New Technology News

Sunday, January 12, 2014

NBCUniversal News Group is announcing a minority investment in NowThisNews, a New York-based startup that’s looking to reinvent video journalism for the Facebook and smartphone era. As part of the investment, the two companies will co-produce original short-form news videos to be distributed across mobile and social platforms.

The brainchild of Huffington Post co-founder Kenneth Lerer (who also serves as Chairman of Buzzfeed), former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau, and Bedrocket founder and CEO Brian Bedol, NowThis News is reinventing video news for the social and mobile worlds.

Part of this is making news accessible to newer platforms like Facebook, Vine, YouTube, Snapchat and others. Specifically, the teams will co-produce content for TODAY, MSNBC, NBC News and CNBC on topics relating to pop culture, political, and business news. These videos are posted on social platforms as well as on NowThis News’ mobile app.

The startup has a team of journalists who have held senior positions at ABC News, CNN, Washington Post and The Huffington Post and previously raised $10 million in funding from Lerer Ventures, SoftBank and others. The New York Times reports that NBC took a 10 percent stake in NowThis News.

“We know that news consumption among younger audiences continues to grow, but in order to reach that audience, we need to continue to create video for the platforms they use most. NowThis News does exactly that — delivering relevant news stories for the mobile and social platforms that resonate with this audience,” said Patricia Fili-Krushel, Chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, in a release. “We’re excited to incorporate this relationship into our overall strategy — to innovate inside and outside the company — positioning the News Group for future success.”

Kenneth Lerer, NowThis News’s Co-Founder and Manager Director of Lerer Ventures said, “By working together, the NBCUniversal News Group and NowThis News can learn from each other and build a great digital news experience that’s a win-win for the new news consumer who wants all video, all the time, built for social and mobile. This partnership allows us to showcase our shared vision of combining the world’s strongest news brands with NowThis News to super serve consumers.”

For NBC, this is the second investment in a non-traditional news platform this year. NBC Universal just backed Re/code, the technology news site recently founded by former AllThingsD founders Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

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NBCUniversal Invests In Mobile Video News Service NowThis News

6:39 PM

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NBCUniversal News Group is announcing a minority investment in NowThisNews , a New York-based startup that’s looking to reinvent video journ...

As a kid who grew up on Lazer Tag and the Killer, the idea of a compact, always-on live action RPG is very compelling. Dustcloud fits that bill.

Created by a designer named Howard Hunt, the game uses small, gun-shaped “Dusters” that have LEDs that register hits and damage taken. You can use your Duster in street to secretly hit other players and because it uses RF signals there you simply need to be in line of sight rather than aim directly at a small target. The guns use Bluetooth LE to communicate with your phone and notify you of hit statistics and the whereabouts of other players. You can play offline with friends or join in on a massive, world-wide networked game.

We tried the game at CES and found it to be quite fun. While it takes some set-up – Hunt himself initialized the guns up for us – he expects things to get easier with time.

The team, which includes Ota Fejfar and Hunt, is looking for $100,000. They’ve raised $17,000 on Kickstarter so far and offer a number of packages including a single gun kit for $55 or a dual gun kit for $90. The “aftermarket” proposition is actually kind of interesting: if you want to play online with players around the world (a prospect that would assume massive market saturation), you can buy bullets (called speks) for 5 cents each. You store your speks on your smartphone and when someone shoots you they gather up your speks. This would presumably encourage you not to die so much.

When we played the game in a dark parking lot at CES we had an absolute blast. Once you understand how the guns operate and how to hit other players it becomes easier to have a bit of fun. It also makes you a bit winded, which is always a good thing. Dustcloud sits firmly in the tradition of laser games of yore and that, I think, is a good thing.

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Dustcloud Transforms You Into a Virtual Assassin

5:09 PM

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As a kid who grew up on Lazer Tag and the Killer , the idea of a compact, always-on live action RPG is very compelling. Dustcloud fits tha...

DDG

See that graph up there? Thats a chart of how many queries the privacy-minded search engine DuckDuckGo has seen each day since early 2010.

See that massive growth near the end? That’s when details of the NSA’s PRISM program first leaked. Pretty much overnight, DuckDuckGo more than doubled its traffic.

Wondering what the heck DuckDuckGo is? That’s okay. But once you know, be sure to tell your friends.

DuckDuckGo is sometimes portrayed as the “anti-Google”, but that’s not quite right. It’s more like bizarro-world Google. It looks similar, it acts similar — but in the end, it has totally different motives. DuckDuckGo aims to offer up the simplicity and functionality of the big search engines, minus all the creepy tracking stuff. The company outlines everything they do/don’t store right here, but most importantly: it doesn’t use tracking cookies, and it doesn’t save a record of your IP.

DDG Logo

I don’t think there’s a better way to portray the sudden and massive surge in the public’s desire for Internet privacy than that graph and the accompanying stats. The month before Snowden’s revelations, DuckDuckGo saw 54.4 million requests. The month after, it saw 105.6 million. Incredible.

All in all, DuckDuckGo’s total search count for 2013 came in at just over 1 billion – more than double what it saw in 2012.

There’s still room to grow, though — lots, and lots of room. Even after their monstrous mid-year spike, DuckDuckGo’s numbers are a tiny drop in the worlds biggest bucket when put up against the likes of giants. Google pulled in over 1.2 trillion searches in 2012, for example. That’s 3.2 billion searches, or roughly 3X all of DuckDuckGo’s annual traffic, each day.

DuckDuckGo last raised money ($3M) at the end of 2011, long before Edward Snowden was a household name. With these numbers and the ever-growing demand for privacy online, raising another round would probably be like a walk in the park.

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DuckDuckGo’s Popularity Exploded In 2013 Following The NSA/PRISM Leaks

4:24 PM

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See that graph up there? Thats a chart of how many queries the privacy-minded search engine DuckDuckGo has seen each day since early 2010....

Mophie said earlier this week that it’s expanding beyond its popular smartphone battery products with the upcoming launch of the Mophie Space Pack. Shortly after the announcement, I stopped by the Mophie booth at the Consumer Electronics Show to get a demo of the new product.

The company’s PR manager Kevin Malinowski told that from Mophie’s perspective, the company has “almost perfected” its battery products, so the team was looking for “the next pain point,” and it settled on storage.

People often feel like they don’t have enough storage space on their phone, he said, so they have to start deleting things to make room. Malinowski added that solutions like cloud storage may have their place, but they fall short in some respects — for example, you could store files in the cloud and want to access them while on a flight, but then find that you can’t get to them because the plane doesn’t have reliable WiFi (or any WiFi at all).

Mophie’s approach to the problem, he said, wasn’t to create “something brand new,” but instead something that’s “very familiar feeling.”

On the hardware side, that means creating a device looks almost identical to Mophie’s existing products. In fact, while it’s storing your files, it’s also providing battery power to your phone. Charlie Quong, the company’s senior director of product management, laid the Mophie Space Pack down next to the Juice Pack Air and they were virtually identical, aside from a silver button on the back of the Space Pack that’s used for turning it on and off.

On the software side, the interface should feel fairly intuitive to iOS users. You access the files through an app on your phone, which allows you to browse them based on type, i.e., videos, music, documents, and so on. Quong was also able to play a movie file (Night of the Living Dead, if I’m not mistaken) from the Space Pack without any significant lag time.

Mophie has taken advantage of the various APIs that Apple provides, so the Space Pack should work with any file type that’s “natively supported by the iPhone,” Quong said, though its capabilities will be limited if a file is protected by DRM.

As for getting those files onto the Space Pack, the storage unit can be connected to your computer via USB. Or if someone sends a file via email, when you select it, saving the file to Mophie will show up as an option. Quong also showed me several settings for automatically saving your camera roll — there’s even a special camera feature within the app that allows you to take photos that are saved directly into the Space Pack.

Mophie plans to start shipping the Space Pack (which is available for pre-order now) on March 14 — it offers a 16 gigabyte model for $149.95 and a 32 gigabyte model for $179.95. And although the current version only works with the iPhone 5 and 5s, Quong said the company is interested in supporting other devices as well, particularly other iOS devices.

The new product, he said, “actually opens the door up to a whole new base of users.”

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Mophie Team Explains Why It’s Expanding From Power To Storage

3:24 PM

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Mophie said earlier this week that it’s expanding beyond its popular smartphone battery products with the upcoming launch of the Mophie Sp...

Many Dropbox users are still facing a partial outage that has been going on for nearly 48 hours at this point, and Dropbox is still scrambling to restore all services to everyone. The Dropbox site and service went down shortly after 6 PM PT on Friday, January 10, and continues to affect what Dropbox calls “a small number of users.”

Specifically, around 5 percent of users still can’t sync files from the desktop client, and 20 percent are having issues on mobile. A fix is rolling out soon to improve both those numbers, Dropbox says.

Early claims suggested the outage might be the work of hackers, but Dropbox categorically denied the involvement of any external organizations or individuals in the current problems, and the hackers who originally claimed responsibility have since recanted.

According to updates posted to its official tech blog, Dropbox technicians have been making gradual progress on restoring service to affected users, but it’s noting via its Dropbox Support Twitter account that “not everything is working for everybody.” It seems to be reintroducing features gradually, prioritizing basic access to all documents and adding the rest as time permits.

It’s not clear how far-reaching the current outage is, but Dropbox is still very actively responding to user requests for information and updates via its support Twitter.

Dropbox sent out an email to business users on Saturday night, reassuring them that files remain exactly where they left them, despite the lack of access. We’ll keep you updated and let you know when full service is restored.

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Web-Based Access To Dropbox Files Is Back For 99% Of Users, But Service Interruption Nears 48 Hours

2:24 PM

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Many Dropbox users are still facing a partial outage that has been going on for nearly 48 hours at this point, and Dropbox is still scrambli...

Talk about a long week.

Along with a Polar Vortex infiltration, which left much of the northeast straight up frozen, the southwest had its own invasion: the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show. Vendors, exhibitors, buyers and members of the media ventured to sunny Las Vegas from all over the world to check out the latest gadgets and gizmos from thousands of electronics companies.

That said, we couldn’t resist discussing the magic and splendor of CES in this week’s episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few TechCrunch writers together to chat about the most fascinating stories of the past seven days in tech.

In this episode, Greg Kumparak, Darrell Etherington and I discuss a few of our favorite things, including the new Oculus Rift virtual gaming headset, Qualcomm’s incredible new mobile processor, and the shining stars of our inaugural Hardware Battlefield.

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CrunchWeek: CES, CES, And CES

2:09 PM

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Talk about a long week. Along with a Polar Vortex infiltration, which left much of the northeast straight up frozen, the southwest had its ...

Evaneos, a French startup that competes with traditional tour operators by providing a marketplace for tailored travel experiences, has raised $6 million in Series B funding. The round is being led by XAnge Private Equity, with participation from previous investor ISAI.

This brings total funding for the four year old company to around $7 million, having raised a little over $1 million in two previous rounds from various angels and ISAI.

Meanwhile, Paris-headquartered Evaneos says the new capital will be used for European growth, specifically to launch in new countries beyond France, Spain, Italy and Germany where it currently operates. It says the investment will also enable it to triple its workforce in the coming years. In 2012 it grew staff to 20 employees, up from 12 employees the previous year.

Furthermore, additional features are being planned to enable its community of active travelers to exchange and share information, such as opinions or photos, taking the company’s proposition beyond discovery and booking.

Evaneos — founded by Eric La Bonnardière (CEO) and Yvan Wibaux (CTO) — provides an online platform to help travellers design, estimate the cost, and book a personalised trip by connecting them with local agents in each destination country, who then offer advice and assistance. These local agents are tourism professionals, also known as Destination Management Companies, who traditionally provide services to major tour operators. In that sense, it’s a classic online play that serves to remove the intermediary.

“Our competitors are the tour-operators that offer discovery and adventure tours. We revolutionize their business model by cutting out the middle-men,” Evaneos CEO Eric La Bonnardière tells TechCrunch. “We are a marketplace that connects travelers with selected local agencies all around the world. Travelers customize trips directly with local experts who give the best of their countries and save money.”

Local agencies therefore work directly for travellers, offering a fully customized service, specialized expertise and assistance on site (pick-up at the airport, assistance number 24/7, etc.) with a price that Evaneos claims is 20% to 30% cheaper due to the absence of an intermediary.

To that end, sales appear to have been growing at a decent clip, at least doubling year-on-year: €2 million in 2010, €7 million in 2011, and €14 million in 2012.

Evaneos makes money by charging a fee for each transaction on its website. It says the fee is much less than the margin typical of a tour operator and is transparent for customers — it’s paid by local agencies without increasing the end-customer price.