Thursday 23 May 2013

Loom Is Building A Better iCloud


Loom Is Building A Better iCloud


Loom-logo

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.
Loom - Home
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%


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


google_cloud_logo

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


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


Lyft Highway shot

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

reminder_add_mac


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.
reminders_list2
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.
reminder_email
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


Yahoo Acquires Gaming Infrastructure Startup PlayerScale


playerscale logo

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.

Twitter Launches TV Ad Targeting, Twitter Amplify For Real-Time Videos In Stream


Twitter Launches TV Ad Targeting, Twitter Amplify For Real-Time Videos In Stream


ITweetNY

Twitter today made the latest push in its bid to cozy up to Madison Avenue and the world of big-budget advertising, by tapping more into the kind of mainstream mediums where advertisers like to spend their money. Today the big focus is TV and your living room. In New York, the company announced Twitter Amplify, a way of bringing real-time video into the site, with initial partners including the broadcasters BBC America, FOX, Fuse and The Weather Channel. And it also announced TV ad targeting, one of the first fruits of the company’s acquisition of BlueFin Labs.
Twitter ad targeting works like this: an advertiser or media buyer uses a special dashboard that Twitter has created for the service, which lets a brand monitor when an ad has aired on TV. Through this, the campaign manager can then send out Promoted Tweets that coordinate with them. They synchronise, Twitter says, using “video fingerprinting technology to automatically detect when and where a brand’s commercials are running on TV, without requiring that advertiser to do any manual tracking or upload media plan details,” Michael Fleischman, one of the co-founders of BlueFin Labs, and now a product manager for Twitter, notes in a blog post.
Through this, the advertiser is able to measure how socially responsive people are to the TV campaigns and vice versa. Using Twitter handles and hashtags on the TV ads will be how those advertisers shuttle people to the social network.
Twitter says it will be able to determine where and when an ad ran on TV, as well as track those who have subsequently tweeted about the ad and the TV program that it ran against. “We believe a user engaged enough with a TV show to tweet about it very likely saw the commercials as well,” the company notes on its blog.
The company is banking on a crucial stat as the leap of faith that this will all work: it says 64 percent of mobile-centric users on Twitter use it in front of the TV at home.
For now Twitter’s targeting service will be available only in the U.S.

BROADCASTING CLIPS

Meanwhile, the instream broadcasting clips that are part of Twitter Amplify, starting with BBC America, FOX, Fuse and The Weather Channel, will be very closely tied to ads and video directly on the platform. This is something that Twitter has already been doing with partnerships with, for example, the NBA, where a video also features a link to an ad:
twitter amplify
What’s interesting is that it looks like Twitter will be limiting use of this new kind of Twitter card to paying users, with Glenn Brown, director of promoted content and sponsorships, noting that they will be “powered by Promoted Tweets.” The idea appears to be that rather than replacing the TV experience (not yet at least!) these in-stream videos will be used as “spectacular, timely content that rounds out their TV experience or reminds them to tune in.” In other words, ways of getting people to the TV with teaser clips rather than simply offering them a way of seeing what they want on Twitter and cutting out the tube altogether.
Speaking at the New York event, CEO Dick Costolo talked about how the company has made advertising a more “frictionless” experience because of its emphasis of real-time updates. It’s clear that adding more broadcasting-like experiences into Twitter will further that concept.
The company during its event also threw in some fun ad-land perks: a Q&A session with Glee actressJane Lynch and a Tweeting vending machine churning out swag.
Twitter has been making increasingly strong moves this year to get its platform to be more ad-friendly (and revenue-friendly). That kicked off in February with the launch of an advertising API so that larger advertisers can better manage their campaigns on Twitter; an improved advertising analytics dashboard; and Google AdWords-style keyword targeting (TC coverage herehere and here). Just earlier this week the company also unveiled the official launch of Lead Generation Cards, something Twitter had been testing for a while already, which lets advertisers include actions like requests for more information that users can get automatically by clicking a button in an advertising tweet. (You can see how this last one also sets the stage for Twitter making the leap into commerce, with one-click purchasing.)
While Twitter has not provided any official public guidance on how much it expects to make in advertising this year or in the future, there has been a lot of speculation about the number because many expect Twitter to go public, with a likely date in late 2013 or 2014, according to observers. A report from eMarketer in March noted that it was raising forecasts for the company to $583 million in 2013 and $950 million in ad sales in 2014, 60% coming from mobile.
The stats that Twitter’s president of global revenue, Adam Bain, provided last year shows just how much the company has grown over the last year. Bain noted at the time that Twitter had 140M+ active users; now that figure is estimated to be closer to 300 million.
Bain also had noted that 55% of users access Twitter on mobile, with 40% growth quarter over quarter, and that among Twitter’s active users, only some 60% actually tweet, but all of them “listen.” And in a sign that Twitter was always going to figure out a better way of leveraging ads on the platform, even a year ago, some 79% of people on the site were already following brands.
More to come.

JustFab Goes Up A Size In Europe, Acquires Fab Shoes To Take Its Fashion Subscription Service To France And Spain


JustFab Goes Up A Size In Europe, Acquires Fab Shoes To Take Its Fashion Subscription Service To France And Spain


the fab shoes

JustFab, the subscription-based fashion commerce site, is putting the $109 million that it has raised so far to use: today it is announcing the acquisition of The Fab Shoes, a European e-commerce shoe club in France and Spain, to build out its global operations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The deal will give JustFab a stronger foothold in the European market: it already has operations in Germany, where it has a European HQ in Berlin, as well as in the UK; now it will be adding France and Spain, with the integrated site coming in July 2013. Growth in Europe has been coming at a fast pace for the company so far. In 2012, JustFab did $2 million in sales, co-founder and co-CEO Adam Goldenberg tells TechCrunch (he shares the CEO role with co-founder Don Resller). ”This year we are on track to exceed $30 million.” The Fab Shoes has slightly more than 500,000 users; combining that with the 1.5 million across Germany and the UK, JustFab will now have over 2 million members, with 15 million worldwide, and is on track to do $250 million in revenue globally ($215 million in the U.S.).
Call it a funny coincidence, but this isn’t the first acquisition JustFab has made of a would-be competitor with the word “Fab” in its name. Earlier this year, the company acquired FabKids to spearhead a move into children’s fashion. “We have a running joke that whoever is called ‘Fab’, we’ll buy them,” says CEO Adam Goldenberg. (And indeed that may not extend to the biggest Fab of all, Fab.com, which apparently is now raising a $250 million round at a $1 billion valuation.)
More seriously, Goldenberg says that his company is not singularly focused on buying up so-called “clones” of its own service. Taking a lesson from some of the challenges companies like Groupon have had digesting large, inorganic acquisitions to scale up their services — from what we understand Groupon has yet to migrate many of its extensive global assets on to a single common platform with the U.S. operation — JustFab has a different approach.
As Goldenberg describes it, the company’s M&A policy is based on acquiring smaller businesses that complement JustFab’s and are also built on the same subscription model. This means that they can be easily integrated into the bigger company’s infrastructure.
There is another reason for this: it’s increasingly a challenge for e-commerce fashion companies these days to raise money, with much of it going instead to those that have proven to have the most scale. “This is part of the reason why we raised such a big round last year,” Goldenberg noted. The Fab Shoes, founded in early 2012, was raising financing — or trying to — when JustFab came knocking.
“Scale and infrastructure are key if you want to grow quickly in the fashion business,” said Pablo Szefner, CEO of The Fab Shoes, in a statement. “While The Fab Shoes has had a lot of early success, we are thrilled to take our core business to the next level. With JustFab, we can provide our existing members and potential new customers with excellent styles, quality and service for an outstanding shopping experience.”
“We met Pablo and Xisco” — Pablo Szefner, CEO of The Fab Shoes and Xisco de la Calle, its COO — “and we decided this would be a great talent acquisition as well.” De la Calle will become the VP of operations for JustFab Europe, while Pablo becomes General Manager for France and Spain, overseeing 12 employees in Barcelona and Paris.
While some have waved a red flag over subscription-commerce sites — the implication being that they are not transparent enough about how they charge users on a regular basis — Goldenberg is insistent that this is a model that works well and is a hit with its customers, and investors. “There is a subscription commerce funding craze right now,” he says. “But because it is so low-cost you have to have the scale to make the economics of it work. We have millions of satisfied customers.”
Looking ahead, he says the company is planning to launch more products beyond the shoes that are the basis of the company’s model. In addition to childrens’ clothes that will go online in June, there is already denim and handbags that altogether make up about 30% of the company’s sales. And he hints that there will be another fashion category being launched later this year. “We’re building the next generation of H&M and Zara,” he says. Through all of that, “we’re staying entirely focused on subscription-based commerce.”

Pinterest API Documentation Briefly Reappears On New Developer Site


Pinterest API Documentation Briefly Reappears On New Developer Site


Pinterest Pin It Forward UK

Remember how over a year ago, everyone was all excitedabout the forthcoming Pinterest API? CEO Ben Silbermanneven teased its release in a March 2012 email to Pinterest users detailing a Terms of Service change. And API documentation even once popped up on the site, only later to lead to a 404? Well, don’t get all excited again, but the API documentation has returned…um, sorta.*
This week, when Pinterest announced support for more pin types (product, recipe, and movie pins) as well as a new Pin It button that works in mobile apps, it also launched a developer site at developers.pinterest.com. The company says the site will be the home to some of the existing documentation and resources that had previously lived on the Pinterest Business site, as well as the new information on the pins and the mobile Pin It button.
“Over time, as more tools become available to third parties, we will continue to post resources on this site,” a Pinterest spokesperson says.
New tools like that long-awaited API, perhaps?
Though not directly linked on the site itself, an easy guess at the URL structure led to this –  http://developers.pinterest.com/api/ - a section which contains some half-written (if that) documentation about the Pinterest API. Details are limited, but the site speaks of a restful, JSON API and offers a couple of sections with very little additional info. (See screenshot below).
Pinterestapi
Previously, the company had been asking developers interested in an API to fill out the formhere to “be one of the first to know when it’s ready.” However, several very interested developers tell us that they have yet to hear from Pinterest about the API or even the new Developer site itself, in fact.
* Of course, after asking Pinterest about this page, it disappeared. (The API page now redirects to the main Developers site). Sorry you can’t see it for yourself.
“We are still working on finishing up this page. It is currently not linked to from anywhere else on the site,” the spokesperson says. “We’re still working on some kinks and want to make all of the content and what’s available is great before releasing.”
This isn’t the first time API docs appeared on Pinterest’s homepage before disappearing, so this appearance alone doesn’t guarantee a timeframe for its arrival. But it’s promising.
Plus, Pinterest’s recent launch of richer pins and mobile buttons shows that the company is now moving forward with its plans to turn Pinterest into a platform. And an API is a necessary part of that longer-term goal, in order to enable developers to build rich, third-party apps on top of Pinterest’s service.

TaskRabbit Debuts Tools For Hiring Ongoing Temp Work As It Hones Focus On Business Users


TaskRabbit Debuts Tools For Hiring Ongoing Temp Work As It Hones Focus On Business Users


TaskRabbit for Business

TaskRabbit, the San Francisco startup that hasmade a name for itself by helping people connect with odd jobs, is now a place where you can find a real job too.
Today TaskRabbit is launching a new set of tools in its three-month-old TaskRabbit for Business portal that are designed to help companies hire ongoing temporary workers for jobs that will span over multiple days, weeks, or months.
The TaskRabbit for Business portal launched in early March at South By Southwest, with the aim of helping companies there bring on staffers to help out over the course of the several-week festival. Since then, TaskRabbit for Business has emerged as the company’s fastest-growing segment of users, chief revenue officer Anne Raimondi told me in an interview this week, with 16,000 businesses signing up over the past several months. TaskRabbit now has 11,000 workers on its platform, 10 percent of whom use TaskRabbit as their sole source of income.
With the newly expanded features, now businesses in all nine markets throughout the US where TaskRabbit is active can use TaskRabbit for Business to bring on a W-2 employee for work that takes up more than 15 hours per week. TaskRabbit, which will take a 26 percent commission on all W-2 classified jobs (normal tasks charge a 20 percent fee), will handle all compliance paperwork, including payroll taxes, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. Traditional temp agencies typically take a 40 to 60 percent commission, Raimondi says.
TRJOBS Logged OutIt’s a big launch for the 65-person TaskRabbit that puts it squarely into competition with a new set of companies — the temp hiring industry is estimated to be worth some $230 billion annually and is dominated by huge global firms such as Adecco and Manpower. But in a way, it’s a very natural evolution for TaskRabbit, Raimondi said.
“We built this out because it was the single biggest ask from our business users. Customers were already trying to do it on the site,” Raimondi said, pointing to TaskRabbit’s practice of runningcomprehensive background checks on all the people working in its system. “But the pieces that were missing were behind the scenes — paperwork processing, tax compliance, W2s, workers compensation, payroll, unemployment insurance, time sheeting.”
Temp jobs will appear in the same stream as regular tasks on the TaskRabbit dashboard, but with a small icon of a briefcase to designate that they’re for ongoing positions. There are some small changes with how errand runners will display interest in the positions — pulling in more detailed resume information from LinkedIn, writing a cover letter, and the like.
Small business task posting already accounts for 30 percent of the company’s sales, despite being a minority of the company’s users, Raimondi said. It stands to reason that making it easier for companies to do more things through TaskRabbit could allow the company to capture a bigger slice of the cash that goes back and forth in the business world. With enterprise hotter than ever, it’s no surprise to see startups that have made their names on the consumer front home in on the enterprise world as well. This could be a big boost for TaskRabbit’s revenue, if it all works out well.

GREE China Shutdown Gets Uglier With Accusations of Denying Aid to Pregnant Employee


GREE China Shutdown Gets Uglier With Accusations of Denying Aid to Pregnant Employee


Last week, employees reported that Japanese social gaming giant GREE had just announced it was shutting down its entire China branch, and laying off the entire staff. This news was subsequently confirmed by GREE, and the only remaining question seemed to be how GREE would compensate its employees.
A week later, that question remains unanswered, as GREE’s proposed settlement has left many employees unsatisfied. One worker told the Beijing Times that part of the problem is that many employees put in massive amounts of overtime with the expectation that this dedication would be rewarded in the long run, and that GREE’s compensation plan doesn’t account for that. But a company spokesman told the paper that dissatisfied employees were a small minority of the total staff at GREE China.
But the real trouble for GREE from a PR perspective is that one of the laid-off employees is eight months pregnant. According to her, the loss of her job means the loss of access to pregnancy insurance she’s been paying into for ten years in addition to a maternity leave allowance, and GREE executives and the company’s lawyer have reportedly said they will not be offering her any additional support. (We’ve contacted GREE to see what they say about this and will update this post when we hear back from them). The woman says she has already filed a labor dispute with the relevant authorities in Beijing. A Beijing-based lawyer told the Beijing Times that GREE’s refusal to offer her additional support may violate Chinese labor laws, which make it difficult to terminate the contracts of pregnant women without offering significant additional compensation.
Whatever GREE ultimately decides (or is forced by the law) to do, the report has already damaged the company’s reputation. On weibo, the pregnant woman’s story has beenreposted hundreds of times, and almost all the comments are in support of her rather than the company. It’s hard to believe that GREE couldn’t have seen this coming.
Frankly, whatever the law says shouldn’t matter much one way or the other; GREE stepping up to help out this woman ought to be a no-brainer, and I expect we’ll see it do that soon. Even if the law is on your side, it’s never good to bully a pregnant woman, and if paying for one birth and some extra months of maternity leave is what it takes, then GREE should just chock that up as part of the cost of shutting down its China office rather than trying to fight it in the legal system (and destroying its own reputation in China in the process).

New Xbox Fails To Excite Investors As Microsoft, AMD Stocks Stays Flat While Sony Shoots Up 9%


New Xbox Fails To Excite Investors As Microsoft, AMD Stocks Stays Flat While Sony Shoots Up 9%


Sony Vs Microsoft

Wall Street apparently wanted something more revolutionary out of the Xbox One that launched today, as Microsoft’s stock is down 0.66 percent. In turn, investors on news of a potential spin off, pushed Sony shares up 9 percent, coincidentally just after Microsoft announced its answer to the Sony Playstation.
Microsoft’s debut of the Xbox One today touted features including live TV, Skype group video chat, split-screen multi-tasking, voice command, social recommendations, a more sensitive Kinect, and stronger hardware for next-generation graphics. A deep partnership with Electronic Arts, Steven Spielberg’s involvement in a Halo TV series for Xbox, and exclusive early access to downloadable content for the new Call Of Duty game were all announced as well. Still, there wasn’t one thing that left people saying “PlayStation is screwed.”
stock prices
The complexities of integrating with live TV and the lack of an obvious killer feature contributed to $MSFT staying flat on the day, closing down 0.66 percent, or $0.23, to $34.85. AMD, maker of the bits inside the Xbox One, also ended slightly down today, closing at 4.02, down 1.95% on the day. Both Microsoft and AMD are on an upward swing, most notable since the beginning of May when the invite for today’s announcement went out.
At the same time, Sony’s stock rose 9.25 percent, or $1.94, to reach $22.91. According to Nikkei, Sony is considering spinning off its entertainment division — a part of the company oddly left out of  CEO Kazuo Hirai One Sony initiative.
But Sony wasn’t quiet on the eve of the new Xbox reveal, either. The company tried to hijack gamers’ attention to updates on Twitter and Facebook this morning with ads touting the June 10th reveal of its new PlayStation console at E3. PS4 ads told viewers they could “See It First” by RSVPing to watch Sony’s event, and offered a teaser video hosted on both Sony’s site and YouTube.
Playstation Twitter Ad
Some of what Sony has in store for the PlayStation 4 was debuted at an event in February, but details were scarce. The corporation will need a hit, though, as Sony has been hemorrhaging money with a $5.74 billion loss in its 2012 fiscal year.
The real duel will go down at E3 where both Sony and Microsoft will spill more of the beans on their new consoles. Xbox One’s incremental updates could certainly be outshined if Sony can unveil some significant advancements, not just lifeless game demos and endless specs.
Facebook Playstation Ad

Google X Acquires Makani Power And Its Airborne Wind Turbines


Google X Acquires Makani Power And Its Airborne Wind Turbines


makanicloud

After previously investing in the company, Google has now acquired Makani Power, a green energy startup that is currently building airborne wind turbines. The acquisition was first reported in Brad Stone’sBusinessweek story about Google X, and judging from Stone’s story, the team will join Google X. Google invested $10 million in the Alameda, Calif.-based company in 2006 and another $5 million in 2008. As far as we can see, this also marks the first time Google has acquired a company specifically for its Google X skunkworks.
Stone reports that Google CEO Larry Page approved the acquisition, but as Google X’s director Astro Teller notes, Page said that X “could have the budget and the people to go do this, but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future.”
The company was founded by Saul Griffith and Don Montague, a former World Cup windsurfer. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.
Google has confirmed this acquisition and provided us with the following statement from Astro Teller, Google X’s “Captain of Moonshots”:
Creating clean energy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world, and Google for years has been interested in helping to solve this problem.  Makani Power’s technology has opened the door to a radical new approach to wind energy.  They’ve turned a technology that today involves hundreds of tons of steel and precious open space into a problem that can be solved with really intelligent software.  We’re looking forward to bringing them into Google[x].
Makani says it hopes that this acquisition will provide it with “the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels.” The acquisition comes just a week after the company completed the first autonomous flight of its Wing 7 prototype.
Here is how TechCrunch columnist Matylda Czarnecka described the project back in 2012:
The Makani Airborne Wind Turbines, which resemble mini airplanes, are launched when wind speeds reach 3.5 meters per second. Rotors on each blade help propel it into orbit, and double as turbines once airborne. The blades are tethered to the ground with a cord that delivers power to throw them into the sky and receives energy generated by the turbines to be sent to the grid-connected ground station.
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