Google’s major developer conference, Google I/O, went down this week. Was it a bit of a letdown? Probably. Did cool stuff still come out of the event? Eh? Maybe? We discuss these topics and more this week on the TC Gadgets podcast. In fact, we even had Frederic Lardinois join as a guest, along with John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook (that’s me!), Romain Dillet, and Darrell Etherington as Bob McKenzie.

Enjoy!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.

Click here to download an MP3 of this show.
You can subscribe to the show via RSS.
Subscribe in iTunes

Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twin Harvard graduates who famously sparred with Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook and are now working as tech investors through Winklevoss Capital, are part of the growing group of venture capitalists who have taken a keen interest in Bitcoins. Last month, it was revealed that they personally own roughly one percent of the currency, having purchased the equivalent of some $11 million. And now, the Winklevosses tell TechCrunch they have invested in Bitcoin in another meaningful way — by leading a funding round for a startup in the space.

BitInstant, a New York City based startup that operates an online platform for buying and selling Bitcoins, has raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Winklevoss Capital with the participation of other strategic investors including money services veteran David Azar. The investment was closed this past fall, but the Winklevosses are just now publicly announcing it in the lead-up to the Bitcoin Foundation’s 2013 Conference being held in Silicon Valley this weekend.

BitInstant, which has a full-time staff of 16 led by CEO Charlie Shrem, has emerged as a key player in the nascent Bitcoin market: The company already processes approximately 30 percent of the money going into and out of Bitcoin, and last month alone facilitated 30,000 transactions, the Winklevosses said in a phone call this week. The funding is meant to allow the company to further scale up its staff and product as it angles to become the go-to site for Bitcoin transfers.

The Winklevosses say they were attracted to invest in BitInstant in large part because of its leadership. CEO Shrem is the vice chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, and CIO Alex Waters previously worked with the core developers on the original Satoshi Bitcoin client. “Charlie has been in the space for a very long time, and he has an impeccable reputation among Bitcoiners. He knows everyone in the space and everyone in the space knows him,” Cameron Winklevoss said. “One of the most exciting things about people who are into Bitcoin it’s that they’re a really passionate community, and Charlie is a passionate entrepreneur. He would be in that category of someone who lives, breathes, and sleeps Bitcoin.”

Speaking of that community, the world of Bitcoiners does indeed have an interesting edge to it: There’s an underground vibe that seems like it would contrast with the more traditional East Coast prep style of the Winklevosses. In our phone call, Cameron and Tyler said that they’re intrigued by the current feel of the Bitcoin space — and its potential for becoming a bit more structured in the coming years.

“We’re definitely pretty fascinated by it. The classic issue with Bitcoin is that it’s very early days,” Tyler said. “The entrepreneurs in the space are very impressive, but it takes really two areas of expertise: One is technology, and the second is understanding money services and regulation and all those things that are important for sustainability. Most entrepreneurs and companies we see in the space have the tech down, and they’re super strong there, but in terms of being buttoned up and looking like an average bank, it’s hard to couple both of them together. We think that BitInstant and Charlie do a fantastic job of doing both.”

This marks the third big-name funding news for Bitcoin startups in just a few days. Earlier this week Adam Draper announced that half of the companies in his next Boost.vc accelerator program will be focused on bitcoin, and yesterday Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led a $2 million investment in Bitcoin processing startup BitPay. It will be interesting to see how the Bitcoin space in general evolves as even more buttoned-up types and traditional money managers get involved.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has hired Atsushi Iwashita as its Managing Director in Japan, according to AsiaJin. Iwashita was most recently CEO of brand consultancy firm Interbrand Japan and previously served as CMO of McDonald’s Japan. Facebook has been growing quickly in the region, recently surpassing local competitor Mixi. Earlier this week Mixi replaced its founding CEO with 30-year-old Yusuke Asakura.

Catlin O’Neill, chief of staff to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, will join Facebook’s lobbying efforts in Washington, The Hill reports. She will join Greg Maurer, a former aide to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), and Chris Herndon, a former Republican House and Senate aide, on Facebook’s House lobbying team. O’Neill had worked for Pelosi since 2002.

Facebook Director of Communications Larry Yu this week announced that he would be leaving the company to work with friends on building The Pramana Collective, a new communications consultancy for startups. Yu had been with Facebook since August 2008.

Facebook also removed 28 positions from its careers page this week, likely after making hires in the areas of user operations, account management, global marketing, measurement and others. The company appears to have hired commercial and patent counsel, heads of agency and CPG relationships in Sydney, and a public content partnerships analyst, among others.

Prior listings removed from Facebook’s careers page:

• Executive Administrative Assistant to COO (Menlo Park)
• Commercial Counsel (Menlo Park)
• Patent Counsel (Menlo Park)
• Associate Manager, Public Policy (New York – Washington – Menlo Park)
• Manager, Technology Communications (Mobile) (Menlo Park)
• Merchant Operations Analyst (Menlo Park)
• HR Specialist (Contract) (Dublin)
• HR Specialist (Austin)
• Leadership Sourcer – Contractor (Menlo Park)
• Critical Facility Technician (Forest City)
• Measurement Partnership Manager (Menlo Park)
• Analyst, User Operations, Brazilian Portuguese (Dublin)
• Analyst, User Operations, Russian (Dublin)
• Team Lead, User Operations (Austin)
• Public Content Partnerships Analyst (Menlo Park)
• Account Manager, Polish (Dublin)
• Account Specialist, Strategic Client Services (Dublin)
• Agency Partner, Sub Saharan Africa (Dubai)
• Partner Manager, Preferred Marketing Developer, CEEMEA (Dublin)
• Agency Relationship Manager, Global Marketing Solutions (Sydney)
• Head of Agency (Sydney)
• Head of CPG (Sydney)
• Client Partner, Games & Mobile (Menlo Park)
• Client Partner, Mobile (Chicago)
• Client Partner, Technology/Telecommunications (Menlo Park)
• Manager, Global Marketing Solutions – CPG (Austin)
• Data Engineer, Data Warehouse (Menlo Park)
• Measurement Partnership Researcher (London)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

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

Today at BlackBerry Live, CEO Thorsten Heins announced the availability of BB 10.1 for the Z10. This first major update to BlackBerry’s next-gen mobile platform starts rolling out today and packs a moderate amount of updates.

“By the end of this week, the vast majority of our international carriers will offer this update,” Heins detailed. “US carriers will offer it by the end of the month.”

This version brings more classic BlackBerry features to BB 10. Phone contacts can now feature personalized notifications with custom ringtones, vibrations, and LED flashes. Further customization is available with custom notifications for different email accounts.

HDR support should improve the Z10′s lackluster camera performance. The software also updates the camera software with improved red eye reduction.

The update also supercharges the BlackBerry Hub. Everything should be more fluid and seemless as the Hub can send PIN to Pin messages and offer contact suggestions.

International carriers should get the update by the end of the week with availability on US carriers by the end of May 2013. Look for the update here or through the Z10′s software update section.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Fast & Furious movie franchise has earned the title of this week’s most engaged movie Facebook page. The page boasts a PTAT of over 2 million making it fourth fastest rising page among pages of all categories. The next top rising movie page received 468k engagements, 1.5 million less engagements than the Fast & Furious page.

This list of top gaining movie pages is compiled with PageData, which tracks page growth and engagement across Facebook.

#	Name	People Talking About	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1	Fast & Furious	3,250,183	0	+2,084,271
2	Iron Man	1,068,433	0	+468,335
3	Scarface™	516,794	-2,154	+433,643
4	Aashiqui 2	472,923	+43,502	+266,490
5	After Earth	394,926	+38,595	+210,175
6	The Hangover	558,421	+23,422	+198,569
7	Star Wars	359,569	0	+171,192
8	Ace Ventura: Pet Detective	171,054	+4,511	+164,668
9	A Walk To Remember	230,120	+5,853	+164,101
10	Juno	140,003	0	+134,029

In anticipation for the films release in the next few weeks, Fast & Furious has increased its marketing efforts by purchasing Facebook Ads. Much of these ads have been video page posts placed in both the news feed and the right ads column. Rather than promoting the most recent post on the page, it chooses to promote content that is more substantial such as a trailer or a video. This is the type of content that users want to engage with and hold a true interest in.

As it can be seen here, the page managers are using the Power Editor to promote and monitor their ad. Though this trailer was originally released on April 28, using it as an ad has increased how long the post has remained relevant.

Coming in second on this week’s list, Iron Man released the franchise’s second sequel this past weekend. Despite the movie coming in No. 1 in the box office worldwide, it still only garnered a 468k increase in Facebook engagements. It is clear that some of the page is purchasing ads for some posts, these ads are not rich in content compared to Fast & Furious. Instead of promoting a video, the page chooses to promote photo posts.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about movie pages as well as other categories.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Earlier today, I had a chance to sit down with Adobe’s David Wadhwani, the senior vice president and general manager for Digital Media and public face of Creative Cloud at the company’s MAX conference in Los Angeles this week. Adobe announced a number of product updates this week, but the most important and wide-reaching announcement was obviously the move to subscription services with Creative Cloud and the fact that the company will stop developing its Creative Suite. While there has been some pushback against this move, Wadhwani believes that most of the community is ready for this move and that it will help Adobe innovate faster and serve its users better.

Creative Cloud

As Wadhwani stressed when I talked to him, the company currently plans to sell Creative Suite 6 “indefinitely.” For him, it’s important to look at where the company sees the creative evolution going. Adobe, he believes, has to look at “where do we see the creative world going and the evolution that we think is going to take place.” Adobe’s strategy, he said.” To effect and lead some of these changes, he believes, Creative Cloud is the way to go for the company. What’s often missing in the creative workflows today, he said, “is that element of connectedness. Creativity today is too often done in isolation.” Connecting you to your co-workers and a larger community on, for example, Behance, “is a very empowering thing for a lot of creators.”

If that’s where creation is going, he said, “it’s become very obvious for us that the best way for doing that is to create a truly integrated experience for creatives from their tools to all of these services and communities.” Adobe, he said, wants to put its resources into where the company can add the most value. In this context, the focus on creative cloud becomes a natural step in the company’s evolution.

The fact that the early reaction to Creative Cloud has been positive and that the company is seeing “good strong accelerating growth” has given Adobe the confidence “that as a whole, the creative community is open and obviously interested in moving in this direction.” He did, however, also acknowledge that not everybody will be ready to go this way and that it’s a big change that will take a bit to sink in. Adobe wants to have an open dialog with its users about this change and will also take its message on the road in the next few weeks. So far, he’s been very happy with the response from the creative community at MAX.

One aspect of Creative Cloud that Adobe hasn’t really talked about publicly is also that this change could prevent quite a bit of piracy. Making Photoshop and its other creative tools more affordable means that it’s now often easier for users to just pay a monthly subscription fee than to pirate the software. He also believes that all the extra services, including Behance, storage, syncing and many of the new tools the company has in store will get people to see that the value in subscribing to Creative Cloud goes beyond the tools.

The transition to Creative Cloud, to him, is not just about the business model, but also a cultural change. “The culture of Adobe has always been to appreciate the work that’s created by our customers,” he said. Going forward, Adobe wants to help amplify its users reach and it’s clear that Behance will play a central role in this. The tool wasn’t just showcased extensively during both MAX keynotes, but Wadhwani also talked about its role at great length during our conversation. To him, this is clearly an exciting and new aspect of what Adobe can do.

But What About Developers?

In return, however, the focus at MAX this week was clearly on designers and creatives and far less on developers than in previous years. That’s something Wadhwani also acknowledged in our chat. Going forward, Adobe isn’t taking its focus away from developers, “but refining where we focus in the stack.” Going forward, Adobe will put an emphasis on tools for user interface designers and user interface developers, especially as Adobe will continue to work with browser vendors. For enterprise developers and with regard to backend tools, he said, there are lots of other options out there and going forward, Adobe won’t devote all that many resources to them.

Adobe’s Hardware

The other major announcement at MAX was obviously that Adobe is experimenting with hardware products. As much as I tried, though, I couldn’t get Wadhwani to say whether Adobe plans to turn these prototypes into actual products (my feeling, however, is that the company is definitely leaning in that direction). What Adobe wants to do with its hardware, he said, is to fill some of the gaps that it sees in the toolset right now. He’d be very happy, he said, if other hardware manufacturers made similar products or wanted to participate in the process, too, but in a way, it seems like Adobe is taking a similar approach as Google is with its Nexus devices by creating reference points for others. The tools the company showed today, he believes, will complete the profile that can turn touch devices like the iPad into full-blown tools for creative professionals.

It also sounds as if Adobe is working on other hardware ideas, too, as Wadhwani described project Mighty, its stylus, as “the tip of the spear” of what Adobe is doing in terms of forward-leaning innovation. Tonight, at the MAX closing event, Adobe plans to show some sneak peeks at other projects in its labs, so it’ll be interesting to see if there will be more hardware announcements at that event, too.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After a brief hiatus for TechCrunch Disrupt, Ask A VC is back this week with two all-star guests in the investing world. First up we have Freestyle Capital’s Dave Samuel. Later in the week, Redpoint Partner Chris Moore will be joining us in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.

Samuel is a longtime entrepreneur who has founded a number of companies including Spinner (acquired by AOL for $320 million), Brondell, and Grouper (acquired by Sony for $65 million). While Samuel has been making angel investments for some time now, in 2011 he and his business partner Josh Felser started a formal fund, Freestyle Capital, which makes investments in early-stage startups.

Moore focuses on making investments for Redpoint in consumer internet, online marketing and SaaS companies. He currently serves on the board of directors of 9Flats, BlueKai, eBureau, Extole, Fanhattan, Hark, Inadco and Intent Media. Moore also led Redpoint’s investment in Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe), Right Media (acquired by Yahoo), Auditude (acquired by Adobe), and IntoNow (acquired by Yahoo).

Please send us your questions for Samuel and Moore here or put them in the comments below!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In this week’s Ask A VC episode, we sat down with Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi.

Volpi, who makes investments in both enterprise software and consumer internet companies, serves on a number of boards, including Path, Sonos, Lookout, Hortonworks, Soundcloud, Big Switch Networks, Zuora, Foodily, and Storsimple. We asked Volpi what his biggest challenge is as the board member of a startup, and what entrepreneurs should be looking for in a board member.

He also had some interesting perspective on the latest buzz word du jour, big data, and where we’ll see the most innovation taking place in the enterprise data space.

Tune in above for more!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Walmart is the top gaining retail and consumer merchandise page in the People Talking About This metric this week. With over 28 million total Likes, Walmart is the second most liked retail and consumer merchandise page on all of Facebook. The page had 742,059 engagements over the week, increasing by 221,116 week-to-week.

This list of top gaining product and service pages is compiled with PageData, which tracks page growth and engagement across Facebook.

#	Name	People Talking About	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1	Walmart	742,059	0	+221,116
2	Macy’s	336,411	0	+213,003
3	White Magick Alchemy	150,692	0	+136,528
4	Target	129,363	+3,131	+75,320
5	Amazon.com	197,846	+4,243	+51,933
6	Ricardo Eletro.com	92,411	0	+43,169
7	Magazine Luiza	92,034	0	+39,417
8	Soccer.com	56,609	0	+38,759
9	Marshalls	41,286	0	+30,842
10	Coupon Club	294,219	0	+28,945

For Walmart, there is an inconsistency on engagement post-to-post. While there are some posts that receive over 40k in total engagements, there are others have trouble breaking 1,000. This signals that the company is paying for Page Post Ads or Promoted Posts for certain updates. The page creates an average of six posts per day.

Unlike the rest of the pages this week, White Magick Alchemy is a niche page, but has gone viral with one post accounting for the majority of the page’s engagement for the week. The post about a wildlife biologist saving a tranquilized bear received 146k likes since it was posted, but is not directly related to the business’ line of products. The page has characterized itself as animal activists, but it is unlikely the page will sustain this type of engagement since it is such a specific interest.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about retail and consumer merchandise pages as well as other categories.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook