’s bound to be an exciting space to watch.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Since graduating from Y Combinator in 2012, Grouper has been on a mission to help busy, overworked young people get away from the glow of computer screens and out into the real world to meet new people. To do that, the startup sends its members on “Groupers,” which are essentially blind, group dates between two groups of friends, designed to take the awkwardness out of one-on-one dating.

Eager to avoid being seen as another dating site, the startup instead wants to appeal to younger generations who prefer casual meetups over drinks at a local bar to traditional “dinner-and-a-movie” dates. Since launch, the service has expanded into 20 U.S. cities, and members have shared hundreds of thousands of drinks. Up until now, Grouper has existed exclusively on the Web, but today the startup is looking to take its offline social network to the next level by bringing Groupers to the iPhone.

“Grouper has always made more sense from a phone,” says founder and CEO Michael Waxman. “As a device, it has the ability to get out of your way and let you enjoy the real world, which is what we think Grouper is all about.” To make the dating experience more manageable, Grouper allows anyone to sign up, choose two friends who are up for a blind date, and pre-pay for a round of drinks at a local bar.

The service then matches your trio with another group of three — for now, three guys and three girls — using your application, Facebook info, algorithms and some human curation to match you with a cool date. No profile creation required.

On its web service, members have been able to tell the service when they want to go on a Grouper, and the startup will take care of everything else, including choosing the location, making the reservation and paying for the first round of drinks. If the date is a bust, members are only roped into one round of drinks and can make a move for the exit thereafter. If it goes well, they can pay for a second round themselves, or head to a new location.

While this makes the experience more casual and takes the hassle out of planning, it still requires users to plan in advance. That is the biggest selling point of Grouper’s new iPhone app, which, besides streamlining the process for mobile, now allows members to schedule Groupers on-demand. Starting this week and rolling out over the next few months, members will be able to organize Groupers on-demand, in under an hour.

Inspired by other apps that act like a remote control for real life, like Uber, Waxman says, on-demand Groupers allow users to tap a button, get matched with three new people they’ve never met and schedule a Grouper the same night. The iPhone app comes with a mobile concierge service, so that members can message back-and-forth with the group who makes the reservations. It also automatically sends a confirmation email to both parties.

Another cool feature is that Grouper connects to your Instagram account so that you can snap pics while you’re out on your date, which are automatically pinned on a map by location so that users can tap through, checking out Grouper’s candid date shots. At the end of the date, like Lyft or Uber, the app asks members to rate their experience.

However, unlike the traditional “four star” approach, users can rate their Groupers on a sliding scale. If the date went horribly, it will automatically ping the startup’s customer service team so that they can try to help resolve the issue and take steps to make sure the issue doesn’t happen again.

Going forward, Waxman says that Grouper will look to add other integrations that complement its mobile experience, like being able to order an Uber to take your group to and from the date. While he wouldn’t specify, Foursquare or Yelp integration would jive with its mobile strategy, allowing users to view recommendations on nearby restaurants, bars and attractions.

Waxmans says that, while features like allowing those already in relationships to organize double dates are on the long-term map, in the near-term they will be focusing on additions that make the current mobile experience better and easier. Plus, anything that Grouper can do to add value for its 400 partner bars will be a win over the long-run and make city-wide expansion easier as it scales.

Because the on-demand feature is just launching today, I haven’t had a chance to test it live and thus can’t vouch for it, but having seen a demo, it looks great and does make a lot more sense in terms of user experience for what the company wants to be strategically over the long haul.

Check it out for yourself here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You know the drill, you order something from your favorite site and you can’t wait to get the package. Like a blogger normal person, you go to work and hope that the package is there when you get home. That hope slowly turns into worry as you picture your valuable freight sitting outside of your home, while people walk by it and wonder what it is.

There are a few companies providing solutions for this problem, setting up physical locations for you to have your packages shipped to, such as commerce juggernaut Amazon. A few months ago, Google picked up a Canada-based company called Bufferbox, a YC-alum, which left the space wide open for a startup to jump in and fill the void. That startup also comes from Y Combinator, Swapbox, and the team is launching physical kiosks in the San Francisco area during its beta period.

Currently, there are two Swapbox locations, one at Stanford, where the co-founders Nitin Shantharam and Neel Murthy attended school, and the other in Glen Park. Currently, you can have your first package delivered to a Swapbox for free, and pay $1.99 for each one after, which is next to nothing.

I sat down with the team and discussed their plans, which are pretty lofty and impressive.

TC: Tell us about your team.

Neel Murthy: Team is two people – Neel Murthy and Nitin Shantharam. We’ve know each other for like 15 years, since we we’re kids in Southern California. We also have a great group of advisers and of course a ton of support from YC.

TC: How many Swapbox locations do you hope to have open in the next six months?

Neel Murthy: Our goal is to have at least 15 locations in the next six months. The mission is to bring a Swapbox close to as many people in San Francisco as fast as possible. In addition, we don’t want to put these in locations where people don’t need Swapboxes, so consumer demand will dictate how many/where Swapboxes are in SF.

TC: What is the biggest hurdle to working in the real world vs. virtual?

Neel Murthy: The biggest hurdle with the real world is that we have physical devices that take up space and weigh something, which obviously presents logistical challenges that traditional companies don’t see. However, what we really want to do is merge the real world with the virtual world in an entirely virtuous fashion. When you are dealing with the virtual world there are less physical regulations and restrictions. In addition, traditional tech companies tend to have an audience that is more global than local, so we have different growth strategies that are more local and grassroots rather than viral.

TC: Other than joining YC, how much money have you raised or bootstrapped with?

Neel Murthy: Prior to YC, the entire company was bootstrapped through our own savings.
———

The postal service and shipping companies like FedEx and UPS don’t have the best reputation with consumers these days, and there is quite a bit of opportunity for the model that Swapbox is working on, including doing co-branded Swapbox’s with online retailers like Fab, for instance. All you have to do is request a Swapbox address, and the shipping company will get a pin to drop your package off. It’s completely safe, and you can go make your pickup at any time just by swiping your credit card at the kiosk.

One of the interesting things to note is that one of the designers that are working on the physical Swapbox is a former Apple employee, so you know that they’re going to have an eye for making beautiful products. The team has been working on this product for well over a year, and Shantharam says that the two think quite a bit about what commerce is going to look like in 50 years from now or 100 years from now. The other advantage for Swapbox that fascinated the team was automating as much of this process as possible, as that’s what they’ve homed in on as the main pain point for consumers.

As far as manufacturing the kiosks themselves, the team has found a cost-efficient way to do it here in Silicon Valley, rather than outsource it to a location like China. This is something that they’re very proud of.

Swapbox hopes that their service catches on and draws repeat customers, and if demand starts generating from specific places in the San Francisco area, that’s where they’ll put their next kiosk. For what Murthy proudly described as “an automated doorman,” the pair did its research along the way. The first ever Swapbox at Stanford consisted of Murthy and Shantharam sitting at a table for 48 hours straight. Murthy joked “We were a phsyical Swapbox, and we learned quite a bit. Also, it wasn’t very healthy of us to do.”

Here’s a look at a unit that you might see pop up in your neighborhood sometime soon, but the company is working on a new design they tell me:

Recently, Murthy had a pie shipped to his house and wasn’t there to pick it up. After dealing with tracking the package, the pie had perished. This is something that has happened to me personally with perishable goods and it’s quite frustrating.

Convenience and comfort are key when you’re talking about shipping and receiving, and Swapbox cares about both of those things. By using technology to solve real-world problems, these guys could actually pick up where Bufferbox left off in Canada and show larger companies like Amazon how it’s done the scrappy way.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After yesterday’s photos posted to a Chinese forum of a device claimed to be the Samsung Galaxy S IV, a video of what looks like the same device has landed on YouTube —  again purporting to be the sequel to Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S III. As with the leaked photos, the video was spotted by SammyHub. The video shows a large handset, initially with the back off and the battery removed, before the battery is inserted, the plastic back snapped on and the phone turned on. As it boots up, it displays Chinese carrier China Unicom’s Wo logo before loading what appears to be a version of Samsung’s TouchWiz UI.

The design of the device looks very similar to the Galaxy S III, with a high gloss plastic casing — tallying with other S IV reports – and metallic looking bands around the edges. The physical home button is present and correct, below a screen that looks longer than the S III’s pane — in keeping with rumours that Samsung is upping the touchscreen inch count to 5 inches (from the 4.8 inch pane on the S III). A five inch screen will push Samsung’s flagship handset into phablet territory, alongside Samsung’s Galaxy Note range.

The demo of the device goes on to showcase the camera function, the dialler and the settings menu — including the about page (in Chinese) which shows it’s apparently running Android 4.2.1 (Jelly Bean). In the background of the video, another video can be heard (and briefly seen reflected in the device’s screen) running Apple’s iPad Mini promo — doubtless to suggest that the Galaxy S IV is hoping to tread on the mini iOS tablet’s toes.

As with all such leaks, it’s not possible to confirm whether this is the real deal — although, being a video, it’s certainly more elaborate than many of the blurry leaked photos that crop up online ahead of flagship product releases. Either way, Galaxy fans don’t have long to wait as Samsung is due to unveil the real deal at an event in New York on Thursday.

Update: For a bona fide glimpse of the real deal, Samsung’s US Twitter account tweeted the following graphic, ahead of Thursday’s event:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When OUYA launched the enormously successful Kickstarter campaign for its Android-based gaming console, CEO Julie Uhrman said she had “no idea” whether it would succeed.

“I was scared shitless,” she said.

Uhrman, who gave a keynote interview this afternoon at South by Southwest Interactive, admitted, “our path to market was unique” (though thanks to Kickstarter it’s becoming less unique). After all, when the campaign launched, there was no product — just an idea and a team. There wasn’t even really a website, but instead a URL that redirected to the OUYA kickstarter campaign.

On the first day of the campaign, Uhrman said she was awake at 5:45 in the morning to hit the button for the Kickstarter page to go live. That, she said, was “the moment where we no longer had control.” The team had no way to know how people would respond to the idea, or even if someone might decide to copy it: “There is no special sauce here.”

For the next few hours, Uhrman said she was busy sending out emails. Her family and close friends came over a few hours later, and they all called in sick as they kept refreshing the page to get the latest numbers. By lunchtime, she said they knew that “this was something” and there was “a void in the marketplace” for a more open, affordable game console supporting a broader ecosystem of games. Eight hours and 22 minutes after launching, OUYA had raised $1 million, shooting past its $950,000 goal. In the end, it raised $8.6 million.

Uhrman said that amount is enough to run the company and to deliver the first big wave of consoles to Kickstarter backers (shipments are supposed to start on March 28). However, she said that the real key was enlisting the support of 63,416 Kickstarter backers — if she’d raised the money from a single investor, it wouldn’t have been enough to get OUYA to where it is today. In fact, Uhrman said that she’d tried to raise money through more traditional avenues, but no one wanted to invest in a hardware startup.

Not that the response to the campaign was entirely positive. For the first two or three months after it launched, Uhrman said the top Google result was a PCMag article titled “Why Kickstarter’s Ouya Looks Like A Scam.” The skepticism, Uhrman said, came from that aforementioned non-traditional path. So why didn’t she even bother with the website?

“The reality is, I just focused on one thing, which was the campaign,” she said.

The Verge’s Josh Topolsky, who was conducting the interview, followed up by joking asking, “Is OUYA a scam?” To show that it’s not, Uhrman called out for anyone who had already tried out the developer units (the company said it shipped 1,200 of those units). One audience member said that they had, and that it definitely wasn’t a scam. (Whew.)

Uhrman said that what OUYA has already accomplished in terms of creating the console was hard, but the real challenge is building an ecosystem of game developers. There are 481 titles announced so far, she said — they include some notable wins, including the console exclusive for Double Fine Adventure, Tim Schaefer’s Kickstarter-financed game.

Beyond recounting OUYA’s history so far, Uhrman also talked about her broader vision for the company, which we covered in a separate post.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Get ready for some more M&A activity in the real estate sector. This morning, the real estate search engine Trulia announced that it is looking to raise up to $100.3 million $150 million in a follow-on offering, with “some or all of such net proceeds to acquire or invest in complementary businesses, products, services, technologies, or other assets.” Trulia went public last year, and currently has 23.6 million monthly active users. Update: today’s follow-on filing is an amendment that includes the partial release of some shares owned by “certain officers and directors of the company” that were previously locked up. A spokesperson says that it is for $150 million, with $100 million going to company reserves.

In a filing with the SEC, the company said it would be offering some 5.25 million shares in a primary and secondary offering. 1.75 million of those shares will come from selling stockholers, and 3.5 million will come from Trulia itself, with the $100.3 million calculation based on its $30.44 per share price as of March 8 on the NYSE. It also notes that the raise could be as high as $115.4 million “if the underwriters’ option to purchase additional shares in this offering is exercised in full.” It also notes that the follow-on offering altogether could raise as much as $164 million.

The only other major acquisition from Trulia was a move to enhance the usefulness of its real-estate search service by making it more social and interconnected with other aspects of local life. In 2010 it bought Movity, a Y-Combinator alum and specialist in geodata that also had created a service to track local check-ins. It was still in stealth mode at the time.

A spokesperson for Trulia noted in an email that two-thirds of the proceeds, or $100 million, “will go straight to the company’s cash reserve.” He also added a bit more color on what acquisitions might mean:

“The follow on offering is for the company to build a bigger cash reserve to accelerate the growth of the business. As a company, we will continue to be very thoughtful and disciplined in our approach to putting our capital to work. The purpose of raising additional capital is to strengthen our cash reserves and balance sheet, so we can execute on growth opportunities as they arise, such as mergers and acquisitions, partnerships and funding new product initiatives.”

In a market very crowded with real-estate startups and several bigger players, Trulia has been slowly ramping up the functionality of its service beyond straight listings. Last week, the company introduced a recommendation engine called Trulia Suggests to improve personalization features on the site. That service uses an algorithm that you seed with some of your preferences, and then it combines that with your browsing history on Trulia itself to suggest properties to you.

At the same time that Trulia is forging ahead in these kinds of moves to improve engagement and use of its services, the company needs to drive more revenue-generation for its bottom-line results. In February, for the second quarter of reporting as a public company, Trulia posted a net loss of $1.59 million, or a loss of $0.03 per share. That was down by around $1 million compared to a year ago, when its net loss was $2.5 million. Revenues were up by 75% to $20.6 million.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mail digitizing startup Outbox is launching in San Francisco today, the first step in what co-founder Will Davis says is a broader national rollout.

If, like me, you find physical mail to be an annoyance, this is good news. Basically, Outbox swings by your real-world mailbox three times a week, digitizes the content, and makes it accessible on the Web, iPads, and iPhones. That means you’re less likely to dump an important document into the recycling bin (hell, my initial, physical Outbox invite ended up in my laundry hamper, and they had to email me another copy), and your desk/kitchen table/whatever doesn’t get cluttered with piles of junk mail.

Of course, there are rare occasions where the digital copy isn’t enough, but Outbox accounts for those. For starters, any packages (like an order from Amazon) will be dropped off on your doorstep. And if there’s any other piece of mail where you want the physical item, you can select it on the website and Outbox will deliver to you. Everything else gets shredded and recycled.

Outbox was first developed in Austin, where the team has worked out a lot of the kinks. For example, you can identify whether you’re signing up for a household plan (so all the mail at a given address gets collected) or an individual one (only mail sent to one name gets collected, which is important if you have roommates). And if you need a key to open the mailbox, you can send Outbox a photo and it will make a copy based on that image.

There were about 500 testers in Austin, Davis said, and only 3 percent of them actually cancelled: “We have an incredibly sticky service.”

Intro to Outbox from Outbox on Vimeo.

It sounds very appealing, but I did wonder whether everyone’s going to be excited about having strangers opening and scanning their mail. Davis’ co-founder Evan Baehr said that everyone who collects the mail and processes it has to go through a thorough background check. He also argued that since it shreds everything, Outbox is actually a more secure way to dispose of mail than what most people do now.

I also wondered about the company’s long-term prospects. If physical mail is becoming less and less important (a development signaled by the U.S. Postal Service’s plan to stop Saturday delivery), where does that leave Outbox in five or 10 years? Well, Davis pointed out that the postal service delivered more than 150 billion pieces of mail last year, and that even the pessimistic projections suggest that it will be delivering 120 million pieces annually in a few years. He also pointed at Netflix as a company that built a relationship with customers via physical mail, and used those relationships as it transitioned to a new model, streaming video in this case. (Netflix’s transition hasn’t been entirely smooth …)

So what does the next version of Outbox look like? Baehr and Davis didn’t get too specific, but they noted that among other things, Outbox can help build a relationship between companies and consumers. It already allows customers to try to stop certain types of mail delivery, but they said the company can also go back to those businesses and help them market themselves in ways that actually engage and interest consumers. Baehr also said that bill pay and check deposits are on the product roadmap.

Looking beyond San Francisco, Davis said he’s hoping to launch in cities including New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles by the end of the year.

“The cool thing is, because we’re a hyperlocal service, we don’t have to build this huge infrastructure,” he said. “We can actually pretty much build it out in a few months’ time.”

Back in 2011, Outbox raised a $2.2 million round led by Floodgate. As it expands, it will be probably be raising more funding, Davis said.

After a one-month trial, Outbox costs $4.99 per month. I’ve signed up myself, but the collection hasn’t started yet, so I can’t offer much first-hand experience. I have played around with a demo account, so I can say that I like the interface — it’s visually rich enough that it captures the character of the real object, and it’s easy to sort things into different folders. (It would be nice if there was an easier way to scroll through lots of mail at once.)

San Franciscans can sign up here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Y Combinator company Glassmap, a location-aware app that was big back in the day (last year), has just announced that is has been acquired by Groupon.

This makes total sense, because Groupon needs to know where you are, who you’re with, and what you’re doing and like to do so that it can push more relevant deals to you. This is something that companies such as Google are also working on.

Here’s what the company had to say:

Today, we’re happy to announce that Glassmap has been acquired by Groupon! Our goal when we started building Glassmap was to help people find what was interesting and relevant around them. But in plainer terms, we just really wanted to mold all these fancy ideas and innovations of Silicon Valley into a simple and useful tool for the real world. Groupon has revolutionized how people today use technology to interact with the real world, and that’s why we’re so excited to join them. Together, we’ll be able to create even more amazing products.

Most importantly, we want to thank all our loyal users for riding with us for these past two years. It’s been really fun for us, and we hope to continue delighting you with our efforts with Groupon. The Glassmap application will wind down and close on February 15, 2013.

As the team mentions, it now has an opportunity to take what it has built and put it in front of a more mainstream audience – like outside of San Francisco.

When the service launched, I spoke with its team, and they told me about some pretty interesting location technology it was building, which doesn’t tax your phone’s battery like other apps. The team, Geoffrey Woo, Jon Zhang and Jonathan Chang, are all engineers who dropped out of Stanford’s MS program. Their focus in school? Distributed systems, circuits, web and mobile development, and industrial design.

Quite a grab for Groupon.

No word on what the purchase price was, but this sounds like one of those fancy acquisition/hires that we talk about all of the time, mostly surrounding Facebook and Google. Is Groupon about to get more hip? We’ll find out.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch