Secret sharing app Whisper has seen tremendous growth since launching last fall. But until recently, it’s only been available on iOS. With a launch on Android’s Google Play store this week, Whisper is going to be available to a whole bunch of new users, particularly in its key demographic of young adults aged 18-24.

Whisper, in case you don’t know, is an ultra-hot app designed for easily sharing secrets anonymously with other users. It’s like PostSecret for mobile phones, allowing users to upload or search for images online and then adding text messages on top of them. Whispers are shared with all users of the app, and the most popular are surfaced based on the number of hearts or responses received from other users.

In addition to public responses, Whisper users can also privately message each other, as long as they’re willing to pay for the feature. That not only keeps the amount of marketing down, but it also provides a way for users to connect with other users that they wouldn’t have otherwise known.

The app continues to grow phenomenally fast. When we checked in with Whisper, users were viewing about a billion page views on the app per month. That’s up to about 1.5 billion per month now, according to co-founder Michael Heyward. Messaging on the app, which makes up the bulk of Whisper’s revenues, is growing even faster. Heyward said there’s essentially zero churn among users who sign up — and pay — for messaging.

“Any time there’s a new person that enlists in that feature, we grow it at a more exponential rate,” he told me. As a result, there are more than millions of messages being passed around privately among users.

While Whisper has seen pretty fantastic growth over the last several weeks, being on iOS limited the app’s addressable market. That’s especially true since Whisper’s most important user base — those between the ages of 18 and 24 — tend to overindex on Android devices. As a result, Heyward believes that its iOS app could only access approximately 40 percent of its most important audience.

With that in mind, the team worked around the clock to get its Android app released. It initially started work on the app about six weeks ago, looking to replicate all the features and functionality of its popular iOS app.

The Android app first hit Google Play earlier this week and received about 50,000 downloads in the first 48 hours — all without any real promotion from the company. More importantly, the engagement levels with early Android users have been on par with or better than iOS usage. For instance, about 40 percent of initial Android users have created Whispers already.

Whisper has raised $3 million in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from investors like Trinity Ventures, Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee, and Flixster’s Joe Greenstein. The company now has 14 employees, but Heyward says they’re looking to add a few more hires over the coming weeks.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When the AP Twitter stream was hacked a few weeks ago leading to a massive drop in the equities market, I went off. I found the fact that the AP – a news organization staffed by intelligent people and with a long history of adapting to new media – could be hacked through a phishing attack was unconscionable. It would be like Bank of America being hacked by a group of script kiddies.

Sadly, this happens over and over. Why? Thankfully the folks at the Onion had the foresight to explain what exactly happened when the “Syrian Electronic Army” “hacked” their Twitter stream.

If you run your company’s social media account, read it. The takeaways are here:

I think the third suggestion is the most important – always change your Twitter password on a regular basis and, more important, never ever ever ever click on a link that suggests you should change your Twitter password via the browser. If you must change your Twitter password, either do it through Twitter.com directly or, barring that, email Twitter. If you’re the AP or the ACLU or the Boston Pony And Terrier Lovers Of America Club, I’m sure they’ll help out.

Twitter itself needs to offer dual factor authentication or, at the very least, send you a text when someone changes your password. This is imperative. Twitter is now a medium for corporate communications and for it have the security of a web forum is unconscionable. The person in charge of your Twitter feed should also have a completely separate email address, outside of your domain, and that person should have a process in place to check the URL of the password change page and then only change the password if everything is kosher. At the risk of raising script kiddie, I would say that most “hackers” depend more on the stupidity of their marks and less on their technical skill.

Don’t be stupid.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In Q4 of last year, Facebook’s mobile MAUs surpassed desktop for the first time in its history. That trend continued in Q1 2013 with 751M MAUs. This is what we learned with today’s release of Facebook’s Q1 results.

Despite claims earlier this month, Facebook didn’t lose users, but gained 2M. Asia continues to be the largest area of user growth, according to the slides provided by Facebook today. During the earnings call, COO Sherly Sandberg mentioned that mobile ads are performing well particularly in Asia.

Here’s a full rundown for Q1 year-over-year user growth:

- Daily active users (DAUs) were 665 million on average for March 2013, an increase of 26% year-over-year.
- Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.11 billion as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 23% year-over-year.
- Mobile MAUs were 751 million as of March 31, 2013, an increase of 54% year-over-year.

As you can see, the overall growth of monthly active users is incremental from the past quarter:

Something we’d like to find out is if certain age groups are growing faster than others. Some feel that even though the social network is an essential utility for many all over the world, the younger crowd might be starting to spend time socializing on other platforms. This was of course one of the reasons that Facebook acquired photo-sharing app Instagram last year, since the younger crowd had flocked to it as their sole social network. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that Instagram’s community is growing faster than Facebook did when it was at a similar size. There’s another reason.

The mobile user growth kicked up its ad revenue numbers as well, accounting for 30%, or $375M.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s hard to gauge how popular Apple’s iCloud really is, but the idea behind it is solid: give developers a place to save their users’ data, give users control over this data and allow developers to focus on their apps and not storage. NimbusBase, which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 today, had built exactly that, with the ingenious twist that the data is stored in the cloud of the users’ choosing. Currently, NimbusBase supports Dropbox and Google Drive, with SkyDrive and other providers expected to launch in the near future.

NimbusBase’s New York-based founders Ray Wang (CTO) and Alex Volodarsky (COO) told me that developers currently have three choices. They can use iCloud, but that’s limited to iOS; they can build their own storage infrastructure and then pay for server space; or they can use specialized backend services, but those tend to charge a premium for storage.

With NimbusBase, developers can easily integrate the same features they would get from those tools into their own apps, but without any of the hassle because the cloud storage providers handle all of the storage infrastructure for developers and users. To get started, developers only need to add a few lines of code to their apps and NimbusBase handles the rest. For now, NimbusBase only works for web apps, but the team plans to release its Android and iOS integrations soon.

Services like Dropbox, of course, aren’t designed to be storage backends for apps, which typically use databases to store their users’ data. NimbusBase gets around this by first storing the data in a local SQLite database (or in a local file) and then slicing the data up into small files that get synced with the user’s storage service.

In addition to storage, these cloud storage providers also function as the de-facto user accounts for the apps – just sign in with your DropBox or SkyDrive account – so developers don’t have to worry about that, either.

For users, this also means they remain in full control over their data. Don’t like the app anymore? Just wipe out the directory in your Dropbox account and you’re done. You can try NimbusBase’s demo app to see how this works in practice.

To make sure that Dropbox and Google wouldn’t have any issues with how NimbusBase uses their services, the team talked to both of these companies to explain its service and got the go-ahead from both of them.

Currently, NimbusBase offers a free plan – its so-called “Hacker Plan” – which developers can use to build and test their apps. Once they are ready to launch their service, they will have to pay $500/year for the enterprise plan. For a popular app, the team told me, that should be a “no-brainer,” given that they simply pay a flat fee whether the app has a thousand or a million users, or whether those users save a few text files or high-res photos. The users, of course, will have to start paying their cloud storage providers at some point.

NimbusBase only works for web apps. Next on the company’s roadmap is an Android version that then allows Android developers to essentially replicate iCloud’s data-syncing features on Google’s platform. The team is also looking at adding encryption to NimbusBase’s feature set.

So far, Wang and Volodarsky have bootstrapped their company, which they founded last August. The two are actively looking for additional funding to hire more engineers and to expand NimbusBase beyond Drive and Dropbox.

Disrupt Q&A:

Q: What is the pricing?
A: Free at first, then an annual subscription price.

Q: Where does this go in a year from now?
A: Initially, will focus on mobile developers and start supporting more platforms.

Q: How hard is this to do?
A: “We think it’s hard because for people who want to integrated with every cloud providers, this is hard to do.” Syncing with personal clouds is not trivial.

Q: Can you give me a sense of the scope of this problem?
A: Building the infrastructure is hard for developers and users want control over their data.

Q: What’s your sales strategy?
A: Developer tools are viral. Once developers use it, they will tell each other and will reach out to others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Heroku, the popular cloud platform as a service company, today announced the public launch of its Europe region. Developers will now be able to deploy their services closer to their European customers, which should result in markedly reduced latency for them. The company says it has observed performance improvements of 100ms or more per request for European end users.

Heroku is built on top of Amazon’s EC2 platform, so while the company doesn’t explicitly note this in its announcement today, this means it is using Amazon’s data center in Ireland for this service. In the U.S., Heroku’s services are currently based in Amazon’s North Virginia (US-East-1) data center. Given this launch in Europe, it’s likely that Heroku is also looking into expanding its U.S. presence to more data centers across the country, too.

Developers, the company says, will also be able to easily deploy more than 60 add-ons from its marketplace in this new zone. Heroku will automatically deploy these in the same region the app is running in, too.

The company previously offered this service as a private beta for a small number of users, including Swedene’s TV4 and Betapond. “Deploying our app closer to our users in Heroku’s Europe region gave us a 150ms improvement in web performance. Based on this win for our users, we’re moving all of our apps to the Europe region,” TV4′s CTO Per Åström said in a canned statement today.

Safe Harbor Coming Soon

One issue for U.S. companies that want to bring cloud-based services to Europe is the fact that they have to comply with the EU’s privacy protection laws, which tend to be a bit more strict than similar laws in the U.S. The EU’s Directive on Data Protection prohibits the transfer of personal data to non-European Union countries that don’t meet its privacy protection standard. To ensure that this won’t hinder cloud-based services too much, however, Europe allows U.S. companies to be certified to ensure that their privacy policies are compliant with European regulations.

Heroku says it is “not yet a registered participant in the Safe Harbor program,” but the company has “laid the groundwork for becoming Safe Harbor certified and expect to have it soon.” Until then, developers have to assume that some of their data will be stored in – or pass through – Heroku’s U.S. data centers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google today added a new feature to Google Apps for Business that could make its Chrome browser significantly more palatable for businesses. The company’s new cloud-based management tool for Google Apps for Business and Education customers now gives IT administrators the ability to customize more than 100 Chrome policies and preferences for their users right from the standard Google Admin panel or through Windows Group Policies for managed devices.

In addition, Google launched a new Chrome extension today that allows businesses to automatically switch to a legacy browser for sites that still need to run in an older browser. IT managers can define these sites. While Chrome Frame allows users to use the Chrome rendering engine in an older browser, Google notes, “Legacy Browser Support lets IT admins of organizations embrace the modern web.”

The new cloud-based management system for Chrome for Business is now automatically enabled for all Google Apps for Business and Education users, and the policies will be automatically enforced for Chrome users who sign in to Chrome with their business accounts on Windows, Mac and Linux.

These policies allow IT to decide which web applications, extensions, startup URLs and themes are automatically set up for the company’s users, no matter where they use Chrome. Besides these basic settings, however, IT managers can also dive a bit deeper and decide whether they want users to be able to see WebGL content, share their location, turn on Safe Browsing mode, turn on Incognito Mode or even if their users can see images. Admins can also use the tool to manage a URL blacklist.

“The web and browser have come a long way in the last 20 years,” Google says in today’s announcement. “As Chrome continues to push the boundary of what’s possible on the modern web, these innovations should be available for everyone, everywhere — especially at work.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook today officially announced its enhanced status update product, which allows users to share what they’re doing or how they’re feeling in a structured and visual way. The feature will be available to all U.S. users in coming weeks and will likely expand globally after that.

Overall, structured status updates could lead more users to share their activity in a way that can be later used for ad targeting or indexed in Graph Search. Essentially, Facebook is bringing the vision of Open Graph — users connecting to objects through more relevant verbs than “Like” — to its own platform rather than relying on third-party apps to do so. A result might be that users become familiar with this type of sharing on Facebook and end up being more comfortable with third-party apps that help them tell similar stories. Even if not, Facebook will gain information to improve its service for users and opportunities for advertisers.

When users go to create a post on desktop, Facebook will offer a new smiley face icon next to the options for adding friends, location or an image. This produces a drop down menu of options: “feeling,” “watching,” “reading,” “listening to,” “drinking” and “eating.” Users can then share more details about their current status. The resulting update will include an emoticon to represent the user’s feeling or tag the page associated with the user’s activity. Users can tag friends or location in these posts. They can also include a photo or link. But they cannot combine multiple activities or feelings. Content that users indicate that they watch, read or listen to will also end up in the new About page sections for TV shows, movies, books and music.

These new post types would lend themselves well to Sponsored Stories. Entertainment companies or publishers might want to pay to promote activity that mentions their film or book, for example. CPG brands or restaurants could sponsor “eating” or “drinking” stories that mention them. Facebook hasn’t launched this capability for advertisers yet, but it has been possible for companies to sponsor any third-party Open Graph action since February 2012.

The development of structured status updates was first revealed in January, and we’ve seen the feature in testing among Facebook employees and some other users since then. Today Facebook officially launched the product by rolling it out to a wider audience and making a post on its newsroom site about it.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Google today announced a new partnership with social login providers Janrain and Gigya that will bring its Google+ sign-ins to thousands of new sites. In February, Google launched Google+ sign-ins to developers who can use it on the web and for their Android and iOS apps and starting today, all of the 400,000 sites that use Janrain to provide social logins and the 600,000 sites deployed across Gigya‘s 650 premium clients can now use all of the features that come with Google’s new and improved sign-in service.

As Google product management director Seth Sternberg told me yesterday, developers obviously like the fact that they can use this service to easily enable two-factor authentication on their sites. In his view, however, there are two breakout features that so far have been more successful than Google expects: over-the-air Android installs – which check if a website user also own an Android phone and lets you install a site’s mobile app with just a click – and the interactive posts to Google+ that are made possible through the new sign-in infrastructure. While he didn’t share any concrete numbers, Sternberg said that the interactive posts have resulted in “fantastic interaction rates” and that people who see them are “disproportionately likely to interact with them.”

For publishers and other website owners who use Janrain and Gigya, this new feature means that they can also pull in more information about their users. The regular Google login, after all, isn’t coupled to a social network so while they could get more information about their users from Facebook and Twitter, users who used Google’s old sign-ins remained relatively anonymous.

As Janrain’s CEO Larry Drebes told me yesterday, he believes that this will be the main reason for many of the 400,000 sites in the company’s network to switch (which only takes a few clicks for companies that already use his service). About a third of Janrain’s users currently use their Google credentials to log in to its partner sites, and as Drebes told me, Google’s numbers are growing at the expense of Facebook.

Some of the Janrain customers that are enabling Google+ sign-ins at launch include NPR, HSN.com and Universal Music, so Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber fans can now sign in to their idols’ websites with their Google+ credentials.

On Gigya, American Idol and other Fox Broadcasting properties will enable Google+ sign-ins at launch, as well as Food Network UK. As the company’s CEO Patrick Salyer told me, the company provides social infrastructure services to 48 of the top 100 largest websites and that more than 1.5 billion users touch its services in some form every month.

Salyer also has an interesting theory about how Google could use the data it gets through Google+ sign-ins. What if, he said, Google used this data to also personalize its search results at some point? If you use Google+ sign-ins to regularly sign in to a newspaper website, for example, Google could push those results to the top of its search results pages. Chances are, after all, that this is a source you trust.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BraveNewTalent launched as a ‘social recruitment’ platform back in 2010 and went on to secure VC funding a year later. But last year saw the startup pivot in a big way. The original model was geared towards the idea that people would want to follow companies they might want to work for in the future, and companies in turn wanted to educate potential hires about how they work. If the recruitment process was started earlier earlier – even before positions became available – some of the talent issues would go away. At least that was the theory.

Back in 2011 BNT had secured an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding from Northzone Ventures and two angels. Clients like IBM, Tesco, L’Oreal and McAfee started using the platform, which also integrated with Facebook, just as other ‘recruitment apps’ operated, such as BranchOut, JIBE, Superscout and Emp.ly.

In reality, however, says CEO and founder Lucia Tarnowski, “We realised we were trying to build communities around recruitment content. But trying to build user engagement around transactional content like that doesn’t work. Job seekers just wanted jobs, and recruiters just wanted to fill positions. So the model didn’t scale just focusing on jobs.”

So six months ago BNT pivoted towards being 100 percent enterprise focused, and went from ‘social recruiting’ to ‘social learning’.

Is this just semantics or is there now a real difference in what they do?

Well, the new model means companies on the platform can still recruit from an audience of users, but the whole thing is not nearly so ‘job centric’. Instead, says Tarnowski, it is now ‘learning centric’ around the content that is produced – not just by the companies, but by the users themselves.

Perhaps the best way to think of it is if you took Yammer, opened it to anyone to join, then gave them a free hand to post content that was relevant to your industry. Sure it sounds not unlike LinkedIn, but the difference here is that LinkedIn is not used inside the enterprise (like a Yammer). Indeed, BNT looks like it is going to end up having a foot in both the free-wheeling Internet and the enterprise communications world.

Looking at the new interface you can see how this might be. The new BNT looks reminiscent of how a Yammer might be opened up to be more porous between both internal employees and external users who might one day be called in for an interview.

Danish startup Robocat has built a lot of software for Apple’s iOS devices, but today the company is branching out with the launch of a new hardware accessory for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. It’s called Thermodo, and it’s a very small hardware thermometer that fits in your device’s headphone jack, and transmits real temperature data for use in apps.

The Thermodo hardware has a passive temperature sensor, housed in an audio jack and protected by a small cylindrical end cap that only extends around a quarter of an inch out from your device. It doesn’t need its own power source, and it transmits weather data as an audio signal that can be picked up by your phone and translated into the corresponding temperature on your phone via an API, which the company will first use in a dedicated Thermodo companion app for iOS, as well as in two of its previously released apps, Haze and Thermo.

The Thermodo works offline, indoors and out, and comes with a carrying case keyring to make sure you don’t lose the tiny thing when it’s not in use. Robocat says that eventually, any device could potentially support Thermodo, including Raspberry Pi, Macs, and Arduino-based gadgets, thanks to the company’s open source SDK.

I talked to Robocat founder Willi Wu about the project, and why it came to be in the first place. He says the company branched out from its core focus on mobile weather apps based on feedback from users.

“The idea Thermodo is actually based on an indirect request from our users,” he explained.” We received several one star reviews because our users wanted the feature of measuring the temperature themselves right where they are. Currently the iPhone does not support any access to any temperature reading within the phone nor is there a dedicated sensor for this purpose. We wanted to attack to this problem anyway and came up with the most simple solution we could imagine, Thermodo.”

While other devices like the Square credit card reader and the Jawbone UP fitness band use the headphone jack as a way for accessories to communicate with smartphone devices, Wu says that Thermodo is fundamentally different in its approach. That opens up plenty more possibilities for how the company could use the tech in the future to create other kinds of sensors, he says.

“Thermodo is not translating sounds to data like Square or other softmodem-based products,” he said. “It turns out that we can apply this method to all kind of applications. What we do is converting the temperature into an electrical impedance and this impedance is determined by what we call the “Thermodo Principle.” Now we can convert all kind of things into an electrical impedance, like for example wind speed, pressure, brightness and so on.”

Wu says Robocat’s technical lead is already measuring his resistors and capacitors in this manner, and that the company is experimenting with some of these alternate sensing capabilities already. Eventually Thermodo could have a number of sibling devices to gauge just about everything under the sun (including the sun’s brightness).

Thermodo is looking for just $35,000 in funding, and pre-order pledges start at just $19 for a single Thermodo unit. This is a project that will hit its goal quickly, and I can’t wait to see what comes next from Robocat’s new hardware focus.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch