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Tuesday, January 21, 2014
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BookingBug

The UK startup BookingBug, which provides an online booking and reservation platform for businesses — SMEs right up to larger enterprise outfits — has raised a further $1 million in funding. The round comes from newly-established fund, Deep Ventures, and is the only funding taken by BookingBug since it raised a rather modest seed round of $350,000 back in 2011. That’s the great thing about a startup that produces revenue from the get-go: BookingBug offers an array of tariffs for businesses taking bookings through its wares, which increase in price based largely on number of bookings made per-month.


BookingBug launched all the way back in 2009 as a way for, then mostly SMEs, to share and charge for their availability -– by hour, day, week or as classes, courses or events –- providing a platform to accept those bookings and handle enquiries online. We described it as being “realtime” (a very popular buzz work back then) and distributed, in that the London-based startup offered a widget that could be embedded on a business’ own customer-facing site or those of its affiliate partners and even through social media. It also added a basic API for further third-party site integration.


However, BookingBug has since expanded its customer base to also target the enterprise, where there’s a lot more money to be made and keeps BookingBug less reliant on SMEs who are increasingly being offered an array of niche/vertical platforms (think dedicated wares for dentist practices or hairdressers etc.). Related to this, and with today’s new funding, it plans to completely tear down the current API and widget building capability to open up its protocol to select developers and become a platform in the true sense of the word.


In a call with TechCrunch, BookingBug CEO Glenn Shoosmith likened the approach to that of e-commerce platform Magento, in that the startup plans to make its platform fully customisable and embeddable into existing systems used by the enterprises, big retailers and government organisations that it’s now selling into. In fact, Shoosmith says he was inspired by the UK government’s “open” e-gov agenda, and that demand for a more expansive platform also came from those larger customers.


Or, in PR gobbledygook, BookingBug wants to become “the go-to protocol for anyone wishing to connect the online and offline worlds.”







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The UK startup BookingBug , which provides an online booking and reservation platform for businesses — SMEs right up to larger enterprise ou...

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advertise here

The mobile advertising market, as we heard earlier today, will be worth $14 billion in 2014, and it looks like Android is getting ever closer to dominating it. In Q4, Android-based smartphones, for the first time, surpassed the iPhone in terms of mobile ad impressions on the Opera Mediaworks ad network, with a 36% share compared to 28.7% for the iPhone. With 60 billion impressions monthly, covering 425 million users and 14,000 sites and apps, it’s one barometer of how well platforms are doing respective to each other.


But iOS is still winning out when it comes to revenue and overall impressions when you factor in tablets. Apple’s platform took nearly 56% of revenue across both smartphones and tablets in the three months, compared to Android’s 32%. If you break out phones alone, the margin narrows to 40% iPhone and 30% Android phones.


The other platforms continue to lag behind significantly, with BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Symbian all below 5% in terms of traffic and revenue:


Screen Shot 2014-01-21 at 13.57.18


The disparity between revenues and impressions continues also in the kind of content being consumed on mobile networks.


While social sites are by far the biggest traffic driver at 34.25% of all impressions, when it comes to revenues, music, video and media are proving more monetizeable, with 20.6% of all revenues. That shows that in the ongoing seesaw of premium versus user-generated content, premium will continue to win out in terms of commanding higher revenues. (It also points to one reason why sites like Facebook and Twitter want to figure out ways of becoming the go-to places for consuming this kind of content.)


photo: Flickr


more to come.







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The mobile advertising market, as we heard earlier today, will be worth $14 billion in 2014 , and it looks like Android is getting ever clos...

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ibooks_studying

The race for the future of the education market is on, and Apple has increasing competition from device makers and service providers like Samsung and Amazon. Cupertino isn’t slacking, however, and this morning it announced a new expansion of some of its core educational offerings to help it maintain its edge.


Apple’s iBooks Textbooks and iTunes U Course Manager products are being launched in brand new markets in Asia, Latin America, Europe and beyond according to a new press release from Apple, bringing the total number of markets that iBooks Textbooks now reaches to 51, and the total for iTunes U’s Course Manager to 70. Some of the new countries which now have access to the platforms include Brazil, Italy, Japan, Russia, Thailand and Malaysia.


If you’re not familiar with the programs, iBooks Textbooks allows publishes to create interactive, digital-native texts for students that can be accessed using the iBooks app on any Mac or iOS device, while iTunes U Course Manager allows educators to create fully-guided course programs for use with the iTunes U iOS app. The two are tightly integrated, as texts used in iTunes U courses can be made available via iBooks.


Amazon has been aggressively pursuing the education market, introducing new features via Kindle FreeTime for helping kids learn early on late last year. It also introduced Whispercast in 2012 as a distribution method for texts and books for organizations and schools, and added Kindle Fire app deployment to that service last year. Apple’s international reach is still a big advantage for it however, and pushing both these services out to additional markets should help it with the overall race to win the hearts and minds of students everywhere.







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The race for the future of the education market is on, and Apple has increasing competition from device makers and service providers like Sa...

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Sketchfab

Adobe recently updated Photoshop with a few 3D capabilities. A hidden gem that wasn’t much discussed is the ability to export and share 3D models directly from Photoshop thanks to Sketchfab.


The main focus of last week’s update was on 3D printing support directly from Photoshop. While Photoshop is not a 3D modelling application, it has had the ability to open 3D files for a while. It can be useful if you want to add textures and work with the actual 3D model.


Adobe is rethinking this a bit and positioning Photoshop as the last stop before exporting your 3D model. After modelling your object in your favorite 3D application, you open it and Photoshop and print to your MakerBot or send your file to Shapeways, which will handle the 3D printing part.


But what if you are just working on a 3D character for a video game, or want to send your model to your coworkers to get feedback? This is where Sketchfab comes along. As a reminder, Sketchfab is a Soundcloud for 3D models. You can upload, browse and embed 3D models from your browser.


And now, you can just press the “export to Sketchfab” button in Photoshop to bring your file to the web. Adobe-owned Behance already supports Sketchfab embeds to showcase your creations in your online portfolio. But there are many other potential use cases, including internal communications.


Finally, as Sketchfab relies a lot on the WebGL technology, Adobe is now indirectly a WebGL proponent. It would have been different a few years ago when Flash was the de facto platform to share interactive content on the web.


It’s a validation of Sketchfab’s technology, and the team of 11 can expect more users now that Sketchfab is directly integrated in Photoshop. The startup has raised $2 million and now faces the difficult feat of becoming the default 3D sharing platform before anyone else does.


Here’s an example of a Sketchfab embedded model:



(Top gif by: Rhizome)







5:39 AM

Adobe recently updated Photoshop with a few 3D capabilities. A hidden gem that wasn’t much discussed is the ability to export and share 3D ...

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US-TELECOM-COMPANY-VERIZON

It wasn’t that long ago that smartphones were a niche product. They were bought almost exclusively by nerds and nerdy businesspeople. But that time is long gone. In Verizon’s most recent financial earnings report, the telecommunications giant touts that 70% of the devices on its retail postpaid network are smartphones.


Verizon also reports that at the end of 2013, there were 96.8 million retail postpaid connections after the company added 1.6 million new connections. That works out to 67.76 million smartphones on Verizon’s network alone.


In the summer of 2012, smartphones crossed the 50% penetration mark on Verizon’s network. At that time, just before the launch of the iPhone 5, feature phones were quickly going out of vogue while at the same time, smartphones were dropping in price.


Now, in the dusk of 2014, smartphones are clearly the dominant type of phone. They’re available at every price point. And carriers couldn’t be more happy. With smartphones comes pricey data plans and happy company fat cats.


Verizon is reporting 2013 fourth quarter total revenues of $21.1 billion, up 5.7 percent year over year. For full-year 2013, total revenues were $81.0 billion, up 6.8 percent over 2012, and service revenues were $69.0 billion in 2013, up 8.3 percent year over year.


There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight for smartphones. With carriers constantly reinventing upgrade cycles and manufacturers rolling out innovative models, the smartphone market doesn’t look to be saturated anytime soon. If anything, the company’s whose futures depend on smartphones won’t allow it.







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It wasn’t that long ago that smartphones were a niche product. They were bought almost exclusively by nerds and nerdy businesspeople. But th...

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beats-music

Beats Music, the streaming music service from the Dr. Dre-fronted headphone company, arrived this morning on iOS and web (Android version should be forthcoming shortly). The long-anticipated streaming product is the result of Beats’ acquisition of MOG last year, and you can see that company’s DNA all over the new version. But the question is really how Beats competes with other similar offerings from others including Rdio and Spotify, especially now that MOG has confirmed its being shut down by its parent company April 15.


Beats Music starts you off with a bit of an orientation process, to try to get to grips with some of your musical tastes out of the gate. On the one hand, this should provide a recommendation engine advantage over services like Rdio where new users are left to their own devices in terms of forming a beginning musical genome from which to cull content. On the other, despite an attempt to make the interface feel somewhat fun, it’s a fairly annoying onboarding process when you’re just trying to get to the music. Plus, I didn’t find it all that intuitive or even really accurate in terms of artists it offered up to choose my preferences from.


Still, once you’re in, Beats is able to offer up album and streaming station suggestions immediately thanks to that process, and that’s a little less daunting than being greeted with a blank slate, and a little more personalized than just seeing top lists of what others are listening to.


Click to view slideshow.

Besides the customized content shown off in the “Just For You” section, you also get “The Sentence,” which is a (suspiciously) Songza-like playlist generator where you slot in up to four terms to get music appropriate to the mood; “Highlights,” which is the generic promoted content surfaced for all users; and “Find It,” which lets you search for specific playlists via Genres, Activities and Curators. You can also just search for artists, albums and songs using the menu on the sidebar to go the them direct, but the focus here is clearly on playlists and radio-style discovery.


Playlists I tried out where decent, though not as uncannily accurate as the stations I’ve grown used to on Rdio – but then again I’ve had far more time building a musical profile of my tastes at Rdio. With The Sentence, I got more interesting results, but the phrase building is fairly nonsensical, and is based on set choices for each category, whereas you’d expect that in altering one term the other choices might adapt or change accordingly.


With any music, you can choose to store it for offline use on the mobile client. On the web, there’s no offline storage, but everything else operates in basically the same manner. One of the first things I tried was streaming to both locations at once, but after about 20 minutes the iPhone app stopped playback, notifying me that it was because Beats Music was being streamed by my account elsewhere. That’s hardly a big strike against it, since its competitors do the same thing.


Overall, Beats Music seems like a promising entry into the market at first glance, with a strong library and a decent user interface. It aggressively foregrounds the discovery services and auto-generated playlists, however, and that seems like a weakness based on its estimation of my own tastes based on the imperfect initial survey. It does make me wonder if I’ll put in the time required to find out if it gets more accurate with time, but the rest of the product is solidly conceived.


Beats Music will cost $9.99 per month (and it’s U.S.-only for now), but it’s available for a free 7-day trial for all new users, with no credit card or anything required at sign-up. It doesn’t seem like it has the brains to necessarily kill either Spotify or Rdio at this point, but Beats has a powerful marketing engine behind it, and a hardware business that’s ripe for service promotions and free giveaways in combination with the streaming music offering, so that could sway things in its direction.







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Beats Music, the streaming music service from the Dr. Dre-fronted headphone company, arrived this morning on iOS and web (Android version ...

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Regular readers will know that we love the functionality that comes with smartphone cameras, including inherent portability, powerful processors, and imaginative post-processing app solutions. However, what we supremely dislike -- with a vengeance -- are the little software-driven lenses that phone makers see fit to slap on the devices. Those horrible cheap lenses can in no way replicate the optical je ne sais quoi, overall depth and longevity of larger precision ground-glass optics.


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Regular readers will know that we love the functionality that comes with smartphone cameras, including inherent portability, powerful proc...

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