Google’s underwater Street View launched last September, but Google’s Ocean program actually began six years ago, when one of the founders of Keyhole (which, after being acquired by Google, later became Google Earth), was inspired to also look into mapping the ocean. For several years now Google has been mapping the oceans, but bringing Street View underwater is still very challenging.

“Our goal is to really make all of our maps data more comprehensive by adding more ocean data. We want to take you from your home to the turtle’s home,” Google’s Jennifer Austin Foulkes said. So far, Google has launched this for six locations, including Oahu, Maui and locations around the Great Barrier Reef.

Because there is a strong scientific component to this project, the team set up a strict protocol for taking this imagery. Richard Vevers, director of the Catlin Seaview Survey – Google’s partner in this project – said that the cameras his team uses for this project are very different from those used by Google’s other Street View vehicles. The team had to use wider-angle lenses, for example. Google’s underwater Street View camera has three cameras on its front and takes images every three seconds. One of the cameras points downward, because that’s how images during reef surveys have traditionally been taken. The back of the scooter features a tablet that can control the cameras.

During a typical dive, the divers cover about 2km and take 3,000 to 4,000 images per camera, and the team does three dives per day, each of which lasts about an hour. In total, the team has taken about 150,000 images so far, and Vevers expects this number to grow exponentially over the next few months. In the long run, the team hopes to create diver-less systems that can stay underwater for 12 hours or more. The technology is already available, but it needs to be adapted to the kind of camera system needed for Street View.

In addition to the usual cameras, the team is also testing stereo cameras to create 3D imagery and has recently experimented with doing underwater Hangouts and using Photo Spheres to engage the public.

Every camera system costs about $50,000, and four of them are currently in existence, though two of them haven’t been in the water yet.

To get this underwater data into Street View, Vevers used Google’s standard Business Photos tool. The actual location of the images, by the way, is triangulated. The images, it’s worth noting, are also freely available for scientists.

The team is focusing on the Americas right now, but plans to bring underwater Street View to all of the world’s oceans over the next three years (that’s obviously just a few locations – not all of the oceans…). Another focus for the team is getting more developers involved – both for crowdsourcing data and for developing better reef-recognition algorithms. The existing algorithms can only interpret images from a downward-facing camera, but the team is hoping to create tools for working with all of the data the cameras generate.

Given the threats to the ocean, there is obviously a serious side to this project, something Vevers noted during his talk. Street View, he argues, is an important tool to inform the public about the threats that the ocean’s face today. “People don’t want to protect anything they can’t see,” he said. Most people don’t dive, but there’s no reason why we can’t take them diving virtually. There is no point in doing science, Vevers argues, if it doesn’t get out to the public and policy makers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Photos have always been at the center of the Google+ experience and at I/O today, Google announce a major update to Google+ Photos that now makes use of the many of the tools the company acquired when it bought Nik Software last September. The focus of this update is squarely on automating a lot of the photo editing and sharing process. Google+ can now, for example, automatically enhance the tonal distribution in an image, soften skin, sharpen certain parts of an image and remove noise – and all of those computations happen in the cloud.

As Google’s Vic Gundotra told us before the event (and reiterated today), “you don’t take a photograph, you make it.” Users spend thousand of dollars to make photos great, he noted, but photography is still labor intensive and organizing photos is often still a hassle. “It takes time, and most of don’t have the time,” Gundotra said.  But what if Google’s data centers could be your darkroom?

So what if Google could automatically fix your image sand pick the best ones and highlight them automatically? That’s another new feature the company is launching today. The system can now analyze your images and kick out blurry photos, duplicates, images with bad exposure (which it will try to fix). It can also recognize good images with certain landmarks, for example, and detect faces and see if people are smiling and/or of those people are in your Google+ circles. It will also try to make some decision based on aesthetics. What used to take hours of work, Gundotra said, now happens automatically in the cloud and take seconds.

Using all of this, the system can make greenery pop, soften skin tones, clean up the color of the water and apply local enhancement to contrast and other features automatically. It can also automatically remove red eyes. Users can, of course, apply all of these enhancements separately as well.

The original images, of course, always remain untouched and users can easily toggle back and forth between the enhanced version and the original.

Now that Google offers everybody 15GB of free storage, users an also upload 15GB worth of full-size images to Google+ Photos. In addition, the autobackup feature provides unlimited storage space for photos at sized under 2048px.

Auto Awesome

In today’s age of animated GIFs, the Google+ team also decided to get in on the game – but with a twist. The system – which is apparently called “Awesome” – can automatically detect when an image is part of a series and stitch it together in one image or an animated GIF. “If we detect that you took a series of photos, in burst mode or otherwise, we can stitch them together,” Gundotra told us. To recognize these images, the system does a bit of analysis to make sure the background hasn’t moved.

This is about more than animated GIFs, though. This new feature – which Google calls “auto awesome” – can also automatically create a group photo from a series of photos and pick the one where everybody is smiling. It can stitch together landscape photos to create panoramas and create HDR images from a series of photos where it detects bracketed exposures. All of this happens extremely fast, too, thanks to the power of Google’s data centers.

All of these features are going live today and Google has already gone back and created “awesome” images for all of your existing photos in Google+.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Arram Sabeti is CEO of ZeroCater. Follow him on Twitter @arram.

When you throw a rock into the water, it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, [...] This is what fools call magic and of which they think it would be effected by means of the daemons. Nothing is effected by daemons, there are no daemons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast – Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

Five years ago I moved to the Bay Area because I wanted to start a company. I came here armed with that single goal and the education of a dozen Paul Graham essays. To me, determination has an almost magical quality. I’d always felt that with enough of it I could do absolutely anything.

People say startups are risky, but for me, working at a job my entire life seemed like the worst possible outcome, so starting a company was the least risky thing I could do. I think that’s what people mean when they talk about founders being a little crazy. I realize this is an unusual personality trait.

To fund my adventure, I sold my car and bummed a ride to the Bay Area. I spent two days on the Berkeley public library computers looking for a place to live. I convinced a retired dentist to give me the keys to a cheap studio in El Cerrito before he’d seen any money or even gotten my signature on a lease. Looking for my apprenticeship, I started applying to startup jobs.

It turned out that 21-year-olds with no degree or marketable skills weren’t in great demand. As luck would have it, a paper I picked up told me it was the worst summer for jobs in a decade. Eventually my cash ran so low that I walked to downtown Berkeley and went into every business with an open door asking for job applications. Even there the response was abysmal. A week later I had exactly one offer. It was from Ben & Jerry’s, which I accepted.

A few days later I saw a job opening on Hacker News for a Community Manager at Justin.tv. I remembered reading about the founders when they sold their last company on eBay, so I excitedly emailed them and soon got an invitation to interview.

I spent the train ride across the Bay figuring out how I’d stand out from other applicants. When I got there I pulled out my notebook and made sure to interview them as rigorously as they were interviewing me. I even said “Just to be fair, I should mention I’m going to quit in a year to start my own company.”

Over three interviews, the candidates were whittled down from sixteen, to six, to me and one other. At the end of the third interview, Justin Kan asked, “how much salary do you need?” I told him ”I’m only in it for the experience; I only need enough to live. 

I got the call that night. “It was close, but we want someone who’d be around for more than a year.” I thought I’d shot myself in the foot until he added, “but we want to create a new position for you.” I gave my notice to Ben & Jerry’s.

The job was a grab-bag of unwanted tasks. I tested new releases of the site, managed job applicants, and even ordered lunch for the team. The work was tedious, but getting hired at Justin.tv was the best thing that could have happened. I got to work next to the most capable people I’d ever met, and I learned how startups really work and met dozens of people who’d provide invaluable help and advice later. Two of the founders would end up as investors and advisors in my company.

One of the best things about the startup community is the incredible pay-it-forward attitude. It’s almost like the bond between war veterans. The individual circumstances may vary, but every founder can empathize with the struggle.

After a year and a half at Justin.tv, I still didn’t have a startup idea, so I gave myself a deadline: I was quitting my job in six months, so I better have something paying for rent and ramen by then. I added a countdown timer to my desktop and changed my work password to “SixMonthsQuit,” something I’d be typing eight times a day. (You clear your cookies often doing site testing.)

The Promise Of Lunchtime Stress

I had lots of conversations with friends about potential ideas. Around that time Justin mentioned that a friend at another company had asked for the list of restaurants I was using for lunches. Maybe I could help them? At the time, ordering lunch was, surprisingly, the most annoying, stressful part of my job. My restaurant list had taken a year of trial and error to build. I got a meeting with their office manager, and she seemed incredibly relieved to hand off the responsibility. Managing company meals turned out to be a hair-on-fire problem. I started asking for introductions to office managers from everyone I knew and one customer became two, then three. I quit my job three months after setting the deadline.

I remember being deathly embarrassed that my “tech” startup consisted of 0 lines of code, an inbox, and an enormous spreadsheet. Eventually, I got over my embarrassment and learned that the first rule of being a salesman is being unashamed of selling. If someone at a party mentioned that their company ordered food, I pulled out my phone and got their email address right there. When I received emails from sales people, I’d flip the script: had their company considered having food delivered? Could I talk to whoever would make that decision? I’ll listen to your pitch if you listen to mine.

Pitching became a reflex. When I was buying a phone, a Verizon employee saw my card and asked what I did. Not even expecting a sale, I started pitching by reflex, “ZeroCater makes it simple for companies to feed their people. You can just tell us, for example: We have 74 people, two vegetarians, and 1 vegan, and want lunch every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We create custom orders across a curated list of restaurants, food trucks, and caterers. Awesome food just shows up and you never have to think about it again.” When I got home, I found that all the Verizon stores in San Francisco had signed up to feed their employees during the new iPhone launch.

The beginning was the hardest, when only a few customers stood between me and not making rent, but a year went by and the company grew. The spreadsheet I used for scheduling grew to five hundred columns and the processes I had in place started to break. Billing grew to take 20 hours a week. I started looking for a technical cofounder to build software. Unfortunately, most of the developers I knew already worked at promising startups.

Eventually, I convinced a developer friend to join me. We applied to Y Combinator and got an interview. Luckily, Paul Graham loved the idea. “You help companies with their number one problem: recruiting!” He then turned to Jessica Livingston and asked, “How do you like managing catering for Y Combinator events?” “I hate it!” Despite this, we were still too nervous to get any work done until we got the acceptance call that night.

Near the end of Y Combinator, an investor heard about us through someone we were trying to recruit and asked for a meeting. We spoke over coffee and he emailed us the next day: “Good news- we discussed ZeroCater as a team and we’d like to move ahead with a term sheet. [...] We can do a convertible note or a “bridge” equity round (assuming you’re not ready for Series A), and we’d also like to know if you’re willing to go up to $1mm.”

The view had been breathtaking but it was at that moment that my roller coaster reached the top of the tracks. The next day my technical cofounder told me he was quitting.

It had been a stressful three months and we were often leaving the office past midnight. I had been talking about building a billion dollar business, and I think that’s when he realized he didn’t love the company enough to give it 100% of the next 4-8 years of his life.

There are two things you don’t want to be when you’re trying to raise money as a tech company. You don’t want to be a single founder, because everyone knows startups are too much work for one person, and you don’t want to be non-technical, because everyone knows that a business guy with an idea has no inherent value.

I was both. It didn’t matter. I was going to build a company.

Demo Day was approaching, where I’d pitch my company to a room full of investors.

After I’d tried several rewrites, two days before demo day, Paul Graham suggested the ending of my presentation: “more and more companies are feeding their employees, and we want to ride that wave, a wave of food.” Looking for a way to wake investors up from the 44 other presentations they’d be sitting through, I found an artist who could create a painting overnight that would illustrate the “wave of food.”

My presentation ended with “We want to ride that wave,” where I’d pause, flip to the painting, and say “a wave of food.” This got a lot of laughs.

I must have practiced that presentation over 150 times, right up to the moment I went onstage, much of it in the Y Combinator parking lot, where a friend came up to me and said “Arram, you know there’s such a thing as over practicing.”

There’s a great quote from Teller (of Penn & Teller): “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

I presented, and ZeroCater was voted #1 at Alumni Demo Day.

A few investors balked at the idea of investing in a single, non-technical founder but fortunately most were enthusiastic enough that I raised $1.5 million – more money than I’d planned.

Over the next two years we built the team and kept on growing. We now feed over 350 companies each month, including Sony, ZipCar, Yelp, and eBay and have served well over a million meals.

Paul Graham has written that one of the surprising things they learned after starting Y Combinator is that determination is the most important factor in predicting success, even more important than intelligence.

I think of Bill Walsh, coaching the 49ers, with the worst record in NFL history, trying and failing to break an eight-game losing streak against the Miami Dolphins. I think of him sobbing in the dark on the flight back to San Francisco, while his assistant coaches shielded him from being seen by any of his players, and nearly submitting his resignation before changing his mind and going on to win three Super Bowls.

I think of Buckminster Fuller, broke, seeing his daughter die of polio, and on the verge of suicide, before deciding to embark on “an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”

I think of Tony Hsieh selling LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265M, eventually investing in, then joining a struggling shoe company called Zappos. I think of him investing more and more of his own money until he went broke and sold his apartment at a loss just to make payroll before being acquired by Amazon for nearly $1B.

I think of Elon Musk, on his third failed rocket launch, after putting his entire fortune into his three companies, having to borrow money to pay rent, with just enough cash for one more launch before successfully reaching space and closing a deal with NASA.

Musk describes it best: “It’s like chewing glass and staring into the abyss.” In the worst times, the pain is both physical and mental. There’s a part of his 60 Minutes interview I watch at least once a month, where Musk is asked if he considered quitting after his third failed launch. He replies in a quiet, understated voice: “Never. I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.”

There’s a reason Musk is on the very short list of people who’ve founded three separate companies worth over a billion dollars, and that moment captures it perfectly.

You determine the greatness of your accomplishments by the amount of pain you’re willing to pay down. The more ambitious you are, the more glass you’ll have to chew. Everyone has their grind, even people doing what they love.

Anyone, given health and a reasonable amount of intelligence, can accomplish goals on a global scale. I really don’t think there’s an upper limit. That’s what my five-year experiment has confirmed for me: You can do anything with enough grit.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Marc Randolph, the Founder & CEO of Netflix:

I keep saying how brutally hard this is. Each time you crest the rise in front of you, it just makes it clear the size of the even larger hill that looms beyond it. It goes on for a long time. I pissed blood for years keeping Netflix alive while we figured that shit out – as did every other successful entrepreneur in the valley.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Nearly 100 years ago, the Anderson Carriage Company produced and sold one of the most popular electric vehicles of the time: The Detroit Electric. With production peaking at 1,000-2,000 cars in 1910, the company eventually renamed itself after its popular model and sold nearly 13,000 electric vehicles during its 32 years of production. The company never recovered from depression, producing its last EV in 1939.

Detroit Electric is back. Meet the first car to wear the historic nameplate in over 70 years: The SP:01.

The brand was revived in 2008 by Albert Lam, former Group CEO of the Lotus Engineering Group and Executive Director of Lotus Cars of England. Now headquartered in Detroit’s historic Fisher building, the company is set to restart Detroit Electric starting with the SP:01 electric sports car.

The SP:01 is just the first from the Detroit startup. More family friendly vehicles are in the works, with two new models in the pipeline for 2014. The company is also setting up its production shop somewhere in the Detroit area where it expects to have a yearly production capacity of 2,500 vehicles. This facility will create 180 new jobs.

Detroit Electric only plans on making 999 examples of the SP:01. That’s well under the 2,400 Tesla Roadsters produced during its four-year run. With a starting price of $135,000, the SP:01 also has a starting cost higher than the Roadster. But at least it’s just as fast.

Detroit Electric claims the SP:01 is the fastest pure-electric production car on the market. And that’s true since the Roadster is no longer available. It’s claimed, although yet verified, performance numbers puts the SP:01 on the same level as the limited edition Tesla Roadster Sport. Plus, with a claimed top speed of 155 mph and 0-62 mph time of 3.7 seconds, it’s quicker than just about every other car out of Detroit including the new Corvette Stingray.

Propulsion is provided by an air-cooled, asynchronous AC motor powered by dual 37-kWh lithium-polymer batteries. The system is good for 201 horsepower and 166 pound-feet of torque — not bad for a car that weighs just 2,403 pounds. Strangely enough, unlike the dead-simple Tesla Roadster, the SP:01 features a four-speed manual transmission or an optional two-speed automatic. Since the electric engine is either on or off, there is no need to use the clutch when stopping or starting.

Detroit Electric claims the SP:01 has a driving range of 180 miles based on the New European Driving Cycle, but as Autoblog notes, while the official calculations haven’t been released, that likely results in about 150 miles on a U.S. cycle.

It’s no secret that the carbon-fiber shell comes from a Lotus Exige. Interestingly enough, the Tesla Roadster is based largely on the Lotus Elise platform.

Per Detroit Electric’s press release, it takes 4.3 hours to fully charge the SP:01 from a 240 volt outlet with 32 amps. It takes 8 hours on a 13-amp sources. But like the Chevy Volt, the SP:01 can output its electrical charge, serving as a sort of $135k electric generator in a pinch.

Here’s hoping that Detroit Electric finds the same level of success as its forebearer. The EV market is wide open for new players. Tesla, while Detroit Electric’s main competition, has a large head start but by no means a monopoly. Fisker is dead in the water, GM and Toyota are pursuing hybrids, and Nissan is seemingly content selling low-end electric vehicles.

The SP:01 will hit the production lines this August. The price starts at $135,000.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Being as chiseled as I am is tough. You have to eat right (brownies only every other day), exercise (take the stairs to the attic), and keep tabs on things like your heart rate and body temperature while playing Sim City. That’s why the Basis is one of the best “general purpose” body monitors I’ve seen. The band, which senses your blood flow, body temperature, and perspiration along with steps and motion, is a small, discreet watch-like system that works surprisingly well as a standard pedometer but offers a way to break bad habits and make new ones.

I’m a longtime fan of quantified health devices for the simple reason that they offer immediate feedback on my current activity level and health. I’ve been using Fitbits for as long as they’ve been available and I’ve managed to lose 20 pounds by keeping my activity up and not eating like a slob. The Basis is different in that it offers the same features as a Fitbit but with a few improvements. For example, on the bottom of the watch there is an optical BPM heart sensor as well as leads for perspiration sensing and temperature. Because it is a watch you can wear the device overnight and monitor your sleep habits as well.

The device itself is about one inch on each side with an integrated rubber band. Four spots in the corners activate various features and there’s a central button that is not yet activated in this incarnation of the device. Pressing the right buttons displays steps take, calories, and current heart rate and you can activate the clock or data by pressing the left “buttons.” A sensor turns on the backlight when you move the watch towards your face (this happens intermittently but it works in principle) and you can also turn on the backlight by pressing the left touch button.

As a watch, the Basis is fairly basic and I’d even say sub-par. You can tell the time and the date, but traditional sports functions are missing. Viewing it in low or bright light is difficult and the backlight pops on for a mere five seconds, giving you just enough time to forget what time it is. It lasts about five days on one charge and connects to your computer or charger via a sort of USB-powered “frame” that connects to the watch body. It’s a bit cumbersome but it improves the water-fastness of the watch.

The real magic happens on the back end. The Basis watch syncs with MyBasis.com, a dedicated website for the device, as well as a forthcoming mobile apps for Android and iOS. It is here that the Basis shines – and confuses.

Basis uses the concept of “habits” to motivate you to get off your duff. Some of the habits are simple – one asks you to simply wear the watch – while others encourage you do take a certain number of steps a day or spend a certain amount of time sleeping. You unlock various habits by completing challenges over time and you begin with only a few possible “goals” during your initial set up.

This system is both ingenious and frustrating. While open-ended health devices like Fitbit and the Jawbone Up reward you after you’ve completed a certain number of steps with an email or notification, the Basis forces you through a set of gamified steps to gain your “reward.” It encourages you to visit the website often and unlock new rewards but the rewards themselves are so open-ended that it’s difficult to remember some of them. Unfortunately, the Basis band won’t remind you and the only indication that you’ve hit a certain step count is a little winner’s cup icon at the end of the readout. A bit more info – “You completed the Sleep For Eight Hours Challenge” – would be immensely helpful.

The system also offers a number of interesting graphs including comparative activity and “heat graphs” of your various vital statistics. You can, for example, see when you tend to sweat the most (I found sweat when I eat) and when you tend to wake up. “Insights” offer little snippets of information about your day including sleep quality and the like.

Being a watch nerd I usually wear the Basis on my right hand and a real watch on my left. Because the watch is fairly small and dark it looks more like a Fuel Band or an Up than a Timex. I think that depending on this watch as a daily wearer would get immensely frustrating and I wouldn’t recommend it.

However, as a window on your body it is superior even to my beloved Fitbit and I’d say it’s even better than the Up. Simply having my heart rate available at all times is a valuable bit of data and the step counter is as accurate as the Fitbit in most situations. The Basis is obviously bigger and more conspicuous than other devices, but the battery life and form factor make it a slightly superior choice if you’re willing to wear it on your wrist all the time.

The market for quantified health devices is definitely huge and entrants like Basis keep pushing the envelope further and further. The B1 seems like a strong first try, and the company expects to release firmware upgrades that will add more functionality to the watch over the next few months. The ability to pair the watch with a mobile app is also a much-needed addition as the syncing system is a bit wonky via USB.

For $199, I think this band gives most any other health device a definite run for its money and I’d even recommend the Basis over more complex offerings by Suunto and Polar. Rather than making a kitchen-sink sports watch, Basis has produced a cool, streamlined monitoring device that is, for the first time in the space, eminently usable and promises some interesting potential.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

He founded the Atom Factory talent agency. He manages Lady Gaga, and when she wanted her very own social network for her millions of “little monsters”, he co-founded Backplane. And he doesn’t do weekly team meetings. Troy Carter is a general badass, and will be at Disrupt NY.

Carter’s Atom Factory embodies the essence of a lean startup: With its small team, the company is making waves in the entertainment world by constantly reinventing itself and creating products based on interactions with fans.

“We want to increase their income and their profile by building their relationship with fans. Fans are looking to be more part of their world,” Carter once told Fast Company.

Enter Backplane, Carter’s next step for Lady Gaga’s massive online presence. The startup is funded by Google Ventures, Tomorrow Ventures, SV Angel, and Menlo Ventures and aims to serve fans by bringing together all of an artist’s online profiles into one source. The platform, which just expanded to 10 more artists, powers LittleMonsters.com, a site that more than 1 million of Gaga’s rabid fans call home.

Oh and Atom Factory’s tagline happens to be “Discover. Develop. Disrupt.” Perfect.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Troy Carter
Chairman CEO, Atom Factory
Co-Founder Backplane

Troy Carter is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Atom Factory, an entertainment management company defining popular culture globally. As a digital and social entrepreneur, Carter has defined the careers of numerous recording artists, including multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winner Lady Gaga. Carter began his career in Philadelphia working for Will Smith and James Lassiter’s Overbrook Entertainment, and joined Bad Boy Entertainment in 1995 where he worked with disruptors such as Notorious B.I.G. In 1999, Carter formed the boutique talent management company, Erving Wonder. Erving Wonder quickly became one of the preeminent artist management firms and was acquired by the Sanctuary Group in 2004.

After founding Atom Factory in 2010, Carter and his Atom Factory artists began scaling the web’s largest social media audiences on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. In 2011, to focus the potential of these distributed networks, Carter co-founded Backplane, a Silicon Valley startup that unites people around affinities, interests and movements. The following year, Carter incorporated A IDEA, a product development and branding agency, as well as AF Square, an angel fund and technology consultancy.

Today, the AF Square portfolio holds interest in more than 40 technology companies at various stages of growth. A IDEA will launch Pop Water, a new beverage category product, later this year.

[photo by Adam Fedderly/Fast Company]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Looking for social commerce inspiration?  Here’s an interesting initiative from Magazine Luiza, Brazil’s 4th largest retailer , that builds on the curated commerce trend.

Last year and bucking the trend of bringing social to the store, Magazine Luiza brought the store to social, by inviting people to curate their own mini-store on Orkut and Facebook.

The ‘Your Store’ (Magazine Você) initiative invited consumers to stock their own mini-store with up to 60 items from Magazine Luiza’s inventory.  Users could personalise the store, offer personal reviews and comments, and get 2.5% – 4.5% commission for any sales made.  Fulfilment and logistics was handled by Magazine Luiza.

Contagious Magazine reports that whilst the idea was popular – 53,000 stores were opened, and whilst conversion rates were 40% higher than traditional stores, only a total of 10,000 products were sold.

Whilst this could be seen as another nail in the coffin of the ‘bring the store to social’ variant of social commerce, we think it points to an opportunity.

How about if the idea was tweaked – a la OpenSky – to offer member organisations/certification bodies for independent professionals a simple solution for their members  (Think personal trainers, caterers,  yoga/Zumba instructors, photographers, hairdressers, educators). Self-employed professionals depend on, and use their social networks and followers to build their businesses, so there would be a natural fit for curated store on a blog, linked from YouTube, or even Facebook.

If you’ve ever been to a Zumba instructor event, you’ll see why this would work.  Instructors buying sack loads of Zumba gear to sell to their members.  It’d be a useful benefit from the Zumba Instructor Network if they could do this without having to manhandle the gear themselves – and it’d keep member dues coming in.

As the science of promotions shows, the key to success will, of course, be to run any such store with two-sided promotions, both the curator and customer should get a better price than can be found elsewhere. Otherwise the idea is dead in the water.  But done right, here’s a real opportunity in the social commerce space.

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Pebble smartwatches have been hitting doorsteps for a little while now, but my colleague Darrell Etherington and I have only just been able to join the party. The reasons for the extra wait differed for the two of us — I was a late backer, and his got stuck in Canadian customs — but the timing seemed right, so here’s our tag-team review of the device that helped kick start a new era of smartwatch hype.

Darrell: The Pebble has one huge advantage over other smart watches right out of the box: aesthetics. This is a watch that lets your geek flag fly without being ass-ugly. The watch face options aren’t necessarily all that awesome, but set it to the text face that comes pre-installed and don’t worry about the rest. Also, black was the right choice, even if it was the only choice if you wanted one of the first shipping devices. Black watch on black strap in the Pebble looks fantastic on most any wrist.

The screen is legible enough, but in some light the glue becomes visible to the point of annoyance, which is a rookie mistake and should not make it into production units, if the Pebble team is worth its salt. It affects all the Kickstarter units I’ve come across so far, however, so that’s not a good sign.

Chris: I don’t think the Pebble is quite as handsome as Darrell does — it’s not bad looking, but it’s hardly a fashion-forward timepiece. Still, some of the promises that Pebble has made to its backers have positively influenced the watch’s look — rather than including something like a standard microUSB port for instance, the Pebble sports a magnetic charger so as to keep the whole shebang waterproof. The included rubber strap is plenty comfortable too, if a bit on the drab side. That’s easily remedied though — the Pebble apparently works fine with any 22mm watch band though, so the sky’s the limit as far as customization goes.

While we’re talking about design, the Pebble’s iOS and Android companion apps are both intuitively laid out (which is critical since the Pebble would be largely useless without them). The sync process is very brief, and once that’s done you’re quickly guided into setting up notifications — the whole process can be knocked out in just a minute or two. And of course a tiny vibration motor whirrs whenever you get a notification, though the wrong kind of aftermarket watchband may make it harder to feel.

Darrell: Compared to the MetaWatch, using the Pebble is like a breath of fresh air. It’s almost the difference between proving that a smart watch as a concept is a good idea vs. something no one needs. From display, to overall look, to usefulness and dependability of features, the Pebble just blows the MetaWatch out of the water. Some might miss features like weather, stocks, and more that you get with the MetaWatch, whereas the Strata struck me as a novelty that quickly lost its charm, the Pebble already seems like something I’d have to at least adjust to living without.

Chris: Unlike Darrell, the Pebble is my first foray into this whole crazy smartwatch thing, and my time spent with the thing has generally been very positive For the past few days I’ve been switching between linking the Pebble with my iPhone and my Droid DNA, and it wasn’t long before I began to prefer the experience on the latter just because of the extra granularity Android affords me. Under Android, I’m able to pass along notifications from Facebook and Google Voice (!) in addition to more standard fare like calendar entries and text messages.

Thankfully, the four-button navigation scheme used to handle all these notifications and menus is incredibly straightforward. The top and bottom buttons on the right side allow you to (what else) scroll up and down through menus, while the two remaining buttons take you forward and back. Hardly a flashy way to get things done (especially when some smartwatch rivals lean on touchscreens for operation) but it mostly works like a charm.

Darrell: There are still issues with the Pebble. Email notifications cut out when using it on iOS when it drops the Bluetooth connection and reconnects, for instance. Caller ID and message notifications work consistently, however, so this isn’t a huge issue. The menu system could also use work; it’d be nice to be able to rearrange items in the list to make frequently-needed ones easier to access. Adding watch faces from the app just puts them at the bottom, and that’s going to become a bigger issue once you have third-party apps to manage from the Pebble. The backlight is also immensely inconsistent; don’t even bother with the automatic ambient light sensor, just turn it on at night and off during the day, or keep it on all the time if you’re not that concerned with eking out as much battery life as possible.

On iOS, despite the fact that limitations are limited, the ones that it does provide work well. I actually prefer it to Android, since the limited support (only iMessage/SMS, email, phone and calendar notifications come through) means you won’t face a constantly buzzing wrist.

Chris: I’ll agree that notifications work, but the way they’re implemented leaves plenty to be desired. Let’s say you get more than one message within a short period of time — the Pebble will only ever display the most recent one, so you’re going to have to go digging for your phone anyway. Now, I never expected the Pebble to replace my phone(s) for these sorts of tasks, but I was looking for something that would at least help me triage the constant flow of messages and updates and the Pebble isn’t quite there yet.

I haven’t had much luck with the ambient light sensor, but that really hasn’t been an issue for me. I’ve been leaving the backlight setting on pretty much all the time and haven’t seen a huge loss in terms of battery life — I can get about 5-6 days out of it with everything turned on, and the backlight is off most of the time anyway.

Since we’re talking about inconsistency though, what about these screens? They’re not always the prettiest things to look at while in direct sunlight, mine in particular — it’s not as notable when the Pebble is just displaying a clock face, but there are some cloudy patches of coloration visible when I navigate the menu outdoors. Apparently it’s just a natural thing, but it’s still sort of unpleasant to see every day.

Darrell: The Pebble is still a little rough around the edges (visible glue at some angles under the display, which isn’t a problem limited to a few isolated units), but it’s much closer to the vision I had in my mind of a wrist-mounted, smartphone connected computer than anything else I’ve used so far. It still feels like a first-gen device, but it doesn’t feel like a prototype. But now that rumors of an Apple smart watch are swirling, most users who don’t feel a pressing need for this kind of device would do best to take a wait-and-see approach, especially if they’re already using an iPhone.

Chris: I’m frankly a little torn when it comes to the Pebble — it’s very limited in some key ways, but as a whole it’s a portent of very exciting things to come. People who haven’t already bought into all this smart watch hype probably won’t find anything particularly revelatory or earth-shaking here, though I can’t say I feel like I’ve wasted $150. If anything, I think of it more as investment in what the Pebble platform can actually become as it matures and garners more developer support.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Social TV and the second screen experience is quickly catching on among viewers, but the space as a whole is still nascent. While many are eager for a better social TV experience, as there’s plenty of upside for fans, advertisers and broadcasters alike, collectively we’ve all been waiting for one of these players to hit critical mass.

When Viggle announced in November that it would be merging with GetGlue, it seemed as if the combination of two of the leading apps in the space would be a step in that direction. But, fast forward two months, and the Viggle/GetGlue merger was dead in the water.

The companies still aren’t saying much publicly about why the deal never materialized, although we’ve been hearing that both mutually decided they’d be better off independent and forging ahead alone. It’s also due to the fact that Viggle struggled to raise the necessary capital, which Ryan reported at the time, were likely influenced by the less-than-impressive numbers behind the deal. All in all, it seemed to paint a troubling picture for the emerging social TV apps.

To be fair, Viggle just saw its first birthday, and it’s also in the unusual position of being a one-year-old, public company. So, yes, unfortunately for them, they’re required to disclose quarterly earnings, so today we got a chance to take a look at the company Q2′s results.

The numbers (both for Viggle and social TV as a whole) still seem low, but it’s at least a step in the right direction. During the quarter, Viggle saw revenue rise to $3.875 million, an increase of 88 percent compared to $2.05 million last quarter. Another positive sign? The company saw diminishing adjusted EBITDA losses in the last quarter, which dropped from $8.4 million in the third quarter to $6.45 million in Q4.

Viggle’s registered users reached 1.62 million in the fourth quarter, a 42 percent quarter-over-quarter increase, which continued in January with another 14 percent bump, which saw the company close out the month with 1.85 million registered users. Of course, what’s far more germane is the number of active users, and Viggle also saw improvement on that front, as monthly active users increased 135 percent over the last four months, growing from 233K in October to 548K in January 2013.

The other positive sign for Viggle is that its co-founder (and billionaire media mogul) and CEO, Robert Sillerman, continues to invest his own money in the company. Ryan reported in November that Sillerman was putting up $12 million of his own money in a credit facility, and today the company announced that it secured an additional $25 million credit line from its CEO.

Some other relevant statistics on Viggle’s quarter: Through the end of Q2 2013, users have checked into 133.3 million TV programs, 40.2 million of which came in the second quarter alone. Viggle users are know spending an average of 73 minutes in the app per session, says Viggle President and COO Greg Consiglio, and revenue exceeded the cash cost of rewards each month in the quarter.

Consiglio explains that part of the reason Viggle has demonstrated less-than-positive numbers at the outset has been the increased burn of acquiring companies that, admittedly never took off. Its burn rate has decreased over the quarter, thanks to its progress on the virtual currency front. When it came out of the gates, the COO said, there was a lot of trial and error around virtual currency, which model would work best for users — how many points to give out for certain behaviors, for example. But the cost of rewards has decreased, the COO says, as the company has worked to build out an experience around rewards — not just to be a one-trick-pony.

The executive also says that Viggle is also seeing increasing loyalty from advertisers, charging them only when users engage with the ads, completing an action that the advertiser establishes at the beginning, rather than using the typical CPM model. In addition, the company is now working with major brands like Capitol One, Wendy’s, Burger King, Mercedes, ABC, PBS, PG & E, and has secured a handful of “seven-figure deals,” the COO says.

Consiglio also sees a big upside in the fact that the average American is watching 36 hours of TV each month, which, combined with the growing ubiquity of mobile devices, would seem to indicate that there’s a lot of room left to grow. The company is also encouraged by the fact that its engagement rate around its CTRs is well north of 10 percent, far higher than the average, which tends to be around 1 percent.

Since launch, Viggle has added a realtime engagement platform to its TV loyalty model, combining those with games, chatter features and better diversification, and that diversification, the COO says, has alleviated some of the early pressure. The company has also opened its APIs to developers, allowing them to build social TV experiences around Viggle.

Going forward, the company will look to begin more actively spreading the word, aggressively investing revenue and cash in marketing and start to move towards other platforms. That means it may not be long before users see Viggle show up on Xbox, Roku and other connected TV platforms. There’s still a long way to go before social TV hits the tipping point, but for Viggle, the numbers this quarter at least show that it’s moving forward rather than the alternative.

Find the full earnings report here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Cylance,a cyber security company founded by former Global McAfee CTO Stuart McClure, has raised $15 million in a round led by Khosla Ventures and Fairhaven Capital.

Cylance uses data to help keep core systems healthy. In particular its focus is on critical infrastructure and the types of threats President Barack Obama mentioned in his State of the Union address last night when he announced he had signed an executive order to protect the nation’s infrastructure from the escalating danger of cyber attacks. and urged the U.S. Congress to pass a Cyber Security bill. McClure, in an interview yesterday, said Obama recognizes that the physical and cyber worlds are coming together. Power grids, utilities, they all are vulnerable to attack. The problem: nobody is fixing it.

McClure said the answer to our troubles is something we have known we could do since the late 1990s. Organizations need to treat its systems like a healthy person treats their body. For instance, getting a flu shot is not the answer to keep from getting sick. Most people who don’t get the flu take care of themselves. They have a good diet, exercise and get enough sleep.

Systems need similar treatment except their nutrients are in the form of data algorithms. Taking preventative measures makes the difference between falling victim to attack and withstanding the virus by showing strength in the core of an organization’s system defenses.

Data represents the nutrients that our systems need to stay healthy. Data, when applied to algorithms, acts as a way for an organization to keep its defenses strong.

Cylance is another example of how data represents the biggest shift for at least the next 20 years. Cylance is using data in not such a different way than Google uses it to develop self-driving cars. Data is at the core of Google’s capability, connecting disparate data points to form patterns that can be used for a car to drive itself down the road. For Cylance, it means using data to form patterns to understand the preventative measures required to keep a water utility safe from attack.

The threat to our infrastructure is not just limited to electrical grids or other high profile infrastructure. Cylance will focus quite a bit on embedded systems, the technologies used in all kinds of medical equipment. These embedded technologies, be they in printers or defibrillators, will increasingly be the subject of attack. And data is the best safeguard.

The biggest problem Cylance will face is not the attackers — it’s the security industry resistant to change and a public apathetic about the risks we face from attacks that could shut off our water or plunge entire regions into darkness. Without those forces engaged, Cylance will only be able to solve a small part of a problem that grows ever wider in scope.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch