Startups

“Draw this App” turns your iPad into a virtual studio that will improve your drawing skills using metrics to track progress. The app challenges the user using a similar technique for learning how to write cursive so that anyone can hone their drawing skills.

Qwilt is... Where Your Story Unfolds. Qwilt transforms the photos on your iPhone into a beautiful visual story of your life that you can experience and share with others.

Free Map with WiFi hotspots, passwords and comments for Cafes, Hotels, Shops! Offline storage of Wi-Fi points! * Designed specially for travelers! We know about WiFi hotspots everything and everywhere. Actually WORLDWIDE and even in the most remote cities of Europe, America, Asia, Middle East, Oceania, Post USSR.

If I can paraphrase a popular Alicia Keys song, this woman is on fire. And Marissa Mayer is clearing moving Yahoo back into the center of the Silicon Valley tech conversation. Days after finalizing a $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, Yahoo has bought yet another company. 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 that 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 LudwigMarissa 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, presumably it makes 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 Filed under: Business, Cloud, Deals, Dev, Games, Mobile

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

Is the PC market shrinking? Not if you’re Lenovo Over the past few quarters, Lenovo’s PC sales have remained steady, even as the larger PC market itself has declined. Its latest quarter is no exception: The company’s net income increased to $126.9 million from $66.8 million last year. Those numbers come as Lenovo’s share of the PC market increased to 15.3 percent, according to an April report from IDC. In fact, Lenovo was the only top PC company to post a gain in PC shipments rather than a decline, says IDC. Lenovo’s PC sales contrast strongly with those of industry leader HP, which last quarter saw its PC and notebook shipments decrease 18 percent and 24 percent, respectively. At 15.7 percent, HP’s share of the PC market is just barely higher than that of Lenovo — though not for much longer this rate. Lenovo’s numbers were also boosted by sales of its smartphones, which are sold in countries like India, Russia, and Indonesia. Lenovo is the second-largest smartphone vendor in China behind Samsung, and it expects its global smartphone shipments to increase to 50 million this year. Lenovo may be mostly a PC company, but it’s pretty clearly showing it wants to be so much more. Filed under: Business

I was at a conference a few days ago and I was watching Rand Fishkin speak about nudges, and it made think about all the nudges that I’ve used in the past to convert visitors into customers. And then it hit me how most people don’t even use nudges with their online business. But before I go into how you can use nudges, lets first define what a nudge is: To push against gently, especially in order to gain attention or give a signal. Now that you know what a nudge is, here is an example of one: It’s a simple message to tell hotel guests to save water as it helps our planet. Can you guess how effective it is? Well, it’s helped hotels on average of save 2300 liters of water and 150 liters of detergent each month. In essence, you are leveraging simple cues, or verbiage to help encourage people to take a specific action. That’s what a nudge is. Now lets dive into how you can use them to convert visitors into customers: The pen is mightier than the sword Words have a lot of power. An addition of a word or a removal of one can drastically affect your conversion rates. For example, 37Signals tested the call to action phrase “see pricing and plans” over the verbiage “free trial” and they were able to boost signups by 200%. That’s right, the verbiage “see pricing and plans” boosted signups by 3x. On Quick Sprout, when I added a simple dollar value to the email optin box within the sidebar, I was able to increase conversions by 22%. Don’t take words for granted… adding or removing words can have a huge impact on your conversion rates. You just have to figure out which words your visitors are sensitive to and then you can start leveraging them. Design is the new marketing Color and visual cues can have a major impact on conversion rates. Did you know the Hellobar on Quick Sprout accounts for 11% of all of my leads? It’s just a simple bar that scrolls with you as you are reading this blog post… but that one bar accounts for 11% of my revenue. It’s not just with me either, KimberlySnyder.net generates around 20% of their revenue through Hellobar as well. And it doesn’t have to be drastic changes either, one simple design tweak can drastically increase conversions. MarketDialer decided to run an A/B test in which they added the cost of their solution to their homepage. Here is the original version: And here is the new version: Can you guess which one converted better? By showcasing their price, they were able to generate 100% more leads. If you are interested in adjusting your visual cues, you should first check out this infographic as it will break down the meaning of colors and how they affect people psychologically. What’s useable may not convert the best I always thought that making things easier for the user would boost your conversion rate. But sadly, it doesn’t always work that way. With Crazy Egg our checkout process used to be one page, until Conversion Rate Experts convinced us to test a two-step check out process. The first step being where a user puts in their name and email, and the second being the checkout page. Do you know what the results were? A 10% increase in conversions. The Obama Administration saw similar results with this tactic. When Obama was running for President his team tested a multiple step checkout process. The end result was a 5% increase in conversions. Not bad for a simple design tweak. The reason I think a multiple step checkout process works is because a person is already committed after they give you some of their information. So might as well complete the rest of the checkout. Conversations sell themselves One of the simplest nudges I’ve tested is to create a conversation with people. If you ever signup for the Quick Sprout newsletter you will be placed in an email drip sequence. In one of the emails I ask you to “hit the reply button and tell me what you think of the email”. Whenever someone hits the reply button, I make sure I always respond to them, thank them for their feedback. I am not askin

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

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

Illustrations for REMOTE: Office Not Required are being done by the fantastic Mike Rohde again. This one is for the essay “Stop Commuting Your Life Away”. The book is due out in October of this year.