Just about six months ago, Uber won a big battle with D.C. regulators to have its on-demand car service approved for operation within the nation’s capital. But new regulations from the D.C. Taxi Commission could severely hamper the company’s ability to offer low-cost services in the district.

Last December, the D.C. City Council voted to approve a legal framework that legitimized mobile e-hail applications there, as long as those applications followed certain rules. It defined a new class of for-hire vehicles (taxis and sedans) that could use mobile apps as a way to connect drivers and passengers.

The unanimous City Council vote followed a year of negotiations with local regulators to get its services approved for usage within the district. (The very public fight even included a sting operation by D.C. Taxi Commissioner Ron Linton in which he took an Uber and then handed over a variety of fines to the driver.) Still, after a whole lot of back-and-forth, it seemed like Uber was finally in the clear.

New regulations approved by the D.C. Taxi Commission last week could be a setback in the progress that Uber has made there, however. Among other things, those regulations would require mobile e-hail applications to integrate with the payment processor that is used within local taxicabs. That’s a non-starter for Uber, which currently has its own payment processor for in-app payments, and it could mean the end of UberTAXI in the city.

Another set of rules, which is being considered now, would ban cars that weighed less than 3,200 pounds. That would keep Uber from offering fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, which would affect its ability to offer its lower-cost UberX service there. With the possibility of UberTAXI and UberX being shut down, the company would only have its legacy black car and SUV businesses in the city.

Other regulations that Uber disagrees with would require Uber and other e-hail providers to hand over data related to rides that were booked using mobile applications. According to Uber, another rule could give the Taxi Commission the ability to choose whether or not apps are approved for usage in the city, and unilaterally keep Uber and other services from operating there.

For its part, Uber has tried to once again mobilize its users to reach out to D.C. officials and petition the local government. It’s asked users to email and tweet at Mayor Vincent C. Gray, and has put up a petition on Change.org. That petition has already received more than 2,500 signatures, with 5,000 needed.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As Facebook looks to convert more page owners into advertisers, it is trying even more new ways to highlight its Promoted Posts product.

Some users are now receiving notifications when one of their page posts performs better than average. The notification encourages page owners to advertise the post to get “even better results.” Whether or not they take the recommendation, page owners might appreciate the notice about how well their post is doing. This is similar to another recent test of a homepage module that identifies a well-performing post and links to a page where users could buy additional reach through Promoted Posts. This new test uses Facebook notifications instead.

Another test some users are seeing lately is an additional button to promote their posts. The button in the top right corner of an existing post next to the “highlight” and “edit” options features a megaphone icon, which Facebook uses to denote advertising. The story also includes a “boost post” button in the bottom right corner. Other page owners are seeing different language, including “promote” “get more reach” or “advertise post” instead of “boost post.”

Promoted Posts are page posts that get additional paid reach in News Feed among fans and friends of fans as a result of using a button on the page. Part of their appeal is that they don’t require page owners to create campaigns through the more complex ads create tool or Power Editor. However, as Facebook gets more aggressive in pushing these paid features, some page owners might be turned off.

First screenshot from Jay Baer via Social Marketers, a private industry group for social marketing professionals.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Finally we have an app that ends the age-old debate about whether or not the earth is getting warmer. The Just Science app has collated all the data from the last two centuries to determine the earth’s surface temperature. Developed by Novim, a research group from UC Santa Barbara, the Just Science app just won $40,000 from the American Clean Skies Foundation for improving our scientific knowledge about the world. As Novim Executive Director Michael Ditmore told me, the free Just Science app is the result of 18 months’ work in which his research team went all the way back to the year 1800 for data about the earth’s temperature.

So what’s the truth about global warming, I asked Ditmore. The earth is getting warmer, he confirmed, by around six tenth of a degree in the last 50 years. “Not spectacular, but significant,” Michael Ditmore reports on the findings of an app which, in my mind at least, is both spectacular and significant.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sure, your Android tablet probably works like a champ when you’re splayed out on the couch, but is it one of your go-to gadgets for when you go traipsing through the great outdoors. I’d wager not — they tend to be a little fragile — and that’s why the folks at Seattle-based Sqigle is looking to a bring a curious tablet named Earl to market.

As you might’ve guessed, Earl isn’t your ordinary Android tablet — the team refers to it as the world’s first “backcountry survival tablet,” and it has a prospective spec sheet that certainly lives up to the name. It sports a 6-inch frontlit e-ink display from LG for one thing, as well as an IR touch array (so you can operate Earl with gloves, naturally), and a flip-out solar panel for on-the-go charging, all encased in a 0.6-inch thick water and muck-resistant chassis.

Where Earl really seems to shine is its approach to connectivity. It comes with your usual loadout of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC radios, but once complete Earl will let users listen to AM/FM broadcasts as well as tap into shortwave and long wave frequencies.

Throw in the ability to use Earl as a two-way radio and preloaded 100k topographical maps of the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and you’ve got yourself quite the survivalist gizmo. The only major omission? There’s no camera to be found here, though it’s not like most tablets fare well on that front anyway.

To be quite honest, much of what the team claims Earl will be able to do seems a little outlandish — Sqigle’s early renders point to a heavily-tweaked version of Android 4.1 running the show, and I seriously wonder whether or not the team will be able to implement some of these features as elegantly as these images portray. That said, I can’t help but hope Sqigle makes good on all of it. All told, the team is looking for $250,000 to take the Earl from 3D printed prototype to full-fledged backwoods companion, and the outdoorsy types among you can lock down an Earl of your own for $249. If all goes well, Sqigle founder Jonathan Perry hopes to kick off the production process in earnest in July, with the first units hitting backer doorsteps by the end of the summer.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Dots, a game launched just last week out of betaworks, has reached over 1 million downloads in just one week of availability.

According to a blog post, the app hit number 1 in eight countries, and went into the top five in another fifteen countries. Right now, in fact, you’ll find Dots as the number three free app behind Hardest Game Ever 2 and Falldown2, two worthy opponents.

Of course, backing from betaworks is always a smart way to get off to a good start, but dots stands on its own as a quality piece of mobile gaming software.

It’s a simple, digital take on the classic connect-the-dots game. You connect as many of the same-colored dots at once, and ultimately aim to make a square, which erases that entire color from the board.

In true mobile game fashion, users can earn power-ups and advanced tools by scoring “dots,” which are also available as in-app purchases. betaworks’ Paul Murphy relayed to TechCrunch that people are both earning and buying dots in a way the team is pleased with.

But the magic isn’t just in the gameplay, which is highly addictive to say the least. Hacker-in-residence and co-founder Patrick Moberg brought his experience with design, illustrations, and developing to create a truly beautiful game, with all the right aesthetic nuances and animations.

Plus, the social component of the app has made it quickly viral. “The app is heavily, heavily supported by the social mechanics in the game,” said Murphy. “So that’s working, and we suspect it will continue to work well.”

The question now is whether or not dots can keep up the momentum like a true classic or become the next Draw Something. For now, however, the team is focused on incremental improvements like expansion from iPhone to iPad, and support for colorblind users.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Some of the creators of TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon project Espace are still learning to code, and this was the perfect event at which to hone their skills. The six-person team designed a site this weekend to connect meetup groups with venues offering space where events can be hosted. Organizers and venue owners use the site to sign up and list their needs or what they have to offer, respectively. Espace then helps to put them in touch to broker the deal.

The idea resonated with two of the group’s members in particular: husband and wife team Jamal and Felicia O’Garro. Both started learning Ruby recently, and today host a meetup group of their own. This group, started in January, is focused on helping others who are also learning to code, by offering training classes and coffee-and-coding sessions. The group meets Sundays at New York-based co-working space, Alley NYC, and despite its young age, it has already grown to around 550 members, with 30 or so showing up at each weekly session.

Others working on the Espace team this weekend include David Lau, Adam Waxman, Cavaughn Noel and Linda Peng. The site uses the Twilio API, which gives both the vendor owner and meetup organizer a virtual number that they can use to connect to discuss the details of the group’s meeting space needs. Asked if meeting organizers were really all that concerned about sharing their real phone numbers with venue owners, Jamal admitted that he was mainly interested in playing around with the Twilio API.

Jamal may be a newer coder, but he’s already building software for another area startup, CommonBond a recently seed-funded company that connects student borrowers with alumni to crowdsource funding of student loans. Whether or not Espace continues after this weekend is unknown: Jamal is turning into a hackathon junkie, it seems – this is his third in just a few months’ time, he says.

Espace onstage:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Remember PLAiR? About nine months ago, the startup raised $2.1 million from Roger McNamee and Mike Maples’ Floodgate Fund, but wouldn’t say what for. (Spoiler alert: We found out anyway.) Never mind that. The company is finally ready to release product! And, well, here the product is.

As we expected, PLAiR is a sub-$100, dolphin-shaped dongle for streaming online video to your TV screen, either from a computer or any mobile device. The idea is to enable anyone to experience AirPlay-like functionality, even if they don’t have an Apple TV — or an iPhone or an iPad. The product debuted at CES and is finally ready to ship to consumers.

With a 1 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and Wi-Fi capability, PLAiR allows users to stream all the content they care about, without having to buy a connected TV or worry about whether or not it has a certain app.

Viewers can plug it in to an open HDMI port on a TV and connecting to PCs through a Chrome plug-in or mobile and tablet devices via native Android and iOS apps. Once connected, viewers can watch any available online content or locally stored media in full, 1080p video resolution and Dolby 5.1 surround sound.

I got a demo of the device a few weeks ago, and it works more or less as advertised. On the web/PC side of things, PLAiR provides a landing page where users can find basically all their favorite TV shows through a single interface. Once they’re launched from a laptop or desktop, users can leave the page and surf the web, checking out other pages. And the mobile apps have a wide selection of freely available video content that can be streamed from smartphones or tablets.

Anyway, the device is for sale at www.PLAiR.com/store for $99. Oh and it’s available in three colors.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Vibrant Media, which powers in-text ads and other contextual ad products, is going cross-platform today with the launch of a number of new units.

Some of those ad units are entirely new to Vibrant’s lineup, while others take the company’s desktop ads and optimize them for touch interactions. CEO Cella Irvine told me that there’s growing interest from ad agencies in campaigns that span desktops, smartphones, and tablets, and also in mobile-specific campaigns. Some of Vibrant’s existing ad units already worked on mobile, she said, but they weren’t really designed for non-desktop devices. The goal with today’s launch is to make sure “the experience is native to the device.”

Irvine walked me through quick demos of some of the units that are launching today. There’s a redesign of Vibrant’s full-screen Mosaic ads, which are now designed for tablet and tablet gestures (like tapping and pinching to expand), and which can launched from in-text or in-image ads. There’s also a Brand Flex unit built for smartphones, which allows users to navigate and filter through relevant brand content. And there’s a Dynamic Adhesion unit, which is a spin on the keyword-based advertising that Vibrant is best-known for — in this case, the ad is specifically tied to the keyword, so as you read an article, you might see multiple keyword-based ads, which collectively tell the advertiser’s story.

Vibrant is also offering versions of its Image and Lightbox ads that should work on mobile, the company says.

In a follow-up email, Irvine emphasized that the new units allow for “creativity at scale” — “A brand today doesn’t have many venues to tell its brand narrative across platforms,” she said.

And while there’s probably always going to be some grumbling about whether Vibrant’s ads are intrusive or annoying, Irvine said the mobile units will continue the company’s emphasis on “viewability and choice” — she said the viewer always has a choice about whether or not they want to engage with the ad. (And people are making that choice on desktops — one of Vibrant’s ad units only launches after users highlight a keyword through a three-second countdown, and Irvine said 4 percent of consumers actually do highlight the keyword long enough to activate the ad.)

As for monetizing the new cross-platform units, Irvine said she wants to move away from the idea that CPMs (the cost per thousand impressions) are “the only way to measure effectively across devices.”

“We believe that … CPE – an actual engagement by a user with an advertisement – along with viewability, dwell time and brand lift, will be the most important metrics for brand marketers in mobile,” she added.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For years, sales teams have used CRM software to keep track of their wins and losses, but had few tools for predicting which leads would actually pan out. But now sales teams can use data, from both internal and external sources, to help determine which customers are worth going after. With the help of new startup Infer, sales organizations can add predictive scoring to their sales toolboxes.

Infer has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with other investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Social+Capital Partnership, Sutter Hill Ventures, and individual angels including Pejman Nozad. Along with the funding, Redpoint partner Satish Dharmaraj joined the Infer board.

The platform works by ingesting all sorts of corporate sales data from various CRMs and other sales and marketing databases, and combines that proprietary internal data with various signals available on the web. That means stuff like corporate job listings, company financials, legal filings, and the social media presence of potential customers — basically anything with the potential to show whether or not a potential customer intends to invest in whatever type of business or technology an Infer client is selling.

The information that it spits out provides a view into which potential customers are most likely to buy, providing sales teams with the ability to focus on those clients. That results in shorter sales cycles, and ultimately, the ability to sell more stuff over the long term.

Over the last few years, Infer has been working with various clients to help refine its product and provide better results. With a machine learning algorithm, Infer uses internal data over time to determine which signals end up being strongest or most important for each client. Since no two sales organizations are alike, the platform adapts to each one, and provides models for which leads are most likely to yield results as time goes on.

With that knowledge, Infer has been able to very quickly get some serious customers on board — companies like Box, Jive, Tableau, Yammer and Zendesk. And it’s gotten a lot of companies to commit to multi-year deals as a result of its ease of use. More than just providing a better predictive model for sales leads, it also is drop-dead simple to plug in to customers’ existing CRM solutions.

Infer was founded by data scientist Vik Singh, who was an entrepreneur in residence at Sutter Hill Ventures, after stints at Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. He’s joined by co-founders Yang Zhang, who was also ex-Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, as well a Chung Wu, who was formerly the front-end tech lead of Google’s Public Data project.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Netflix released its first-quarter earnings report today, and the company saw another period of strong growth, adding more than 3 million streaming members, bringing its total to 36 million. Domestically, Netflix saw 2 million new streaming members, which was relatively equal compared to last quarter and up from 1.74 million in Q1 last year.

Helping Netflix along in its rebound after the split of its business, which caused a big customer backlash, has been the company’s focus on original programming, beginning with its first “major” TV series, House of Cards. Netflix just recently launched its second original series, Hemlock Grove, and on May 25th will feature the much-anticipated debut of Arrested Development. However, the question has been whether or not Netflix’s new shows would significantly add to its member total — or whether people would sign up for a month to get the shows for free and then cancel.

In its letter to shareholders today, Netflix said that in spite of the fact that “some investors were worried that the House of Cards fans would take advantage of its free trial, watch the show and then cancel,” there was, in fact, very little “free-trial gaming” as the company calls it — fewer than 8,000 people signed up to watch it for free and then cancelled — out of what the company says were “millions of free trials in the quarter.”

Herein, Netflix is just talking about the free trial portion of its service, whereas the other question has been whether or not the new members the company has been able to attract through House of Cards would actually stick around. And it seems that, from its 2 million new members, it was actually able to retain those new customers.

“The launch of House of Cards provided a halo effect on our entire service and spoke to the quality of experience members can expect from Netflix,” the executives said in their letter to shareholders this afternoon. In fact, the good news for Netflix is that, so far, Hemlock Grove seems to be attracting the same amount of attention, if not more than House of Cards.

“Hemlock Grove was viewed by more members globally in its first weekend than was House of Cards and has been a particular hit among young adults,” the company said in its letter. However, on the other hand, that goodwill may be short-lived. According to reviews from Metacritic, people aren’t exactly loving Hemlock Grove — in fact most seem to think it’s awful. The AV Club goes so far as to give Hemlock an “F.” So there’s that.

That could change, after all. The show hasn’t been out very long. Netflix just made all 13 episodes available three days ago. At the same time, it wouldn’t be surprising if Netflix were to go through a little bit of a hangover after House of Cards — or to learn that it has dedicated more capital, advertising, etc. to its first big splash (House of Cards) and its much-anticipated comedy (Arrested Development) than Hemlock. However, that’s just speculation at this point and only time will tell.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch