Startups

Paul Adams, who was previously Facebook’s global head of brand design, has joined a startup called Intercom, where he will be serving as head of product design. Adams told me earlier that he wasn’t looking to leave Facebook, but he had also been advising Intercom and became excited about the opportunity. The startup, which is backed by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, 500 Startups, and others, offers tools for online businesses to track every interaction with a customer and to use that data to deliver personalized messages and offers. When I suggested that this sounds like a shift from Adams’ previous work in advertising, he didn’t entirely disagree, but he also said Intercom’s work ties into the themes he’s been exploring at Facebook, which have also been expressed in his talks and his book Grouped. (In addition, Adams is known for his work at Google, particularlya presentation that seemed to outline many of the ideas that eventually shaped Google+.) Adams argues that in the future, businesses’ interactions with potential customers are going to be much more personal and relationship-based, rather than following the one-to-many broadcast model of traditional advertising. Intercom facilitates those company-to-customer interactions, and he added that it’s not just a way to deliver slightly-more-targeted marketing emails. “In the past … companies tried to minimize customer interaction,” Adams said. “They didn’t want to customers to talk back to them — that was overhead. Minimizing customer interaction is a very outdated model from a pre-social web world. Intercom is very much about intimacy, very much about being personable.” Adams will be working out of Intercom’s Dublin office — he said he had already made the move from Silicon Valley to Dublin for personal reasons.

Automattic, the company behind publishing platform WordPress, has sold $50 million in a secondary offering led by investment management firm Tiger Global. The sale will allow some early investors and employees to get cash in exchange for their shares, while adding another stakeholder in the company. The share offering wasn’t necessary to raise funds for the company, according to Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg. In a blog post, he wrote that the company is “healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly.” He also noted that the minority of stockholders who participated in the secondary sale continue to hold on to the vast majority of their shares. Lee Fixel at Tiger Global led the investment, which follows other high-profile late-stage deals that the firm has made recently. Those include investments in Eventbrite and SurveyMonkey. Tiger Global is also an investor in companies like Palantir, Square, and Warby Parker, as well as Facebook and LinkedIn. With the purchase, Tiger will join existing investors in Automattic, such as Polaris Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and The New York Times Company. WordPress, of course, is the publishing platform (one might call it a CMS) that powers a number of high-profile sites, including TechCrunch. The company behind it is just about to celebrate its tenth anniversary on May 27, and will have meetups in cities across the world to celebrate.

We’re hearing reports that someone (name/gender/orientation/favorite color unknown) has paid a tidy $1.5 million for the pleasure of cruising into space with actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Insert eye-rolling Great Gatsby space pun here. At the amfAR Cinema Against AIDS charity auction last night in Cannes, where DiCaprio was promoting his new Jazz Age film, bidding rose to 1.2 million euros for the trip, which will take place aboard Virgin Galactic’s new commercial spaceliner, SpaceShipTwo. The craft is a suborbital, air-launched spaceplane designed for space tourism. The first flights are scheduled to take off in 2014. Ticket prices have increased from $200,000 to $250,000 this year, but apparently DiCaprio makes the whole experience worth around $1.25 million more. Now we know the value of one of his aging-but-still-dimpled smiles. What’s more, we read on Space.com that two other tickets for the same flight sold at the same auction for $2.3 million. Now we know the value of the glorious halo that radiates throughout the interior of a spaceplane from one of this aging-but-still-dimpled smiles. Image credits: 20th Century Fox, Jeff Foust/Flickr Filed under: Science

With U.S. smartphone penetration approximately at 57 percent today, it’s no surprise that consumers are using their phones to assist with shopping needs. What’s interesting, according to a new report from The Integer Group and M/A/R/C Research, is 16 percent of Hispanic shoppers are using their mobile device to make purchases compared to 12 percent of general market shoppers. This was revealed in the latest issue of The Checkout. “Since mobile and online tools are important to Hispanics, there is opportunity to leverage technology to better engage this audience. It’s not just about replicating general market strategies and making them bilingual, it’s taking those key elements that Hispanic shoppers seek and incorporating them into the shopper experience,” explains Martin Ferro, senior account planner for Velocidad. Other findings on Hispanic shoppers from The Checkout include: Hispanics place greater emphasis on their personal networks, with 40 percent saying recommendations from their friends and family influence their shopping list compared to 29 percent of the general market. Hispanic shoppers are more experiential, with 25 percent of Hispanics saying that having an enjoyable shopping experience was most important to them compared to 18 percent of general market shoppers. When considering value, 53 percent of Hispanic shoppers say finding the highest quality items is the most important factor compared to 40 percent of the general market. Price is also an important factor, with 45 percent of Hispanics saying this is most important to them compared to 43 percent of general market shoppers. To learn more, check out The Checkout here.

Presumption of innocence is a fundamental component of law in many nations, including Canada, France, Russia, and even, yes, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is not however, enshrined in the constitution of the United States of America, although it’s often believed to follow from amendments 5, 6, and 14. Not so much at U.S. District Court in New York, however. “I believe that the government will be able to show at trial direct evidence that Apple knowingly participated in and facilitated a conspiracy to raise prices of e-books, and that the circumstantial evidence in this case, including the terms of the agreements, will confirm that,” U.S. District Judge Denise Cote said on Thursday. The trial features the U.S. v. Apple on a Department of Justice charge that Apple conspired to price-fix ebooks, limited ebook competition, and break Amazon’s hold on the market. And it’s an interesting example of a monopoly-style case being brought on against a company with a tiny fraction of the ebook market (Apple), mostly to the benefit of a company with a massive wedge of the ebook market (Amazon). Apple comprehensively denies the charges. “Apple has not ‘conspired’ with anyone, was not aware of any alleged ‘conspiracy’ by others, and never fixed prices,” the company stated in a reply to the suit last year. Tell it to the judge, I guess. That’s precisely what Apple is attempting to do, but statements like the above must be more than a little worrisome for Apple legal representatives. Perhaps just as worrisome is that Judge Cote has already begun writing a draft of her decision — before the trial has begun. Evidence has already been submitted to the court, however, and that — apparently — is enough for Cote to already form an opinion on the case. One of those pieces of evidence was a line in an email from then Apple CEO Steve Jobs to News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, whose company owns the publisher HarperCollins. The line that the DOJ released was fairly damning, on the face of it: Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99. That certainly looks like it could be price-fixing, right? But here’s the line in the full context of Steve Jobs’ email: Our proposal does set the upper limit for ebook retail pricing based on the hardcover price of each book. The reason we are doing this is that, with our experience selling a lot of content online, we simply don’t think the ebook market can be successful with pricing higher than $12.99 or $14.99. Heck, Amazon is selling these books at $9.99, and who knows, maybe they are right and we will fail even at $12.99. But we’re willing to try at the prices we’ve proposed. We are not willing to try at higher prices because we are pretty sure we’ll all fail. As I see it, HC has the following choices: 1. Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99. 2. Keep going with Amazon at $9.99. You will make a bit more money in the short term, but in the medium term Amazon will tell you they will be paying you 70% of $9.99. They have shareholders too. 3. Hold back your books from Amazon. Without a way for customers to buy your ebooks, they will steal them. This will be the start of piracy and once started there will be no stopping it. Trust me, I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see any other alternatives. Do you? In that context, Job’s sentence appears to be simply an option that HarperCollins has. And it looks a lot less damning. It’s not clear what other evidence Judge Cote has seen. And it’s not clear if she’s trying to urge the parties involved to come to a pre-trial settlement by pressuring Apple to make nice and roll over for the DOJ. But it is to be hoped that she will maintain some level of objectivity in the case she’s judg

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Early Bird Tickets on Sale Intel’s long years investing in mobile processors are about to pay off with its biggest win to date. We’ve confirmed that the next Samsung Galaxy tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, will have an Intel Atom chip based on the Clover Trail code name. A source familiar with the matter confirmed to us that Samsung has chosen the Intel chip over other competing ARM-based solutions, including Samsung’s own Exynos mobile processors. If it’s true, that could mean that Intel’s mobile processor business is finally getting some traction. Benchmark testing sits leaked that news this week. The GFXBench site and the SamMobile site noted the Intel chip appeared to be inside a device dubbed the Samsung Santos 103 tablet with the product name GT-P5200 running Android on an Intel Clover Trail chip. Various sites concluded that was Samsung’s third-generation Galaxy Tab slate, which has a 10.1-inch touchscreen. Test results say the device has a 1280 x 800 display and is running Android 4.2.2 operating system. The processor . The processor can run between from 800 megahertz to 1.6 gigahertz in terms of clock speed. That’s within the stated capabilities of the dual-core Atom Z2520 processor. The Intel chip is made in a 32-nanometer high-k metal gate manufacturing process. Other sources have noted that the Samsung tablet will come in multiple versions and will have an Exynos processor. That may mean that Intel has just one of the versions. Other rivals competing for the business include Nvidia’s Tegra chip. Intel expects to make more progress in mobile over time. It is releasing chips now with the code-named Haswell microarchitecture that will improve power efficiency and graphics performance dramatically. The graphics will be twice as good as previous Atom chips and active power will be 50 percent better. Intel will release new information in a talk at the upcoming Computex trade show in Taiwan. That will include new designs and upcoming low-power chip microarchitectures including Silvermont (used in Bay Trail tablets for this holiday), Avoton (for micro servers) and Merrifield for smartphones. Filed under: Business, Gadgets, Mobile .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #1f80e4 0%, #1862ae 100%); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1f80e4), color-stop(100%,#1862ae)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: linear-gradient(to bottom, #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#1f80e4', endColorstr='#1862ae',GradientType=0 ); }

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Early Bird Tickets on Sale Searching for a job is a stressful process that involves web searches, exhaustive emailing, networking, and ends with anxiously awaiting a phone call. However a study issued today found that job seekers are increasingly turning to mobile devices for every part of the quest for employment, starting with search. The study was conducted by Glassdoor, a career and jobs community site. It has information on more than 220,000 companies, 14 million registered users, and 13 million monthly unique visitors. Glassdoor launched an iPad app last week and led an accompanying effort to explore mobile job seeker behavior. Glassdoor found that 68 percent of job seekers are using their mobile device to search for jobs once a week or more. 3 in 5 job seekers has searched for jobs on their mobile device in the past year, and 30 percent search for jobs more than once a day from their phones. As anyone who has been unemployed (or in transition) knows, the state of uncertainty lends itself to compulsive searching, hoping that your dream job has popped up in the last hour. 60 percent of people are likely to search for jobs on their mobile device, while 54 percent are likely to read company reviews, 52 percent will research salary information when they are on-the-go, and 46 percent want job alerts pushed to them. One in four job seekers are deterred from applying to a job if the company’s career site is not mobile optimized, and 30 percent think applying for jobs on mobile devices is difficult. Phones are good for some tasks, but answering questions about why you are the best suited for a position is best done at an actual keyboard. As we continue to rely on a smartphones for everything from social media contact to managing health care, job searching is likely to head in this direction as well. 84 percent of respondents said they believe mobile devices will be the most common way people search for jobs within the next five years. Mobile technology lends itself to situations where you want immediate, context-driven results. Part of looking for a job is typing in search parameters and receiving results, but word-of-mouth, referrals, and networking drive recruiting and hiring, at least in the tech world. If you hear about an opportunity while out-and-about, your phone is the clearest method to learn more. Mobile devices are also useful for staying on top of a company’s news and being prepared for an interview. 64 percent of candidates said they check a company’s social media channels in the hours before an interview. 43 percent of candidates use their smartphones before an interview to read the job description and 34 percent said they visit the company’s website. Once the interview starts however, 78 percent avoid using their phones. Glassdoor surveyed 1,100 employees and job seekers online. The company has raised $42.2 million to date and is based in Sausalito, California. Photo Credit:antrophe/Flickr Filed under: Business, Mobile .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4;

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Early Bird Tickets on Sale iOS 7 is widely to reveal a new iOS7 on June 10 at its Worldwide Developer Conference. And there are some big changes in store. Scott Forstall and his love of user interface elements that mimic the “real world” is long gone. Jony Ive, the design genius behind the iMac, iPhone, iPad, and pretty much everything Apple in the last decade, was appointed to overhaul and comprehensively redo Apple’s most important crown jewel in October of last year. Now, it appears, he’s close to complete. Ive has been leading a thorough revamp of the iPhone UI in preparation for the upcoming iOS 7 release, and according to 9to5 Mac, he’s also most done. The changes are significant, described as “black, white, and flat all over.” That’s a massive change from the original colorful, shiny, semi-transparent iOS development language, which tries hard to make virtual controls and objects look and feel and act like real controls and objects. You see that today in the drop shadows behind icons, the compass interface of Find My iPhone, and the physical button-like Apple toggle controls: Source: John KoetsieriPhone UI design Forstall, the former iPhone chief who was cut from the Apple team after refusing to apologize for the Apple Maps disaster, was a big fan of skeuomorphic design: design that connects the new to the old with decorative but — some might say — unnecessary elements. Those “some” would include Ive. Apple’s Notes app is an example of skeuomorphic design, with faux leather at the top and the virtual remnants of virtual torn-off pages at the top. On iPhone, iBooks, Find My Friends, and Newstand are examples, with with fake bookshelves, fake stitching, fake leather, and fake shadows. For a designer like Jony Ive, who has spent his life stripping away excess, simplifying relentlessly, there is something inherently dishonest about skeuomorphic design. It’s something of a lie … because there is no wood in your iPhone, no dead animal skin on the screen, and no paper to be torn off. And, he’s been quoted as saying that software designs built with physical metaphors do not stand the test of time. There are design elements in the iPhone’s user interface language that are already trending away from the original color and connection to material controls. Safari and Mail, for instance, have no parchment, no leather, no torn-off page remnants:   There are no images yet of iOS7, which will be one of Apple’s most closely-guarded secrets up to WWDC. Changes reportedly include dropping the textured, cloth-like background of Notifications Center in favor of a flat grey, and the shiny, transparent lock screen will lose its luster for a flatter, less evocative interface. You would have to think that a detail-oriented design-obsessed Ive will have comprehensively altered the appearance of almost everything in the iOS design language, but we’ll know more on June 10 when Apple reveals it. In all this rush to get rid of skeuomorphic design, there’s one thing to remember. Perhaps the iPhone was so transformative, so new, and so different, that skeuomorphism was a necessary first step in the evolution of its design language. And perhaps the virtual has now become so real … that now we don’t need it anymore. Filed under: Business, Dev, Gadgets, Mobile .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .blurb-cat-mobile .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; paddin

The bigger Google gets, the more often regulators are getting on its case. The next probe into the company could from the Federal Trade Commission which is trying to figure out whether Google is leveraging its ad market dominance to push customers to its other services, as Bloomberg reports. The criticism is a common one lobbed at Google by its critics, the most vocal of which is search engine rival Microsoft. Like much of the European Union, Microsoft isn’t crazy about Google’s ability to own, from top to bottom, peoples’ interactions with the web. While the FTC recently cleared Google of  similar charges, its counterparts in Europe are still on Google’s case. Unlike Google’s search dominance, however, Google’s ad market share is far from locked down. The company controls roughly 18 percent of  digital display ad revenue — a slight bump over Facebook’s 15 percent, according to the latest numbers from eMarketer. That’s a far cry from a monopoly. Still, at issue here isn’t Google’s dominance but rather the top-down integration of its many services. It’s one thing to control a market, but its something else to pursue anti-competitive tactics mean to make it impossible for any other company to challenge that control.  The FTC is trying to figure out whether that’s what Google is doing. One thing to keep in mind is that the probe is still in its preliminary stages and might not officially happen. But don’t expect Google’s competitors to stop lobbying for regulator intervention anytime soon. Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat Filed under: Business

We’re less than a week out from our Austin TC Meetup + Pitch-Off, and I can already smell the barbeque in the air. Austin, are you ready to rumble? The Austin Meetup + Pitch-Off is going down on Thursday, May 30, at The Stage On Sixth. The event begins promptly at 6pm and runs until 10pm. Tickets are $5 each, and include booze. But, you ask, what exactly is this fabled TC Meetup + Pitch-off that I’m pushing? Well, at its core its a gathering of your city’s local VC, entrepreneurial, startup and general tech crowd. Attendees can socialize, drink booze (21 and up please) and maybe even meet a few really cool people. But that’s not all. The TC Meetup + Pitch-off is equal parts meetup and pitch-off, which is a competition that lets entrepreneurs and founders pitch their products to a panel of judges with only sixty seconds to make their plea. Even if the ideas aren’t interesting (which they totally are), there’s real entertainment value in watching someone battle against a clock. Judges will include Matt Burns and John Biggs from TechCrunch, as well as local Austin luminaries Bijoy Goswami and Noah Kagan. I’ll be MCing. It’ll be great. Our NY Meetup + Pitch-Off was a smashing success. PaddleYou was spotted in Hardware Alley after coming in third at the Pitch-Off, while runners up Talkz and winner 3DLT both made it into the Disrupt Battlefield. Applications are currently closed for the Austin pitch-off, but tickets to the event are still available here. We still have some startup tables left where you can demo your product to the attendees and TC staff. If you have any questions about the tables, please email Megan Lehn. Our sponsors help make events happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.