“In the Studio” at TechCrunch TV this week welcomes a former California resident and current investor back to the west coast, where he and his partners have embarked on a new journey to build out a physical presence in Silicon Valley and San Francisco for one of the most dynamic business groups in the world.
Ajay Agarwal, a managing director with Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), is leading the charge of building his firm’s west coast offices and unveiling a brand new $600m fund, announced a few weeks ago in The New York Times. That’s a whole lot of money to invest in new consumer, enterprise, and mobile opportunities. This is sort of a personal homecoming for Agarwal, who went to Stanford years ago as a undergraduate computer science student and founded a company while he was in school. Now, after nearly ten years with Bain Capital in Boston, he’s leading his team here in California, comprised of Sahil Gupta, Indy Guha, and Adam Marchick, as it it were a startup, too. → Read More
Mobile app developer Rovio has famously turned its Angry Birds game into a popular toy franchise, but most other new-fangled gaming companies haven’t spent much energy going this route. But now social gaming leader Zynga is, per a big licensing deal with Hasbro. → Read More
Over the last decade the major music labels — and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America — have established a repeated pattern of attacking consumers in the name of squelching illegal file-sharing. Piracy, they claim, has been the industry’s undoing, accounting for an over 50% drop in sales since 1999 (the industry likes to discount the impact of legal per-song music downloads via services like iTunes, and the myriad other changes facilitated by the rise of high-speed Internet connections).
Their efforts to combat piracy are often draconian: threatening tens of thousands of people with lawsuits claiming obscenely high damages; attempting to coordinate their threats with consumers’ ISPs; and, most recently, supporting legislation like SOPA and PIPA that would undermine the fabric of the Internet. Hell, Universal once pulled down a 30 second YouTube video of a dancing baby because the baby had the audacity to dance to a Prince song.
Which is why my jaw dropped when I saw that VEVO, a property jointly owned by some of the biggest record labels in the world, was showing a pirated stream of an ESPN football game at its Sundance PowerStation venue last month — on no fewer than two televisions, and a pair of laptops. → Read More
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and the majority of us are likely scrambling to find that special gift. (The rest of us, meanwhile, are cursing couples.) A Valentine’s Day gift is usually more important than others because it’s a one-on-one situation, unlike Christmas or birthdays. Just one gift, to just one person — and it better be good.
With that in mind, I’d like to address an article out of AllThingsD this morning that sourced information from PriceGrabber’s Valentine’s Day Dashboard Report. The report took information from February 4 through February 5, finding that various tablets, TVs and phones are hot items for gift-crazed Valentines.
The information itself isn’t that intriguing, but it did get me thinking about handing out gadgetry as a gift. → Read More
It won’t stop with Google Search Plus Your World. When asked if we should expect more integrations of Google+ into Google products, G+ director of engineering David Glazer said at today’s Inside Social Apps 2012 conference, ”Yes, where it’s good for the user. I think there’s more places to make people happy by showing them content they care about.” At the first major speaking engagement about its social network, Glazer also discussed user acquisition, monetization, and support for brands. → Read More
As part of its 2012 US Digital Future in Focus whitepaper, comScore looked at the online ad landscape and found a mix of old and new names. The report includes a list of the top 10 display advertisers in the United States (all of this data is US-only), as measured by impressions. As in previous years, AT&T topped the list, but there’s a newcomer — Google, which delivered 40.4 billion ads for products like Chrome, Google Offers, and Google+.
Large brand advertising on the Internet is growing in general, comScore says. To quantify that, it measured the number of advertisers delivering at least 1 billion impressions per quarter. There were 145 advertisers in that league during the final quarter of 2011, up 38 percent from the same period in 2010. → Read More
Television is in trouble. Americans streamed 43.5 billion videos in December 2011, up 44% since December 2010, according to comScore’s 2012 US Digital Future In Focus report released today. The study also showed that 105.1 million Americans now watch videos online each day, up 43% from 73.7 million in 2010.
comScore says YouTube is largely driving this, and that average minutes per video view, average videos watched per user, and total ads streamed are way up as well. TV and film studios should take notice and consider how they can create companion content to engage this growing audience. → Read More
Some of us can’t be bothered to check in, but still want to find interesting people nearby. The challenge for developers is how to do this in a way that is both useful and not creepy. Glancee, available for both iOS and Android, gets closer to solving these problems than most I’ve seen.
The app lets you sign in with Facebook, then it shows you people within 100 yards, or one, two, or ten miles who have things in common. In some ways this sounds similar another app I recently covered, Highlight — but there are key differences, that will make each app appeal to different sets of users. → Read More
In December, Eric covered Open Home Pro, a startup that lets realtors sell homes via their iPads. Today, there comes a similar effort from Pixloo, except this service is designed for use by anyone – realtors and homeowners alike. With Pixloo, you can upload information about your home, including text, photos and even videos and then immediately export that data to major real estate sites including Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com and others, all for free.
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The Pirate Bay, in many ways, is disappearing. It is one of the most popular torrent sites on the web and its database of millions of torrent files – essentially pointers to pieces of files hosted elsewhere – has long been the go-to spot for budding pirates around the world. While it still exists in spirit, the admins are now moving all of the torrent files off the site and are instead offering magnet links. This is an important distinction that will move the locus of general piracy from a single site to any number of sites, reducing the Pirate Bays importance as a source. → Read More
Remember when the iPhone app GLMPS launched last summer, seemingly heralding the start of a new image format that blended static photos and video? No? That’s OK. Today, there’s a new twist on the idea of reinventing the mobile photo, this time by turning static photos into animated ones. With the newly launched app called Cinemagram, you can turn your iPhone pics into animated gifs in a matter of seconds.
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comScore has released its ‘explicit’ U.S. search data for January of this year and while Google and Microsoft Bring’s search share continues to grow, Yahoo’s share dropped both year over year and month over month. This comes after Bing overtook Yahoo in terms of search queries for the first time in December. While Bing grew slightly from December 2011 to January, Google reached its highest share since December 2010 this past month.
Google search queries increased 6% year over year in January, to 66.2%, compared with 65.9% in December 2011 and 65.6% in January 2011. Bing queries increased 21% year over year in January to 15.2%, compared with 15.1% in December 2011 and 13.1% in January 2011. Yahoo queries are on a downward spiral, decreasing 8% year over year in January to 14.1%, compared with 14.5% in December 2011, 15.1% in November 2011 and 16.1% in January 2011. Yikes.
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After hitting 2 million members at the end of last month, design shopping startup Fab.com is today rolling out new iOS applications that offer a number of new features and improvements. In addition to an updated layout, search and navigational elements, one of the apps’ biggest new features is the inclusion of the recently launched new storefronts called “Fab Shops.”
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Here’s a fun example of the original programming that YouTube is supposed to be investing in these days — a relay from Santa Monica to San Diego. With lightsabers.
Geek celebrity Chris Hardwick is announcing the event, dubbed Course of the Force, on the YouTube blog. Hardwick hosts the popular Nerdist podcast, and he plans to launch a Nerdist YouTube channel in April,which he says will include “Neil Patrick Harris, Rob Zombie, Awkward Family Videos, The Dudesons and The Kids in the Hall,” plus more programming that covers “gaming, science, tech and cosplay.” → Read More
Consider today the end of an era for one of the most iconic brands in the imaging industry. While their bankruptcy protection filing from last month signaled the need for some drastic action, it’s still a bit of a shock to see Kodak announce that they are putting all of their digital cameras, camcorders, and picture frames out to pasture.
When all is said and done, Kodak expects annual operating savings of around $100 million, but the bigger loss is going to be that of a cultural icon. Kodak will still exist, sure, but primarily as a purveyor of desktop printers as well as online and retail photo printing services.
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The “toast” is an age-old, time-honored tradition, where we raise a glass to pay tribute to — and express our goodwill towards — friends, loved ones, and sometimes even our fellow man. They are even known to be meaningfully punctuated with by a good drinking song or two. And now, thanks to BizRate.com and Shopzilla Founder Farhad Mohit, there is, as they say, an app for that expression of goodwill. Yes, “cheers” is no longer simply a word that accompanies toasts — or the place where everyone knows your name — it’s also the “world’s first positivity app,” for the iPhone. → Read More
According to a new report from Nielsen, the number of U.S. homes that have broadband Internet, but only free, broadcast TV, is on the rise. Although representing less than 5% of TV households, the number has grown 22.8% over the past year.
In addition, the behaviors within these homes are unique. These broadband/broadcast-only households stream video twice as much as the general population, says Nielsen, and they watch half as much TV. → Read More
It would seem that representatives from Change.org and SumOfUs.org have organized a global protest against Apple’s use of Foxconn and other Chinese manufacturing plants to build the iPhone and iPad.
This comes on the heels of a New York Times series exposing harsh working conditions in said plants. 250,000 people have signed petitions calling for a “worker protection strategy”, which will today be delivered to Apple stores in a number of major cities, including New York. → Read More
Appcelerator, the company behind the popular Titanium app-building platform, is announcing its third acquisition today. The company is buying Cocoafish, a mobile app infrastructure provider that lets developers add various features to apps including messaging capabilities, push notifications, photo uploads, checkins and other social features, storage, discussion forums and more. Although the name implies an iOS affiliation, Cocoafish is actually a cross-platform backend service provider supporting iOS, Android, and even Flash and Ruby.
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Don’t you just hate when you’re out skateboarding, minding your own business, and suddenly one of the wheels comes off and you break a kneecap? Well now there’s a new startup called BoardProspects, which aims to help companies build better boards. A quick glance at their website reveals that the company is not going to be able to solve your skateboarding woes, however, but it may help your business roll more smoothly.
If your company is in need of new members for the board of directors (cough Yahoo cough) or the advisory board (cough Honeywell cough), you may want to give Boston-based BoardProspects’ upcoming offering a second look. → Read More
