Wednesday, 15 February 2012
Key Russian Social Network Adds Facial Recognition To Photos
TechCrunch Europe is edited by Mike Butcher (FRSA, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts). As well as editing TechCrunch Europe, Mike is involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub (@TechHub), in London initially. A long time journalist, Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including... ? Learn More
Odnoklassniki, is the second largest social network in Russia, behind Vkontakte, and is part of the recently floated Mail.Ru Group. Facebook’s market share in Russia has never passed 5%, according to ComScore (or 5 million people a month). Odnoklassniki has 25-26 million visitors a month. That gives some context to the news today that Odnoklassniki today launches a new face detection feature powered by Israeli-based startup face.com, which already provides its technology to Facebook.
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Health 2.0: Innovators, Opportunists & Delusionals
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a Patient Relationship Management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice consulting to 25 hospitals and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.
Last week, Health 2.0 wrapped up its largest ever event with 50 percent more attendees than their previously largest event. A number of companies launched during the conference, but like many events the most interesting activity wasn’t what happened on the main stage but the many side meetings/events that took place. The other notable item is the recasting of major corporations from within and outside of the traditional healthcare arena. This is further evidence highlighted in the Healthcare Disruption series (see links below).
One of the most intriguing quotes was by Mark Bertolini CEO Aetna who stated “We’re evolving into a HealthIT company with a health insurance component.” He stated that $12B out out of their $34B in revenue was from non-insurance revenue streams and they have done over $1.6B in acquisitions in the last year. There’s much more to come from large corporations. I had several conversations with Fortune 100 companies who are extremely serious about having a presence (or expanding their existing presence) in the healthcare industry. Most haven’t announced anything but don’t be surprised to see more in the coming months.
Broadly speaking, my takeaway from Health 2.0 was there were three categories of people leading projects and startups – Innovators, Opportunists and Delusionals. In all three cases, Tom Evslin’s quote “nothing great has ever been accomplished without irrational exuberance” captures the state of the industry. Naturally, many will wash out but some huge successes will emerge.
The most interesting, of course, are the Innovators. More on that in a moment. The Opportunists remind me of many companies in the dotcom boom. Consultants, Investment Bankers and the like chase the almighty buck as they see Healthcare as a place to make a quick buck. Unlike the dotcom boom, there’s not many quick flip opportunities in healthcare though expect to see some micro transactions that can provide a modest return for developers. It’s easy to sniff out the Opportunists as they have little background or true passion in healthcare and sprinkle in the right buzzwords like “Meaningful Use” to act like they understand the landscape.
The Delusionals were all over at Health 2.0 demo’ing “cool apps” yet sadly falling into the same trap that many startups that were rubble from the Internet bubble. They have familiar quotes from that bygone era – “we’re not worrying about revenue.” I’ve seen this movie before and know how it ends. Apparently, they didn’t read HealthTech FAIL: Lessons For Entrepreneurs From Health Startups Gone Awry.
The Innovators are where the real action is. I’ll highlight a couple examples where I spent much of my four days during the Health 2.0 event. There was a two-day Code-a-thon sponsored by Novartis. I believe Novartis publishing an API will be looked back as a seminal moment in the shift to Pharma 3.0.
I outlined the implications of this in Health 2.0 Code-a-thon: Novartis invites all comers to innovate around their API [Disclosure: Avado provided the underlying platform for the implementation of forms and services integrating with the API]. More than even the implications of the API, Novartis did a great job of signaling to the market that they are “open for business” to working with innovative individuals and startups that they can partner with to evolve their business.
As interesting as the disruptive technology is, I’m most fascinated with disruptive new healthcare delivery models. Clayton Christensen’s ground-breaking book was The Innovator’s Dilemma, however he followed that up with his co-author Jason Hwang, MD with a book entitled The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care.
In that book, he highlights many of these disruptors. Earlier I highlighted a couple examples of disruptive new healthcare delivery models in MedLion: The Most Important Organization In Silicon Valley That No One Has Heard About and WhiteGlove Health’s Funding Round Powered by Technology-enabled Services.
It’s hard to argue with the case made by Christensen and Hwang that in order to slay the healthcare cost beast that is bankrupting local, state and federal government, disruptive innovation has to happen. One of the most respected economists in the world, Laura Tyson, stated “We don’t have a debt problem, we have a healthcare problem.” The newly formed group, the Healthcare Delivery Innovators Alliance (HDIA), was founded with the purpose of identifying and advancing standards for new healthcare delivery systems that can demonstrate that they can dramatically lower costs while improving the health outcomes and consumer experience.
Having played a role with the IAB (the industry association for the Internet ad market) in the aftermath of the dotcom bust, I was asked to share how that experience can be instructive for accelerating the growth of disruptive innovators in healthcare delivery. Also presenting and participating in the first in-person meeting of the HDIA was the Innovator’s Prescription co-auther Jason Hwang. [Disclosure: Avado has joined HDIA as a founding member of the alliance.]
I was pleased to find out that the founders of the HDIA have a similar plan to the “Prescription” that I outlined in the embedded presentation below. As with the turnaround of the Internet Ad industry, proof, standards and education are critical to accelerating the growth of these exciting new models. The Alliance is inviting organizations to join their movement. While welcoming any organization that is sincerely driving innovation, the HDIA is particularly interested in employers who share the interest in reversing healthcare’s hyperinflation.
Naturally, if employers (who pay for the majority of healthcare) signal to the market that they are going to buy from healthcare delivery models that are really making a difference, it will accelerate the growth of these models. The reality is that any disruptive innovator has nothing to lose while incumbents are primarily focused on preserving current revenue streams. With those revenue streams in healthcare adding up to almost 20% of the economy, rest assured the incumbents will use FUD and every other tactic in the book to protect that ocean of revenue.
As with any group that brings change, the Innovators are going through the 3 Stages of Truth articulated by Arthur Schopenhauer – first it is ridiculed, second is violently opposed and finally it is accepted as fact. Organizations such as MedLion, WhiteGlove, Qliance and others are in the second phase as they have proven their models work and it threatens status quo. The HDIA’s purpose is to get it to the final stage of truth.
View HDIA Introductory Presentation and Getting healthcare innovators their fair share on Slideshare or view the embedded slideshow below.
The following is the Healthcare Disruption series referenced above:
Healthcare Disruption: Pharma 3.0 Will Drive Shift from Life Science to HealthTech Investing
Healthcare Disruption: Providers Will Use HealthTech to Differentiate and Produce Better Outcomes (Part II)
Healthcare Disruption: Providers Are Making Newspaper Industry Mistakes (Part III)
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
A Ten-Minute Charger For The Nissan Leaf – In Time
Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More
One of the drawbacks of current (if you will) electric cars is the rather long time it takes to charge their batteries. We found with the Leaf that as long as you adapt your lifestyle to it a bit, it’s not a problem, but the unexpected happens and it would suck to be at low charge when you suddenly need to get to the hospital, or what have you. Quick-charge solutions are out there, but few are really practical and many still take hours to reach full charge. Nissan says they’ve created one, however, that could charge a car in only ten minutes.
It’s a collaboration with Kansai University in Japan, and the technology breakthrough has to do with the electrode material used, though it’s not clear where in the process the new vanadium oxide and tungsten oxide electrodes are being implemented.
The ten-minute charge uses a new compact charge station that costs less than half what the previous quick charger did, and could also be used on other automakers’ vehicles. Still, at around a million yen (~$13,000), it’s more suited to institutional use. Gas stations, parking lots, that sort of thing. It’s bad enough already that you have to get a 220V adapter in order to get your Leaf back on the road in good time.
The advanced processes and materials used mean that this isn’t likely to be found at your local shop any time soon, though. And of course there aren’t really enough electric vehicles out there to make this a priority just yet. But by doing the theoretical work now, Nissan can be ready with a product when the time is right.
[via SlashGear; image: AFP/Yoshikazu Tsuno]
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
WD TV Live Media Streamer Skips Internal Storage For Spotify
Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More
Western Digital is getting a lot of mileage out of their WD TV media players, and that trend continues today with the announcement of their new WD TV Live box. Unlike its big brother, the WD TV Live is strictly a streamer, but it has a reason to boast: it’s the first WD product to ship with Spotify support
The WD TV Live doesn’t have any internal storage to speak of, but it does sport 2 USB ports for all of you who carry thumb drives full of illicit TV shows.
Once it’s set up on a wireless network or an ethernet connection, the WD TV Live can access media from computers on your home network, or from content partners like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Pandora. It’s got enough horsepower to playback video content at 1080p, and supports a boatload of media formats from the mundane (like AVIs) to the more obscure (hello MKV!).
Ardent Spotify fans need not worry about missing out here. The WD TV Live supports a majority of Spotify features, like managing playlists, sharing songs, and subscribing to friends and fellow music lovers with good taste.
With companies like Microsoft looking to own the living room with their new media initiatives, it makes it harder and harder for boxes like the WD TV Live to pick up any steam. Still, its price point is sure to help: at $99, the WD TV Live is an inexpensive way to start streaming with minimal headaches. It’s set to appear in Western Digital’s online store shortly, and it shouldn’t be long before it hits your electronics retailer of choice.
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
And The Lion Shall Lie Down With The Lamb: Nintendo Issues Blue Sega-Themed Wii
Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More
I remember the time when you were either a Nintendo kid or a Sega kid — assuming you were lucky enough to have one of the consoles at all. You’d ask your friend if they had played Super Mario Bros 3 warpless, and they would respond that no, they were still trying to beat their Casino Zone times in Sonic 2. Things would be a little tense after that. And this was a prejudice that I felt would never be mended. But when Sega went all-software after the Dreamcast (R.I.P.), things changed.
Sure, we’ve had Sonic games on Nintendo systems — have for years. But a Sonic-blue Wii? According to my inner child, they’ve finally crossed the line.
The reason is normal enough: it’s a Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games bundle. The Wii itself is of the new, slightly crippled variety (doesn’t have wi-fi or play Gamecube games) but it’s a perfect little collaboration for the upcoming Olympics — if you lack the soul of a gamer. To anyone who grew up in the 80s, this is a gross dereliction of fanboy duty by the obsessively self-centered Nintendo.
It also comes with a sticker sheet. I have to assume that someone at Nintendo threatened to disembowel themselves if Sonic were permanently placed on a Wii.
This abomination will be available in Europe starting November 18th. Or as they might say, 18 November.
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Thanks To Whole Foods Deal, LivingSocial Grew Five Times Faster Than Groupon In September
Erick Schonfeld is the Editor of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to... ? Learn More
LivingSocial is still less than half the size of Groupon in terms of gross revenue, but in September it grew five times as fast largely thanks to one deal: Whole Foods. According to new data from daily deal tracker Yipit, LivingSocial’s gross revenues for deals in North America grew 32 percent in September, compared to 6 percent growth for Groupon. (Both figures are monthly growth versus August, 2011).
Yipit estimates that LivingSocial sold $59.3 million worth of deals in September, a month-over-month increase of $14.6 million. As much as $10 million of that amount was related to a very successful Whole Foods deal which offered $10 off a $20 purchase. Which just goes to show how one popular national deal can really move the needle for the daily deal sites. Groupon saw similar success with a Gap deal last year.
Even if you back out the impact of the Whole Foods deal, LivingSocial still would have shown 10 percent growth during the month. That is still faster than Groupon, but off a smaller base. Groupon sold an estimated $143.4 million worth of deals in North America in the same period. Groupon maintains 54 percent market share of daily deals in North America, versus 22 percent for LivingSocial—a number it has been hovering around since July. But both are doing very well, with a $3.2 billion annual gross revenue run-rate for Groupon and a $1.7 billion run-rate for LivingSocial, based on September’s numbers.
The Daily Deal industry overall grew 12 percent in September to an estimated $266.6 million in gross revenues, a faster pace than the 9 percent growth rate in August. The industry as a whole is at a $3.2 billion annual run-rate, based on September’s numbers (with Groupon representing $1.7 billion and LivingSocial $712 million of that total). Note that these are the gross revenues the deals represent, and not the direct revenues each company gets to keep after it splits the value of each deal with merchants.
Groupon and LivingSocial together make up 76 percent of the daily deals industry,but a dome of the newer, smaller players are growing even faster (again, off a smaller base). In September, No. 3 player TravelZoo grew 37 percent. AmazonLocal grew 177 percent, and Google Offers grew 236 percent. Something tells me that No. 3 spot is going to change fairly soon.
LivingSocial is the social commerce leader behind LivingSocial Deals, a group buying program that invites people and their friends to save up to 90 percent each day at their favorite restaurants, spas, sporting events, hotels and other local attractions in major cities. LivingSocial has an extensive user base of more than 85 million, and is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
Learn more Launch Date: November 11, 2008 Groupon features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in more than 565 cities around the world. By promising businesses a minimum number of customers, Groupon can offer deals that aren’t available elsewhere. Groupon brings buyers and sellers together in a fun and collaborative way that offers the consumer an unbeatable deal, and businesses a large number of new customers. To date, it has saved consumers more than $300 million and claims it...
Learn more Yipit aggregates and recommends the best daily deals based on users’ locations and interests. Yipit draws its deals from 330 active daily deal services including LivingSocial and Buy With Me, then ranks them according to users’ preferences. Yipit is available in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and New York.
Learn more View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Netflix Redux: Is It Ever OK to Fire Your Customers?
Mark joined GRP Partners in 2007 after having worked with GRP for nearly 8 years as a two-time entrepreneur. Most recently Mark was Vice President, Product Management at Salesforce.com (NASDAQ: CRM) following its acquisition of Koral,where Mark was Founder and CEO. Prior to Koral, Mark was Founder and CEO of BuildOnline, the largest independent global content collaboration company focused... ? Learn More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at his Startup Blog, BothSidesoftheTable.
A month ago I applauded Reed Hasting’s bold decision to split his business into two components. Today he’s announcing that they’re backing out of this decision.
Netflix as a service has always prided itself on movie recommendations that are tailored specifically to you, plus user ratings on the quality of films. So let me use their ratings system to judge their actions to date and explain how I think things will break in the future and why.
The big price increase: 5 out of 5 stars. The remainder of this article will deal with this decision but it comes down to the different economics of DVD rentals due to “the first sale doctrine,” which gives Netflix a complete library of films and the fact that the first-sale doctrine doesn’t apply to digital downloads. This makes their business types very different. Some customer segments value the DVD business and these may be more price sensitive. Some customer segments value the convenience of instantly available films. They might be willing to pay higher prices (and perhaps not an “all you can eat” price but a “pay as you go” price per film). They are potentially different business models. Netflix needs to segment their customers and charge each what is appropriate.
The decision to split the businesses: 3 out of 5 stars. I really like the clarity of two business units—whatever you name them. Each with its own head, its own financial reporting and its own content strategy, pricing strategy and marketing strategy. Did they need to be separate legal entities? No, probably not. But creating better visibility for investors of the profitability of each unit and accountability for bosses of each to perform well according to differnet metrics is a good & important idea. Perhaps they should have just created business units called: Netflix DVD & Netflix Streaming. Or take a play out of Coca Cola and called them Netflix Classic & Netflix Digital (note: in the future they may want to have downloads and not just streaming so I like “digital” more than “streaming.”)
The handling of the announcement to split the businesses: 1 out of 5 stars. Netflix announced the changes to its company via a blog post. A blog post! While I loved the sentiment of what was written in the post, the lack of the human touch made it DOA. Netflix needs to borrow the marketing prowess of Salesforce.com. You need to plan big announcements. You need some showmanship. You need to invite the press, talk to them, let them ask questions. You don’t handle major announcements via a blog post and no touch points. Of course the press is going to roast you. Duh. They don’t understand the complexities of your business. They need to grill you with questions and look in your eyes as you respond. Not a freakin’ blog post. So how will consumers react? Basically their reaction is heavily correlated with the press coverage of your rollout. Here’s a brilliant post that they *might have* written but didn’t.
The name Qwikster: 1 out of 5 stars. I was asked by a journalist at the NYT if I thought it was a clever name since it was perhaps intentionally retro. I responded, “no, it’s not clever. They thought about it for 5 minutes. Probably the 5 minutes before they wrote their blog post. What is my evidence? They didn’t even bother to get the Twitter handle for it. A quick read of the Qwikster Tweet stream talks about “bible studies” and the like. I, for one, read the Tweet stream right after Qwikster was announced. I can assure you that it was most certainly not about bible studies. It was filled with profanity and pretty dirty commentary. Much of this has been deleted, me thinks. That’s not how you handle a major announcement in your company. WWMBD?
The decision to have two IT systems for Netflix & Qwikster: 1 out of 5 stars. One of the biggest things that came up in the 255 comments to my original post was how disappointed people were in having to have two separate IT systems for Netflix & Qwikster. Two separate rating systems, two separate queues, etc. Yeah, I thought that was pretty dumb, too. Again, I think nobody had really given much thought to what customers would want in the rollout. I stated in the comments that I felt that even with separate legal entities they could have had APIs between the IT systems that allowed for reviews, queues, billing info, etc. to be synchronized. This is the main reason the tech elite roasted them. Dumb, da-dumb, dumb, dumb.
The decision to back-out of the splitting of the business: 3 out of 5. Given how badly the announcement of the splitting went and their inability to control the PR cycle (or their stock price!) I guess it’s not the end of the world to unwind their decision. Right? Well at least this time they’ll handle the announcement of the change more carefully. Or …
The announcement of the decision to back-out of the business: 0 out of 5. JFC. Really? Major change by blog post again? How’d that work out for you last time?
Fan Summary of Netflix Redux, the movie: 2 out of 5. Netflix is a great business. I use it all the time. I’m a 99% streaming guy so I do want a bigger library. There are some films I find on iTunes or NVOD that aren’t on Netflix. I pay for them separately. I’m in the convenience “I want it NOW!” customer segment. But they sure need somebody at the top handling their marketing and PR better. Maybe the person that runs this is tremendously talented and Reed Hastings is setting the agenda. Or maybe they need to hire somebody with more gravitas / experience. But if I were on the board that’s what I’d be complaining about more than the changes to the business, the separation of business units, the loss of some customers, etc. Because poorly run marketing can negatively affect a company. And it ain’t rocket science.
So with that out of the way …
Is it ever ok to fire your customers?
Netflix increased prices by 60%. They are projected 1 million losses of customers beyond what they had expected: 200,000 from streaming and 800,000 from their traditional DVD mailing business.
Is this suicide? Is it ever a good idea to “fire” your customers?
Before answering let me preface with the following to take them off the table in the debate:
Customer Segmentation
I’m sure you’ve all heard of customer segmentation before. In case you haven’t there’s a primer here. It basically means that you split your customers into “like groups” that can then be analyzed as a constituency and different groups. An example of how a customer segment discussion inside your business could take place is in this post I wrote on Customer Segmentation (“Elephants, Deer & Rabbits”).
Each customer segment of your business needs to be analyzed to determine whether they are profitable enough given ongoing costs to serve them relative to the revenue you would receive and the retention money you’d have to spend to keep them with your service.
Once you’ve run profitability analysis on each of your customer segments you need to decide whether you have the operating model that allows you to serve each segment profitably and even if you do whether you want to divert management attention to serving these customers.
In Netflix’s case, I’ll bet that there are a large number of DVD customers who don’t want to pay for streaming. They’re the “cost conscious” segment and perhaps overlapping with the “technology laggard” segment. The problem with this segment for Netflix is that they may not be profitable at the current price points and at a minimum servicing them isn’t pointing at where Neflix knows its future will be. Netflix estimates that only 10% of its 24 million customers would be “DVD only.” If this is right then some of these 2.4 million customers might have actually gotten a price decrease. If they were on the $9.99 all-you-can-eat DVD + Streaming plan they can now pay just $7.99 for DVD only. A 20% savings for a cost conscious consumer.
If you’re cost conscious and want “streaming only” service you can get that also for $7.99 / month. If you’re like me, the “convenience customers” I don’t mind paying $6 extra per month for the right to have DVDs and a broader library even though I never seem to use it. If that segment is 25% of their users then they’ll rake in a cool $432,000,000 extra per year with very little additional costs. That extra profit will go a long way toward buying content rights for streaming plus making up for the lost customers who abort from Netflix altogether. So probably not a bad bet to fire the low end of their customers.
Here are some more examples of where businesses haven’t wanted certain customer segments:
1. Hypermarkets & convenience shoppers—In the local super market industry it would be heresy to not have a “quick check out” aisle for people with less than a certain number of items to purchase. The local residents who shop there expect to be able to come by frequently for items such as milk, bread or diapers. They don’t want to wait alongside those with their weekly shopping basket.
But did you know that many “hypermarkets” intentionally don’t have convenience lanes? Yes, customers complain. By the hypermarket business is based on turning over large volumes of product and making money on the number of “turns” that each product has and on the banking “float” (when you get paid versus when you have to pay your suppliers). They price cheap, stack ‘em high and want to move a ton of product.
As a result they’re often crowded. They don’t want to discourage their $700 shoppers with $10 shoppers buying milk. “But if they built a new lane then they could serve both customer segments, right?” Not necessarily. The high-volume merchant is built on a different model. They don’t want that $700 customer not shopping because they can’t find a parking spot taken by a $10 shopper. Yes, there is an economic cost to parking space scarcity.
They have security personnel that check you out as you leave. They don’t want to increase the volume of people flowing through this queue. And so on.
A customer is not a customer.
2. Magazines—Magazines make their money through a combination of subscription or purchase revenue vs. ad revenue. Each mag has a different mix. I once had a discussion with an industry insider who told me of times in the past where magazines intentionally raised prices in order to dissuade more readers. What? Not possible.
He explained that much of their revenue was advertising based and they relied upon high-minded advertisers. As their subscribers started to move downmarket they started losing important advertisers. By raising prices they could control their customer segments and therefore drive higher ad revenues.
3. Apparel—You’d think that all retail brands would want to maximize the amount of product that they sell. Not true. Many apparel brands and cosmetic companies will actively fight against discount channels like Ross carrying their products. The moment you see lower-end customers wearing your products it loses cache for the upper end segments. I personally find this all a bit Sneetch-ish but it’s basic human nature. So in order to keep prices & profits high they spend serious money trying to fire the lower-end segments of their market.
I know of at least one major high-end cosmetic & fashion brand that actively limits stock of its most sought after product to even their best customers. They create limited availability in their most exclusive brands to segment even the upper-end tier of their most loyal customers. Strange, I know. But that’s the way the world works.
My argument isn’t to stay focused on the most exclusive customer segments. Sometimes that is the best strategy, sometimes it is not. But you need to understand your segments, choose which ones to serve, figure out an effective operating model to serve them, be careful not to divert your management attention to every segment and be willing to fire your customers if they’re taking you in the wrong direction.
With more than 23.3 million members in the United States and Canada, Netflix, Inc. is the world’s leading Internet subscription service for enjoying movies and TV shows. For $7.99 a month, Netflix members in the U.S. can instantly watch unlimited movies and TV episodes streaming right to their TVs and computers and can receive unlimited DVDs delivered quickly to their homes. In Canada, streaming unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix is available for $7.99 a month. There are...
Learn more Companies: GRP Partners, Dealmaker Media, GumGum, RingRevenue, Ad.ly, Qualys, Bedrock, Burstly, Launchpad LA, App7, DonorsChoose.org Mark joined GRP Partners in 2007 after having worked with GRP for nearly 8 years as a two-time entrepreneur. Most recently Mark was Vice President, Product Management at Salesforce.com (NASDAQ: CRM) following its acquisition of Koral,where Mark was Founder and CEO. Prior to Koral, Mark was Founder and CEO of BuildOnline, the largest independent global content collaboration company focused on the engineering and construction sectors, which was acquired by SWORD Group (PARIS: SWP). Earlier in his career, Mark spent...
Learn more View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Twitter Launches An Issue Tracker And Other New Features For Third-Party Developers
Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More
In early September, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey posted a note to developers asking for feedback on how the network could better serve them. From the post: We want to know what additional materials you need from us to help you build products, boost distribution and expand your reach. It looks like Twitter has taken this feedback into account, and has rolled out a number of new features for developers based on their responses.
One of the main developer requests was a centralized issue tracker. Twitter has now launched a dedicated Issue Tracker, hosted on its new developer portal, which will replace the existing Google Code Tracker.
Another piece of feedback was a clear policy on API changes. Twitter will now give developers a minimum is 30 days advance notice before ‘sunsetting’ anything. For more broad, sweeping changes, Twitter says it will be flexible with developers and give them as much time as possible.
Rate limits are a big issue for Twitter developers and the company says that it permits 350 requests per user (oauth_token) per hour if you’re making authenticated calls and 150 per hour against the calling IP address for unauthenticated calls.
The goal is to scale usage of the API with the growth of a developer’s user-base and as they bring on more users, they will get greater access to the APU. Twitter also said that it is committed to push Site Streams, which will allow apps to receive real-time updates for events such as mentions, follows, timelines, and more, out of beta by Q1 of 2011.
Twitter promises to be more communicative overall with developers and especially help third-party developers work through authentication issues using oAuth.
By investing in creating new tools and features for developers, Twitter is clearly making a more concerted effort to work with third-party developers. In the past, there have been come miscommunications and it’s wise for the network to start listening to what developers want and need. In March, Twitter basically told developers to avoid competing with them on native clients. It’s not that Twitter doesn’t want developers to build off their platform, they just don’t want developers to build clients that mimic Twitter’s own services. As we’ve written, this is business, not personal. Regardless, it’s good to see Twitter taking actions to smooth things over with developers.
Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...
Learn more View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
HP Turns To Bing For New webOS Maps App On Smartphones
Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More
Though webOS products have been somewhat shelved going forward, there are still plenty of people out there using HP and Palm phones running the OS. For them, getting map information and directions has been quite the task with the webOS Google Maps-powered app. But today that should change, as the company has opted for a Bing Maps-powered mapping application for the OS.
This is the same Maps app you’ll find on the now discontinued HP TouchPad. According to MobileBurn, the app loads much faster, and comes with new features from Bing. For instance, users can choose between standard map view, satellite view, or birds-eye view, which are pretty gorgeous as far as maps go. The app now provides driving, walking or public transit directions, along with access to your address history and saved locations.
The new app is available for all webOS smartphones, which includes the original Pre, Veer, and Pixi smartphones. Just search “Maps” in the App Catalog and download the new app.
It’s really wonderful to see that HP hasn’t washed their hands of webOS entirely. Plenty of loyal webOS customers deserve a solid Maps application, especially since their OS of choice is on its way out the door.
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Shawn Fanning And Sean Parker Talk About Airtime And “Smashing People Together”
Erick Schonfeld is the Editor of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to... ? Learn More
The last company Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker started together was Napster, over a decade ago. Now they are teaming up again to create a new startup called Airtime (previously codenamed Supyo). The two have completed an $8.3 million series A financing from Founders Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am, Scott Braun, and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.
Fanning will be CEO and Parker will be executive chairman. Parker will be spending more time in California to take an active role in the company, and changing his position at the Founders Fund from Managing director to a general partner. “I had to figure out a way to step back from the venture fund in order to dive full time into this,” he tells me. Parker also has a “quasi-operating role at Spotify,” where he is a board member and helps with everything from product design to negotiating with the music labels and its recent Facebook integration. The third founder is CTO Joey Liaw. The company has about a dozen employees already and is looking for a founding engineer with experience in scaling a high-availability site that can handle a ton of realtime, concurrent users.
Inspired by Chatroulette, Airtime will be random, realtime and include a live video chat component. Fanning and Parker are still vague on specifics, but don’t expect it to look too much like Chatroulette. Parker originally helped recruit Fanning from Path, where he was CEO, to work on Chatroulette at the behest of Yuri Milner, who is now one of Airtime’s investors. “They lacked a clear vision and a management team. Yuri asked me where would you take this thing and who should run it,” says Parker.
The collaboration with Chatroulette’s young founder Andrey Ternovskiy didn’t work out, but it got Fanning and Parker thinking about a larger problem. “With all due respect to Andrey,” says Fanning, “it was just scratching the surface of what it could be—a universal host that is introducing people, smashing people together.”
“It was fascinating to watch in the sense that it was not a virally engineered product,” says Parker. “Here you have a product growing through organic word of mouth. It looked like Napster in 1999.” Chatroulette also eliminated the anxiety of meeting new people by randomly pairing users. It ended up being too extreme and attracting a lot of naked dudes, but there it was obviously tapping into something essential.
“We are trying to address the problem of what has happened the last 10 years of social media,” says Parker, who was also the founding President of Facebook. “Your social network has become more rigid and constraining.” Airtime, it seems, will be more about meeting new people. “Facebook is about identity, the people you already know,” says Parker. “It has little to do with people you don’t know.”
So how will Airtime help you meet new people? Fanning and Parker won’t say. But if I had to guess, I’d bet that it will be around interests. Think about it. If you combine the random smashing together of people that Chatroulette was so good at with an interest graph that matches up people based on topics and activities they care about, you’ve got the beginnings of an online party with Airtime playing the host. The name Airtime, though, suggests that it could also be a platform for personal broadcasting as well. Will these live video chats be one-to-one, group chats or public broadcasts like on YouNow, a live video startup that launched at Disrupt SF? Stay tuned.
The new stealth project by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. It is believed to be in the video chatting space. Originally codenamed Supyo, it will launch as Airtime.
Learn more Companies: Founders Fund, ooma, Causes, Plaxo, Facebook, Napster, fbFund, Yammer, Asana, Element Payment Services, Spotify, Airtime Sean Parker is a serial entrepreneur and a managing partner at the Founders Fund. As one of the two founders of Napster, Sean helped architect and manage the peer-to-peer file sharing application to become one of the largest on the net. Parker subsequently helped found and manage Plaxo, a VC-backed contact management application company. More recently, Parker worked as the Founding President of Facebook before moving on to join up with Peter Thiel at The Founders Fund,...
Learn more Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1998 while attending Northeastern University. He is currently the GM of Rupture at Electronic Arts. Fanning has since founded SNOCAP, a B2B Music Distributor, in 2002, and Rupture, an MMORPG social network in 2006. Both companies were sold in 2008 – SNOCAP to imeem, and Rupture to Electronic Arts.
Learn more View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Apple’s iOS 5 Error 3200: Now Trending Worldwide
Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More
If you’re trying to upgrade your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch to iOS 5 this afternoon, there’s a pretty good chance that it isn’t going to go smoothly: Twitter is currently teeming with complaints that users are suffering from an “internal error” as iTunes attempts to activate each device. The issues are so prevalent, in fact, that ‘Error 3200' is now a worldwide trending topic on Twitter. Ouch.
The issue is reportedly related to Apple’s servers, which are unable to keep up with the massive influx of traffic. The fix? A lot of people suggest to just keep trying, though some of them are saying it took dozens of attempts before their request went through. It’s probably a better idea to go read for a while and try later — but I’d probably be clicking madly alongside the rest of you if I had the same issue.
Let’s hope that this isn’t foreshadowing things to come: Apple is officially launching its server-based iCloud alongside iOS5, which is obviously reliant on Apple’s servers being able to handle a lot of traffic (I imagine there’s going to be a major spike as people update their photo streams for the first time). Apple’s last major venture into the cloud, Mobile Me, was a rare stumble for the company, and I’d expect they’ve put a lot of preparation into ensuring that fiasco doesn’t repeat itself. But this isn’t a great start.
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Daily Crunch: Propulsion
Bryce is a designer at CrunchGear for TechCrunch. Bryce Durbin is an illustrator and designer for print and web. He grew up in Columbus, OH and now lives in Elkader, Iowa with his wife Shannon and their son Link. His portfolio is at brycedurbin.com. ? Learn More
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
YouTube Launches Movie Rentals For The UK
TechCrunch Europe is edited by Mike Butcher (FRSA, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts). As well as editing TechCrunch Europe, Mike is involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub (@TechHub), in London initially. A long time journalist, Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including... ? Learn More
YouTube has rolled out its movie rental service in the UK. Youtube.com/moviesnow features over a thousand feature films including The Dark Knight and Reservoir Dogs alongside British classics like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The UK is the third country to get the service, following the US and Canada.
Prices for the films range from £2.49 to £3.49. Users have 30 days to watch the movies rented and then have 48 hours to finish the movie.
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Fab.com Is Growing Like Crazy, Debuts Android And iOS Apps
Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More
Fab.com, which started out as Fabulis, a social networking site for gay men, has not only recently changed its name but also started from scratch with an entirely new business centered around online flash sales of design items. After raising a $1 million seed round, and another $8 million in Series A funding, back in July, the company has seen absolutely stunning growth after the pivot.
The startup’s CEO, Jason Goldberg, says the site now boasts over 750,000 members, of which 40,000 signed up over the course of last weekend alone. And with 18% of its traffic (and 12% of its revenue) currently coming from mobile devices, the time was ripe for Fab.com to launch some apps.
Today, the company is doing just that, debuting applications for Android, iPhone and iPad.
Fab.com is already generating about $100,000 in sales on a daily basis, and Goldberg expects this number to shoot up quickly after the launch of the mobile apps, which are evidently free of charge.
The app enables users to receive daily notifications when new sales go live, browse and purchase items, and share products on Twitter and Facebook, among other features.
Screenshots galore:
Fab.com features daily design inspirations and sales at up to 70% off retail. Fab.com was started by Jason Goldberg, who founded SocialMedian and Jobster, with design industry veteran Bradford Shellhammer, contributor to Dwell and formerly of Blu Dot and Design Within Reach in New York, NY, along with Deepa and Nishith Shah in Pune, India and Veerle Pieters in Deinze, Belgium. Fab.com’s headquarters are in New York, NY. The Fab.com website offers daily design inspirations and sales of up to...
Learn more View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
A Pirate’s Life For Me: Police Bust Hungarian Movie Ring
Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com. ? Learn More
If you had any misconceptions about the noble pirates fighting the nasty, dirty MPAA, put those to rest now. Here’s the inside of a pirate’s lair in Budapest where we find a 70TB disk array (the article claims it held “5000 movies, 4000 songs, 6000 games and 500 pieces of software,” which is a ridiculously low number), blow, and what appears to be a shotgun.
A pirate group called CiNEDUB has single-handedly “forced” Warner Brothers to stop releasing films in Hungary for fear of having their content recorded and pirated on the day of release. Sick of CiNEDUB preventing them access to the ouvre of Harry Potter, the police busted the ring and found a large server room, lots of cash, and a mirror and razor blade combo that suggests some high times.
The bust happened under pressure from the Hungarian National Tax and Customs Administration. Two members of the nine member team are behind bars while the rest are still at large. From Torrentfreak:
“Most of this team were responsible for the great American filmmakers blacklisting Hungary,” NAV said in a statement.
Say what you want about freedom and digital rights: these guys were, in the end, making money on pirated video. I don’t like corporations pressuring governments to do their bidding and I agree that it’s stupid to equate piracy with terrorism and gangsterism, you can’t honestly say that whatever these guys were doing in that cocaine- and shotgun-infested flat improved our digital freedoms one iota.
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
Google, Vocre, Apple, And Now Raytheon Diving Into Cloud Speech Recognition
Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More
If you were following along at Disrupt SF, perhaps you caught Vocre’s impressive demonstration of their near-real-time spoken translation app. As I was watching, I was picturing the gears turning behind the veneer of the app, though: the cloud transcription, translation, and speech APIs, and how there’s a nice big market for this kind of thing. Google knows it, and of course we’ve had speech on Android for a long time. Apple knows it, but took its time to release it in a more consumer-focused package.
Now even defense contractor Raytheon is getting into the game. Their TransTalk app, which has emerged from the soup of defense contracts and government research funds that is DARPA, is specifically designed for deployment in the middle east.
It’s for Android, which jives with the military’s earlier lean towards the operating system, though it look simple enough that it wouldn’t be much of a task for the defense giant to port it to a government-sponsored fork or whatever gets decided on.
The app itself (running on a Motorola Atrix) is a simple affair; it’s meant for deployment with English-speaking troops and has very little in the way of decoration. You select a language (Arabic, Pashto, and Dari are supported, as these are the primary dialects in the middle east theater), speak to it, and it prints and speaks a translation. The other speaker does the same, but pressing a different button.
So the app isn’t noteworthy for its purpose, but what is interesting is that it isn’t a self-contained app, but rather calls out to the cloud. Military applications tend to concentrate as much functionality as possible on the local device, because as you may have heard, warfare tends to be on the unpredictable side, and data infrastructure isn’t guaranteed. So cloud solutions, as practical as they may be for a consumer application, have been viewed with skepticism by the military establishment.
On the other hand, could the choice be viewed instead as shrewd, considering the efforts that DARPA and others are going to in the creation of a connected battlefield? My guess is that this isn’t actually a strategic move, but a pragmatic one: they bait the hook with a cloud solution and reel it in when they’ve got the resources to make it something locally-hosted. Last year they showed a similar app but on a larger platform. Miniaturization isn’t a trivial step, and they probably thought it worthwhile to gauge interest with this cloud version before going all in. Right now the military smartphone platform is still in flux so it would be unwise to start loading their eggs into one basket or another. But decentralized processing isn’t such a bad bet to make, and Raytheon seems to understand that.
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
App Trailers Gives You Gift Cards For Watching App Videos
Mobile advertising startup AppRedeem has just launched App Trailers, a new product that rewards you for viewing videos about mobile apps. The service, available here from the iTunes App Store, doesn’t use the same model as typical incentivized install programs do today. Instead, users are given points for watching a trailer, then are provided with the option to download the app at the end of the video. Only if a users taps “yes” is the advertiser charged.
Says AppReedem, these types of installs will be more valuable to the advertiser because the user is indicating that they actually want to install and try that app. Users get the same number of points whether or not they choose to installs, so they’re really only downloading apps they’re interested in – there’s no bonus for tapping “yes.”
Each video listed in the app is worth 10 points, but users can get 25 points for registering their email or inviting friends to try the service.
Rewards include a $1 Amazon gift card (100 points), a $5 REI gift card (500 points), $10 gift cards from Crate&Barrel, Fandango or Macy’s (1,000 points) and $25 gift cards from Nike, Nordstrom or Pottery Barn (2,500 points).
Given how long it would take you to accumulate enough points to earn the top-level rewards, it’s clear this app is best suited to those who have a lot of free time on your hands. (Perhaps those without an Angry Bird addiction?)
That said, App Trailers is certainly a unique take on driving app installs in an increasingly overcrowded app marketplace. And who know? You might even discover a new app to try when the service ramps up a bit. Currently, there are videos for a number of popular apps, including Priceline, Groupon, LivingSocial, SkyGrid, PingMe, Blendr and others. The only problem? Apparently you don’t get any points for having all those apps already installed on your phone. Bummer.
You can try App Trailers for yourself from here.
AppReedem raised $700,000 from SV Angel and Blue Run Ventures in June. It also has an AppReedem-branded app on Android here.
AppRedeem is an early-stage, high-growth promotion and advertising platform that drives mobile application engagement. World-class firms – Gilt Groupe, Groupon, and others – use AppRedeem today to fuel their mobile growth.
Learn more View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
ZiiLabs Demonstrates Their Jaguar3 Android Tablet Media Platform On Video
Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More
We’ve seen a few peeks of Creative’s Zii-powered Android tablets over the last couple months, but being rather spec-oriented, this reference platform didn’t get much attention. This video does a better job of showing off the advantages of having a general-purpose parallel CPU array like StemCell. It’s a special 48-core chip they’ve married to a 1.5GHz Cortex A9, and it’s dedicated to media processing.
It may not be that we ever see this guy in action: the Zii series of media players just couldn’t stand up to the iPod touch, and it could be that this augmented Android platform isn’t cost-effective or flashy enough to bring in sales. A hell of a lot of people are going to opt for something like the Fire, since they have no idea what WebM is, and don’t see why they would want to have 1080p playback on a small tablet that can’t even display that resolution. That’s why they have a Blu-ray player attached to a 55? LCD. Who can blame them?
It does look like a nice little tablet, though, and having that big parallel array would probably be attractive to a lot of developers. But I don’t think the market is big enough right now for this to sell more than a few thousand units.
[via Fine Oils]
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
CEOs From Evernote, Adly, CloudFlare, Graphic.ly & More Join Advise.me Team
Startup accelerator Advise.me is on a roll, having already increased its seed funding size and its advising team only a week after launch. Today, it’s adding six more high-profile executives to the team, including CEOs from notable startups like Evernote, Adly, CloudFlare, Graphic.ly and more.
Today’s new additions include the following:
Advise.me, whose “Global Startup Initiative“ program encourages companies from all parts of the world to apply, has now received more than 400 applications from interested companies. That’s 200 more than it had received by the end of September. 200 every 2 weeks? Not bad, not bad at all.
The organization will reveal its first company on Tuesday, but it’s a company Advise.me is building itself. (Hmm?) Stay tuned.
Advise.me’s program is offering a slightly different take on startup advising than some of the others in the space. Instead of a classroom approach, each startup receives one-on-one support from a team of 2 to 7 industry experts who have experience that’s relevant to the startup they’re paired with. That not only improves the quality of the advice the team can give, but the advisors can also help startups by connecting founders to the appropriate industry contracts.
Learn more View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.