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Thursday, December 19, 2013
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Content recommendations company Taboola wants to be everywhere readers are, offering up links that they’ll find interesting (or at least click on). With that in mind, the company is releasing an API that will allow publishers to build its recommendations directly into their mobile apps.


Taboola, in case you didn’t know, is the company behind all of the “From Around The Web” and “You May Like” recommendations that you see at the end of post from such reputable publications as Huffington Post (owned by AOL!) and TMZ.


Recommendations include such high-quality links as “4 Symptoms Of Male Menopause” and “Jenny McCarthy and Her Boobs” (see below), which is an incredibly lucrative business, but causes some people to tweet stuff like this:



It’s hard to hate on Taboola too much, in part because I know that my clicking on Taboola stories about what you can get away with when you’re drunk is part of the reason I’m served up “content recommendations” about drunk chicks doing outrageous things when only partially clothed.


The company has also done a fair amount of work to allow readers and publications themselves to filter out recommendations they don’t want to see more of. Not a fan of stories about Anne Hathaway’s yoga pants? Hover over the recommendation and click the little “X” and Taboola will take that vote of non-confidence into account before it tries to serve you up another story about celebrity nether-parts.


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Anyway, now that its links are available all over the web, it was only natural that Taboola would want to insert them into mobile apps as well. To do that, it’s launching a mobile API today that will enable publishers to quickly integrate Taboola into their native mobile environments and have content recommendations served up directly in-app.


In early trials, the aPI has proven immensely successful in getting fat-fingered mobile users to click on sponsored results. As part of a partnership with mobile app developer StepLeader, Taboola was built into mobile apps for companies like Fox Television Stations, Capitol Broadcasting Company, ComCorp USA, Cowles California Media, News-Press Gazette, Midwest Television and Titan TV Broadcast Group.


The result? More people clicking through to more pieces of content. According to Taboola, its CPMs were over 200 percent higher than typical mobile banners, and click-through rates were 400 percent higher.


On desktop, mobile web, and now mobile apps, the company is betting on growing its business even more aggressively than before. Taboola has raised $40 million from investors that include Pitango Venture Capital, Evergreen Venture Partners, WGI Group, Marker, and Eyal Gura.







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Content recommendations company Taboola wants to be everywhere readers are, offering up links that they’ll find interesting (or at least cl...

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Built on top of the Raspberry Pi, Kano is a build-it-yourself computer which launched on Kickstarter with the aim of pulling in $100,000 in crowd funding to get 1,000 of its Kano kits to market by summer 2014. It’s only six hours away from closing its campaign and has raised just over $1.4 million so far.


The kits are for an an “end-to-end computer”, costing $99, which arrives in pieces so the curious – this is mainly aimed at kids – can put it together. Kano’s very simple guidebooks lead the kid on to start coding and building stuff.


This is a simple, fun, step-by-step computer kit which makes the Raspberry Pi a lot more accessible. Kano comes with Keyboard, SD card, makeable casing, case mods, an operating system, lots of games and levels, a DIY speaker, and Level books with dozens of hours of projects.


Kano is not just repackaging Pi hardware but building its own software on an operating system, Kano OS — built on top of Debian Linux (using the Debian Wheezy distro) — and a Scratch-esque visual coding environment called Kano Blocks.


Kano Blocks look like this and show a game of Pong, and Minecraft constructions:


Kano is starting with the idea of serving a global and emerging markets, starting with English, Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin versions of its kit’s guidebooks. It’s also working on adding more languages, including Hindi.


The startup has also taken in seed funding from friends & family to develop the kit over the past year, including some funding from Index Ventures via one of its three co-founders, Saul Klein, a partner at the firm.







6:09 AM

Built on top of the Raspberry Pi, Kano is a build-it-yourself computer which launched on Kickstarter with the aim of pulling in $100,000 ...

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When I read a new report on app store trends for 2013 recently, my most irritating fear was confirmed: The "freemium" app business model has not only won the app sales model, it has handily crushed the paid app model -- squeezed it down into a tiny sliver of relative revenue. The results are so tilted toward free apps with in-app purchases as a business model, in fact, that even more new apps will apparently be written entirely with the freemium model in mind. That's why I'm sitting under my desk and rocking back and forth as I type this sentence.


5:39 AM

When I read a new report on app store trends for 2013 recently, my most irritating fear was confirmed: The "freemium" app busine...

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Kazam is a screencasting and screenshot application that shows much potential, but it is not yet fully suitable for anything more than personal use. Screen-recording tools are a step or two beyond single-frame screen-capture applications. Kazam performs both functions and can record input from the computer's microphone as well as from the speakers. You can record sound from any sound-input device supported by PulseAudio. It is very handy to have an app that provides both motion and still-capture modes.


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Kazam is a screencasting and screenshot application that shows much potential, but it is not yet fully suitable for anything more than per...

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mac-pro

Apple is now selling its new U.S.-assembled Mac Pro via its online store, as announced yesterday in a press release. The pro-targeted computer starts at $2,999, but with custom options and maxed out specification, plus a single Sharp 4K display which also went on sale this morning, you can spend as much as $13,194.00. And let’s be honest, you’re going to want at least two 4K displays, so bump that up to $16,789.


The ship date for that super custom build is listed simply as “January,” but stock configurations are expected to be in the mail by December 30 according to current estimates. There’s also a personal pickup option, but so far any checked say that they’ll “ship to store,” meaning you likely can’t just walk in and buy one at this stage.


Mac Pro is definitely going to be a rarified choice among Mac models, reserved for those with deep pockets and advanced technical need, but it’s still an extremely drool-worthy machine even for those of us who don’t have the means to justifiably pick one up. The next time I have a spare $15,000 or so, though, you know exactly where it’s going.







5:08 AM

Apple is now selling its new U.S.-assembled Mac Pro via its online store , as announced yesterday in a press release. The pro-targeted compu...

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Floored screenshot 2

New York-based startup Floored just closed a $5.26 million Series A funding round led by RRE Ventures to fuel its business. This round seems to be all about growth and going to the next level.


Greycroft Partners also invested in today’s round, as well as existing investors Lehrer Ventures, Sigma Ventures and Felicis Ventures. Previously, the company had raised $1 million in seed funding.


As a reminder, Floored is a Disrupt NY 2013 finalist. It scans office spaces, apartments and houses using 3D camera technology and proprietary software to build customizable 3D models for real estate purposes.


But the real game-changer lies in the use of 3D. For example, after an office space is scanned, you can easily move around and add furniture in real-time to realize whether the space would be a good fit for your company. Or you could even work with Floored to tear down a wall, add a counter and many other things.


To scan interior spaces, Floored partners with Matterport, a company that builds 3D scanners using Primesense’s cameras — Primesense manufactures the sensor inside the Kinect. Scanning a space is a matter of hours. After that, Floored cleans up the data in-house and renders the result in real time for the web and its iPad app — the entire process takes a couple of days.


Here’s the result in WebGL with Floored’s new graphics engine (the web viewer was just updated):


For a real estate company, using these scans is as easy as embedding a YouTube video on your website. If you want to have a look at the upcoming feature set (full screen view, map…), click on this separate page.


The new funding will allow the company to grow its engineering team and probably be able to do more 3D scans — existing customers include Hines, Taconic Investment Partners, Related Companies, CBRE and Cushman Wakefield.


Having the best proprietary technology and locking the market are the two key elements to Floored’s success. The new influx of money should help the company get there.








5:08 AM

New York-based startup Floored just closed a $5.26 million Series A funding round led by RRE Ventures to fuel its business. This round seem...

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You can almost date a hotel room's last remodel by the number and location of jacks. In the old days, you'd be lucky to find a usable power outlet -- one that wasn't taken up with lamps or TV. Plug-in phone jacks were nonexistent. We then went to bedside phone jacks and later to desktop phone jacks and onto Ethernet jacks for supposed broadband; eventually, we went over to WiFi, with no jacks. Next came flashy flat-screen, media-dripping TVs with no inputs -- HDMI inputs came later.


5:08 AM

You can almost date a hotel room's last remodel by the number and location of jacks. In the old days, you'd be lucky to find a usa...

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