Two years ago, I had a terrible experience at the Great Wall when I visited its most popular corridor in Badaling. Trapped between tens of thousands of local tourists for miles upon miles one scorchingly humid August day, I eventually managed to get off by riding a roller coaster down the Great Wall that ended up in a bear park. Really!

I’m not alone. AnyRoad co-founders Daniel and Jonathan Yaffe almost ended up doing the same thing, but they were smarter. They asked around and found out about remote parts of the wall where you could walk for miles without seeing another soul. It took hours to get there, but they got lucky and met a courteous taxi driver who showed them exactly what they wanted — that endless, breathtaking view of the crumbling Wall stretching for hundreds of miles into the distance.

With that as inspiration, they decided to do a startup together that would offer custom tours to people in cities like Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Jerusalem, San Francisco and more.

The Yaffe brothers have a colorful background. The older one, Jonathan, founded and was a principal of a charter school named KAIS International in Tokyo for several years, while the younger one, Daniel, ran and sold a drinking magazine called Drink Me and is releasing a book on whiskey later this year. Their technical co-founder Michalis Polakis is a former Soundcloud engineer.

They say they’re not quite like YC-backed Vayable, or other marketplaces for experiences, because they’re partnering with established tour guides and small companies instead of regular, everyday locals that want to give people experiences in their spare time.

AnyRoad has 200 tours available through 150 guides so far in five countries. The average ticket price being about $180. These include experiences like a Candomble tour in Rio de Janeiro, which teaches people about the history of the dance and music or a visit to a whiskey distillery in Brooklyn. About 80 percent of the company’s booking are from outside the U.S.

In their two month beta, they said that bookings are tripling each month and more than 1 percent of visitors to the site book a tour. AnyRoad takes a 14 percent commission off each one.

They had to meet with more than 3,000 tour guides throughout different countries over 18 months to figure out different pain points in the booking process.

The challenges are, of course, about scaling. The strong existing online travel startups have really strong SEO strategies, and are easy to find atop any search for hotels or tours in different cities. The company said it’s focusing on unique distribution channels and other partnerships, without offering too many specifics.

On the supply side, AnyRoad is basically a very customized CMS for tour guides. It’s a self-serve model although AnyRoad curates the marketplace and doesn’t let every potential tour onto the platform. They also verify the guides’ credentials for safety and trust. The startup is bootstrapped so far.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The problem with most video apps is that they don’t allow viewers to have much of a clue about what a video is actually like. Too often, video publishers pick a thumbnail that is misleading or only shows a small bit of what their content is about. That can leave viewers frustrated if they invest the time to actually watch a video. And for publishers, it means lost views, if they don’t choose correctly. Cinecraft’s Videogram technology seeks to solve this problem by creating thumbnails that provide more context.

Cinemacraft CEO Sandeep Casi believes there hasn’t been a so-called Instagram for video. Video thumbnails simply don’t provide enough context for what’s happening in a video, and so potential viewers will choose not to click through.

So Cinemacraft has designed a solution: It’s built technology that scans videos and creates a pictorial summary of their content. With both a platform API to look into publisher videos and an iOS app to display them, Cinemacraft’s Videogram products give publishers a better way to display their content and gives viewers more insight into what a video is actually about. Videogram breaks videos down into chunks that it displays so that they can quickly get an idea of whether or not they will want to watch the whole thing.

But there’s other interesting stuff happening on the back end: For instance, since the video previews that it generates are created dynamically, the platform knows not only where users are most engaged, but which moments they are most likely to click on. That enables it to provide more compelling previews as time goes on.

It also provides analytics into what viewers are watching and engaging with within the video. Trending moments can be highlighted, and publishers can use them to better target pre-roll or impression ads.

Right now, more than anything the Videogram app is a showcase for what publishers can do with the technology. It curates content from multiple providers and displays them in its own Videogram format, providing a few other features — like the ability to comment within the app, or share clips with others on social networks. In fact, they can share specific moments, not just the entire video. Videogram users can also upload or capture their own videos within the app and get the same preview thumbnail treatment.

But really, the Videogram technology is best for publishers, as a way to show off their videos. On that front, the company is running pilot programs with 10 publishers, including the likes of Sony, Collective Digital Studio and Big Frame, among others.

The core technology is licensed from Fuji Xerox Labs, where Casi helped develop it. Cinemacraft is based in Tokyo, with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The company has received seed funding from 500 Startups and other angel investors.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Gengo, an increasingly popular online translation service that uses a network of more than 7,500 pre-screened and rated translators to provide high-quality translations in 33 languages, announced that it has raised a $12 million funding round. The round was led by Intel Capital, with participation from returning investors, including Atomico, Iris Capital, Infocomm, NTT-IP and Saudi Telecom Ventures. The service previously raised a total of $6.8 million, including a $5.25 million series A round led by Atomico and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. McClure is also a Gengo board member.

The fact that a number of telecom companies are part of this round, Gengo’s CEO and founder Robert Laing told me in an email earlier today, ”shows how telecoms companies ‘get’ the global opportunity of Gengo.”

“The Gengo team is excited about working with investors from Asia, the USA, Europe, and the Middle East, led by Intel Capital, because of their global experience and track record helping entrepreneurs,” Laing writes in today’s announcement.

Added Matthew Romaine, CTO and co-founder of Gengo: “There’s a significant technology component to human translation at scale, so it’s great to work with a firm with the pedigree of Intel Capital.”

Currently, Japan and the U.S. account for about 40 percent of Gengo’s revenue each. The company currently has a staff of 30 in its Tokyo office and nine employees in San Mateo.

According to Laing, the company has been growing rapidly. Gengo’s translators have already translated more texts in 2013 than they did during 2012. Part of this growth, of course, is due to the recent partnership with Google’s YouTube, which has now made Gengo one of its two integrated paid translation services, as well as a recent partnership with 3Play Media.

Besides video, Laing says, Gengo is also seeing a huge volume of translations from travel and e-commerce sites, as well as from a number of “leading e-commerce, online travel, and community portals are powered by its translation platform.”

The Gengo team plans to use this new round of funding to accelerate its global expansion and improve both its translation platform and increase the speed of the translation process.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Taxi e-hail startup Hailo is looking to expand the number of cities that it serves, and could soon add San Francisco and Washington, D.C. to that list. Based on a couple of job postings on the company’s website, the company is looking to hire city general managers for those two cities, signaling its plans to launch its app in even more new markets.

The listings were posted as the company looks to take advantage of new funding and introduce its service in new cities. A few months ago, Hailo raised $30 million from Union Square Ventures, KDDI, Richard Branson, and other investors. With that cash, the company is looking to expand across a number of new cities. As CEO Jay Bregman wrote to me when I asked about the San Francisco job posting, Hailo want’s to be wherever there are licensed cab drivers:

“Hailo wants to be in New York. Hailo wants to be in San Francisco. Hailo wants to be in Breckinridge, CO. Hailo uses existing infrastructure and works anywhere there are licensed cabs.

Setting up a local infrastructure and recruiting driver-partners and local drivers are key pieces of our operating philosophy. We understand that more medallions are slated to be on the streets of SF and drivers are worried about making ends meet. Help is on the way.”

Hailo’s app is currently available in London, Dublin, Toronto, Boston and Chicago. The company is also working to bring its e-hail app to New York, Tokyo, Madrid, and Barcelona soon.

In New York City, Hailo — and all the other taxi apps, for that matter — are still in a holding pattern while waiting for litigation to clear up between the Taxi & Limousine Commission and a bunch of livery car drivers. (That’s something we’ll be talking about at Disrupt NY 2013 in a few weeks, by the way.) The Tokyo launch comes in part thanks to that investment from Japanese telco KDDI.

The San Francisco market is already pretty well acquainted with on-demand ride services. Local residents have been using their mobile phones to hail rides from services like Uber for a while. There’s also Lyft and SideCar for those who don’t mind riding in some regular dude’s car. Flywheel, another taxi hail app, has been in the Bay Area for a while, also. (You might have known it as Cabulous.) Oh, and then there’s InstantCab, which offers some kind of a hybrid cab and community driver ride-share thing. So there’s plenty of Hailo competitors already there.

In Washington, D.C., the competition isn’t quite as fierce, but Hailo won’t be alone in the e-hail market. Uber has been operating in the capital for a while, and has even launched its UberTAXI service there, thanks to a deal it struck with the local city council. SideCar is also in D.C. now, thanks to a big national rollout that it’s been embarking on after raising $10 million of its own.

But hey, competition is good, right? It makes everyone better, gives consumers choice, gives me something to write about.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Productivity app Evernote today is announcing that it is teaming up with Honda and the Japanese mobile carrier Docomo to launch the Evernote Accelerator, a month-long mentorship program based at Evernote’s HQ in Redwood City for developers and small startups from around the world that are making apps using Evernote’s APIs. The move is a step ahead for Evernote in its strategy to build out its business beyond its own-branded products and into a wider platform for others developing productivity services: the company today already sees 6 billion API calls per day, but most of those come from Evernote apps themselves.

Evernote, Honda Silicon Valley Lab and Docomo Innovation Ventures will be providing participants with workspace, living space, mentorship from Evernote engineers, marketing and a living stipend, but the program will stop short of investing directly.

“At the moment we don’t see the need to fund them. The best possible outcome is a successful Evernote product. We don’t need to take a financial stake for them to be a success,” said Rafe Needleman, the ex-tech journalist who moved to Evernote as a platform advocate last year and is helping run the accelerator. “We expect great Evernote products and that will make this a success for our users.” He does add, though, that part of the advantage of startups or independent developers coming into the Evernote ecosystem could also involve making introductions to others who might become backers.

But even if there may not be direct VC-style investment on the part of Evernote, there may be investment in another form: Evernote Food, one of the company’s standalone apps, was first developed during one of Evernote’s hackathons, Needleman points out. Evernote eventually bought the IP to create the service we know today.

Participants will be chosen from among the winners of the 2013 Evernote Devcup, a multi-regional event Evernote holds to encourage more people to use its APIs. The curriculum, it says, will begin in October 2013 with mentorship and development. Then there will be a Silicon Valley-style demo day in November.

While Needleman said Evernote was open about what possibilities there could be for potential apps to run on the Evernote platform, he also directed attention to the two co-sponsors of the accelerator. The API for Honda’s in-car system will also be in the mix, and the Docomo influence will mean that there will be a strong mobile element too. These will result in specific prizes in mobile and transport.

While accelerators have become quite ubiquitous in the world of startups, what’s unique about this one is how Evernote proposes to source candidates. The idea, says Needleman, is to tap people from as far afield as they can, with hackathons held in Tokyo, Singapore, Zurich, and Mexico City as some of the feeders; and then to use a taste of life in the tech mecca as another way to reel them in.

“We are trying to play to startups outside of Silicon Valley,” he said. “It’s really seen as an opportunity to see what’s it’s like to be a part of everything here.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Bitcoin correction we wrote about yesterday was not caused by a DDOS attack on one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges, Mt.Gox, but rather by a massive spike in interest in the crypto currency, according to Mt.Gox.

During trading yesterday the value of Bitcoin plummet by 60%, dropping from a high of $265 to around $150 (it has since climbed back up slightly, to around $180). As the value of Bitcoin dropped, San Francisco-based exchange called TradeHill claimed the fall was a result of distributed denial of service attacks on Mt. Gox and Bitstamp.

But Mt.Gox has now posted a notice on its Facebook page explaining the dramatic dive as the result of too much interest in Bitcoin. As its infrastructure slowed down under the volume of new users crowding in, it said the resulting lag then caused traders to panic and sell off currency — triggering the drop.

Earlier this month the Tokyo-based exchange was hit by a DDOS attack — which it said had caused its “worst trading lag ever“. But this time the lag was caused by the Bitcoin goldrush, and existing investors’ fearing a Bitcoin bubble.

Mt.Gox said 60,000 new accounts were opened in the first few days of April alone, vs 75,000 for the whole month of March, and added that it is seeing an average of 20,000 new accounts opened per day, while trading volume has apparently tripled in the past day.

As a result of the increased strain on its infrastructure, Mt.Gox said it may have to temporarily close the exchange for two hours in order to add more servers to cope with the influx.

“We have been busy working on improving things since last week and our team has been working around the clock to improve Mt.Gox to catch up with the demand,” it added. “We will continue to release several updates today and in the coming few days to improve our system overall performance.”

Having previously been a DDOS target, and with the value of Bitcoin still so high, Mt.Gox is likely to be a target for hackers for the foreseeable future.

Mt.Gox’s update follows below in full:

Hi everyone, just a quick update on the situation and what happened last night.

First of all we would like to reassure you but no we were not last night victim of a DDoS but instead victim of our own success!

Indeed the rather astonishing amount of new account opened in the last few days added to the existing one plus the number of trade made a huge impact on the overall system that started to lag. As expected in such situation people started to panic, started to sell Bitcoin in mass (Panic Sale) resulting in an increase of trade that ultimately froze the trade engine!

To give you an idea of how impressive things were here are some numbers that we would love to share with you guys:
- The number of trades executed triple in the last 24hrs.
- The number of new account opened went from 60k for March alone to 75k new account created for the first few days of April! We now have roughly 20,000 new accounts created each day.

Due to these facts we have been busy working on improving things since last week and our team has been working around the clock to improve Mt.Gox to catch up with the demand. We will continue to release several updates today and in the coming few days to improve our system overall performance.

Also please note that we may have to close the exchange for two hours in the next 12 to 24hrs to add several new servers to our system.

Thank you for your understanding and continuous support!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For many travelers, their sense of adventure is only limited by language barriers. With its roster of offbeat activities, however, travel site Voyagin seeks to give visitors a more intimate look at five Asian countries-Japan, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The Tokyo-based startup, which launched its site last December, plans to add more countries this year.

The company, which was originally called FindJPN, has raised $450,000 so far. It started as part of Open Network Lab, a Japanese incubator, and then raised seed funding from Digital Garage and other investors.

The Web site targets both backpackers and luxury travelers between the ages of 25 to 50 who prefer not to book packaged tours.

“They’re mostly interested in food, cultural, and off the beaten track experiences,” says Tushar Khandelwal, Voyagin’s head of marketing and community .

Activities, or ‘experiences’ as Voyagin dubs them, are hosted by local residents, and currently include outings ranging from the kooky (such as getting your ears cleaned by a woman dressed in elaborate cosplay in Tokyo) to artistic (learning how to make silver jewelry in Chiang Mai). Experiences that can give tourists a sense of what daily life in a country is like include a yokocho night in Japan and a tour to meet the washermen and dabbawalas (lunch box deliverymen) of Mumbai.

Locals can apply to become hosts by submitting an application and chatting with a member of Voyagin’s team. Listings are free and Voyagin prides itself on having met with 90 percent of its hosts in person. There are currently about 400 listings and the site makes money by taking a 15 percent cut plus a $3 service fee when a booking is made.

In-depth information about each experience is available in English, along with the length of time each activity takes and its price. One of the startup’s goals is to expand its offerings as its team grows, says Khandelwal. He adds that Voyagin, which currently has about 8,000 unique visitors per month and sees several bookings per day, is on target to double its growth this month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

French real-time alerts startup mention, which describes its offering as ‘Google Alerts on steroids’, has raised a “flash” seed round of $800,000 (€600,000) from Alven Capital and Point Nine Capital. Mention offers a real-time web alerts for brands, companies and individuals to track what’s being said about them on the web and social media sites.

The startup, which was founded in April last year, said it will use the capital to “structure” a marketing and sales team, as well as for product development to improve collaborative features for multiple-users organizations. It is also planning to relocate its core team to the U.S.

Although not quite a year old, mention has amassed 50,000 users, and paying customers from 46 countries. It’s also seeing double-digit revenue growth every month. CEO Edouard de La Jonquière said it wanted to take advantage of this momentum to “quickly raise a seed round on a ‘flash mode’”.

“We’ve contacted five investors whom we knew were thrilled by the project with a single HTML5 presentation page and a pre-drafted terms sheet. The whole idea was not to lose any time on the round and keep focusing on product development and traction,” he said in a statement.

Mention’s web app can be used on a PC and across mobile devices, and allows users to share and react to their mentions. Users to-date cover a “broad variety” of small and large companies and organisations, as well as individuals, according to the startup. It offers a free option, supporting limited mentions, alerts and history; rising to $19.99 for a pro plan, with unlimited alerts and history and 50,000 mentions per month plus data export tools and analytics; or $99.95 for a team plan, which offers the same as the pro plan but adds support for multiple users.

“We have law firms, universities, city councils, start-ups, PR firm, private detectives, communities, Fortune 500 enterprises as well as students, NGO, political parties, hotels and restaurants. And all those from San Francisco to Tokyo,” noted co-founder Thibaud Elzière in a statement.

“We’re very impressed with mention’s easy-to-use product and the immense traction which the company developed within a short period of time,” added Christoph Janz from Point Nine Capital in a supporting statement.

Mention’s feature-set puts it in competition more with social media monitoring services such as HootSuite than Google’s free (and pretty basic) Alerts tool. HootSuite, which had some five million users as of last December (but has not disclosed how many are paying), has been steadily broadening the outlets it monitors to become more of a general web alerts tool than a social media specific dashboard service.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zynga is cutting costs further by closing its Baltimore studio and consolidating its presence in New York City and Texas.

The moves follow a series of cost-cutting efforts that saw the closure of the Boston and Tokyo offices along with layoffs for about 5 percent of the company’s workforce. Those moves allowed the company to save $25 million last quarter.

In today’s changes, Zynga is consolidating the McKinney, Texas, office, which came out of the very successful Newtoy acquisition back in 2010. The company is moving the 30 or so employees there to Dallas, which is an hour away. The studio’s leaders and Newtoy’s founders Paul and David Bettner left in the last year as their “With Friends” line of games had a strong run under Zynga.

Zynga is also closing the Baltimore studio, which was behind CityVille 2. Zynga recently shut that game down after it didn’t live up to expectations as a follow-up to the original CityVille.

The company is also closing down one of its Austin offices and moving those employees to North Austin. Zynga’s New York City offices will also get moved to the company’s mobile studio in the city. Fewer than 1 percent of the company’s employees will be affected, Zynga said.

Zynga chief operations officer David Ko said in a statement:

“In an effort to leverage resources as we focus on creating franchises and driving profitability, Zynga has made changes to four of our US offices. We are closing the McKinney, Texas and downtown Austin offices and relocating those teams near-by to our existing Dallas and North Austin offices. And, we will be consolidating our NYC offices to move staff to our NYC mobile studio. Also, as a part of today’s changes, the Baltimore studio will be closed. While these decisions are always difficult, these steps will affect approximately 1% of our workforce and enable us to focus our resources on the most significant growth opportunities.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Over the past few years, YouTube has been dramatically increasing the resources that it provides to the creative community that uploads videos on its platform. Starting with the acquisition of Next New Networks back in TK, the company has been investing in providing tools, equipment, funding, and guidance to its legion of creators, in an effort to help them improve the quality of their content.

Recently, that’s included the opening of production facilities in London ahead of the 2012 Olympics, and in Los Angeles last fall. Those spaces were meant to attract creators in Europe and North America. Now Asia, specifically Japan, is getting its own creator space, with the launch of a production facility in the Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo.

Like the other YouTube Spaces, the Tokyo facility will be open to select YouTube partners who will be able to use it free of charge to launch ambitious new projects, get their hands on advanced equipment, or just hone their skills while collaborating with other creators.

Typically, creators gain access to the spaces by applying at youtube.com/space. YouTube will begin taking applications on April 1, and will make its choices for those who will participate later in the spring.

Those who are accepted get three months to use the production facilities, including access to sound stages, as well as the use high-quality cameras, lights, production and editing equipment. The Space has three production studios, equipment rooms, screening rooms, and post-production facilities, including edit bays and a foley room.

In addition to providing support for on-demand content uploaded by YouTube creators, the space will host screenings of their content, and will also have live events. That includes live-streamed music sessions and Google Hangouts, including a concert by Japanese singer Juju later this week on February 15.

While YouTube continues to offer guidance and funding to independent creators through the launch of production spaces in places like L.A. and Tokyo, as well as other initiatives, it’s not alone. A number of multichannel networks like Machinima, Maker Studios, and others have emerged to provide marketing and production support to creators looking to increase their audiences.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch