Unface.me Is A Gossip Girl-Style Social Service For Anonymously Trolling Your Friends

A Russian startup called Unface.me has created a new social network inspired by the Gossip Girl TV series which lets users create an alter ego to — let’s face it — troll their friends, or even post even worst types of gossip entirely anonymously. The site connects with Facebook and Russian social network VKontakte so it can pull in users’ genuine friend networks, then furnishes them with a series of tools to poke fun, dish salacious gossip or vote on who of their friends is coolest and therefore who is not. Y’know, teen stuff.

Teens powered the rise of social networking giant Facebook. But today’s teens are arguably starting to be less enamoured with the platform their siblings spent  all their time on, what with so many other, more flexible ways to ping and poke each other. Facebook’s insistence on real names, and its standard comms toolset of public posts, private messages and IM isn’t helping here. Looked at through the hyper layered and stratified teenage lens, it’s pretty limting. Which is giving startups the opportunity to crowd in.

Zuck and co were also not as quick to respond to the growth in mobile messaging as they should have been. The long and short of it is that today’s teens are spoiled for choice; they don’t need Facebook to stay in touch — they have a whole arsenal of creative digital tools to get around being grounded.

Facebook’s difficulty, of course, is that it can’t keep up with the kids without risking alienating itsmassive user base of oldies. With such a whoppingly huge user base  that spans multiple age-groups comes a big responsibility not to put segments of users off. Keeping things fairly simple is the compromise path, but that too risks boring the kids — so they go looking to get their kicks elsewhere, whether it’s Snapchat or Unface.me.

Now it must be said that Unface.me is pretty rough round the edges — and focused pretty squarely on the Russia market for now. It isn’t necessarily anything more than a curiosity. It’s just come out of a closed beta, so its user base is small, with a test group of around 20,000 that it’s now looking to grow — having just opened up to the public. It says it’s also starting to advertise to get the word out. But as an experiment in extending social networking by adding an element of privacy it’s interesting to watch — also bringing to mind secret-sharing app Whisper.

Unface.me’s founders are three computer science graduates from Moscow State University, with respective specialisms in marketing, business development and web development. The startup is currently bootstrapped with funds from founders, friends and family.

“The inital idea came from the Gossip Girl series, but we decided to go further and develop a place where people can share their feelings freely and get honest opinions from their friends, but sharing secrets and gossips can be done too. We strongly believe that anonymity loosens up and helps discovering new facts about friends and yourself,” Unface.me’s Dmitrii Ponomarev tells TechCrunch.

The site has been in development for around a year and a half, with the closed beta kicking off six months ago.  The “mission” is to “let every person discuss freely anything or anyone”. And, judging by some of the public posts, there’s certainly plenty of that going on already. Indeed, it’s pushing into some pretty unpleasant territory, which is generally  what happens when you mix teens and gossip, regardless of the medium they’re using.

The key twist here is the mixture of unknown and known, says Ponomarev. Since the users are interacting with their real friends, pulled in from third party social networks, not random online strangers. From there they can choose to chat and post anonymously or under a fixed alterego. Or indeed using the real name they use on the linked social network.

“A user can anonymously write a story about his friends on yesterday’s party, share it anonymously via sms and watch the discussion,” explains Ponomarev. “Or he or she can post a photo of his new look and get really honest responses from friends because the are anonymous. Or he can start an anonymous chat with his friends and discuss something that matters with his friends but no one will know each others’ names… We’ve gone much further than just posting anonymous text messages.”

Teens are famously creative in their communications. Even within the Facebook straitjacket they find subtle and not so subtle ways to hack the limits — by ‘being in a relationship’ with all their BFFs, say, or asking each other to like a post for feedback on what they look like and so on. Unface.me looks like it’s picking up on that preference for teens to gamify their communications — and giving them even more layers to interact with each other.

Facebook can still be part of the mix, of course — as one of the foundation networks that Unface.me is using as its jumping off point. However, if more teenage chatter ends up going on anonymously outside Facebook’s walls that’s not an outcome that will end up pouring coin into Zuckerberg’s coffers as it restricts the flow of data. Addressing the innovation challenge posed by upstart startups that are offering cooler, more teen-friendly ways to do stuff is the sort of war that is  looking impossible for a single, central dominant service like Facebook to win. When it comes to the social networking/social messaging space, it’s definitely time to get the popcorn in.

WordPress-Maker Automattic Sells $50 Million Of Stock In Secondary Offering To Tiger Global

Automattic, the company behind publishing platform WordPress, has sold $50 million in a secondary offering led by investment management firm Tiger Global. The sale will allow some early investors and employees to get cash in exchange for their shares, while adding another stakeholder in the company.

The share offering wasn’t necessary to raise funds for the company, according to Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg. In a blog post, he wrote that the company is “healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly.” He also noted that the minority of stockholders who participated in the secondary sale continue to hold on to the vast majority of their shares.

Lee Fixel at Tiger Global led the investment, which follows other high-profile late-stage deals that the firm has made recently. Those include investments in Eventbrite and SurveyMonkey. Tiger Global is also an investor in companies like Palantir, Square, and Warby Parker, as well as Facebook and LinkedIn. With the purchase, Tiger will join existing investors in Automattic, such as Polaris Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and The New York Times Company.

WordPress, of course, is the publishing platform (one might call it a CMS) that powers a number of high-profile sites, including TechCrunch. The company behind it is just about to celebrate its tenth anniversary on May 27, and will have meetups in cities across the world to celebrate.

Facebook’s Head Of Brand Design Paul Adams Joins Customer Outreach Startup Intercom

Paul Adams, who was previously Facebook’s global head of brand design, has joined a startup calledIntercom, where he will be serving as head of product design.

Adams told me earlier that he wasn’t looking to leave Facebook, but he had also been advising Intercom and became excited about the opportunity. The startup, which is backed by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, 500 Startups, and others, offers tools for online businesses to track every interaction with a customer and to use that data to deliver personalized messages and offers.

When I suggested that this sounds like a shift from Adams’ previous work in advertising, he didn’t entirely disagree, but he also said Intercom’s work ties into the themes he’s been exploring at Facebook, which have also been expressed in his talks and his book Grouped. (In addition, Adams isknown for his work at Google, particularlya presentation that seemed to outline many of the ideas that eventually shaped Google+.)

Adams argues that in the future, businesses’ interactions with potential customers are going to be much more personal and relationship-based, rather than following the one-to-many broadcast model of traditional advertising. Intercom facilitates those company-to-customer interactions, and he added that it’s not just a way to deliver slightly-more-targeted marketing emails.

“In the past … companies tried to minimize customer interaction,” Adams said. “They didn’t want to customers to talk back to them — that was overhead. Minimizing customer interaction is a very outdated model from a pre-social web world. Intercom is very much about intimacy, very much about being personable.”

Adams will be working out of Intercom’s Dublin office — he said he had already made the move from Silicon Valley to Dublin for personal reasons.

More VMware Departures With Two Executves Joining Redpoint Ventures Executives As Entrepreneurs In Residence

Two VMware executives have left to join Redpoint Ventures to help the firm extend its reach into the enterprise and mobile markets. Their leaving marks a string of recent VMware departures, following the Pivotal spinout of several of the two companies’ product groups.

Both executives joining Redpoint had important roles at VMware.Javier Soltero  was responsible for driving advanced development and strategy for application level cloud services. Soltero joined VMware after the acquisition of SpringSource in 2009. Three months prior, SpringSource, a Java framework, had acquired Hyperic, a large-scale web infrastructure management software provider. Soltero was co-founder and CEO of the company. Soltero has some Internet chops that date back to the earliest days of the web. Early in his career, Soltero worked at Netscape, where he was responsible for early Internet messaging, application servers and e-commerce technologies.

Kevin Henrikson joined Zimbra in 2005 and worked there until Yahoo! acquired the company in 2007. In 2010, VMware acquired Zimbra, where Henrikson directed Zimbra’s engineering and development roadmap planning and execution, including potential company acquisitions. He holds a published patent and a filed patent in conjunction with his work at Zimbra.

A number of VMware executives have left the company in the past year. Last week, Microsoft hired Patrick Chanezon who recently left VMware to join Microsoft as its director of enterprise evangelism. Dave McCrory also recently left VMware to join Warner Brothers. He served as one of the chief developers of VMware’s Cloud Foundry, the platform as a service.

And in January, CTO Steve Herrod left to join General Catalyst as a managing director investing and supporting early-stage enterprise companies.

The Austin TC Meetup + Pitch-Off Is Less Than A Week Away! Get Tickets Now!

We’re less than a week out from our Austin TC Meetup + Pitch-Off, and I can already smell the barbeque in the air. Austin, are you ready to rumble?

The Austin Meetup + Pitch-Off is going down on Thursday, May 30, at The Stage On Sixth.

The event begins promptly at 6pm and runs until 10pm. Tickets are $5 each, and include booze.

But, you ask, what exactly is this fabled TC Meetup + Pitch-off that I’m pushing?

Well, at its core its a gathering of your city’s local VC, entrepreneurial, startup and general tech crowd. Attendees can socialize, drink booze (21 and up please) and maybe even meet a few really cool people. But that’s not all.

The TC Meetup + Pitch-off is equal parts meetup and pitch-off, which is a competition that lets entrepreneurs and founders pitch their products to a panel of judges with only sixty seconds to make their plea. Even if the ideas aren’t interesting (which they totally are), there’s real entertainment value in watching someone battle against a clock.

Judges will include Matt Burns and John Biggs from TechCrunch, as well as local Austin luminariesBijoy Goswami and Noah Kagan. I’ll be MCing. It’ll be great.

Our NY Meetup + Pitch-Off was a smashing success. PaddleYou was spotted in Hardware Alley after coming in third at the Pitch-Off, while runners up Talkz and winner 3DLT both made it into the Disrupt Battlefield.

The Fairphone, World’s First Ethically Sourced Smartphone, Opens Pre-Sales To General Public

Netherlands-based hardware initiative Fairphone began around three years ago as a project designed to highlight the use of conflict minerals in the construction of consumer electronics, and then evolved three years later into a full-fledged hardware startup, with the aim of turning its knowledge into action with the building of an ethically sourced, built and distributed smartphone. Now, it’s opening up pre-orders to the general public, beginning with customers in Europe.

The Fairphone needs 5,000 pre-orders in order to begin production, and retails for a total of €325 ($436). That price included taxes, however and what you get for that is an unlocked, 4.3-inch smartphone running Android 4.2, powered by a quad core processor. It has an 8 megapixel rear camera, and a 1.3 megapixel front facing shooter, with dual-SIM trays for easy carrier switching and international travel.

As a smartphone, the Fairphone seems capable enough, but it’s the manufacturing process that’s really core to the concept of the device. The phone itself is made using materials from a completely transparent supply chain – Fairphone is looking at the provenance of each mineral used to make each component, the people who build each part and the processes evolved and their social and ecological impact, and will make all of that information available to buyers and the general public. The idea is to flag stuff that’s being done poorly, highlight ways to make changes, in both the short and long term, and also build a collection of best practices that can be shared with the rest of the industry.

Fairphone initially had opened sales only to the over 16,000 people who signed up to express interest when it initially announced the project, giving them first crack at the initial pre-order run. It seems like the percentage of those that were actually willing to put their money down on a device and contribute to the initial fund was much lower, however, which has prompted the expansion of sales to anyone in Europe who might want to contribute.

The Fairphone is being transparent about the sales process, too; thus far, it has managed to sell 2,333 phones through pre-orders, with 20 days left in its campaign. Hopefully broadening the buyer pool will spark more interest, because the project stands to be able to shed a lot of light on what for many is a completely invisible or poorly understood process.

Jony Ive’s iOS 7 Flat Design Overhaul Reportedly Features A Lot Of Black And White

A new report from 9to5Mac and its usually well-connected sources today adds a little more color to what we’ll be seeing from the big iOS 7 redesign rumored to be making an appearance at WWDC this year in June – and what we’ll apparently be seeing is a lot less color. The visual overhaul not only emphasizes so-called “flat design” (avoiding complicated textures in favor of bold, solid tones), but also features the use of many black and white elements across the UI.

The new report reiterates what we’ve already heard – that Ive is heading up a pretty extensive overhaul of Apple’s mobile OS, concentrating primarily on the visual aspects of iOS. Now, though, we get a bit more info about how and why Ive is targeting so-called skeuomorphic elements (those that mimic real-world textures) and additional details about specific elements of the OS that have undergone change, plus redesigned apps and even some new features.

Ive feels that the sorts of heavy textures used in the current iteration of iOS aren’t designed to last, and will quickly take on a dated look, according to 9to5Mac’s sources. Physical metaphors for digital design are a dead end, he apparently believes, and makes for a lack of harmony between and among individual iOS apps like Notes, Maps and Game Center. It’s true that other, more recent takes on mobile interfaces have focused more on unity, like Windows Phone, but it’s also true that from a success perspective, iOS has trounced Microsoft’s newer mobile OS; flat design may have the praise of the tech community, but it hasn’t necessarily proved itself in the consumer arena yet.

Other big changes coming to what people are used to on iPhone include the lock screen mechanisms, which will finally see the iconic lock screen re-envisioned with a “shine-free, black interface” says 9to5Mac. Round buttons will replace the grid for security code input, and notifications might get more useful thanks to expanded interactivity options made possible through multi-touch gestures.

Notifications in general will get some changes, ditching the linen texture background per the report in favor of something more black and white. More widgets are on their way to Notification Center, too, and we could see access included to regularly-accessed settings, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the Airplane Mode switch.

The Home Screen gets a minor but notable visual refresh, losing the shine on buttons and system apps given flatter designs that don’t “pop” quite as much as the current versions. iOS 7 also apparently borrows a trick from Android, adding in panorama-style scrollable wallpapers that continue across home screens, instead of presenting the same static image for each. In general, common interface elements like the on-screen keyboard will undergo a flattening effect, ditching things like drop shadow and toning down the color in favor of greys, whites and blacks. This extends to core apps like Mail, Calendar, Maps and Notes, each of which have more uniformed, primarily white interfaces. Each also gets a unique olor for buttons and highlights, however, providing a strong visual cue about which you’re using while retaining a similarity of design across all the software.

New features reportedly include a standalone FaceTime app for iPhone, as well as Flickr and Vimeo integration, and better in-car tools connected to Maps and Siri for hands-free use. We’ll also see a lot of changes on the developer side, likely with the introduction of many new APIs to unlock more potential for apps, something which has become a common feature of iOS updates.

9to5 reports that we’ll see this arrive for the general public along with new iPhone and possibly iPad hardware this fall. The iPhone version of the iOS 7 redesign might beat the iPad version out of the gate however, as the report claims that Apple’s design and engineering talent are focused on pushing out the smartphone version first. Hopefully we’ll learn more at the WWDC keynote, which is coming up June 10, and where we’ll be reporting live.

Report: Waze Could Be In Play Again, With Google The Latest Suitor. Or Not Actually

Google is the latest suitor to be reportedly circling around social sat-nav smartphone app Waze. Bloomberg reports ‘people familiar with the matter’ who say Mountain View is considering an acquisition, and that Waze is “fielding expressions of interest from multiple parties and is seeking more than $1 billion”. However sources contacted by TechCrunch have poured cold water on the Google rumour.

We’ve reached out to Google and Waze but at the time of writing neither company could be reached for comment.

Earlier this month we covered reports that Facebook was sniffing around the mapping and traffic service, with a view to ramping up its mobile efforts. Meanwhile Apple has also previously been linked with a Waze buy – having had its own highly public problems with maps. Google has alsopreviously been rumoured to be interested, as has Microsoft. So that’s the full complement of tech giants all apparently eyeing up the same crowdsourced traffic startup.

Waze was founded in 2007 and has raised some $67 million in VC funding from backers including Kleiner Perkins, BlueRun Ventures, Magma Venture Partners, Vertex Venture Capital, and Li Ka-shing, according to Crunchbase. In February it announced it had grown to 40 million registered users, some of whom it picked up during Apple’s mapgate troubles. Waze has offices in the U.S. and Israel — the latter being where its R&D is based.

A key blocker for any Waze acquisition has been apparent investor conflict over the terms of any deal, with questions about whether Waze would move  fully to the U.S. or keep R&D in Israel causing disagreements. There has also been investor conflict about whether to accept a lower, mostly cash offer or a higher offer comprised of more shares, according to our sources. Rumours of big tech suitors like Google sniffing around could also be a way for Waze investors to try to leverage more out of an acquisition — by making other suitors, such as Facebook (whose up to $1 billion interest in Waze we have previously confirmed), up their own offers.

Bloomberg’s sources claim Google and “other large tech companies” — but not Apple — have approached Waze about a possible acquisition since its talks with Facebook become public. However they also say none of the bidders is close to clinching a deal, and add that the talks may fall apart or Waze may walk away and seek more VC funding to continue expanding its mapping program. So really that’s saying everything is still to play for and any outcome is possible at this point.

Report: Google Could Soon Face New FTC Antitrust Probe Into Its Display Ads Business

Bloomberg today reports that Google could face a new U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust probe into its display advertising business. As Bloomberg’s Brian Womack and Sara Forden note, the FCC is looking into whether Google used its strong position in this market to “illegally curb competition.” The investigators, the report also notes, want to see if Google used its display ads business to “push companies to use more of its other services.”

We reached out to Google for a statement about this new investigation but Google did not have a comment on the report.

As Bloomberg notes, the FCC investigation – assuming it will go forward – will likely focus on whether Google used its dominance in the display ad business to “squeeze out competitors in the display advertising market.”

Google’s ad revenue from display ads was about $2.26 billion in 2012 and, according to a report by eMarketer, could hit $3.11 billion this year. According to the same report, Google currently owns about 17.6 percent of the display ad market, followed by Facebook and Yahoo.

Google and the FTC are, of course, old acquaintances. The two have sparred pretty regularly over the last few years, and just this January, the FTC settled its latest antitrust probe with Google after a 20-month investigation. Google, at the time, agreed to make some voluntary changes, including how it handles its AdWords campaigns.

Google also still faces a similar investigation in Europe, where it recently proposed to settle the European Commission’s investigation into its business practices. A number of other countries, including Canada, are also currently looking into the search giant’s business practices.

With Metrics Up Since Acquisition, Parse Could Get Developers Integrating Facebook And Buying Ads

After being acquired by Facebook, the mobile back-end service Parse has been busy integrating itself into the company, as well as launching new services like web hosting for developers.

The service has built tools to help developers focus on the front-end of their product, while handling all of the messy back-end things like cross-platform compatibility and testing. Naturally, Facebook integration is easier than ever for mobile developers thanks to the acquisition. Its been six years since Facebook’s Platform launched, and during a whiteboard session at its Menlo Park headquarters, the company discussed just how far its come.

Doug Purdy, Director of Product Management, and Mike Vernal of Facebook Platform led the discussion. Ilya Sukhar, who recently joined Facebook with Parse, sat in on the discussion as well.

Purdy set up the conversation about next steps by saying: “We’ve been thinking about how we can provide tools to developers to enable a more cross-platform world. We’re trying to create a platform that developers can build something that spans over devices and makes people the center. Regardless of the device that you or your friends are on, everyone can have a rich experience.”

Sukhar, co-founder of Parse, talked a bit about Parse’s beginnings and day four at Facebook:

If you think about applications broadly, there’s the front-end, and below the hood there’s a lot. The data side, how you sync it back to the server, the databases. None of these things bring value to the users or differentiate apps. Our SDKs make this dramatically easier for everyone.

I was originally building mobile apps myself. I was spending a lot of time building things over and over again, things that were quite hard and painful. It’s time that I could have spent on the actual user experience or the utility of my app. So I decided to build Parse. We’ve grown from one person to 24. Since day one, we’ve had 80K apps, 200M installed apps.

Generally, the community is very excited. All of our metrics are up and it’s been a really fun time.

It’s good news that things are going smoothly, and it’s clear that Facebook sees Parse as a huge part of its developer ecosystem push for the future. As far as new services, Sukhar says the team, which is still operating independently, speaks to developers about what should come next. One of the top features that gets requested is functionality around push notifications and offline mode.

The clear value for Facebook is that Parse’s platform could be the easiest way to urge developers to use Facebook ads. Once you get rid of the complexity of building out a backend for an app, you can pay attention to promoting your app more. Hopefully that promotion will come via Facebook, as Purdy mentioned comScore’s findings that the site is the top way to discover new apps.

On whether less backend worries will lead to more promotion, Sukhar said: “This is something we’ve heard: ‘Parse has done well for me to get things out to market, but now I need users.’ We don’t have anything specific to announce today, but it’s clear that Facebook has the solution.

Cubic Telecom Secures $5.2M To Create Devices That Roam Mobile Networks Cheaply

We’re all familiar with the bill shock associated with roaming abroad with our cellphones. There are plenty of players that allow you to swap out your SIM card and use cheaper traffic, including Cubic Telecom. However, that process is tedious. So Cubic has secured new funding to enable a range of tablets and notebooks to have their technology built into partner devices. To do this they’ve raised a further $5.2 million in funding from Enterprise Ireland, Qualcomm Incorporated, ACT Venture Capital and TPS Investments.

The money will be used to expand globally, and invest in the technology which essentially allows Cubic to operate like its own global mobile phone carrier, not an MVNO. As a licensed mobile network operator (MNO), Cubic Telecom partners with Tier 1 mobile operators to provide coverage in 230 countries. Its Software Defined Network (SDN) works across multiple technologies (3G, 4G-LTE, CDMA and WiFi).

The Dublin based company has also secured contracts with a number of leading Fortune 100 tablet and notebook manufacturers to be in-built into their devices, though these partners have yet to be announced.

The embedded nature of the service means any changes to the internal SIM can be Over The Air (OTA).

Barry Napier, CEO of Cubic Telecom, says they will “enable the latest devices and applications to be always connected anytime anywhere.”

In plain English, that means Cubic Telecom devices can integrate with content and apps. Thus, imagine a word where an app provider asked Cubic to allow its use to be free on Cubic dvices. All it would require would be a simple OTA update form Cubic to its customers. That could be a very powerful place to be.

The company also announced that it will create a total of more than 70 new jobs over the next 3 years, as part of an investment supported by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation through Enterprise Ireland.

Loom Is Building A Better iCloud

Barely a month or two after launching the Y Combinator-backed photo-sharing service Popset, the team realized they were solving the wrong problem. Users weren’t struggling to share their photos with groups; they needed tools to help them organize and manage their photo libraries across a variety of platforms and services. So the company decided to change its course, and today it’s announcing what it has in store: Loom, a cloud storage and syncing service that’s like a better alternative to iCloud.

“People were requesting features and giving us feedback that caught our attention,” explains Popset and now Loom co-founder Jan Senderek. After interviewing hundreds of users over a month’s time, the founders had a better idea of what its user base wanted. People told the team of their awful routines for managing photos – backing them from iPhones to external hard drives, having to sync them through iTunes, how quickly the photos ate up precious disk space on their portable devices and MacBook SSD drives, and so on.

“There are so many thing that are wrong, and it’s kind of obvious how to solve that – by simply putting everything in the cloud and making it accessible to you on all your devices,” says Senderek.

That, of course, is the promise of Apple’s iCloud. But it doesn’t seem to work as well as it should.

In recent months, Apple users and developers have become increasingly frustrated with iCloud, which has proved to be difficult, buggy, and confusing to end users.

“People don’t really understand iCloud. They don’t understand what Photostream is or how it works,” Senderek explains. “It actually makes the problem worse.” Photostream, which saves the last 1,000 photos on your device, appears like a separate album, which also confuses some users.

The team, which also includes co-founders Philipp Wein and Daniel Wagner, realized they had a choice to make. They could either double-down on Popset or respond to the problems users wanted fixed with a whole new product.

They chose the latter.

Popset users were notified at the beginning of this month that the service would be closing in June, and were offered a downloadable .zip file of the photos they had shared.

The new product, Loom, puts all your photos and videos in the cloud, allowing you to empty your Camera Roll and reclaim lost disk space. Designed to replace the native Photos app, Loom instead uses smart technology to intelligently cache photos and videos based on the size of the device that you’re using. In other words, if you’re snapping high-def photos with your 16 GB iPhone 5, you don’t really need the full resolution version of those photos in order to enjoy them on the small screen, or share them with others.

Loom also works even when it doesn’t have a network connection – like Apple’s own Photos app does. It will just sync everything you do while offline once the device is connected again. And it will support some of Popset’s old feature set around album creation and sharing.

Also like iCloud, media stored in Loom will be available on all your devices. A developer API will be available, too.

Initially, the service will work on iPhone, iPad, Mac and web, but the plan is to bring the technology to Android as well, where it will be able to more deeply integrate with the operating system. In addition, photos and videos are only the beginning – the long-term plan is to support other file types including documents, music, audio, TV and movies.

Though Loom is offering something that solves a problem for many, if it goes the freemium route as it’s now intending to do, it will be up against several services with competitive pricing in terms of photo sync and storage. Facebook, Google, Flickr and even Shutterfly are offering photo upload (even automatic upload) and hosting, either entirely free or with large enough free tiers to make their services the better option for those watching their budget.

But Loom also has another interesting idea for making money – if users ever wanted to download their entire photo archive, Loom could send them either a link to download, or as an additional paid option, send them an external hard drive filled with their media.

Pricing details, however, are not yet available.

Loom is opening up its private beta in about a month. TechCrunch readers who sign up here will be able to get into the first batch which is limited to 1,000 users.

The San Francisco-based startup, now a team of eight, had already raised additional funding for Loom shortly after Popset’s launch. An additional seed round is also closing soon.

Microsoft’s Cheap Shot At The iPad Actually Points Out Exactly Why Windows 8 Tabs Suck

Microsoft’s Cheap Shot At The iPad Actually Points Out Exactly Why Windows 8 Tabs Suck

Being behind in a market sucks, and it’s understandable to want to lash out at the top dog, as Microsoft has shown it’s willing to do with Google in search and email, and now with Apple in tablet computers. A brand new Windows 8 ad pits the iPad against Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet, in an attempt to show how much more versatile the Asus VivoTab is vs. the iOS device.

Microsoft uses Siri’s voice (which isn’t difficult, given that it’s a fairly generic computer-generated female tone) to highlight what the Windows 8 tablet can do that the iPad can’t, including things like live tiles (it took me a couple views to figure out what “I don’t update like that” even meant), Windows Snap multitasking, and… PowerPoint. Then finally we get a price comparison, showing the much cheaper price tag for the Asus.

The problem is that not only is the Siri construct weak and her actual lines poorly written, but the abilities Microsoft chooses to highlight show exactly why it doesn’t “get” the tablet market. People aren’t looking for multitasking PowerPoint slide deck-creating machines; they have computers for that.

The closing bit here is maybe the worst part; showing that Apple’s iPad can easily provide a remarkably realistic experience for playing Chopsticks on the screen is not the way to trash your competition, especially if you noticeably can’t offer up an equivalent experience on your own hardware. Apple uses that in its own ads for a reason, and that’s to highlight the magical, delightful experiences users can have on its device. Countering that with a bunch of sober (though admittedly useful) features isn’t the way to turn the tide back in your favor.

An earlier version of this post mistakenly identified the Asus VivoTab in this ad as a Surface.

Google App Engine Drops Some High Replication Datastore Prices By Up To 25%

At Google I/O last week, Google announced that its Google App Engine High Replication Datastore (HRD) – its schemaless object data storage service – currently processes over 4.5 trillion transactions per month, has an uptime of 99.95% and stores over a petabyte of data. Today, the company announced that it is dramatically reducing the pricing for some Datastore features. Storing a gigabyte of data previously cost $0.24 per month, but the company has now reduced this price to just $0.18 per month.

In addition, Google is also reducing the prices for read and write operations on the service. Write operations now cost $0.09 per 100,000 operations (previously $0.10) and read operations cost $0.06 per 100,000 operations (previously $0.07).

The High Replication Datastore automatically replicates data across multiple Google data centers to ensure that it’s always available. Before launching its HRD solution in 2011, Google previously offered a more traditional Master/Slave replication topology, but this old system has been deprecated since 2012.

Google’s HRD also form the basis of its newly announced Cloud Datastore – a NoSQL database that’s currently in preview. Cloud Datastore’s pricing is currently coupled to App Engine’s pricing, so its users will see the same price reductions. Google also offers Cloud SQL for developers who need access to a more traditional relational database.

Lyft Lifts $60 Million From Andreessen Horowitz, Sees 30,000 Rides A Week A Year After Launch

It was almost one year ago (to the day!) that my colleague Kim Mai-Cutler wrote our first store on Lyft, and how the company was going to offer some lower-priced competition to on-demand ride leader Uber in San Francisco. Now, 366 days later, Lyft is celebrating the anniversary of that launch with some huge news: It’s raised a $60 million round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The new funding will give Lyft a huge shot in the arm as it plans to expand aggressively both in the U.S. and internationally, according to founder John Zimmer. And it will have Andreessen Horowitz to help, as a16z general partner Scott Weiss will be joining the board and the firm will be lending some of its operational experience to Lyft as it scales up.

“Andreessen Horowitz has demonstrated that they are the top VCs in the world to work alongside entrepreneurs and build real and established businesses,” Zimmer told me. “It’s great to work alongside someone like Scott, and Mark and Ben, who have built really large companies and are willing to roll up their sleeves and work alongside us.”

“This is why [Andreessen Horowitz] came together as an organizing principle. All of us have scaled companies,” Weiss said. As it pertains to Lyft and it’s growth moving forward: “Now it’s an execution play of bringing this out to the entire world. It’s about, ‘How do you bring in management talent and move faster than you thought you could?’ We’re going to put the full weight of the firm behind [Lyft] doing that.”

In addition to its new funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lyft is also confirming a $15 million round led by Founders Fund, which we reported on earlier this year. Altogether, the company has raised a total of about $83 million since being founded as Zimride in 2007. Along with Weiss and founders Zimmer and Logan Green, the Lyft board of directors also includes Founders Fund principal Geoff Lewis, as well as Raj Kapoor, who had invested in the company as managing director of Mayfield Fund.

30,000 RIDES A WEEK

The funding comes as Lyft is already growing rapidly in all of its markets, including San Francisco, where it competes against ride share offerings from Uber and SideCar. There’s also growing adoption of taxi e-hail apps such as Flywheel and hybrid taxi-community app InstantCab. With mounting competition, Lyft has more than doubled its number of drivers in its launch market, and is still trying to keep up with demand.

The incredible growth that Lyft has shown is one thing that impressed Weiss and Andreessen, as they evaluated the company for investment. “Two months ago, they were doing 14,000 rides a week,” Weiss told me. “Now they’re doing 30,000 rides a week.”

Lyft is also seeing fast adoption in new markets. It launched service in Los Angeles in January,Seattle in March, and Chicago earlier this month. In each case, both the number of drivers and passengers who have signed on in the first several weeks of a new market has outpaced that of the one which came before it.

With the new funding in place, Lyft plans to accelerate its expansion schedule going forward. The company brought on Cherry co-founder Travis VanderZanden to lead operations and, with three or four launches under its belt, the team think it’s got its expansion playbook down. Lyft will be hiring in all aspects of its business — community, engineering, operations, and public policy — as it plans to scale globally. Yes, globally.

SAFETY FIRST

While it plans to expand into a number of new markets, the Lyft team recognizes that there will be challenges on the regulatory front as it attempts to get regulators on board with the idea of on-demand ride-sharing services. Competitor SideCar has faced regulatory scrutiny in a number of new markets that it has launched in, including Austin, Philadelphia, and New York City.

So how does Lyft plan to convince regulators that its service should be allowed to operate? Safety is key.

“I think this is the year for a lot of that [regulation] to get ironed out,” Zimmer told me. “Our approach is and always will be to work together with regulators and stress what’s important, which is safety. I think technology can actually get us to a safer place.”

For Lyft, that includes background checks and driver safety checks. But the company goes above and beyond that, trying to hire drivers who are actually, you know, friendly and nice to talk to. And, of course, it ties everything back to an identity layer, requiring all drivers and passengers to connect to a Facebook account. That helps to ensure that, even if something does go wrong, Lyft has a way to identify both parties in the case of a ride gone bad.

Weiss admits that requiring someone’s real identity through Facebook Connect could limit the potential market in some ways, but it also builds a required level of trust between driver and passenger. Breaking that trust barrier is necessary when you’re talking about peer-to-peer services, and Lyft appears to have succeeded. For instance, more than 50 percent of Lyft passengers are women, Weiss notes.

So far, its safety record is one of the main reasons that Lyft has won over regulators in jurisdictions like California. And it’s a key part of Lyft’s plan to get regulators in upcoming expansion markets to allow ride sharing in their cities.

AIRBNB FOR TRANSPORTATION?

Lyft has plenty of work ahead, Zimmer admits. But he’s confident that the company is on the right track to bring peer-to-peer rides to the world, and in doing so, fundamentally improve the transportation industry. About 80 percent of seats in cars are empty today, and Lyft wants to change that. The funding is just a small part of what will help get the company there, as Lyft is still on “page one” of a 100-page story, Zimmer says.

“For us, raising money is not what we set out to do,” Zimmer tells me. “We want to change the world and create a new form of transportation. Now we have all the ingredients we need to build out our community and make transportation more affordable and efficient.”

For Weiss, the idea of establishing a peer-to-peer marketplace around transportation was fundamentally different from what others in the space were doing, and part of what attracted him to Lyft’s model. “It wasn’t that Lyft was using smart phone technology to make existing transportation systems [like cabs and limos] better,” Weiss told me. “It was using the existing capacity of cars already on the road.”

The end result, they hope, will be a more efficient use of existing resources. In that way, Lyft reminds Weiss a whole of Airbnb, another company that Andreessen Horowitz made a big bet on. Will Lyft do to transportation what Airbnb did to the tourism and hospitality industry? Only time will tell, but the folks at Andreessen Horowitz sure hope so.

Evernote Adds Reminders To Help Users With To-Do’s, Tasks & Projects

Evernote Adds Reminders To Help Users With To-Do’s, Tasks & Projects

For those who use Evernote as a to-do list application, the service just became more useful today with the launch of a much-requested feature: reminders. Available to both Evernote and Evernote Business users on Mac, iOS and web (to start), the option now appears as an alarm clock icon at the top-right of the note on Mac and web, and the bottom of the note on mobile (iPhone and iPad).

Though a seemingly minor addition, the feature actually addresses the top three user requests, Evenote’s VP of Marketing, Andrew Sinkov, explains in the official announcement about the release. Besides the reminders themselves, users wanted a way to more quickly created note-based to-do lists as well as pin notes to the top of their Note list. Now, all of these items are supported.

Reminders are simple to use – you just click the button, add a time and time, and then you’ll get both an in-app alarm as well as an optional email when a reminder is due. The note title will also appear in a new section at the top of your Note list, and you can reorganize Reminders by dragging them around. When the task is complete, you tap the check or, on iOS, swipe to remove the Reminder from your list.

Though everyday organizers will appreciate the addition, of course, the feature is also useful for Business users, and it’s supported in Evernote’s shared notebooks.

The end result turns a shared notebook into a something that’s sort of like a very basic project management utility. Evernote itself uses Reminders for the company’s Video Projects, Sinkov says. Reminders could also appeal as an alternative to the common hack of using Calendar appointments when all you really needed was a simple reminder, not a scheduled meeting.

Evernote makes a few other suggestions for Reminders which also see in encroaching more into the calendaring space, including birthday reminders and doctor’s appointments (with notes and questions attached), as well as packing checklists.

The company is now working to bring the feature to other platforms, and expand its functionality in the future.

Yahoo Acquires Gaming Infrastructure Startup PlayerScale

Another day, another acquisition by Yahoo.

Yahoo said this morning it’s acquiredPlayerScale, a California-based startup that makes software infrastructure for cross-platform gaming. Financial details haven’t been disclosed.

PlayerScale, which was self-funded and cash-flow positive as of this past January, was founded in 2011. According to a VentureBeat article also from January, the company had a staff of 14. It’s not clear yet how many staff are involved and will be joining Yahoo — we’ve reached out for details and will update this with any information we receive. Update: Yahoo tells us that 7 people from PlayerScale are joining Yahoo as part of the transaction.

The four-year-old PlayerScale says its platform now has more than 150 million players, which marks significant growth from just this past January when our own Anthony Ha reported the platform had crossed the 100 million user line. For now this does not look like a straight acqui-hire situation, as both Yahoo and PlayerScale say the gaming platform will remain active post-acquisition and continue to be developed.

Here is a statement provided by Yahoo PR:

“The team has built an incredible gaming platform that is used by over 150 million players worldwide. We intend to continue to support and grow PlayerScale’s technology, and we look forward to building great new experiences on Yahoo! using the PlayerScale platform.”

And here is PlayerScale CEO Jesper Jensen‘s blog post on the deal:

“Today is a great day — both in our journey with PlayerScale and for users of our Player.IO product. We are happy to announce the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform: we have been acquired by Yahoo!. And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!

Our goal has always been to help developers build the best possible games, without having to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure required to operate today’s biggest successes. In working with the folks at Yahoo!, it has become clear that we share this passion.

We have spent the past four years growing a three-person startup into a product that powers games played by over 150 million people worldwide and we are adding over 400,000 new users every day. In the last four months alone, we have increased our daily user growth rate by almost sixty percent. With Yahoo!’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before. We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming — whether it’s casual, social or mobile.

Today marks a milestone for PlayerScale and I want to sincerely thank the team, our developers and millions of users for the adventure so far and can promise there will be more to come.