Let’s say you go to a lot of concerts. And let’s say you have a big social media following. And maybe, just maybe, you’re such a big deal that when you tell all your friends and social media followers about all those shows that you’re seeing, they want to go, too. Wouldn’t it be great if the venue or the promoter or whomever you’re buying tickets from could reward you for all the incremental tickets that you’re helping to sell through your charisma and social influence?

Well now they can.

Thanks to a new product from Ticketfly, the people who put on those shows you love will now have a tool for identifying and rewarding the customers who attend their events — and get other people to do so as well. Ticketfly’s Fanbase includes a proprietary ranking algorithm to create a list of the most valuable customers for promoters and vendors.

That includes attendees’ own purchase history and their social influence, including how often their sharing activity on third-party social networks resulted in a ticket sale. That will allow promoters to see how many tickets they’ve personally purchased, social sharing stats, or lifetime revenue that has come from a particular fan.

Not only can Ticketfly partners use Fanbase to identify their most important and influential customers, but they can also use the tool to contact those customers with offers to like, entice them to buy more and tell even more people about the shows they’re going to. That could include stuff like exclusive pre-sales, merch, VIP seating, or maybe a chance to meet an artist in person.

Furthermore, the Ticketfly system can narrow down users based on their favorite artists or genre. That will allow promoters and venues to provide a higher level of targeting to fans, sending them the most relevant deals or promotions, based on shows they’ve enjoyed in the past.

For Ticketfly, the name of the game is helping its partners to sell more tickets. It does that by connecting its proprietary analytics with integrated social and email marketing tools. Since about 7 percent of fans are responsible for about 30 percent of all revenue, identifying those high-value customers is key to their success. Ultimately, the tools are designed to create a stronger bond between the fan and venue, according to Ticketfly co-founder and CEO Andrew Dreskin.

The Fanbase offering was tested with 50 different venues in beta, of which 92 percent said that they plan to continue using Fanbase multiple times per week, Dreskin told me. Ticketfly will be making the Fanbase tools available to all its clients, as a way to help grow their ticket sales and maybe, just maybe, attract more venues and promoters to use its platform.

Dreskin says that revenues were up 79 percent year-over-year during the first quarter, and that’s actually an acceleration over the previous year. Much of that can be attributed to new venues or promoters coming online with its platform, but Ticketfly also has seen a steady increase in ticket sales within its existing footprint of venues.

In fact, Ticketfly has yet to see a new partner come over from a competing ticket provider — usually the incumbent, Ticketmaster — and not sell more tickets than on its previous platform. Dreskin attributes that sales lift to the integrated platform. Fanbase should only accelerate that lift, as new analytics provide new insights and new rewards can drive increased sales.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Realmac Software is showing off its latest app today, ahead of a launch to come later in the month. The app is called Analog, and is an iPhone version of its desktop quick and easy photo manipulation software. I’ve been beta testing the software, and the experience it provides is in keeping with Realmac’s other recent mobile releases, like the super simple to-do app Clear it created in concert with Impending. So why does the world need yet another mobile photo app with filters? I asked Realmac Software head honcho Dan Counsell to find out.

“It seems like most of the current popular photo apps are competing on features, they keep cramming more and more into them to try and outdo each other,” he explained. “In doing this they have become overly complex and confusing for new users. Camera apps should be fun to use with a minimal interface that just stays out of the way allowing the user to focus on what really matters, their photos.”

That’s what Analog manages to achieve. It inherits this approach to simplified photo editing from the desktop version, but adds touch-specific interfaces and controls that are much better suited to the iPhone’s screen. These use a bold, flat design that emphasize clean lines, large hit hit points and a grid-like pattern that provides all your sharing and editing options in as few screens as is possible.

Another aspect of Analog’s simplicity is that it doesn’t try to replace the social networks you already use with a new one. That’s by design, according to Counsell.

“Online services come and go but by having an app that’s service agnostic we can easily adapt to change.,” he said. “Not to mention the fact that it’s easier for users to have one app that posts to multiple services rather than having to hop in and out of a bunch of different apps.”

Analog started out as an idea that was actually pretty far removed from mobile photography. Counsell said the original Mac app was inspired by his own love of photography, which inspired a need for software that wasn’t quite as daunting or involved as something like Photoshop.

“I love my DSLR and take the majority of my photos with it, so developing Analog for the Mac first was an easy decision,” he said. “After the Analog for Mac launch we had a lot of requests from users saying they wanted it on iOS, so we thought we’d give it a shot and see what happens.”

Realmac is behind Courier, LittleSnapper and RapidWeaver in addition to Clear, and has a solid reputation among Mac fans and iPhone users. Analog will be available on the iPhone at launch a little later on this month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s hard to believe that it’s been less than a year since ride-sharing service Lyft first launched in beta to friends and family, offering a low-cost alternative to on-demand black car service Uber. Not only has it grown aggressively in its home market since then, but Lyft has since begun offering service in Los Angeles and Seattle. It’s tacking on another city this weekend with a launch in Chicago.

With the addition of Chicago, Lyft will now be in four markets nationwide. That’s fewer than competitors SideCar and Uber, but it’s been focused on improving its rollout with each new city. With the recent addition of Cherry co-founder Travis VanderZanden as COO and its expansion playbook set, Lyft president John Zimmer promises me that the company will be aggressively adding new cities over the next year.

In the early stages of its expansion the company has seen positive signs of growth from each new city it’s launched in. Lyft’s launch in Los Angeles outpaced its first 12 weeks in San Francisco, with three times the number of users after its first 12 weeks. And the first month of service in Seattle has outpaced both its first two markets.

In Chicago, it’s hoping for the same type of demand trajectory, and believes it already has the driver supply to match. The launch team in Chicago has seen more drivers apply during its initial outreach period than in either Seattle or L.A., Zimmer tells me.

Exporting Company Culture

The company decided to expand to Chicago next due to the population density and transportation habits of residents there. Surprisingly enough, it didn’t really look at data around the number of people who have tried using downloading the app or using the service locally there.

Just as in L.A. and Seattle, Lyft sent a launch team ahead to Chicago to recruit drivers and vet them for service. For Lyft, that means driver and criminal background checks, as well as a car inspection and training to ensure that drivers fit with the community that it’s trying to build.

Along with the easily recognizable pink mustaches that grace Lyft vehicles, the company’s culture could be its biggest differentiator, but it’s also the most difficult piece of the business to re-create as it expands from market to market.

As for those mustaches — the company almost ran out, as it’s been adding drivers more quickly than its supplier could keep up, Zimmer tells me. Mostly, that was due to growth in San Francisco, where the company has recently doubled its driver count over the last two months.

Notably, the increase in supply has happened while Lyft has faced increased competition in its home market from Uber, which recently launched ride-sharing services of its own. In an effort to compete, Uber has been trying to poach Lyft drivers with some aggressive marketing tactics — including a “Shave the ‘Stache” mobile billboard that’s been driving around San Francisco over the past week.

Focus Now On Ride Sharing

Along with the launch in Chicago, the startup is announcing that it’s officially putting to rest the Zimride brand and will be known just as Lyft going forward. The company continues to support the legacy Zimride business, but the company’s main focus is on ride sharing — and has been for a while. So it’s not a huge surprise that it’s decided to reincorporate as Lyft Inc.

The rebrand follows a long and winding road that the company has been on since its inception. It all started about six years ago, when a group of friends founded Zimride to make it easier for university students to carpool home during the holidays and on weekends. The carpool community eventually expanded beyond university students, but the founders saw a larger opportunity in helping passengers get around urban markets.

So early last year, the remaining founders decided to take the business in a different direction and focus more on ride-sharing in cities rather than the longer, road trip-style carpooling that Zimride was traditionally known for. Thus Lyft was born.

Now that it has seen success with that model in San Francisco and subsequent cities, Lyft is ready to make it available throughout the country. Expect a number of new cities to be turned up over the next several months, as the Lyft expansion team continues to grow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LinkedIn today announced another upgrade to its site, part of a bigger plan to add more features and reasons for people to hang around on its pages for longer: this time it’s the turn of profile pages, where users will now be able to add more images, videos, resumes, presentations and comments and likes from other users as part of the mix. While the site continues to add more features to make itself more “social,” profile sharing — that is, the ability to send over a link to someone to be able to view your profile, and then sharing certain aspects of it, such as a resume or presentation — will not be coming today, but a spokesperson says that this will be available soon.

The feature is being turned on across the whole of the LinkedIn network starting from today.

This will be a useful way for LinkedIn to continue to further its reputation as the go-to place for people looking for jobs, and for professional networking.

But it will also help pretty up the general experience. Up to now, regardless of what your profession or job is, every LinkedIn profile looked exactly the same as the other. Now, the idea is that if you’re an architect, you can expand your profile with more dynamic pictures of buildings you’ve designed; or if you’re a tech analyst, you can include links to some of your recent research. No two job seekers are alike.

This also means that LinkedIn is introducing one more way that it might, potentially, monetize the site. Although today’s profile features are all free of charge, you can see how, for example, LinkedIn might put a premium on extra services (like Sharing, only “coming soon”), or more storage space — for example to hold more content on your profile page.

This also gives LinkedIn an interesting entry into both the area of companies looking to “own” the online profile space, such as About.me and Flavors.me, as well as GetHired, Grouptalent, HireArt, BraveNewTalent, and ResumUp.

Today’s news comes on the heels of a number of updates at LinkedIn — all also made to improve the user experience and usefulness of the platform. They include a Contacts update to add in more “personal assistant” life organizing features; new iPhone and Android apps; an expanded search engine; @mentions in status updates; Klout-style endorsements; and a Recruiter homepage redesign for the site’s most dedicated user vertical.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

On stage at Disrupt NY 2013 today, serial investor Ron Conway and filmmaker/actor Alex Winter took the stage with CrunchFund’s MG Siegler to talk about the documentary Downloaded about the rise and fall of Napster. Ron Conway described being an early investor (his Angel Investors fund put around $500,000 into Napster, he said) and how the process of taking them through the ordeal went. One of the biggest issues, he said, is that the sharing economy problem Napster identified never got solved.

Napster made it very clear that there was a strong desire among people to share and collaborate in order to make the most out of resources among a community, but there was just too much of a reaction against that from people who were already established in the industry. And that’s something that never got worked out, which Conway said was one of the most disappointing parts of the whole affair.

“Technically speaking it never got solved,” Conway said. “Today we have all the sharing economy companies, like ride sharing and AirbnB, and all the local authorities are acting like the record labels. You can’t stop innovation, and it amazes me that people still don’t know that.”

Conway’s referring to problems that companies like Uber have run into, including its closure of taxi services in New York City back in October of last year, and a new policy that will help it do more ride sharing, as a way to side-step regulation and licensing requirements around taxi and livery services in place in most major cities throughout the U.S.

Referring back to the Napster issue and how it ran into major roadblocks around the music industry, record labels and artists, Conway lamented that no one found a way to work through the issues that were causing both sides to be essentially at each other’s throats.

“If people just left their ego at the door, I believe the problems would’ve been solved [long ago],” Conway said. “But everyone immediately went into macho mode.”

Sharing economics drive a lot of startups these days and it’s true they often seem to run into regulatory problems, resistance from incumbent players and more. It’s probably to be expected when you’re taking markets that once made a lot of money separately from individuals, and combining them into one that makes less spread across a much larger group, but people clearly want these to work, and as Conway notes, ignoring that won’t help anyone solve the problem any faster.

For more of Alex Winter’s thoughts on why Napster was a real community, and his predictions about 3D printing template piracy, check out his follow-up interview with our writer Josh Constine.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The White House has officially threatened to veto the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) [PDF]. CISPA is designed to facilitate information sharing between technology companies and intelligence agencies, but civil liberties groups worry it creates overly broad powers to spy on Americans.

A White House Memo makes it clear why they are opposing the legislation in its current form:

“The Administration believes that carefully updating laws to facilitate cybersecurity information sharing is one of several legislative changes essential to protect individuals’ privacy and improve the Nation’s cybersecurity. While there is bipartisan consensus on the need for such legislation, it should adhere to the following priorities: (1) carefully safeguard privacy and civil liberties; (2) preserve the long-standing, respective roles and missions of civilian and intelligence agencies; and (3) provide for appropriate sharing with targeted liability protections.”

Noting, importantly, that “However, the Administration still seeks
additional improvements and if the bill, as currently crafted, were presented to the President, his
senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.” (White House’s emphasis)

Congressional staffers tell TechCrunch that CISPA is expected to come to a vote this Thursday, after debate tomorrow. There has been noticeable tension between civil liberties groups and the big Internet companies, such as Facebook and Google, who have not actively opposed the bill (Facebook, at one point, supported it).

This veto threat is definitely a win for civil liberties groups.

-[Hat tip: Brandan Sasso]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As we move closer to the launch of the (probably awful) Facebook phone, let’s examine just what the social network and its ilk have created. Millions of us use these new tools to joke, flirt and share memories, but just as many of us use these tools much to our disadvantage. In some ways, however, that is making things better for all of us.

This morning Gawker posted surveillance video of a terrible mugging that took place not far from my home in Brooklyn. The video (don’t watch it, it’s not important here) clearly showed the victim going down the stairs and then the attacker coming up behind her wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the Alpha Phi Delta insignia, the nickname “Stugotz” (Italian slang for “dick”) and the number 27. There were a few more clues as to the mugger’s identity, but those were the major ones. The woman was unhurt, but the attack was particularly jarring and disgusting.

Minutes after the Gawker post hit, a reader found this Facebook page. It was all there: the hoodie, the logo, a set of keys, a purple bracelet, and the thief’s yutzy mug preening from a set of clear Facebook photos that could have come right from the “how not to be a frat boy who mugs people” playbook. Today Stugotz, aka Aidan Folan, 21, was taken into custody in Brooklyn.

Aren’t we lucky, then, that this idiot shared his information with such abandon? The average person, myself included, wouldn’t see Folan’s Facebook account as very unique at all. It’s a dossier of a life that apparently led him to rob and beat a woman on the subway. If this had been any other 21-year-old, Folan’s photos of himself cavorting with his friends and calling out his bros in the frat would be absolutely normal. But these are the posts of a criminal, and of late we’re seeing more and more of this.

We’re entering a new era of documentation. In the hours after the Newtown shootings, we found ourselves clicking on links purporting to connect us to the shooter’s Facebook page. Police routinely use Facebook and other social posts to catch criminals stupid enough to snap themselves with the phones of their prey.

Internet vigilantism isn’t new, and this isn’t what I’m on about here. This is about the dangers of exposing yourself too much in one way - in the case of the PyCon debacle two weeks ago or this dark other way. Is it right and good that Folan should be called out and caught for his misdeeds? Absolutely. But taken to the other extreme, these same tools can be – and are – used against the innocent.

It’s easy to write a jeremiad against oversharing in the social era. It’s been done before and will be done again. However, as we watch fools and villains hoisted on their own petards again and again, why can’t we learn something? Why can’t we treat Facebook like a mini social club where our relationships are splayed flat and squirming in other people’s browsers. Or, more important, why do we?

These questions will be answered by us all over the next few decades. Once we realize that our online presence is as palpable, in the end, as our physical one, I suspect more of us will pull back. I’ve already started slowing my sharing, opting instead for private sharing with my family and some jokes on Tumblr. I want idiots like Folan to be exposed, and it pleases me to no end to see him get his comeuppance. But the sword cuts both ways.

In a way it’s good that the social animal is so persistent within us. It lets fools be foolish on a big stage, and when they hurt someone it lets vigilante justice roll over them. But, at the same time, we are not always fools nor are we always foolish. Sometimes being the social animal is a detriment. It’s up to us to know when.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last fall, L.A.-based startup builder Science debuted HelloInsights.com, a Pinterest influencer analytics platform that enabled brands to monitor company growth, track popular items, and connect with potential brand ambassadors on Pinterest. Today the company is announcing a considerable expansion of its services, launching as HelloSociety, turning the analytics engine into a full-fledged marketing agency and suite of software services to help brands drive revenue from Pinterest.

HelloSociety includes a number of services built around how brands can create revenue from the sharing platform. As we mentioned earlier, HelloInsights offers a high-powered analytics platform for brands. The HelloInsights platform uses technology from PinPuff, a Pinterest analytics tool that Science acquired earlier this year. HelloInsights will keep PinPuff features on the site, including the ability to allow anyone access to a Pinterest handle to view its individual score.

The other services include HelloPartners, a partnership program that matches tastemakers on Pinterest with brands; HelloBuzz, a platform that allows brands to create campaigns on Pinterest; HelloCreative, which is a creative toolset for pin creation, and HelloManager, a Pinterest account management tool.

For example, the HelloSociety tastemaker network is composed of more than 250 influential pinners with an average reach of 1.8 million followers, in categories such as fashion, home décor, beauty, DIY, weddings, food and travel. HelloSociety matches these tastemakers with brands to help promote products.

The company says it has already driven $30 million in additional sales revenue through Pinterest for its brand clientele. More than 350 brands use the software, helping drive 2.9 million new users and 22 million unique page views to these companies via Pinterest.

Of course, Pinterest is steadily scaling its own business offering for brands. A few weeks ago, the company launched a new analytics tool that will allow businesses to see how many visitors the content-sharing service is referring to their sites. It would make sense that Pinterest could launch additional services for brands (and charge a premium). But Kyla Brennan, founder and CEO of HelloSociety, says that the offerings her startup gives to brands are beyond just analytics. And many brands have benefitted both in revenue and traffic from these services, she adds.

And brands are responding — these companies need high-powered agency-like software for Pinterest. Clients include Buick, HauteLook, Fab, One Kings Lane, BeachMint, JackThreads, Swell and others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I feel oddly guilty rejecting my Uber driver’s offer of a beer and a blunt. It’s 4 am. I’m drenched, hungover, and bewildered as to why I’m in a rustic garage on the outskirts of downtown Austin, watching tattooed pedicab drivers dance with a tiny dog in a pink tutu. This was not the ride home I expected.

Yet, my experience isn’t entirely unusual. After two years of experimenting with Internet services that allow everyday individuals to sell their cars, houses, and things — the so-called “sharing economy” — I’ve become accustomed to getting a face full of the sellers’ hopes, fears and quirks. Between services rendered and cash exchanged, friendships are forged, awkwardness is experienced, and memories are made.

Before the Industrial Revolution uprooted us from our small-town community roots, I imagine most business transactions included a side of humanity. Modern-day business sterilize transactions of the personal element. Human resource departments have hollowed out their employees, leaving little more than a pleasantly smiling husk of a person.

South By Southwest By The Sharing Economy

Every March, over 25,000 technology enthusiasts cram into the moderately sized metro of downtown Austin for the annual tech pilgrimage, South By Southwest Interactive. Hotels are sold out six months in advance, and every public service is bleeding out their windows with demand.

You’d have an easier time catching a cab stumbling naked and drunk down Times Square on New Years Eve than hailing a taxi during SXSW.

At 4 a.m., after the final after parties had simmered down, the only shot I had at making it back to my bed before I had to wake up the next morning was Uber, the popular smartphone taxi application that had contracted with independent pedicabers during SXSW, to usher sleepy technologists to and fro downtown Austin.

I did not, however, foresee the torrential downpour halfway though my trip that instantly saturated my clothes to my frigid bone. No longer able to stand the sharp icicles falling from the sky, yet still needing to finish the ride, our courtesy pedicab driver took a pit stop at Pediacab HQ to pick up his car and stow his bike.

Pedicab headquarters is like the second-class deck of the Titanic, a dimly lit haven where free-spirited tattooed servicemen party their blue collars off to loud music, an abundance of cheap beer, and liberally available recreational drugs.

“I got jungle juice for sale! It’s strong,” yelled a muscular African American man in his mid-thirties, who backed up a truck full of tortellini and cheap liquor, during what appeared to be his nightly run to the breaking pedicabers. Passing off a blunt, a line forms to offer him wads of crumpled dollar bills in exchange for a styrofoam box filled to the brim with cheap, delicious carby goodness.

“They just aren’t cut out for straightforward jobs,” explains my pedicab driver, about his uniform-less colleagues. “I had a regular sort of office job,” he adds. But, pedicabbing “filled a niche that I didn’t even knew existed.”

Indeed, eccentric personalities seem to flock to the peddling business. The night before I had been driven home by a red-headed engineer, whose super-skinny, yet muscular body supported a head with a beard so thick and unkempt, it look liked it had burst out of his chin. He told me that between judo tournaments, he was pulling 22-hour days as a driver to pay for graduate school in geographic information systems.

It goes to show that behind every invoice and credit card terminal is a person who has experienced their own unique set of crazy, which life inevitably presents while living on our crowded Earth. Traditional retail robs us of a truer view of humanity, with its memories and the tangible sense of its diversity.

Though I wouldn’t knowingly pay money for it, sometimes the worst experiences are the most enriching. I once endured 20 minutes of forced laughter, as my driver regaled me with his amateur comedy routine. Lyft, a popular car-sharing alternative in San Francisco, encourages its drivers to be extroverted. Usually, this just means a mandatory fist-bump and a “how’s your day?” On occasion, it’s much more.

My would-be comedian driver reminded me that not every starving artist is hocking paintings on a street corner. More often than not, it’s a cashier scribbling notes in between customers, dreaming of the day he’ll make it big and tell his boss to screw off. Many of the world’s cherished artists, scientists, policymakers, and businessmen have humble roots.Who knows how much creativity and innovation the world has lost due to the callous whims of an entitled consumer.

So, while I can’t give our comedian his big break, my time with the sharing economy has made me more patient with those I regularly interact with. I’ll think twice about giving the stink eye to a barista who forgets my request for extra-foam on my no whip tazo chai frappuccino. I’ll wish my Verizon customer service agent a happy Easter. I might even refrain from tweeting nasty remarks at a politician or vote for a bill to fund a community arts center.

Or, as the Scottish author Ian MacLaren once reminded us:

This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavouring world, with strong temptations, with doubts and fears, with wounds of the past which have skinned over, but which smart when they are touched. It is a fact, however surprising. And when this occurs to us we are moved to deal kindly with him, to bid him be of good cheer, to let him understand that we are also fighting a battle.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Insync, a startup offering an advanced, business-focused alternative to the Google Drive desktop client, is today taking the service out of a beta with a 1.0 release for Mac and Windows users. The updated client application includes a number of features not found in the earlier build (or in Google Drive itself, for that matter), including support for multiple Google accounts, selective sync, desktop notifications, support for external and network drives, built-in sharing, and more.

The company, based in Singapore and the Philippines, actually got its start as “Dropbox for Google users” – a sort of proto-Google Drive back at a time when Drive was still just known as Google Docs. But when Google moved to launch its own Dropbox-like client with the Google Drive desktop app, Insync reincarnated itself by adding the missing features which the official client lacks.

“In the course of building this thing, what we discovered was that there was this huge group of users who wanted advanced features,” says co-founder and CEO Terence Pua, who previously ran Friendster’s Philippines operations, before starting Insync back in 2008.

“We started asking users what they needed, and things that kept popping up were multiple account support, and being able to watch any folder outside of the Insync folder’s location. We kept wondering why these things were not being built, so we went ahead and built them,” he says.

Designed for power users of Google Drive, the client allows for other handy features like built-in sharing, which lets users right-click on folders or files to initiate the sharing process, plus other features that pro customers want like permissioning, better onboarding, selective syncing of folders and files, and more. And getting even geekier, Insync 1.0 has added symlink, junction and alias support. Pua explains that now, users can keep their folder hierarchy structure in place, instead of having to drag-and-drop files directly inside the Insync folder mechanism.

The 1.0 release is available for Mac and Windows, while the Linux version is still at 0.9, but is expected to launch soon. Combined, Insync has “hundreds of thousands” of beta users across its supported platforms, around 40 percent of which are business customers on Google Apps.

As a part of today’s announcement, the company is also releasing its pricing plans. The Pro plan, which offers full access to the features, is available for a one-time payment of $9.99. In a few weeks, a business edition will be available containing an admin dashboard and centralized billing, allowing I.T. to get a bird’s-eye view of a company’s Drive storage, and add or delete employees, for example. An enterprise version is also in the works which will support document audits, advanced search queries, and the ability to drill down to see usage on an employee-by-employee basis.

Pua explains that the bigger goal for the company isn’t about just being a Google Drive client. “Our vision, really, is to do more with cloud storage,” he says. “Google Drive – and even Google – is just a first step.”

“Whether it’s about syncing, whether it’s about backing up, whether it’s about different devices – you’ve got all this data out there and it’s hard to manage in one place,” Pua adds.

Insync raised $800,000 in angel funding in January 2011, and had also raised $300,000 in seed funding back in 2009. Investors include Reid Hoffman, Tovio Annus (Skype co-founder), Joi Ito (Neoteny Labs), and Santosh Jayaram (formerly VP, Business Operations at Twitter).

Co-founded by Marte Soliza, Insync is now a team of nine, and currently hiring.

The new Insync release, version 1.0, is available for download here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch