July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Nextdoor is going mobile. Today, the ‘private social network for neighborhoods’ released an iOS application so people can be connected to what’s going on in their community anytime, anywhere.

Nextdoor raised $40 million in Februrary 2013 to accommodate its rapid growth. In less than a year, it has gone from 3,600 neighborhoods to 12,000 and has a presence in all 50 states. Thirty percent of all visits to the site come through mobile browsers, and there was clearly high demand for a dedicated iPhone app.

Founder Nirav Tolia built Nextdoor after hearing some startling statistics about the state of the American community. Thirty percent of Americans do not know their neighbors by name and yet strong communities are linked to the overall wellbeing of its inhabitants and weak communities make people more vulnerable to safety and security threats.

“There are trends enabled by the intersection of social media and local content,” Tolia said in an interview earlier this year. “People want to come together to create safer neighborhoods, whether it is to track down a lost dog or warn neighbors against suspicious activity. We are helping neighbors help themselves when it comes to crime and safety. Everyone lives in a neighborhood and wants it to be stronger.”

Nextdoor is an online place for real-world neighbors to connect. People post personal profiles and there are discussion forums and news feeds where they can engage with their neighbors. The site’s most recent update focused on crime and safety and added in features like urgent alerts pushed to mobile devices and integration with police and fire departments. Users clearly wanted access to this “lifeline” while they are away from their computer. Now, they can warn neighbors about road construction, share photos of lost pets, report keys found on the sidewalk, or organize people around real-time issues.

David Sze of Greylock Partners, one of Nextdoor’s investors, said the mobile app brings “immediacy and context” to the platform and will help Nextdoor on its mission to “bring back a sense of community to the neighborhood.” Going mobile is an important step for most startups these days, particularly consumer-facing ones, and for a company that specifically deals with the real-world and real-time events, it is crucial.

Nextdoor has raised over $40 million and is based in San Francisco.  There are 48 employees.

Photo Credit: Screenshot 

In other words, the giant that sold almost 400 million phones last year is getting bigger. And faster.

There’s a reason Samsung gobbles up 95 percent of the profits in the Android device market. It knows how to produce, market, distribute, and sell phones and tablets in massive numbers.

And, it doesn’t rest on its laurels.

The company also announced today that it would soon be introducing more color variations. The S4 is currently only available in black or white, or, as Samsung likes to say, Black Forest and White Mist. New color options coming this summer include Blue Arctic, Red Aurora, Purple Mirage, and Brown Autumn.

Meanwhile, five and a half months after the introduction of the iPhone 5, Apple is still not offering varying color options, although they are rumored to be in the product pipeline, probably for a Fall release.

One caveat on the numbers:

Samsung typically counts shipped units as sold units. And, the company very carefully worded its announcement as “global channel sales,” which should likely be construed as units that are sold and delivered to its channel sales partners. So it’s possible that in terms of actual units in the hands of customers, Samsung has not yet hit the 10 million mark.

But there’s no doubt that the device is successful, and will sell a boatload of units.

I still maintain, however, that the extra software, add-ons, and flashy-but-buggy gewgaws Samsung has added to the device will spell the beginning of the end of Samsung’s smartphone dominance. And would suggest people interesting in buying one wait for the Nexus version, which is basically an Galaxy S4 stripped of all Samsung’s software, and featuring a pure Google Android experience.

Image credit: Samsung

Media discovery startup Shazam released a new version of its iPad app today that adds a ton of new features, boosting your ability to identify music, TV shows, and advertising.

Probably the most notable of these additions is the new auto-tagging feature, which allows users to keep the “tag” button on in the background. I spent some time playing with the new app this morning and found it to be much more accurate in tagging TV shows, as well as background music, while watching television. Flipping the channels around gave me a catalog of my viewing, too.

The app also puts a much greater emphasis on TV, with a revised interface that pulls in links to a show’s IMDb, Wikipedia, a list of all the music featured, and more.. This is in line with what new Shazam CEO Rich Riley said was in the pipeline for the company, as VentureBeat reported last month.

However, just because there’s plenty of opportunity to grow Shazam’s business in the realm of TV, that doesn’t mean it’s turning a blind eye to music. The Shazam iPad app will now include auto-tuning integration with two huge streaming services Rdio and Spotify. (Spotify does require a premium membership to hook up the Shazam integration.) There’s also a new mapping tool that shows which songs are getting tagged across the world.

The app is available for free in the iTunes App Store. For a closer look at the app itself, check out the demo video embedded below.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

One of the great misfortunes of the gadget world is that, all too often, the best devices don’t end up being the best-sellers.

HTC knows this reality well. Like fellow smartphone laggard Nokia, the company is really good at making nice phones that not too many people are interested in buying. This is especially true for the HTC One, a device that, despite being quite, nice, is also probably doomed to languish in obscurity.

Or is it? According to an HTC executive, the company has sold five million of its latest device since its launch in March. ”Orders are pretty good so far and are still more than what we can supply,” the unnamed exec told The Wall Street Journal.

While five million in sales sounds promising, there are a few things to keep in mind here. One, “sales” probably refers to the number of devices sold to retailers, not customers. Two, while the One seems to be selling well, it can’t touch Samsung’s Galaxy S IV, which has already passed 10 million in sales.

Another ongoing, more pressing issue relates to the One’s parts. Production of the device has been severely hindered by HTC’s inability to get its hands on enough components from suppliers, who don’t consider HTC a “tier-one” customer. These issues, the exec says, should be worked in the next few months, which should make it easier to fulfill demand, and, potentially, save HTC’s skin.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Days after finalizing a $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, and coming hot on the heels of a massive image-buffing retrofit of the photo-sharing community Flickr, Yahoo has bought yet another company.

Finally, after years of virtual irrelevance at the search/media company, Mayer has Yahoo doing huge and interesting things again.

PlayerScale, a cross-platform game infrastructure startup that provides tools for games played by 150 million users on platforms such as iOS and Android, announced the acquisition on its site today. And — unlike recent Yahoo acquisitions like Astrid – CEO Jesper Jensen said the company would continue to operate as it has, supporting over 2,600 developers and 4,000 games.

In fact, he added, PlayerScale is adding 400,000 users a day.

“With Yahoo’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before,” Jensen said.

Source: Sean Ludwig

Marissa Mayer

That would be a major change from recent Yahoo acquisitions such as Stamped, OnTheAir, Snip.it, Alike, Summly, Jybe, and Astrid, all of which have been shuttered or put on notice. But it makes sense, given PlayerScale’s volume of business and growth rates.

And the move seems to make sense given Yahoo has now signaled a move into casual gaming on iOS, Android, Facebook, the web, and even Xbox.

PlayerScale’s platform helps game developers with pretty much everything they need to make their game platform work, except the game itself. It includes payments, chat, analytics, virtual currencies, distributed caching, authentication, social sign-on, leaderboards, localization, and more.

Here’s CEO Jesper Jensen’s announcement in full:

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.

- Jesper Jensen

Image credit: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Like a polished and mobile-first Craigslist, New York City-based Bondsy is building a social network that lets you trade just about anything with your friends. No strangers allowed.

Bondsy graduated a year ago from TechStars NYC as a simple social network for selling stuff from your phone — but since then it has evolved into a tool that could help you reconnect with your friends in the real world. The company soft-launched in January, but today it’s officially debuting to the world with a marketing push.

So far, people have used the service to trade handwritten letters in exchange for handwritten replies, gadgets for homemade dinners, and my favorite example, bacon for coffee beans.

Diego Zambrano, Bondsy’s founder, CEO, and serious beard curator, tells me that he learned a lot simply by letting users approach the social network as they saw fit.

“If you give tools that allow people to be creative, people get very creative,” Zambrano said in an interview. “If we go beyond transaction and become a platform that allows people to express themselves, that creates a true bond between people. Those are the most exciting things for us.”

The company’s free iPhone app lets you create a trade listing for just about anything. Maybe you want to get rid of your old records, maybe you’re trying to sell a piece of furniture, or maybe you just want to have dinner with your friends. Bondsy appears to be trying to recreate social connections in the real world that were common before social networks pushed us to the digital world.

Unlike most other marketplaces, Bondsy takes a freeform approach to price tags. While there are plenty of Bondsy posts asking for cash, the ones that truly stand out ask for something interesting, like a lunch or dinner. It’s a good way for you to reconnect with people you haven’t seen in a while, but it could be used for just about anything.

In Brazil, Bondsy users are using the social network to sell cars. In China, it’s being used to set up intriguing gamified challenges. Zambrano embraces all of it.

“My take is that we’ve been going through this whole phase of trying to make everything frictionless, and I noticed that the most meaningful experience I’ve had were the ones that actually had some friction,” he said.

To support his move from Brazil to New York City several years ago, Zambrano sold all of his personal possessions on Flickr. While he was able to get rid of his junk, what struck him most about that experience was meeting up with friends to complete the transactions. That sparked the idea to create Bondsy.

To encourage creativity, Bondsy places a premium on privacy. The company decided to build its own social graph, rather than latch onto an existing network like Facebook and Twitter, because it didn’t trust the way other companies managed their privacy settings.

“By building the way we’re building, it directly changes what people share,” Zambrano said. “It directly changes how open people are.”

Bondsy has received seed funding from Thrive Capital, Betaworks, Chris Dixon, David Tisch, and others.

“What is interesting about leaving Bondsy open and not very structured is that we allow our users to define how they want to use it,” Zambrano said. “It’s a sin to kill these possible behaviors by creating too much structure.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mailbox is bringing its war on email inefficiency to another front: the iPad.

The email client, which launched in February on the iPhone, has been one of the most popular ways for iPhone owners to manage and reply to emails. It’s simple, clean, and according to people who use it, gets email out of the way quickly.

Mailbox for iPad, is more of the same and is, at its heart, just a blown-up version of Mailbox for iPhone — so don’t expect any big, earth-shaking changes here. The one notable shift with the app is that the message panel is now on the left side of the screen rather than the right so that it’s consistent with the iPad’s default Mail app. (The app doesn’t work in portrait mode, by the way.)

It’s also notable that Mailbox for iPad comes with no hints of the app’s change in ownership. Dropbox acquired Mailbox a month after its launch, though it doesn’t look like the company is eager to put its stamp on it just yet.

Also, Android owners — don’t feel left out. Mailbox says that it’s also working on a version of the app for Google’s mobile operating system, though there’s no indication of when that app will arrive.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The next time you enter a tiny Shibuya noodle bar, you could end up paying with one of Square’s payment technologies.

The startup announced today that it’s launching in Japan, its second location outside of the U.S. (it hit Canada in October 2012), and its first market outside of of North America. Square partnered with Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Card Corporation (SMCC) to make the move, the same company that helped bring Visa to Japan.

Square’s mobile credit card reader and apps will be free to us, and it’s charging a 3.25 percent transaction fee (slightly higher than the 2.75 percent fee it charges in North America).

It makes sense for Square to target Japan next — it’s a country that’s been heavily dependent on mobile technology long before smartphones were big in the U.S.. Square’s founder Jack Dorsey has also been a big proponent of the Japanese design philosophy wabi-sabi, which focuses on the beauty of impermanent and imperfect things.

Jawfish Games has launched what some very big rivals haven’t been able to do. The Seattle startup is announcing today it has released two of its own real-time multiplayer tournament games on multiple platforms.

The new social-mobile games Jawfish Poker and Jawfish Words allow players to compete against each other in real time for virtual currency and bragging rights. The games are built on a proprietary technology that enables players to chat and play 15 or 20 hands a minute with real friends. Since the poker title launched a week ago, players have already played a million hands.

Jawfish previously launched the technology in the market in a partnership with Big Fish Games. Those companies released an iOS game called Match-Up! by Big Fish. It enables up to 16 friends to compete against each other in live tournaments within the app’s Word, Match-3, or Mahjong minigames. Now Jawfish, headed by former poker star Phil Gordon, is launching games under its own brand name.

“We’re now showing our chops in real-time multiplayer tournaments,” Gordon told GamesBeat.

Gordon said that players will be able to compete against each other across platforms, including iOS, Android, and the web. Jawfish Poker, available now on Apple’s iTunes App Store, focuses on the most important decision at a poker table: “all-in or fold?” It rapidly cycles players through hundreds of opponents in a fast-action game that is meant to look like a game on television.

Gordon led the design of the game. He is known worldwide as one of the best professional poker players. His team includes the engineers who built the hit title Full Tilt Poker, which was a hugely popular online poker game until the federal government shut it down in a regulatory battle in April 2011. A big legal battle ensued, and eventually the government changed its attitude about real-money online gambling. The app finally reopened last November, after rival PokerStars bought Full Tilt Poker. The team, however, moved on.

Jawfish Words is a real-time word-search game. Players compete in three objectives per round, such as High Score, Corners, Longest Word, or Diagonals. The game launched on the Amazon Kindle in May, and it has generated nearly 500,000 tournament entries since its debut. In June, Jawfish Words will debut on iOS, Android, and Facebook. All players will be able to compete in the same field of play.

That’s important so that the game can reach “critical mass,” Gordon said.

“If there are no players, it’s not fun,” he said. “By going cross-platform, it opens it up more and makes critical mass easier to achieve.”

The poker game is a virtual-goods game, where players can purchase extra chips with real money but can’t cash their winnings out.

The company started in January 2012 with eight co-founders, including Gordon. He finished fourth in a worldwide tournament, the World Series Main Event, in 2001. He was also the lead commentator in Bravo’s TV show Celebrity Poker Showdown. And he was the poker analyst for ESPN.com for five years. Gordon has written four books on poker, and they’ve sold more than 500,000 copies. His earliest accomplishment was entering college at age 15.

Gordon said the technology wasn’t possible 18 months ago, but with faster 4G data networking speeds on smartphones, it is quite doable now. The platform sits upon Amazon Web Services. With more than a million tournaments, the entire bandwidth cost has been less than $20, Gordon said.

Jawfish has $3.59 million in funding from Right Side Capital and Founders Fund. The company has 25 employees and is in the midst of hiring 25 more engineers.

Zynga announced last year that it would release real-time multiplayer game tournaments. But it still hasn’t launched those just yet.

“Our job is to take the games you know and reinvent them as multiplayer tournament games,” Gordon said.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy.

You would think that it would be a terrible idea for a company accused of helping teenagers send each other sexually explicit images to feature bikini-clad young girls in their marketing. Most would avoid such direct associations, for good reason – it’s immature, and edgy when it doesn’t need to be.

But not the makers of the enormously popular app, Snapchat, which allows people to send images and videos that “self-destruct” after a few seconds.

The company claims messages are deleted once they are opened, but there have been a series of recent scandals showing that this may not be completely accurate.  Their product is far from perfect, and there are several ways to compromise the protection they offer.  It is never a good idea to send something over the internet that would damage you or your reputation if it became public.  While this may be common sense, it has little to do with how we actually act online.

The makers of Snapchat are right to reject the “sexting app” label — it’s not clear that this is what it is even being used for, and everyone deserves the option to communicate privately when they want, without automatically being branded as a pervert.

Within a few months of launching, the company has made an enormous and lasting impact on the culture of communication on the Internet, and we should all be grateful.

They have simplified a security process enough to the point that anybody can use it, while validating the market of the next generation of privacy-preserving ephemeral communication.  Most importantly, we may finally get a break from the forced permanence of the Facebook and Google world, where everything you do and share is a data point to be monetized and re-sold to the highest bidder.

And Snapchat isn’t even the best product out there — there’s a whole slew of communication tools that are more secure and functional making their way into the public eye.

One of those is Wickr, created by RSA veteran Nico Sell, a more serious security-focused app that uses “military-grade” encryption to send text, video, voice, and document files that can self-destruct after a given period of time.  Hospitals and law enforcement have expressed interest in a similarly functioning Android app, Gryphn.  Although it’s not “self-destructing,” keep an eye on the exciting and powerful suite of communication apps developed by encryption legend Phil Zimmermann’s Silent Circle company – they are not for “average” users, but they could provide enterprise and more serious clients a massive improvement in security.

What apps like these do is allow us a little bit more freedom to be ourselves, for better or worse.

In the copycat world of Silicon Valley startups and funding, expect to see a lot more “Snapchat for _____” type companies.  Finally, the lack of app creativity may work in the favor of consumers.  We have accepted the notion that what you do on the internet is permanent – a statement that is partially a truthful observation, and partially a threatening promise from the companies and entrepreneurs who are making it a reality – but it doesn’t have to be that way for everything.

Perhaps the greatest impact of this rising industry will be when the giants try to co-opt them, as Facebook attempted with Poke.  The issue of trust in these companies aside, it would be a winning situation for everyone for ephemeral features to be built into the services we already use.

We need more human-behavior-friendly default settings.

Privacy is complicated, and nothing is ever completely secure.  Nobody is immune from this, as Nicholas Weaver wrote in Wired, “even the head of the CIA can’t email his mistress without being identified by the FBI.”  But in the billions of messages already sent through Snapchat are a few people who didn’t have their lives ruined because of something they shouldn’t have shared.

The media can continue to ridicule the “sexting app” that so many young people are using, but they are entirely missing the point.  The same generation being blamed for the supposed “death of privacy” has become wiser than those who are criticizing them.

In a candid admission at the Milken Conference this year, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, when recalling his college days playing in a band, told the audience, “thank God social media didn’t exist then, because if it did, I wouldn’t be here.”  The Internet wasn’t built with security in mind, and we’re still dealing with the consequences of that.  The next generations are going to be the ones who pay the true cost of the design decisions we make today.

Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy. You can follow him on Twitter – @twadhwa – or contact him directly at VB@tarunwadhwa.com. Also, check out his upcoming book, Identified, which will be out later this year. 

Image credit: Shutterstock/Shocked man

That’s a lot of lipstick and high heels.

Zalora focuses on 10 countries in Asia: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The year-old startup says it has already achieved “annualized double-digit million USD revenues.”

“Our company is one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in Southeast Asia and has bright prospects,” said managing director Michele Ferrario. “It is an honor for us that investors of such great repute have invested into an e-commerce company as young as Zalora”

It is indeed an honor when a year-old startup with two or three million dollars in annualized revenue scores a $100 million investment. And it’s an unusual honor as well. But there’s method behind the madness.

The investment was secured by the German holding company that owns Zalora, Rocket Internet, which claims to be “the largest, fastest and most successful international online venture builder.” Founded by the infamous Samwer brothers — who Jason Calacanis has called “despicable thieves” —  its modus operandi has been to take successful models from American startups and apply them globally.

Genius, perhaps, if not very original. And very, very successful.

Rocket Internet sold Groupon clone CityDeal to Groupon for $126 million in 2010 and eBay clone Alando to eBay for $50 million, among many other lucrative deals. That history is undoubtedly part of what led the investment group, led by Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, and the Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group, to participate in this $100 million round.

Source: Rocket Internet

Rocket Internet’s impressive portfolio of companies

A big chunk, 25 percent, of Zalora’s revenue comes from mobile commerce, and the company says its app is the top lifestyle app in all the countries it serves, and the top app overall for Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam.

In other words, Rocket Ventures saw an opportunity to take a big slice of an emerging market, and is moving rapidly — and with massive investment — to own the space.

The capital will be used, Zalora said, to scale up operations and grow the number of local and international brands it carries.

The company has just delivered its millionth order.

photo credit: AehoHikaruki via photopin cc

“We offer unified photo storage across all your devices, for free, at 1,024-pixel quality,” founder Steve Cosman told me a few weeks ago in Toronto. “Or you can pay $5/month for unlimited resolution.”

Tomorrow MyShoeBox is launching version two of its photo backup and sharing service, with a new iPad app, updated mobile apps, and a new shared galleries feature that you use to build grouped sets of photos with people you went on vacation with or family members who shared an event such as a wedding.

The freemium model has helped the company get a quick start.

Source: MyShoeBox

Search and self-quantification

After exiting from Toronto accelerator Extreme Startups in the fall, the service saw 13.4 million photos uploaded in November, its first month. And, Cosman says, MyShoeBox users upload far more photos than Facebook or Flickr users — 3,200 each, compared to Facebook’s 220 and Flickr’s 320.

But the value proposition is much more than photo backup.

Instead, MyShoeBox is a way to enjoy all of your photos, all of the time, on any device you have. Frankly, for most people, their photos are strewn around their main computer (photos from their actual, official, camera), their phone (snapshots from their built-in camera), and their social networks (uploaded from wherever you happened to be at the time). There’s no unified view, no way to see — and search — all your photos at once.

Using MyShoeBox for the first time syncs your photos up to the cloud-based service automatically, in the background, and installing the services’ mobile apps on your Android or iOS-based phone will do the same.

That’s helpful, because we often want to see more of our photos on our mobile devices.

“Our new iPad app is an incredible way of browsing your entire photo collection,” Cosman says. “And it’s one of the only ways you can get your full photo collection on your iPad … most people don’t have enough space.”

What most interested me when I chatted to Cosman is MyShoeBox’ solution to a problem that I think I share with many other digital photographers: enjoying your own work and finding photos. A former program manager for Microsoft’s augmented reality team for Windows Phone, Cosman has placed special emphasis on automated sorting, tagging, and exploring features.

“So many people that have given up the concept of a photo collection,” he says. “Faces, places, and things are important ways to automatically categorize photos. And they keep getting smarter every day.”

So MyShoeBox highlights places you’ve been, photos you took last year at this time, events, cameras you used, and more, creating what the company calls “an interactive infographic” of your life. That includes personal quantification data like the top times you take photos, and your most photographed neighborhoods.

And if you want to search your photo collection, MyShoeBox has just rewritten its search features to be much faster and more powerful as its power users often have more than 15,000 photos each.

“iOS, Android, Windows, Mac … it works pretty much anywhere,” Cosman says. “And once together, it’s automatically organized.”

MyShoeBox is based in Toronto, Canada, and is currently raising a financing round. Its new iPad, iPhone, and Android apps will be live in Google Play and the app store tomorrow.

Image credits: MyShoeBox

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The “Quietly Brilliant” HTC is in the middle a not-so-quiet battle for its future.

Burned by a string of recent failures, the smartphone marker has lost both Asia CEO Lennard Hoornik, who joined the company in 2011, and chief product officer Kouji Kodera. Joining them are the executives from HTC’s communications, marketing, and digital marketing teams — all of whom have left the company in recent weeks.

The departures come as HTC’s future is looking increasingly dim. The Facebook Home-equipped HTC First is, by many metrics, a failure, and there’s no indication that sales of the HTC One are anything spectacular either — which is a crime considering just how amazing the device is.

HTC’s recent earnings paint a similar picture. The company’s profit was down 98 percent in the first quarter, and while it predicts second quarter revenue will hit $2.4 billion this quarter, something tells me that’s going to be tough to pull off.

Overall, HTC’s troubles emerge from a combination of internal and external forces. On the marketing side, HTC just can’t get its act together, which likely explains why the company’s communications arm is being hit so hard by departures. It’s telling that HTC months ago retired its “Quietly Brilliant” tagline (which is a clear window into its current problems, by the way), the slogan still appears when you boot up the HTC One. Something’s wrong there.

Externally, HTC’s eternal foil remains Samsung, which is still sucking up all the revenue in the Android despite the sad reality that its products are fairly tasteless and boring. While HTC has the design prowess, Samsung has the marketing dollars. And right now, marketing is winning.

Keas announced at Healthbeat today two new content partnerships with My Healthy Dish and Noshtopia that will help employees make wiser nutritional choices and save employers money on health care costs. 

Businesses use Keas to create and manage their workplace health programs. The system promotes healthy behavior and teamwork by rewarding people for achieving simple exercise and nutrition goals through games and social motivation. Keas’ CEO Josh Stevens said that seventy to eighty percent of health care costs are preventable, like those caused by smoking and over-eating, or conditions triggered by certain habits and behaviors. Unhealthy habits can lead to lower productivity and the business bears the brunt of these costs. Keas uses gamification to make losing weight and making healthy choices a fun, social, and mobile experience. 

“It is in employers’ best interest to motivate their employees to do the right thing,” Stevens said. “Healthcare costs are rising and every time an employee takes personal time off to visit a doctor or fill a prescription can result in $250-$500 in productivity costs. The productivity savings of health employees are huge.” 

Stevens said his goal is to provide solutions for the “99 percent of a patient’s life when they are not a patient.” Often this means supporting actions like eating more fruits and vegetables and reducing stress. Obesity-related conditions cost around $150 billion a year and a nutritious diet is a central element of overall wellness. 

Keas recently conducted a survey to track employee sentiment towards nutrition and gain insight into what it can do to improve workforce habits. The survey found that 73 percent of the U.S. workforce frequently or always reads nutrition labels, 86 percent is eating breakfast at least 5 days a week, and 94 percent is increasing the daily intake of fruits and vegetables. 63 percent believe that fast food and junk food are leading causes of obesity, and an increasing number of people are turning to home-cooking in an effort to eat healthier. 

The partnerships with My Healthy Dish and Noshtopia will help employees do things like prepare green smoothies for the morning and provide inspiration for simple-to-prepare healthy dinners.  

“These are the folks that publish best content in nutrition,” Stevens said. “They provide meal planning and recipe ideas from experts that employees can use for inspiration. We want to bring everyone together, including CFOs, HR teams, wellness experts, and employees in one central portal.”

The easier it is to integrate nutritious eating into every day life, the healthier employees will be and the less employers will have to pay. It seems like a win-win, except for, maybe, the fast food franchises.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

The mechanics of the innovation are simple and have already added the lexicon of gestures that most mobile users have already become familiar with: Pull the user interface down to force the app to refresh its current view.

But thanks to Twitter’s innovator’s patent agreement (IPA), the business and legal ramifications are just about as easy.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s mobile app on iOS uses a version of pull-to-refresh

As The Verge notes, Twitter’s IPA was released as a 1.0 spec today as releasing it in draft form early in 2012. And the IPA is in full effect for this most recent Twitter patent.

Loren Brichter, the developer who created pull-to-refresh — which Twitter acquired in 2010 when it bought Tweetie — was concerned about how Twitter would use his patent. So concerned, in fact, that he asked Twitter to agree with him as part of the terms of the sale of his company that it would never use the patent offensively.

This means, according to the IPA, any company that has not initiated offensive patent litigation in the past decade is safe. Defensive use of the patent, however is permitted by the IPA if the following terms are true:

1. If a company “has filed, maintained, threatened, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against Assignee or any of Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors.”
2. Or, if a company :has filed, maintained, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against another in the past 10 years.”
3. And finally, “to deter a patent litigation threat against Assignee or Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors.”

There’s one more loophole for offensive patent action if the above do not apply: if the company that owns the patent asks the engineers responsible for creating the intellectual property for written permission.

Overall, however, this is a significant step to making patents better and reducing the impact of patent trolling and patent lawsuits — if other companies adopt it in large numbers.

“We hope the adoption of the IPA will spur constructive dialogue on making patent system work better for companies, inventors, and policymakers alike,” Twitter’s Ben Lee wrote today.

Image credits: Twitter icons

Communication is one of the biggest challenges facing health care today. Doctors cannot use e-mail, social media networks, or SMS texting to discuss patients because it violates privacy regulations, and electronic medical record (EMRs) systems are generally incompatible with each other, which makes the secure exchange of information even more difficult.

At VentureBeat’s HealthBeat today, Verizon managing principal of connected health care solutions Nancy Green explained how Verizon can benefit the health care community.

“When you think of Verizon, you think of our wireless network. But we have a $6 billion health care practice and a chief medical officer ,” Green said onstage. “We are moving and enabling the business of health care so others can innovate. We have experts on compliance and security, and startups can use the size and scope and scale of Verizon to make a difference.”

Security and authentication are major concerns when it comes to medical communication. Green said that 27 countries, the White House, and the U.S. nuclear launch codes are secured by Verizon. The company knows how to do security and authenticate people, and it is applying this expertise to the health care. Verizon has credentialed every clinician and physician in the United States and provide a secure channel for transmitting data, such a prescriptions. An example is Verizon’s work with Surescripts to support electronic prescriptions and set up digital signage on devices. From their iPads and  iPhones, doctors can sign in using a passcode, authenticate their identity, write, confirm, and accept prescriptions, and digitally sign documents. Verizon’s “exchange layer” moves the information securely from network to network (doctor to pharmacy) so doctors don’t have to visit a terminal or use pen and paper.

Verizon’s dual persona technology is also particularly useful in the medical field. Doctors often use their personal mobile devices for work and Green said that it is a struggle to securely manage patient data on phones and keep it separate from personal information. Through an exclusive partnership with VMware, Verizon has a solution that can lock down the enterprise/clinical side of phones.

To quote Voltaire (or Uncle Ben from Spider-Man), with great power comes great responsibility. Verizon has a network of 115 million people and a huge telecommunications infrastructure, and Green said the company is committed to supporting entrepreneurs and ideas that use this power for good. So is competitor AT&T, which also has health care solutions. Both companies see opportunities in an industry that makes up 17 percent of the GDP and relies heavily on mobile and telecommunication technology. These opportunities also extend beyond mobile health technology. In March, Verizon announced its new cloud service for health data exchange and a partnership with HealthSpot to power tele-medicine kiosks in the field.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

A month ago CEO Tim Cook disappointed Wall Street and crushed Apple fans by saying that Apple had amazing new products coming out “this fall and throughout 2014.” Which means that none were coming out this summer, and which also means that if some new products are coming out in fall, they need to be in testing now.

Cue iWatch testing rumors.

Taiwan’s Economic Times says that Apple is currently testing 1.5-inch OLED screens from Ritek’s RiTdisplay after first building prototypes with a 1.8-inch display, which Apple rejected as being too large for a wrist-based computing accessory. The OLED screens use OGS touch sensors (“one glass solution”), which will theoretically help Apple keep the iWatch thin and light.

But Apple has presumably not ordered in volume, as Ritek recorded a first-quarter loss. Apple production partner Foxconn has also reportedly received a small-scale trial production order of 1,000 devices.

Testing the new, smaller size right now — and getting into preproduction — could help Apple get product ready for delivery to consumers in late summer or early fall.

But don’t hold your breath.

The iWatch has been rumored since late 2012, including in some almost-certainly-Apple-initiated NYT, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg leaks. According to at least one study, a full 20 percent of U.S. consumers want an Apple iWatch, sight unseen, and an Apple patent published in March of this year reveals that Apple is thinking about flexible wrap-around displays built into a transparent housing.

Oh, and perhaps one of the reasons for the rumors?

Samsung is supposed to be working on a smart watch, too. Perhaps Galaxy Watch? Meanwhile, Google’s entrant into the wearable computing sweepstakes is already being hacked on, developed for, and ogled.

Or would that be oogled?

Image credits: iWatch mockup by VeneStudio; Hat tip: C|Net

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While messaging app MessageMe just raised $10 million in funding, that announcement was missing key info about the app’s growth. Now the company has come forth with some impressive stats, including that the service now has 5 million registered users just 75 days after launch.

Competing with popular apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, MessageMe offers iOS and Android applications that let you share rich messages and content with family and friends. On top of standard text, you can also send images, YouTube videos, iTunes tracks, voice recordings, and more. Ten days after launch, MessageMe users were uploading two images per second. Today, they are uploading eight images per second. More than 1,500 notifications are sent to MessageMe users each second.

“At MessageMe, our ambition lies in the goal to change the way people communicate around the world, and the mediums through which they connect,” the company said in a blog post today. “From a text message, to a song clip, to those personal moments with your best friends, we’ve built a product which is now used by more than five million people to communicate one day to the next.”

MessageMe only launched its apps in early March but already has attracted $11.9 million in funding. Investors include big names like Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, True Ventures, and SVAngel.

Next up, the company says it has “groundbreaking additions in the pipeline.” We’ll see if it can deliver on that promise.

Photo via MessageMe

WildTangent is diving deeper into mobile gaming by launching its game service on Asus tablets on a worldwide basis.

The WildTangent games will be accessible inside the Asus entertainment platform for Android devices. They offer consumers the ability to play premium casual games for free and receive free in-game items thanks to advertising support from major brands.

In addition, consumers can rent games when free play expires for a fraction of the retail price. They can also apply rentals toward buying the games. WildTangent has been a major player in casual games for more than a decade, but it has only recently expanded to mobile games, which have become the fastest-growing part of the game business.

“Our focus is on providing a fantastic cross-device games experience by providing consumers with new choices to play top games for free or for rent, without the commitment to buy them,” said Sean Vanderdasson, the senior vice president at WildTangent, in a statement. “By partnering with Asus, a global leader in the tablet and PC space, we can help their customers find and play great games.”

“WildTangent makes it easy for owners of Asus tablets to install games from a wide selection of publishers,” said Vira Chang, the head of the eBusiness Service Department at Asus, which is one of the world’s major PC and mobile device makers. “Through our partnership, we are able to extend WildTangent’s streamlined service to our consumers.”

WildTangent’s games are inside Asus@vibe+ for Android. WildTangent games will also be on Asus Windows 8 PCs in the coming months. Players will be able to use the WildCoins virtual currency for in-game items.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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HasOffers, a company offering tools to help companies track the performance of their online ads, has raised a Series A led by Accel Partners, with additional funds from RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser and Founder’s Co-op’s Chris DeVore.

HasOffers is based in Seattle and has 79 employees. It has been bootstrapped, growing on revenues without investment to date, since its founding in 2009. Fun fact: Its co-founders, Lucas and Lee Brown, are twins.

“We really didn’t need to raise money based on our current cash flow and ability to keep growing, but this partnership with Accel changes the game for us,” said Peter Hamilton, the chief executive of HasOffers, in a canned statement.

According to the press release that the company will be issuing tomorrow morning, HasOffers has two products, both delivered as a SaaS (software-as-a-service):

• White-labeled software for networks and agencies to manage their performance advertising programs.
• MobileAppTracking.com (MAT) attributes installs, in-app engagement and purchases back to ad partners (such as social networks, publishers, and mobile ad networks).

Clients for the white-labled product include Bucksense, Tapjoy, SponsorPay, Applift, PocketMedia, OfferMobi, Crobo, and Tapit.

Clients for MAT include SuperCell, HotelTonight, Spotify, LivingSocial, Electronic Arts, Square, and Yahoo!

We contacted Accel’s Rich Wong, who will be joining the board of HasOffers, for an explanation of what motivated the investment.

“In our investment thesis from Accel, we are now in a third phase in mobile advertising,” Wong told us. The first phase included “walled gardens” controlled entirely by mobile carriers. The second phase includes ad networks such as AdMob, Quattro, and others. The third phase, Wong said, is marked by the rise of real-time-bidding (RTB) networks and programmatic buying, and that’s where HasOffers fits in.

“In this phase, the ‘machines are taking over’ and more and more of the ad spend in mobile is going to shift towards a programmatic buying solution, buying across multiple traffic sources, instead of two or three primary ad networks in the previous phase,” Wong said.

The key to that working, Wong said, is having a trusted, independent third-party measurement system, so ad buyers can tell where their clicks are really coming from.

“The days of the CMO not knowing ‘which 50 percent of their advertising was wasted’ is ending,” Wong concluded.

Top photo: The HasOffers executive team. Photo courtesy HasOffers.

Which is precisely why Leap Motion released this video showcasing its impressive Windows 7 and Windows 8 integration:

With Leap Motion, you can now do everything available in Windows for multitouch functionality — without actually touching anything. The company promises that operating system-level functionality and web browsing capabilities will work out of the box, no software or driver installations required, and will be simple to use.

“We want our users to have a magical experience, with easy and natural movements in the air leading to amazing interactions,” co-founder David Holz said in a statement. “Leap Motion’s mission is to break down the barriers between people and technology.”

The demo shows a user navigating Windows 8′s home screen tiles via in-air gestures, selecting and rearranging tiles, opening a web browser, and surfing sites while zooming sections for a closer look, all without touching a mouse or a touch-sensitive screen. In addition, previewing one of Leap Motion’s intended uses as a controller in the media room or kitchen, the demo shows how simple it is to scroll through Netflix, select a movie, and begin watching. Or to draw a scene in one of the Leap Motion apps, then rotate it in 3D.

The Leap Motion device is tiny, about the size of a pack of gum. It senses both of your hands and all 10 of your fingers with 200 times the sensitivity of the Xbox 360 Kinect. The company recently announced OEM bundling with select computers from ASUS, and an even more interesting deal with HP that will see the hardware melt away into the computer itself, embedding Leap Motion’s functionality into laptops to make them gesture-enabled right out of the box, without any hardware components to plug in.

And there’s more to come:

“We’re looking to embed our tech into watches, and smartphones, and glasses, and everything,” Leap Motion’s COO Andy Miller told me a couple of weeks ago.

All I want to know is: Where’s the Mac OS X demo?

Image credits: Leap Motion

AT&T customers really itching to video chat in Google’s new Hangouts app may be itching for a long time.

The carrier says it plans to open up video chatting for all customers running LTE devices by the end of 2013.

“Throughout the second half of this year, we plan to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all our customers, regardless of data plan or device; that work is expected to be complete by year end,” AT&T said in a statement to The Verge.

Core to AT&T’s concern are pre-loaded video chat apps, which the company says come with much higher usage numbers than their non-preloaded counterparts. AT&T, it seems, isn’t confident that its network can handle the burden of lots of Android users video chatting all at once.

For customers, the situation is sure to be a bit tough to stomach, and could push them away from AT&T and into the welcoming arms of Verizon or — more likely — T-Mobile.

The situation is nearly identical to the issues AT&T  faced last year with Apple’s FaceTime app, which didn’t work on its cellular network. Backlash from consumers and regulators eventually forced the company’s hand, however, and AT&T was forced to (slowly) loosen its restrictions on Apple devices. And it looks like the same thing is happening with Android and Hangouts.

SAN FRANCISCO — Mobile devices could save the medical industry and consumers billions of dollars a year.

Mobile health technology provides patients with greater opportunities to manage their diseases and communicate with providers. On stage today at HealthBeat 2013, Ivor Horn of the National Children’s Medical Center (above, center) and Asthmapolis president Mark Gehring (above, right) spoke about the potential for “mHealth” to reach underserved populations and help them take control over their health.

“The key is recognizing how people use technology,” Horn said. “Over 80 percent of patients in underserved populations are willing to receive information via mobile or text, and over 90 percent wanted access to their health information and are open to sharing it back and forth. The two main issues are trust and self-efficacy — the ability to feel like you can accomplish what you want to accomplish is really important and that the information comes from a reliable source.”

More than one-third of U.S. adults are obese, and obesity-related conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and stroke are some of the leading causes of preventable death. The medical costs associated with obesity are in the realm of $150 billion.

Asthma is another pervasive problem. Fifty million people in the U.S. live with chronic respiratory disease, and uncontrolled asthma leads to 500,000 hospitalizations and two million emergency room visits a year. It is a $50 billion problem.

The prevalence of both diseases is higher in low-income populations, and mobile devices can be a powerful vehicle for addressing these problems.

During the discussion with Horn and moderator Robin Strongin, Gehring said that Asthmapolis is not just a mobile app– it is a disease management company that collects data and gives patients tools to improve their clinical outcomes.

“We are redefining the metrics for success,” Gehring said. “This isn’t about downloads. There is a 70 percent reduction in hospitalization for patients using Asthmapolis, and when they do end up in the hospital, they spend 70 percent less time there. This is where the health care system is headed. Our business model is to sell to payers and providers to save them costs, keeping in mind how to save payers and providers money is key.”

Asthmapolis recently raised $5 million from the Social + Capital Partnership to support development of new services to extend its reach to people living with all forms of chronic respiratory disease, not just asthma.

Horn and Gehring emphasized that when building mobile apps, it is important to develop the technology in partnership with the health care system, connecting and providing value to people on all sides, including patients, payers, and health care providers. Ultimately, fewer hospital visits is better for everyone and in addition to eating green vegetables and regular exercise, mobile devices could become part of an integral part of a healthy lifestyle for all segments of the population.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

Peter Molyneux, the father of “god games” and founder of 22cans, has gone mobile and is announcing that his Godus title will be published by Japan’s DeNA.

The game is an ambitious attempt to reinvent the god-game genre for mobile. And Molyneux, who has made heavy-duty console games like the Fable series, is bullish on mobile. His entry into that market is another sign that mobile is becoming to big a market to ignore, even for triple-A game developers.

DeNA, a mobile-social game network with a multibillion-dollar valuation, is expanding to publish Western content. Based in the United Kingdom, 22cans is developing its title for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices. The game will use DeNA’s Mobage mobile-social game platform in the West, Japan, and Korea.

“We have huge respect for DeNA’s successes in mobile gaming. By fusing their expertise and experience with our passion and dedication, we are going to make Godus a truly groundbreaking reinvention of the god-game genre,” said Peter Molyneux said in a statement. “As a global leader in developing and publishing mobile games, DeNA is the ideal partner for us to collaborate with on the launch of Godus.”

In Godus, you play a god. You can wield divine powers over your devoted followers. It’s similar to Molyneux’s older title, Black and White. If you advance your civilization, your people will believe in you more. With that belief, you can sculpt entire lands, beautifying them with your touch.

But you face challenges from rival gods. You can also be an angry god, creating earthquakes, volcanoes, or tornadoes to unleash upon the rival gods and their worlds. You and your people will clash with other gods in multiplayer battles.

“One of my first jobs in the video game industry was working on the quality assurance team for Peter’s Populous 2. That title and its predecessor set the tone for a whole new generation of games,” said Clive Downie, the chief executive of DeNA West. “Fast forward to 2013, and it’s an honor to have the opportunity to work with Peter again on the launch of Godus. Our team is looking forward to working with 22cans on a game that we know will set a new standard for the mobile generation.”

No launch date has been set yet.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That lasted a few months, at least.

Nokia and Intel had decided in 2010 that they needed an answer to Apple’s iPhone juggernaut which was taking high-end smartphone sales away from Helsinki and making it completely obvious that the king of chips had no chips in the mobile processor poker game. Meego was the answer, and Meego would be the operating system that would lead the then-still-powerful Nokia back to the forefront of the mobile market, and would make Intel relevant in small, low-powered, and battery-life-efficient phone CPUs.

Unfortunately, one loser plus another loser often just equals two losers. And, unfortunately for Nokia and Intel, Google and Samsung took their lunch and ate it, too, as Android began to reign uber alles. So Nokia turned to Microsoft for salvation — and a very painful process it has been — and Meego lost its way.

But not entirely.

Jolla, a new and independent smartphone vendor which almost no-one but mobile wonks has ever heard of, took the core of Meego and built Sailfish, a new mobile operating system that is built on an open-source project named Mer that is the new incarnation of Meego, and is just now teasing the coming-soon release of its very first device, the oddly named and oddly designed but also oddly attractive “The Other Half.”

Surprise, surprise, Jolla is based in Helsinki, Finland, where there just happens to be a surplus of top-notch mobile talent available lately (shocking, isn’t it). And surprise, surprise, all of the top Jolla leaders are ex-Nokia employees. Almost two years ago, Jolla announced its intentions of bringing a new smartphone to market. The biggest surprise is that they seem to be succeeding.

We are Jolla. We are Unlike

Jolla appears to be a two-part device, consisting of a 4.5-inch screen, a buttonless main phone handset, and various colorful plastic cases, or “other halves.”

Snap one on, and your phone OS changes.

Source: Jolla

The Sailfish OS almost reminds you of Windows Phone tiles.

Changes color, changes battery life, perhaps, changes content such as apps and media, and changes in other ways yet to be invented, based on the creativity of Jolla and partners.

Actual devices have yet to be released, and the details are fewer than might be desired, but the key point is that the Jolla is Android app compatible. Which, frankly, is probably essential for any new smartphone platform entering the market today. The smartphone market is an ecosystem battle, not a device battle primarily, and any new entrants with any real aspirations for success have to plug into what is already available and — largely — a global standard.

Interestingly, the main Sailfish operating system screen appears to draw from Windows Phone design elements, with titles on the home screen that aggregate information that you might be interested in.

According to Engadget, the phone will have a dual-core processor (type unknown), LTE, an 8MP rear camera and a front-facing camera, and have 16GB onboard storage plus micro-SD expansion.

At the very least, it’s an interesting take on mobile that enables users to participate in some — if not all — of the benefits of the world’s leading smartphone operating system, while still having some unique and differentiating factors. Jolla says it will offer the world’s best multitasking experience, and will be so intuitive that you can operate your favorite features “without even looking at the device.”

Main navigation on the phone is buttonless, with the four main icons appearing to be Phone, Messages, Browser, and Apps. The Sailfish operating system will also support gesture control, the company said.

I’m assuming that full Google integration and access to Google services such as music would not be included, and syncing contacts and other core data would not be as simple as on a straight Android phone.

However, Jolla seems to be competing on differentiation. And while the jury will be out on how successfully they’ve achieved it until we have actual devices in our hands, at first glance, they’ve succeeded.

Image credits: Jolla