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Tuesday, December 3, 2013
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Canon's first kick at the mirrorless market was without question a disappointing debut: The EOS M first launched in 2012, and was a let-down mostly because of its incredibly sluggish autofocus, as well as other quirks like a screen blackout that happened immediately after taking a picture. Canon seems to have addressed both issues with the new design, added Wi-Fi, and left most of the rest untouched.


The M2 has been officially announced via Canon China and Canon Japan so far, with English-language countries likely due for releases later today. The details of the camera are known, however, and include a body design that resembles the original, but that's actually slightly smaller and packs new Wi-Fi connectivity for sharing and image transfer.


The big selling point however remains the improved autofocus, which was by far the biggest area requiring improvement on the original. Canon promises more than double the AF speed with its new Hybrid CMOS AF II system, which double checks the window for focus information that the original did for that improvement. Canon has kept the same APS-C 18 megapixel sensor in the M2, but the sensor wasn't the issue, so this could be a very good entrant in the MILC field, so long as the AF actually does provide significant improvements over the original.


The M2 will ship in Japan in mid-December, but no word yet on when it'll come to the U.S. A pre-holiday ship date would definitely help Canon move a few of these via the under-the-tree crowd, however, so fingers crossed it arrives before the new year. I always like the look of the EOS M, but with the M2, it might have some substance behind all that style, too. Check out Canon Rumors for the full spec sheet if you're interested in the nitty-gritty.







5:09 AM

Canon's first kick at the mirrorless market was without question a disappointing debut: The EOS M first launched in 2012, and was a let...

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Over the past year, video ad startup LiveRail has seen its share of the ad market increase and has seen revenues grow 300 percent year-over-year. It's on pace for a $100 million run-rate in the fourth quarter, as the company gets ready for a possible IPO in the second half of 2014.


Founded in 2008, LiveRail has steadily been introducing publishers to the joys of real-time bidding, using technology and algorithms to match publisher inventory with the highest bidder for their content. On the advertiser side, it allows brands and agencies to better target audiences in real-time, driving up the value of the ads.


With the market for programmatic ad buying expanding, the mostly quiet San Francisco-based startup is hoping to get the word out about its growth. One of the reasons LiveRail is now making revenue numbers public is that it would like to differentiate itself from some other video ad companies which IPO'd this year. Both Tremor Video and YuMe became publicly traded over the summer, but neither one has had tremendous success since then.


While YuMe's shares have recovered somewhat since it announced its third-quarter results, it's still down from the $9.00 listing price of its IPO. Tremor, meanwhile, has fared much worse: Its third-quarter numbers sent the company's stock price down nearly 50 percent in November.


For LiveRail, being on pace for $100 million in revenues puts it almost on par with those who have gone before it. YuMe is expecting full year revenue to be in a range of $154.5 million and $157.5 million, while Tremor's full-year guidance is for between $125 million and $126 million.


But it expects to grow more quickly than each of those competitors. In 2014 it's forecasting another 200 percent growth due to a couple of factors. On the one hand, it's signed a number of major new accounts over the past year, so it has a lot of momentum going into 2014. On the other hand, the company is seeing accelerating demand for programmatic video ad buying.


Broadcasters that it's signed up recently include A&E Mobile, CBS Local, Fox News, Condé Nast, Demand Media, Real Networks, Univision, BET, Advance Digital, Maker Studios, Scripps, and Terra Networks. That's on top of existing clients such as MLB.com, CBS Interactive, and PBS.


At the same time, customers are also getting more comfortable with its technology and make more inventory available for programmatic ad buying. It serves up about 5 billion ad impressions a month, and about 71 percent of its revenue today is transacted through real-time bidding, the company says.


The next step, according to LiveRail co-founder and CEO Mark Trefgarne, is to hire a CFO. The company is in the process of searching for someone to fill that role right now, and is targeting the second half of 2014 to go public.


When and if it does, its investors are probably in for a decent pay day. The company has only raised $12 million since being founded, and is already profitable. Its main investor is UK-based Pond Ventures, which invested in LiveRail pre-revenue.


Not only is it betting on continued momentum, but it's expanded its workforce to meet demand. That includes the opening of its first full-time sales office in Europe, and growing from a headcount of 60 at the beginning of the year to 120 employees worldwide today.


The short-term vision is to serve up all online ads, but in the long term, LiveRail believes there's a bigger opportunity to break into the traditional TV ad business.


“We fundamentally believe that if you fast-forward 10 years, it's difficult to imagine a world where the vast majority of viewing isn't done via IP,” Trefgarne said. “We think there's a world coming where programmatic TV represents 80 percent of TV viewing.”


Photo Credit: bfishadow via Compfight cc







5:09 AM

Over the past year, video ad startup LiveRail has seen its share of the ad market increase and has seen revenues grow 300 percent year-over...

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If you've ever had the opportunity to sit through a high-end audiophile retailer's comparative demonstration, you'll know that the more expensive the living room audio gear gets, the better it sounds. Amazing, but true -- they're not lying. The big problem, once you've sat through one of these comparisons, is that you're going to come to the unfortunate realization that you need to hand over many, many thousands of dollars to buy the best stuff. Anything less expensive, and you know it is second rate -- you've just heard that with your own ears.


5:09 AM

If you've ever had the opportunity to sit through a high-end audiophile retailer's comparative demonstration, you'll know that...

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Intel's acquisition spree continues apace, with the latest being made to augment one of its other recent acquisitions. It is buying Hacker League, a popular platform for managing hackathons, which will be incorporated with the API management company Mashery (acquired April 2013). The terms of Hacker League deal are not being disclosed but we understand it is for a sum significantly smaller than the $180 million Intel reportedly paid for Mashery. Only the platform, IP and other assets are coming over to Intel; the three co-founders Mike Swift, Abe Stanway, and Ian Jennings, who are all in their early 20s, are not.


Oren Michels, Mashery's founder who still runs the business, tells me that the idea behind the acquisition is to augment the developer outreach work that it already does on a daily basis. “We acquired the assets of Hacker League to take a product that makes hackathons great so that we could do more things to support developers,” he said. “It adds something that we can support the developer community with and eventually build parts into our core product over time.”


Adding Hacker League will mean that Mashery (and Intel) will be significantly ramping up their events for developers. Mashery is involved in some 80 hackathons annually, while Hacker League has powered some 460 events worldwide since October 2011, with a database of some 6,000 hacks from those events. (The hackathons it has powered includes the one that kicks off TechCrunch Disrupt, our flagship conference.)


Mashery and Hacker League already had friendly relations before this, crossing paths in the hackathon circuit. “We have a lot of respect for Mashery,” Swift told me. “This is the best possible place for Hacker League to go. I got really excited by the idea of Mashery taking it to places where we couldn't.”


Swift - who created Hacker League with Stanway and Jennings while the three were still students at Rutgers University - says that it had from the start been a side project, created more out of what they themselves wanted out of hackathons than really a startup in its own right. It was always bootstrapped, and until this past summer (when they started to consider what would happen with Hacker League longer term) was run more or less as a side project, with the three co-founders holding down day jobs at places like SendGrid, Etsy and PubNub. They are continuing with other projects post-sale. All three had been a part of the HackNY program, which organises university student hackathons among other things, and this could be called HackNY's first exit. (Swift is continuing his interest in student hackathons; he's the “commisioner” of Major League Hacking, vying to be the official league for intercollegiate, competitive student hackathons.


While Mashery already has an existing business targeting developers - which is beneficial overall for Intel and its mindshare in that community - it will be interesting to see how and where Hacker League's platform gets used in the future. One area where Intel could use the platform would be in its own hardware-focused hackathons. And like other API-focused businesses like Appcelerator, Mashery itself is doing business with enterprises, helping them work on their own internal development, so potentially this could be used to help build out Mashery's outreach in that area as well.







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Intel's acquisition spree continues apace, with the latest being made to augment one of its other recent acquisitions. It is buying Hac...

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After enduring a round of layoffs last month, Rdio, the streaming music startup from Skype co-founder Janus Friis, has found a new chief executive officer, Anthony Bay. Bay, whose experience includes executive positions at Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, inherits the challenge of making Rdio profitable as it competes against market leaders like Spotify.


Margins in the streaming music business are extremely tight and Rdio, which lacks the the music industry connections Spotify has formed, may be struggling to get enough paying subscribers to stay afloat (the company has not disclosed the size of its current user base). Rdio did not say how many employees were fired last month, but we were told by one person that the layoffs affected 35 people, while another tip said that the number amounted to about one-fifth to one-third of Rdio's workforce, with the biggest cuts in engineering.


A representative for the company told us that they layoffs were to “improve its cost structure and ensure a scalable business model for the long-term.” It's unclear how Vdio, the startup's video-streaming service, has been affected.


Another potentially worrying sign is that the startup has not released any user numbers in a while. In contrast, Deezer reported earlier in November that it had passed 5 million user mark, despite not entering the U.S. market. Spotify reported 6 million paying users in March 2013. Rdio did tell TechCrunch, however, that its tripled the number of new users since the end of 2012, and 90% of those subscribers are now on the Rdio Unlimited tier, which costs $9.99 per month.


Bay was formerly head of Amazon's global video business, and also served as chairman at Loudeye, where he led its B2B digital media content division before it was sold to Nokia. At Microsoft, Bay was in charge of the company's e-commerce technology platform, as well as developing Windows Media Technologies, including Windows Media Player. He also worked eight years at Apple, where he led Apple's Online Services.


Bay follows Drew Lamer, who is now Rdio's vice chairman and strategic advisor to itsboard of directors. Lamer announced earlier this year he planned to vacate the CEO post.


Friis said in a statement that Rdio now plans to focus on growing its paying user base globally and added that Bay will “play a critical role in unlocking the value of our global terrestrial radio partnerships.” Rdio announced a strategic partnership with Cumulus Media, which operates 525 radio stations in the U.S., in September. The deal gives Rdio access to Cumulus' programming, as well as promotions on its stations. In return, Cumulus, which took an equity stake in Rdio's parent company Pulser Media, now has an online platform.


To date, Rdio has raised $17.5 million from Atomico, Mangrove, Janus Friis and Skype.







4:53 AM

After enduring a round of layoffs last month , Rdio , the streaming music startup from Skype co-founder Janus Friis, has found a new chief e...

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Apple has been issued a patent by the USPO today (via AppleInsider) that describes a system for using facial recognition and detection on a mobile or desktop computing device. This could work a lot like the Android face unlock option, which has been criticized before for its fallibility, but is also designed to prompt activity and use facial expressions as input for controlling the device.


This could be used to not only protect data on an iPhone in a locked state, but also determine how much information is shared on the lock screen for a user. So if a person is receiving a call and their iPhone recognizes them (determined by a number of factors, including skin tone, vectors, feature distance and size, etc.) then it'll display caller ID and information from the user's contacts app. If it's not someone the phone has listed as a user of the device, it'll block all that data.


Likewise with emails or messages, it could scrub the content of any actual info until there's a positive recognition match for a phone's rightful user. In a desktop computing context, the recognition could be used to analyze a user's behavior over time as they sit in front of their Mac, determining when to trigger certain actions like screen savers, or enter a movie mode, or switch audio devices to prepare for a Skype call, for instance.


Apple has just acquired PrimeSense, the Israeli firm that helped created the original Microsoft Kinect's motion sensing capabilities, so it's tempting to link the two, even though the Apple patent far pre-dates that subsequent deal. Still, Apple has shown that it places a premium on innovation that helps users access their device more securely and more conveniently with the introduction of the iPhone 5s fingerprint sensor, and this could provide a way to allow users more access to things like Siri from the lockscreen, without the privacy compromises that come along with some of the assistant's more useful convenience features.







4:38 AM

Apple has been issued a patent by the USPO today (via AppleInsider ) that describes a system for using facial recognition and detection on a...

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Spotify recently confirmed a whopping $250 million expansion round of funding. But with a lot of public heat from high profile musicians questioning whether the music streaming platform is a boom or bust for business, today Spotify is launching a new service, and putting out updated news on the rise in rightsholder payouts, that it hopes will demonstrate that it's not just growing for its own gain.


Spotify Artists Website is a B2B play that will be an interface between the streaming music platform and the musicians/managers that put their content on it, giving them details on how payouts work and other news about the site. On top of that, as befitting a platform, Spotify has teamed up with Next Big Sound to create a dashboard for artists and managers to have real-time access to data about how their music is performing on the site and other details. And it is also confirming that so far in 2013, it has paid out $500 million in royalties to music rightsholders - that is, labels and artists and all others who get a cut of music whenever it is streamed on Spotify's service.


That effectively means that to date, Spotify has paid out over $1 billion in royalties since 2009:


Total-Annual-Royalty-Payout-Out


“Our belief has always been that if we can offer fans a listening experience superior to piracy, then they will be happy to pay for it, and in turn we are happy to pay out nearly 70% of all the money we earn in royalties,” Spotify writes today in its opening letter on the new site. “We believe that this is the fair approach to take, and that as we grow we will become an increasingly significant contributor to artists' financial lives.”


The moves today underscore the public (and perhaps also private) pressure that Spotify has been under from some artists who accuse the company of being greedy and not actually all that financially beneficial for those whose music is streamed on it. While Spotify has worked hard to win over some of the most influential artists out there (one big win was getting Metallica on board last year), it has also seen some of these artists pull their music from the service as well.


Although that has seen Spotify knocked a bit in the public eye, it's still the platform to beat against others like Deezer, which has yet to launch in the U.S. but is expected to soon, and Rdio, which has apparently “beautiful” APIs for its partners (a source tells me) but hasn't seen the critical mass of user adoption that Spotify has.


While the news in November was about Spotify securing financing for the future (it is still loss-making as a service), today's news is about Spotify showing that it is minding those on whom it is reliant for its plaform to have any meaning for consumers. You can probably expect that this will also lead, soon, to more product launches as well, both on mobile (it's fastest-growing platform) and on the web - where we have heard that the company is likely to be releasing a web-version API for developers and other third parties soon.


More to come. Refresh for updates.







2:08 AM

Spotify recently confirmed a whopping $250 million expansion round of funding . But with a lot of public heat from high profile musicians ...

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