Startups

Thank the old gods and the new that it’s Friday, AMIRITE? You know what that means right? Friday is Gadgets Podcast day, and boy do we have a show for you! In this episode, John Biggs, Matt Burns and Darrell Etherington discuss Microsoft’s just-announced Xbox One, complete with voice commands, a brand new Kinect, a slew of new entertainment/social features, and the best specs yet. Plus, Laptop Week is coming to a close, so the fellas discuss some of their faves, like the Dell XPS 13 Developer’s Edition with Ubuntu and the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina. We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific. Click here to download an MP3 of this show. You can subscribe to the show via RSS. Subscribe in iTunes Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Features: Ships with Chrome OS (generally requires an update to get to latest build) 2560 x 1700, 239 PPI display 32GB SSD 1.8GHz Intel Core i5 Processor MSRP: $1,299 Pros: Hardware is incredibly well-designed Fast boot, right into Chrome-based workflow Touch is nice when actually needed Cons: Seems to leech battery quickly in sleep mode Still just Chrome Expensive Battery life could be better The Chromebook Pixel is the Chromebook I’d pick as my personal Chromebook – if money was no option, and if I felt I really needed a Chromebook. It’s an impressive beast, like a Bird of Paradise, but in the end a trained falcon would be a way better winged thing to own, since it could catch you some wild game, instead of just prancing around with its mesmerizing but fairly useless mating displays. Aspirational While not comparable to a bird of prey, the Chromebook Pixel is a very impressive piece of hardware. The construction, which includes an anodized aluminum shell that has a dark slate finish, corners that are just slightly rounded for a more angular look than say a MacBook Pro, and clear attention to detail paid to the overall fit and finish that results in a final product you feel like putting on display in your home. The computer is solid, and it bears a pleasing weight to remind you, tipping the scales at 3.35 lbs (which is actually lighter than the 13.3-inch Retina MacBook Pro but feels more substantial somehow, perhaps owing to the smaller screen size. The Chromebook Pixel also has a touch-sensitive, high-resolution display that beats the Retina MacBooks in terms of pixel density (which may have something to do with Google’s naming choice here). The screen is admittedly gorgeous in ideal conditions, but ideal conditions are fewer and farther between for the Pixel’s screen than for the Apple one. The color spectrum was skewed slightly yellow on my unit, and viewed at lower brightness legibility suffers. Also, if you think glare is a problem on your MacBook Pro or iMac, you’re going to be amazed at how much worse it can get with the Pixel in bright lighting. The touch aspect works well, and surprisingly I haven’t had trouble with greasy mitts mucking up the screen so far. That’s probably because I seldom actually reach out and touch it though. The movement is awkward from a typing position, and of limited use value in my opinion. But for those few times you do get the impulse to tap something, it’s a very nice-to-have feature, if not a killer one. Speaking of touch, the Chromebook Pixel has one of the best trackpads currently available on a laptop, on par with Apple’s extremely solid input pads. Hardware aside, the Chromebook Pixel’s main attribute is that it runs Google’s Chrome OS. If you’ve not used Chrome OS before, you’re probably not alone. But you also don’t need to worry about a learning curve; this is just like using the Chrome browser on your Mac or Windows computer. Web apps are treated a little more like proper desktop apps, perhaps, but the extensions, the experience and pretty much everything else about it is just like using Chrome. Which is both a good and a bad thing. It’s good because it’s simple, easy, and for a good chunk of people, it probably actually satisfies the majority of their needs. If you’re a light computer user, making the browser the focus of an OS experience makes sense. But unfortunately for Chrome OS, tablets make almost as much, if not more sense for those users. Once you start requiring more than a tablet demands, your needs likely ramp up quickly, and then you’ll feel the lack of dedicated apps like Skype and Adobe’s Creative Suite products on the Chromebook pretty quickly. In other words, the Chromebook Pixel occupies a very thin sliver in terms of potential buyer needs, and there’s likely massive demand on either side. Google didn’t make a mass market device w

Erply, the startup that makes iPad-oriented and cloud-based point of sale and inventory management software for retailers, has raised $2.15 million in new funding, co-founder CEO Kristian Hiiemaa tells TechCrunch. The round, which is Erply’s Series B, was led by Redpoint Ventures with the participation of Index Ventures and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. This brings the total venture capital investment into Erply to $4.2 million. The decision to take on just $2.15 million was a definite choice, Hiiemaa said, noting that Erply had offers from investors keen to pitch in on a $10 million Series B. But Hiiemaa decided to keep the round small because his company, which has a staff of 45, is profitable. “There’s no need [for a larger round] now,” he said. One way that Erply has achieved the strong financial position to be choosy with investors is by having its technology development in Hiiemaa’s native Estonia, where he has the know-how to employ top tier engineering talent. An Erply competitor with engineering operations in the United States “would need to raise $20 million to get the same team and speed,” Hiiemaa said. Still, Erply, which has been kicking into high gear of late and currently has 45 million SKUs in 115,000 stores on board, has no shortage of ways that the new funding will come in handy — especially since its competitors include deep-pocketed tech giants such as Microsoft, Oracle, and RetailPro. The company just signed a lease on a new sales floor in New York City and plans to double its staff in the months ahead. Going forward, Hiiemaa said, Erply is focusing on big enterprise sales efforts, targeting more Fortune 500 companies with more than 200 store locations to use its platform. Also in the works at Erply is an iPad compatible RFID, NFC, and Bluetooth-enabled hardware device to manage inventory that should be making its debut later this year. As Hiiemaa told me earlier this spring, Erply’s larger vision is a big one — to help brick and mortar shops stay in business and keep our neighborhoods vibrant. “The most important thing for me is helping retailers to survive and be successful,” Hiiemaa said at the time. “They have stores, locations, inventory, but they lack web knowledge and algorithmic-powered tools to understand retention. Otherwise, online eats the stores.” Now Erply has a bit more firepower to fight that good fight, and let technology help traditional businesses rather than hurt them.

Continuing to grow its suite of services aimed at mobile app developers, Amazon today announced App Engagement Reports, free app usage reports which are now a part of the company’s Mobile App Distribution Portal. The reports are designed for Amazon Appstore developers in need of information about app performance and revenue. Specifically, the reports include daily and monthly active devices, installs, sessions, average revenue per device, and retention metrics, and they can be filtered by marketplace, viewed in chart form, or downloaded as a CSV, the company explains in this afternoon’s official announcement. Developers will also be able to change the data range on the reports in order to see historical trends. There are six Engagement Reports now being provided: Overview: A summary of key usage data for your app or game Average Revenue: Daily and Monthly Average Revenue per Device (ARPD) and Average Revenue per Paid User (ARPPU) for In-App Items Retention: Daily Retention for days 1-3-7 and Weekly Retention for weeks 1-2-3 Active Devices: Daily Active Devices (DAD), Monthly Active Devices (MAD), and Sticky Factor (DAD/MAD) Sessions: Total Daily Sessions and Average Sessions Per Device App Installs: Daily Installs and Uninstalls At launch, the reports are only available for those apps that were submitted and published after October 25, 2012. For developers who haven’t updated their app since then, they’ll need to either republish the app or submit an update in order to activate the reporting feature. However, there’s no need to make any other changes to the app’s code or integrate any additional software. The report will include data for apps running on Amazon devices like the Kindle Fire and Fire HD, as well as any other Android devices running the latest version of the Amazon Appstore mobile app. App analytics and sales figures are crucial to making Amazon’s Appstore a more complete service – these things have long been standard features of competing stores like Google Play or Apple’s iTunes, for example. Though many developers still integrate third-party SDKs to allow for  increased capabilities and more detailed reporting beyond what comes out-of-the-box, it’s expected for the app store itself to at least provide some sort of basic insight into an app’s traction and sales. Amazon says that reports have been a “popular request from developers,” and that’s likely an understatement. The addition of the new Engagement Reports comes on the heels of several other changes Amazon has introduced in recent months to beef up its Appstore offerings for developers. Not only has it been expanding its footprint globally, the company has also added features like in-app payments, subscriptions, and even its own virtual currency, Amazon Coins, in order to give developers more revenue generation possibilities. Now that developers have had a little time to experiment with those new offerings, it only makes sense that they should be able to track how well those features are performing, and whether or not they have an effect on key metrics like ARPU (average revenue per user) and retention. Additional information about the various parts of the reports and how to access them are explained here. Meanwhile, an Engagement Reports FAQ offers the answers to even more specific questions about the new reports.

TechCrunch Disrupt SF is back! We’re very excited to announce tickets are on sale and stealth companies can now apply for Startup Battlefield. This September 7-11, we’re bringing Disrupt back to San Francisco to welcome an all new slate of outstanding startups, influential speakers, guests and more to the stage. It marks the seventh time we’ve set up shop here in SF and once again all the action — starting with our 24 hour Hackathon — happens at The Concourse at San Francisco Design Center. Last month, at Disrupt NY 2013, Enigma bested a very impressive batch of startups including HAN:DLE, SupplyShift, and Zenefits. The very best startups showed up in New York this year, and we’re stoked to keep the magic alive in San Francisco once September rolls around. So are you ready to launch your company on the biggest startup launch stage? Tell us about it. As in years past we’re looking for the very best startups to compete in the Startup Battlefield and walk away with the Disrupt Cup, $50,000 cash, and gobs of attention. For the first two days, 30 companies will present their product to a panel of judges. But first you have to apply. Applications are due July 17. Click here for the application and full list of rules. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis — and the last two Disrupts had record numbers of applicants — so it’s to your advantage to submit as soon as you are ready. Due to strong demand, we are unable to review applications more than once, so please do not submit a draft application before you are ready for final consideration. PowerPoint slides and video demos are optional but highly encouraged. We reserve the right not to review applications without video demos based on application volume. We look forward to reviewing your application. All submissions are confidential unless otherwise permitted by applicants on the application form. More Disrupt SF 2013 details will be announced in the coming weeks. Tickets are currently on sale at a significant discount. We have a stellar line up of speakers and panels on the docket. But we need your help. Apply for Startup Battlefield and help us make Disrupt SF 2013 the best yet. Our sponsors help make events happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team at sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Muhammed Yunus is a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and the founder of Grameen Bank, and he sparked a movement with the simple question: “If you are a socially conscious person, why don’t you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?” Today, entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley — and increasingly in tech hubs around the world — have taken this mission to heart. The trend is often referred to as “social entrepreneurship” or “impact investing,” and the goal is to use business process to drive positive change. READ OUR IDIOT’S GUIDES On the venture capital game On angel investing On corporate development and getting acquired But social entrepreneurship has its critics. Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank quipped in a recent interview that it’s a “a bit of a fad” and startups that “confuse social good with being in business usually end up as 501(c)(3)s.” Likewise, Clay Johnson, author of the Information Diet, accused Change.org (the poster child for social entrepreneurship that just pulled in $15 million) in a story for the Wall Street Journal for being a “lead-generation business disguised as a social-change organization for whoever is willing to pay them for the email addresses.” Related: Read more about the young entrepreneurs who are changing the way we do business. Pierre and Pam Omidyar with Virgin’s Richard Branson. To take a closer look at social entrepreneurship, I headed to Omidyar‘s annual conference in San Jose, Calif. Omidyar is not your average venture firm — it refers to itself as a “philanthropic investment” practice. Its founders are eBay’s Pierre Omidyar [pictured above and left] and his wife, Pam. Its private event ONEF has grown each year with more interest from entrepreneurs and mainstream venture firms. I caught up with Omidyar’s Todor Tashev and Paula Goldman, Lenddo cofounder Richard Eldridge, and d.light president Ned Tozun to speak to the trend for our “idiot’s guide” series. VentureBeat: Let’s dive in with a basic question. What is social entrepreneurship?  Todor Tashev: Right now, it’s a huge tent, meaning there is a very loose definition. Lots of people are pursuing it, and interpreting it in different ways. Generally speaking, social entrepreneurs are delivering a product or service, but it’s intended to address a fundamental social issue. Social entrepreneurs don’t just make widgets. They make widgets to advance a real benefit for the world. VentureBeat: Can it be tricky to align the social mission and the profit motive? Tashev: We look for companies where there is no conflict between the two. We call it a “single engine.” Some people would put companies like Facebook or Google in this category, but they view social good as a side benefit. Paula Goldman: There is some question of intentionality. Are you doing this with the explicit goal of making a difference? Omidyar investment partner Todor Tashev. VentureBeat: Can these social enterprises be for-profits? Or are they typically nonprofits?  Tashev: More recently, the trend was associated with companies that are for-profit — or have a blended model. Benefit corporations are a popular option [As of January, 13 states -- including California, Maryland and Hawaii -- have passed legislation allowing for the creation of B corps. --Ed.] B corp’s like Couchsurfing and Change.org are not just driven by maximizing shareholder value.  It’s important for companies who need a better way to explicitly convey to their users, backers, and to the general public that they have a broader mission. Couchsurfing may well be the first in history to have attracted mainstream venture capitalists – General Catalyst led a series B round. Goldman: We are not trying to replace traditional philanthropy. But we believe we can use the market; we will have

Tumblr just can’t catch a break. Yeah, yeah, they’re getting a billion dollars from Yahoo— but it’s been a torrent of criticism ever since. Angry users! Porn! Poooooorn! Know what probably won’t help? Botching the key detail of an email sent to many of your most tech-savvy users. Tumblr just sent out a big ol’ mass email to all of the users who host a Tumblr blog through their own, independently-owned domain. In other words, to the folks who know enough about these bleepy-bloopy electronic space typewriters we use to be able to get a bit fancy with their Tumblr blogs. It warned users of an impending change they’d need to make to their settings — a new IP address they needed to point their domain at — unless they wanted their blog to suddenly “no longer work“. The catch: they, uh, kinda forgot the most important part. They’d put in a placeholder for the IP, and… it never got replaced. “Please point your custom domain to [IP Address],” it directed. Wherps. For many of these users, this was amongst the first emails they’d received since the Yahoo acqusition. Within about 30 seconds, the tweets lampooning the email started going up. Moral of the story: If you work at a lil’ company and manage to botch a mass email, don’t worry too much. You’re in good company. Billion dollar company.

Science has come a long way in the past 100 years. We’ve sent humans to space, landed devices on Mars, proposed groundbreaking theories, exploded nuclear bombs, decimated diseases, and more. But with all these advancements, why is still so hard for us to predict future weather conditions? A new video from popular YouTube channel Vsauce explains. “We can send satellites into orbit and people to the moon and predict solar eclipses thousands of years into the future, but yet we cannot reliability predict which way the wind will be blowing in the next hour or so,” the video’s narrator says. “How can such monumental cosmic movements light minutes or light years away from us be understood whereas the weather … remains a mystery?” Mostly, it has to do with the limits of what we are able to know. Predicting the future events of planets and cosmic objects is more doable because we know orbits and other conditions, so predictability becomes easier. But there are so many variables to weather and the air molecules on Earth that it becomes incredibly difficult to generally predict weather outside of about a week. As a society, we’ve certainly gotten better at communicating when severe weather events are about to occur or are in progress. (We saw some of that in regard to the devastating Oklahoma tornado Monday.) But it will take more scientific breakthroughs to get us closer to predicting these types of events will be occurring more than a day or a week out. Vsauce’s video also dives into other topics related to predictability, the butterfly effect, chaos theory, the possibility of a moon landing failure, and more. Check out the fascinating clip above. Filed under: Science

A block from the Mariposa on-ramp and in the eye-line of 90,000 cars whizzing by on 280 sits an old warehouse that was home to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a local alt weekly, and Digg. Most of the building is gutted and inside they are working on the “greatest enabler of hardware on the planet,” according PCH International head Liam Casey. It will be the new home of Lime Labs, a hush-hush design consultancy that Casey bought in 2012 for an undisclosed amount and, most important, the U.S. gateway to Asian PCH’s manufacturing might that allows hardware startups to access stem-to-stern services in design, coding, manufacturing, packaging and shipping. Casey, dubbed “Mr. China” in a James Fallows article that outlined the rising importance of Shenzhen as a manufacturing giant, is one of the biggest machers in Asia. A teetotaling Irishman, the inexhaustible Casey ostensibly lives in a hotel in downtown Shenzhen but is nearly always in the air. He and his cross-cultural team make nearly all the accessories you can imagine for multiple vendors. You couldn’t point a finger in a Best Buy without hitting a product PCH builds. He envisions his new building as a gateway to China and a way to help clients – and the public – understand the vagaries of mass manufacturing. The space will contain a public foyer and cafe where visitors can learn about materials, design, and manufacturing. C-Level training will go on in a large anteroom on the first floor with a huge video screen suspended on epoxy-sealed walls. In short, it’s the Apple Store if the focus was all the trouble that went into products before they ever reached the consumer. “We want it to be the most photographed building in San Francisco,” said Andre Yousefi, co-founder of Lime Lab. The company, which started in the doldrums of the recession, consisted of Yousefi and his partner Kurt Dammermann until Casey bought them and expanded the team to 25. They expect to hire 15 more engineers by October and hope to fill 80 seats in their new HQ by 2014. Not bad for a tiny, two-man shop in a run-down district of San Francisco. Yousefi is the buttoned down member of the group, clean shaven more more dedicated to design than manufacturing. Dammermann is the scruffy mechanic who has seen factory floors and is at home with drill presses and band saws. The Lime Lab vision is born of the needs of hardware startups and companies that need a full service consultancy to help their product move from idea to packaged product in a few short months. “What we don’t do is the high volume accessories work,” said Yousefi. “We’re doing more up-front product development, end-to-end.” Using PCH’s retail distribution platform, TNS Distribution in Dublin, Ireland, coupled with the company’s extensive contacts in China’s manufacturing centers, Lime Lab can take a sketch of a product and bring it to fruition at a speed unimaginable for most strategic design houses. Yousefi and Dammermann were former IDEO designers and CAD jockeys who wanted to build their own consultancy. “You come to us with either a napkin sketch or just an idea and we do the detail design and development to flesh it out,” said Dammermann. “One we have the idea fleshed out with the design team, we work with the team in Shenzhen to take it to the finish line.” The team was reticent to mention their clients or current employees although they have hired ex-Apple, Intel, and IDEO engineers and designers who were looking for something more rewarding. They are working on everything from audio products to mini-computers and their current offices, though small, hold CNC machines, 3D printers, and a small testing facility. The new lab on Mississippi Street will contain far more gear as well as a situation room for describing the retail shipping patterns laid out by PCH and the design decisions made for each p

Developer James Rundquist has just unveiled Glass Nest, an app for Google Glass that will let you control your Nest home thermostat directly from your nerdy, nerdy face. The future is here, and it belongs to white, male dorks. You heard it first here. Nest is a highly automated “smart” thermostat made by the same folks who created the iPod. And, in case you’ve been on a silent yoga retreat for the past year, Google Glass is the eponymous search company’s latest attempt to penetrate every aspect of your waking life. It’s a visor-shaped bit of hardware that places a small, clear screen at eyeball-level. You interact with it primarily via voice. Using the Nest app, you can tell your Glass unit to change the temperature to N degrees and tell Nest when you’re going away or coming home, all the better to put your home temperature control system into or out of away mode. Rundquist, a Georgia Institute of Technology student who warns this is not an official Nest or Google app, has opened the kimono on Github; feel free to fork the heck out of it. Image credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat Filed under: Dev Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013? on the form. .blurb-cat-dev hr { margin: 10px 0 10px 0; }