Startups

Box went on a little shopping trip to France. Today, the file-sharing company announced that it has acquired the technology behind a mobile app called Folders. Folders is an application developed in France by Martin Destagnol. It provides (in true French form) “the most elegant client for your cloud storage.” Using its “amazingly polished user interface,” people can manage multiple accounts like Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive; copy, move, delete, or transfer files; sort, search, and share files; and view them clearly on your smartphone. In a blog post about the news, Box’s VP of Engineering Sam Schillace said the acquisition is all part of Box’s mission to make enterprise software “that doesn’t suck” and make Box’s applications as user-friendly as possible. “I’m a firm believer that even applications developed primarily for the enterprise, like Box, need to be pushing the leading edge for user experience and design,” he said. “They have to be “consumer-grade” in terms of their usability, simplicity, speed and performance. When we saw Folders we saw a beautiful experience and set of design patterns that we had to bring to Box’s users.” Earlier this month Box announced the acquisition of Crocdoc, a YC alum that turns documents into interactive, entertaining experiences. Both Folders and Crocdoc are part of Box’s effort to make enterprise products more engaging, well-designed, and fun to use. Folders will be integrated into the next version of Box’s iOS application. Photo Credit: Flickr user/benoit_D Filed under: Business, Cloud, Deals, Mobile

Former Badoo COO and ex-Googler Ben Ling has joined Khosla Ventures, according to sources. Ling, who has held senior operations roles for a number of big companies in the mobile and internet space, has been added to a growing team at Vinod Khosla’s venture firm. Ling most recently served as COO of Badoo, where he was hired to oversee product, engineering, partnerships, and business operations at the company. Ling joined Badoo in May 2012, but he only lasted about six months, leaving the company last fall. Prior to Badoo, Ling spent a number of years at Google, where his last role included overseeing images, videos, books, news, and finance as its senior director of search products and local business products. At YouTube, Ling was senior director of partnerships and platform, where he was responsible for music, movies, sports, news, in addition to mobile, TV, and API partnerships. In his first role at Google, he oversaw the company’s e-commerce products, including Google Checkout and Product Search. At Facebook, he served as the director of Facebook Platform, working on developer relations at the fledgling social network. There he helped build Facebook Connect, which is the social network’s hook into a number of third-party websites. In addition to his senior operations roles, Ling has also been an active angel investor and advisor to startups. Recent investments include Fab.com, Palantir, Square, PracticeFusion, and Quora. Ling has also held an advisory position at Pinterest and Pulse. Ling isn’t the only operations specialist to join Khosla Ventures. His hire comes just a few months after former Square COO Keith Rabois joined the firm.

This isn’t exactly the launch of Google Now for the desktop, which many of us have been patiently waiting for, but Google today announced that it is bringing a richer notifications experience to Chrome, starting with the latest beta. This definitely feels like it brings Google Now yet another step closer to the desktop. These new notifications, which developers can easily add to their own Chrome packaged apps and extensions, will pop up outside of the browser window and live in a center outside of the browser, so users will be able to receive notifications, even if the browser is not open. This feature is now available for Windows and Chrome OS users. Google says it’s coming to OS X and Linux “soon.” Chrome, of course, already features basic web notifications (and if you’re a Chrome and Google Apps user, you’ve probably seen them from services like Gmail). These rich notifications go a step further, though, as developers can add their own full-bleed icons, images, headlines and short messages to them. Developers can also decide for how long notifications should stay on the screen by specifying different priorities for each alert. The new notification center will be available through the Windows system tray or from the Chrome OS launcher. Last week, Google also announced its new Cloud Messaging for Chrome push notification service. While Google doesn’t mention them in today’s announcement, there is no reason why those push notifications couldn’t soon arrive in the new notifications center, too. You can find a full changelog of what’s new in Chrome 28 here.

Score one for technology: Doctors 3D-printed an emergency airway tube that saved a 20-month old baby boy’s life. After imaging the boy’s faulty windpipe, doctors at the C.S. Mot Children’s Hospital printed 100 tiny tubes and laser-stitched them together over the trachea (video below). “Quite a few of the doctors said that he had a good chance of not leaving the hospital alive,” said the mother of the baby boy, who suffered from a severe version of tracheobronchomalacia, causing his bronchus to collapse. Desperate for a solution, the doctors obtained emergency clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to surgically sew the 3D-printed splint on the child’s airway. “It was amazing. As soon as the splint was put in, the lungs started going up and down for the first time and we knew he was going to be OK,” said Michigan University Professor Dr. Glenn Green, who came up with save-saving solution, with his partner Dr. Scott Hollister. “The material we used is a nice choice for this. It takes about two to three years for the trachea to remodel and grow into a healthy state, and that’s about how long this material will take to dissolve into the body,” added Hollister. Considering that most of the news around 3D printers has been about lethal, undetectable firearms, it’s nice to know that people are also using humanity’s newly found technological powers for good.

Imonomy, an Israeli startup which makes software that analyses webpages and automatically inserts relevant, copyright-free images to accompany the content, has closed a $400,000 seed round from a group of angel investors. Investors include Inon Axel, former CEO of Kasamba (acquired by LivePerson for $40m), Liron Rose, cofounder of AfterDownload (acquired by ironSource for $28m), and Itai Levitan and Tal Shaked, partners at AfterDownload. Imonomy said it will be using the new seed funding for product development and initial marketing and sales activities. The startup was founded in the middle of last year by Oren Dror and Amit Halawa who previously held senior R&D and engineering positions at Yedda, an online Q&A service that was acquired by TechCrunch’s parent company AOL, back in 2007. Imonomy targets its software at smaller-sized web publishers who have a pool of online content but don’t necessarily have the means to spice it up with illustrations — either lacking the production staff to spend the time hunting down royalty free images or the licensing money to pay to display copyrighted images. Imonomy says its semantic software is being used by more than 500 medium-sized websites (with up to 10 million monthly impressions) at present, including AOL Answers and Articles Base. Imonomy’s software scans web content to figure out relevant images to serve up from its database of copyright-free images, and also determines the optimal place to position them on the page to improve user engagement. Inserted images support hover over links to other articles and also displaying ads, giving publishers (and Imonomy) a way to monetise the added eyecandy. It’s effectively a more aesthetic version of inline text link ads. “The idea behind Imonomy is that publishers of content-heavy web sites need to tools to help their sites be visibly attractive,” the startup tells TechCrunch. “High quality copyright-free images are hard to come by and the time and effort required to locate such pictures is a hassle. Imonomy created its content enrichment and monetization system to automate this process in order to help publishers save time, improve user engagement and create monetization opportunities.” Here’s how it describes its system on its website: Our database contains millions of images that cover every possible topic. Our system scans your webpage, finds the best fitting image and automatically insert them into the published page. Thus making content more interesting and informative. Our technology brings our customers greater user engagement and lower bounce rates, which has been in proven to result in significantly increased revenues. imonomy also creates intelligent links between pages, which encourages visitors to easily navigate to additional relevant content. The visual semantic engine can be implemented easily on any website, and we also provide a free API that expands the functionality and the systems abilities. In terms of competition, Imonomy concedes there are “numerous content enrichment tools” out there — name-checking the likes of OutBrain, Zemanta and GumGum — but argues that its approach is unique because it’s bundling “content enrichment and monetization opportunities in a single automated process to publishers for free”. It’s not charging for use of its technology, instead it has a freemium model, tied to the ads that are inserted along with the images — sharing this revenue with its publisher customers so also taking a cut itself. Its revenue-sharing percentage depends on the size of the publisher and the volume of traffic on its website. But for larger sites with more impressions it takes a lower percentage than for smaller, less well visited sites. The startup added that it expects to be profitable by the end of the year. An example of an added image plus ad powered by Imonomy’s engine is shown below:

Toronto-based startup MyShoebox is facing a time in which photo sharing announcements are thick and deep; Google unveiled its updated Google+ photos experience last week at I/O, and this week we seen pretty big announcements from Yahoo! around Flickr. Does that intimated MyShoebox, a photo-focused startup launching its version 2.0 product on the tail of those bits of news? Not really, says MyShoebox founder and CEO Steve Cosman. MyShoebox is a service that scans a user’s entire offline photo collection, uploads it to cloud storage and applies organization algorithms to automatically categorize pics and provide different ways of viewing them. The cloud-based computational stuff is similar to what Google unveiled last week, though Google’s product is more advanced in terms of being able to identify “keeper” shots and automatically enhance uploads, but Cosman says his company isn’t worried about lagging behind giants like Google in terms of computational power. “I’m envious of the tech they’ve got,” he said in an interview. “We’re not about to catch up to Google in terms of cloud computational power and sophistication… [but] it’s much more interesting when you apply it to 10,000 photos than to the ones you upload piecemeal. If your photos are still sitting on the hard drive, there’s not much you can do with cloud computing editing tricks.” MyShoebox’s strength is in getting the pictures from storage and sources that aren’t connected, to the web, as quickly and painlessly as possible. It’s a shotgun, not a scalpel, and it’s very good at what it does. Now, the version 2.0 update introduces features that make that wide-cast net even wider, since it allows for sharing with friends and family. The new Shared Gallery feature means you can swap photos with small groups of friends, each dumping into the same pool. Cosman says that where you’d normally only get the one or two photos with you in it your friend chooses to upload, with this new system you’ll end up with thousands of photos added to your collection. His own nearly doubled when beta testing this feature, he says. Also new with this update is a dedicated iPad app, as well as rebuilt mobile apps for browsing your uploaded photo collection. The whole point of the update has been on taking the MVP that MyShoebox launched back in October, which saw tremendous demand, and bring it up to a level of performance that could better wow users. Cosman says that interest and engagement continues to be consistently high for MyShoebox, but says we’ll have to wait a while longer for updated hard numbers on its user base. The company may be a small fish in a big pond, but it’s looking to be the service that’s first to solve the problem of not what to do with your photos once they’re online, but the one that gets them there in the first place. That will put it in a perfect position to leverage the cloud computing tricks that are making photo editing and sharing great once they’re there, Cosman believes.

Today a TechStars-backed company is launching out of private beta and into the App Store in an attempt to bring the Utopian notion of a barterer’s lifestyle to fruition. Bondsy, founded by a long-haired, bearded, and Brazilian Diego Zambrano, lets users trade anything they own for anything their network has to offer. Yet, unlike Zaarly, TaskRabbit, or other peer-to-peer marketplaces, Bondsy tries to take the focus away from money, and place the real value of the service on the experiences shared. When you first sign up, you’re asked to give permissions to Twitter and Facebook and you instantly dive into a stream of your friends’ trade-worthy items. These can be things like tickets, an old bicycle, access to your home while you’re away for the week, herbs from your garden, or really anything you’re looking to get rid of. Zambrano told me over coffee that he once traded some left-over chili to a couple of friends once. See, Bondsy only lets you trade with friends and friends-of-friends, with the ability to designate a certain item to one or both groups. You can even designate different prices for friends as opposed to the outlying network. Let’s say I’m getting rid of my old dresser. I can ask for $200 from friends-of-friends, and “Let’s talk…” for friends, meaning I’d be open to negotiating a fair offer or giving them a discounted price. See, Bondsy encourages you to trade things that aren’t necessarily of monetary value, since the network is only people who you know. Because friendship is baked right in, the actual transaction feels less like a chore and more like meeting up with a friend. And there’s already a topic of conversation on the table in the form of the things you’re trading. This also means that tradable items are more likely to be favors, baked goods, and experience-based than money-based. You can choose to flip through the stream of your friends’ items or see the entire friend-of-friend network, and the same social features that you see on other stream-based sharing sites still apply. On Bondsy, you can repost an item if your friends will be interested in it, and you can even cc particular friends in the comment with an @mention. Bondsy is available now in the iOS App Store.

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    Filed under: Mobile, Social .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.Micro

Samsung’s hottest new baby just set a record for the fast-selling smartphone in company history. Sales of the Korean company’s Galaxy S4 hit 10 million in less than one month after launch — a level that the Galaxy S III took 50 days to reach, and the Galaxy S II took five months to reach. 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 Filed under: Business, Gadgets, Mobile

Following the lead of other recent tech-focused IPOs, e-commerce software business ChannelAdvisor‘s shares popped almost 40 percent in its first day of trading as a public company. ChannelAdvisor, based in Morrisville, N.C., was founded in 2001 and offers a cloud-based e-commerce platform that helps retailers easily list items on Amazon, Google, eBay, Bing, Groupon, and more and keep their data unified and up to date. The company had more than 1,900 customers worldwide at the end of 2012. And in 2012 alone its customers processed more than $3.5 billion in gross merchandise value through the platform. The company filed for its IPO back in April. Its initial public offering of 5.8 million shares was priced last night at $14 a share, the high end of its pricing range. As of this writing, shares are hovering at about $19.50, a 39 percent bump over the IPO price. “Twelve years ago, my co-founder Aris [Buinevicius] and I started ChannelAdvisor with the mission to help retailers grow and optimize their e-commerce channels,” CEO Scot Wingo said in a statement. “And while we knew e-commerce had potential way back in 2001, we had no idea how big e-commerce — and our mission — would become.” ChannelAdvisor is now listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “ECOM.” Prior to today, ChannelAdvisor raised $75 million in venture capital funding from investors including New Enterprise Associates, Advanced Technology Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners, and eBay. Check out the video below for more on the company. Filed under: Business