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Tuesday, December 10, 2013
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aircastlive

Chances are you’ve got a screen in your pocket and a screen in your living room, and as time goes on more and more companies are trying to find ways to make the two play nice together. The latest entrant in the field is a Chicago-based startup called AirCast Mobile is taking a stab at bringing the phone-television content gap with an app called AirCast Live that lets users remotely send their videos to televisions for viewing.


“But wait,” I can hear you mentally murmuring. “Can’t I already do this with Miracast and Airplay?”


Well, yes and no. There’s no denying that televisions and the devices around them are much, much smarter than they used to be and those two options are largely peachy as long as you’re within range or on the same network. AirCast’s draw is that you don’t actually need to be anywhere that television to get content onto it, as long as you’ve got a decent cellular connection.


The big caveat? You have to have a Roku or a Google TV box lashed to your television to make it all work. You see, each Aircast user’s TV gets a unique (but customizable) ID that they can plug into the companion iOS or Android app. Once those people have the Aircast app installed, the process of shooting video or snapping photos and sending them along to that linked television doesn’t take more than a few taps. Once the intended recipient has installed that AirCast app on their media box of choice, they get a notification that a new video has arrived for their perusal.


To hear founder and CEO Mike Linhardt tell it, it’s a video experience that’s much more akin to messaging than what people may be used to, and that’s just fine.


“The television has largely been a passive device,” Linhardt, a mobile TV veteran, said. “There’s no real interaction between you and your TV.” Phones on the other hand are constantly checking and updating and buzzing with new content, and Linhardt’s vision is to make that sort of content experience possible in living rooms. The team’s been at it for a while now, too — they have received two infusions of seed funding over the past two years or so. the first helped the fledgling company get off the ground, and more importantly, cobble together some consumer-facing products to launch as a sort of dry run for today.


Google TV boxes and Roku are only the first beachheads that AirCast has established, but it’s already gearing up to expand its reach beyond those boxes. Linhardt confirmed that the team has been in talks with a particular smart TV manufacturer about a pre-loading agreement that would see new set shipping with the video app onboard. I’m told it was already a done deal, though I couldn’t get him to give up the name of the company they’ve partnered up with — they say its a “notable” player in the place, but we’ll see how it actually pans out.


Still, it’s not hard to see why purveyors of new televisions are interested in fleshing out their software stacks — it’s often the easiest to differentiate themselves from the rest of the (terribly crowded) pack.







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It was the licensing that killed Turntable.fm — thousands of uploaded songs, each one a tiny stream of coins tingling out of the company’s coffers. Or maybe it was the impermanence of the experience, the thing that it lacked that could have kept people coming back.


Whatever the reason, the music discovery space has been left with a clever avatar-sized hole. One that two-year-old discovery survive and clear turntable.fm homage Plug.DJ hopes to fill. Today, the company is announcing that it’s received $1.25M in seed funding led by Javelin Venture partners to expand its team and boost development of the product.


The service was founded by several people including 20-year DJ vet Steven Sacks, who built much of the front end experience of the site and musician Alex Reinlieb, who serves as the company’s CEO.


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The experience of Plug.DJ is very similar to Turntable.fm, at least superficially. There are rooms which users can create around share interests in kinds of music. There are the funny avatars and there is the DJ stand with an audience watching. Once you get beyond the obvious similarities however, you start to see a fairly engaged and interested audience. Browsing the site’s postings and rooms yields tons of comments from a fairly supportive community that engages with both the creators and each other.


That sense of community is what Reinlieb says he believes is the difference between Plug.DJ and sites like Turntable.fm. Where the latter always left you wishing you had a reason to check in, the sense of community on Plug.DJ is what creates the positive feedback loop that pulls people back to their shared rooms.


Even a superficial delve into the comments sections of the site, for instance, lead to chatter about the communities that have sprung up around rooms on the site. People note that they’ve gotten together outside of the rooms and made friends that they wouldn’t have otherwise, and express tolerance for some site stability and expansion issues.


Reinlieb won’t say exactly how many users Plug.DJ has, noting only that it’s ‘several million’. Those millions are spread over about 190 countries around the world and feature a highly engaged audience, if the company’s metrics are to be believed. The average Plug.DJ user is on the site for over an hour per visit — sessions which can add up to 5-10 hours per week, per user. Those numbers are extremely high for any service, and even more so for one centered around participation in a shared event.


“It’s not a novelty to them,” says Reinlieb of the Plug.DJ community, “It’s a very, very sticky experience.”


The social aspects of the site focus on using Facebook and other networks like Twitter to connect users on and off the site. People create rooms on the site, says Reinlieb, which become communities of users that get together there and elsewhere. Instead of spending the company’s sparse recourses on moderating, they shipped an update to the platform that allows individual users to be appointed as ‘community moderators’ called Brand Ambassadors. These roughly 35 ambassadors help to moderate the content and user groups on the site, which are organized into rooms with ‘nightclub’ allegories. Each room has its own DJs, bouncers, managers and more which can fulfill their own roles. Assigning ownership and a structure to the rooms helps instill a feeling of ownership, says Reinlieb.


Part of the Plug.DJ puzzle is that the site started where Turntable.fm ended when it came to music licensing. There is no music uploading or licensing model on Plug.DJ, instead, the service utilizes pre-licensed music libraries from Soundcloud and YouTube. This neatly dodges the issues surrounding royalties and fees, while tapping into what have already become the de-facto music destinations. YouTube alone is already among the most popular music services, if not the most popular, online. Why duplicate those efforts in their own library.


The funding will help Plug.DJ expand the team, which is where most of the money will be going. They’ve bootstrapped ‘as long as possible’, notes Reinlieb, but now need money for engineers to expand and ostensibly to fix those stability issues.


Using the service does incite some of that same feeling of cleverness that attracted people to Turntable.fm. Spinning in front of a crowd of people, even if they’re virtual, has its own appeal. And if you’re going to tap into a feedback loop to get people to continue coming back to your service — and spending tons of time there — there are worse ways to do it than fostering a sense of community.


But there’s a big difference between a few million users and a sustainable business, and Reinlieb only loosely sketches out ideas for ‘connecting’ artists, labels, brands and fans when we ask about monetization. Still, it has a bit of cash now and a very highly engaged community, so let’s see what happens.


Image Credit: Amie Lee







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On-demand delivery service Postmates has launched in Washington, D.C. today, marking its fifth market in the U.S. The company is also releasing a beta version of its app for Android, which will make the service available for a whole new group of mobile users.


It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since Postmates first launched service in San Francisco. It spent a lot of time in its home market working out the kinks, improving its app, and proving out a model that would allow customers to get items delivered within an hour for a low price.


Then after a while it started expanding into other markets where people need stuff delivered for cheap in under an hour, places like Seattle and New York City and Brooklyn.


That expansion has gone really well, according to Postmates co-founder and CEO Bastian Lehmann, especially in the Big Apple. Manhattan, where Postmates has been in business for the last six months, has grown three times faster than San Francisco and is already profitable, Lehmann says.


So it shouldn’t be a surprise that we’d hear about another new Postmates market not long after. With its expansion into Washington, D.C., Postmates seeks to meet existing demand in the nation’s capital. According to Lehmann, D.C. has had the highest number of app activations outside of New York City.


There are a number of things that make Washington, D.C. an attractive market: It’s densely populated, has a great food scene, and has a lot of office workers with expense accounts who get stuck at their desks during lunch.


While Postmates sent in an advance team to recruit couriers, the company plans to manage the new market from New York, thanks to the proximity of the two cities. And it’s been busy populating its app with restaurants and shops and menus from the area.


In addition to a new market, Postmates is close to releasing a new app for Android mobile users. For now, that app is only being launched in beta at postmates.com/android rather than through the Google Play store.


Part of the reason for the limited release is that the company’s biggest concern is seeing overwhelming demand due to a large number of new Android users. “It’s such a highly requested feature we don’t know what to expect,” Lehmann said.


While “too much demand” seems like a good problem to have, Postmates has already been having problems keeping up with the number of requests it’s had coming in. Last month it introduced “Blitz pricing,” which is kind of like Uber’s surge pricing, and is its own way of dealing with high demand.


Postmate investors include Founders Fund, SoftTech VC, Matrix Partners, Crosslink Capital, and Expansion Venture Capital, along with angels such as David Sacks, Dave Morin, Bill Lee, Scott Banister, David Wu, Thomas Korte, Naval Ravikant, Russell Cook, Russel Simmons, Walter Lee, Andy McLoughlin, Paige Craig, Jawed Karim.







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On-demand delivery service Postmates has launched in Washington, D.C. today, marking its fifth market in the U.S. The company is also relea...

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There’s a lot of terrific content on the web in the form of one-off blog posts and DIY guides from working designers and programmers, but the question is always how to find the best, and how to make sense of content that comes from a variety of disparate sources. Gibbon is a new startup out of the Netherlands, formed when a design and development agency decided to turn their attention to a side project full-time, and it features curated learning playlists to help anyone teach themselves just about anything.


“We [the founding team of Gibbon] are all self-educated, and we learned from posts shared on the web, including blog posts, videos tutorials and things,” explained Gibbon CEO and co-founder Wouter de Bres. “We came to the point where beginning designers and programmers started to ask us what they should read and watch to become a programmer or a designer, and for us that was the point at which we thought we should have a platform to facilitate this.”


On Gibbon, users sign up and then collect articles, links, videos or whatever else from the web, and then share those resources out. Some sample playlists available on the site right now (it’s been running for three months in private beta, so there’s a decent library already on day one of the public launch) include “Becoming a better photographer,” “Learning CSS3,” “On Typography,” and “3D Printing.”


“It’s all peer-to-peer, so everyone can be a student and a teacher, and I think that’s already happening generally in the world,” de Bres explained. “You have stuff that you need to learn, and you have some stuff that you think that others should read or watch. And nowadays I think that everything you need to know or want to know is on the web, and all that’s required is just for someone to create a path for you.”


Education startups like Coursera are great, he says, but there’s more than that for us to learn from what’s available on the web, it’s just not being surfaced in the best possible way. Blog posts from working designers, for instance, relating practical experience in bite-sized installments, might be more valuable than content coming from someone who’s a full-time educator, instructor or academic, but it’s just harder to find and digest given the current systems of content organization.


Aggregation of content is nothing new: People can create their own Flipboards to replicate essentially the same thing that Gibbon provides, for example. But having a fit-for-purpose product makes discovery easier, and there’s a built-in quality metric based on the number of people who engage with those lists: More students on any one playlist means that it will rise to the top of search results.


Gibbon also has plans to monetize versus closed playlists, which it envisions being used by companies to offer up training materials specific to different departments. De Bres says that they’ve already had potential customers inquire about this kind of thing, in fact, and hopes to roll those out by January or February of next year. The startup began as a bootstrapped effort when the entire team from Bread & Pepper, the design company from which it was founded, decided to focus on it full-time, but it has recently secured funding from a couple of seed investors, and an accelerator based in the Netherlands called Rockstart.


DIY learning can take many forms, but for self-starters just looking for a tool that’s more directed than Google, Gibbon seems very promising in concept. A way to more overtly rate content would greatly benefit the product, I think, but it’s a promising start for a young European startup.







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There’s a lot of terrific content on the web in the form of one-off blog posts and DIY guides from working designers and programmers, but th...

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Catchbox

Throw the mic in the air like you just don’t care.


Catchbox is a new throwable microphone designed to liven up audience participation, and in turn reduce the faffing around that seems to occur whenever a conference turns to questions from the audience.


The brightly coloured padded cube houses a wireless microphone that doesn’t mind being tossed across a room or passed from person-to-person crowd surfing-style. In fact, it’s actively encouraged. That’s because, along with being able to sustain being dropped, the device has been engineered to automatically mute the sound when flying through the air or if it falls. The tech is patent-pending, apparently.


Although various smartphone apps and cloud-based tools have attempted to lower the barriers of audience participation at live events by enabling the audience to follow along on their own devices or take part in realtime polls, Catchbox’s makers reckon the humble microphone has been neglected.


“There are a number of products that are aimed towards increasing crowd engagement,” notes Mikelis Studers, CTO of Catchbox, citing event apps, voting systems and, of course, conventional wireless microphones. But these, he argues, can be pricey and complex to set up and deploy, or often require the audience to be educated first and/or download an app.


In contrast, Catchbox’s proposition couldn’t be any simpler. “Audiences understand the product immediately: it’s a throwable microphone,” he says.


The Finland-based hardware startup isn’t just targeting events with large audiences, such as tech conferences. Other markets include education, company meetings, and consultants (here I’m envisaging those team-building experts with their endless supply of counterintuitively awkward ice-breakers, or motivational speaker types).


“There is a high expected value from every group session in those fields so we want to provide a tool that would make each session more efficient,” says Studers. “[The] internet has created new ways for sharing. We want to enhance sharing of ideas when people physically come together”.


The Catchbox is available for pre-order today, priced at $549/€395, which includes a separate receiver that can be plugged into various sound systems including stereos, computers and professional sound equipment. It’s not the only product planned by Catchbox, either. Studers tells me that in future the company will expand in the area of “crowd engagement devices” and explore other revenue models.


Promo video below.







5:39 AM

Throw the mic in the air like you just don’t care. Catchbox is a new throwable microphone designed to liven up audience participation, and ...

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Today, Viber is launching a new feature called Viber Out to its entire user base.


See, Viber Out lets Viber users make calls to people who don’t have the Viber app, effectively mimicking a Skype Out feature by charging a low per-minute rate to mobile or landline numbers.


According to Viber, the prices are generally lower than Skype.


About a month ago, Viber prematurely launched Viber Out to help Typhoon Haiyan victims in the Philippines connect with their loved ones.


To use Viber Out, just visit the “More” tab, and choose Viber Out. From there, you’ll be able to purchase Viber Out credit. No update is necessary to access the new feature.


Viber Out is available across iOS, Android and Desktop, with a Windows Phone version coming soon.


Additionally, Viber is including even more stickers to the revenue-generating Sticker Market, launched about a month ago.


As it stands now, Viber stickers and Viber Out represent the entirety of Viber’s business model, but CEO Talmon Marco promises more sources of revenue in the future.


“Profitability is certainly something on our roadmap, but we currently plan to invest more in the business,” said Marco.







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Today, Viber is launching a new feature called Viber Out to its entire user base. See, Viber Out lets Viber users make calls to people who d...

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Comic Life's latest incarnation has some really useful new additions: a script editor, new filters, a background knockout feature and some new fill options. With great new features, though, come greater complexity and greater demands on screen real estate, which can make the software more difficult to use for newbies and challenging to manage on Macs with smaller screens. If you're new to Comic Life or want to become proficient in its new features more quickly, a quick read of its 20-page documentation will be well worth your time.


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Comic Life's latest incarnation has some really useful new additions: a script editor, new filters, a background knockout feature and ...

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