New Technology News

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

We all hate CAPTCHAs, right? Those pesky additions to web forms that try to determine if you are a human and not a computer bot with nefarious intentions. A necessary evil to fight spam and other attacks, perhaps, but conversely also bad for business, dramatically increasing bounce rates and e-commerce shopping basket abandonment.

Future Ad Labs is on a mission to change this by replacing the CAPTCHA with something more engaging and game-like, which users might actually enjoy, while at the same time creating a new kind of ad unit that brands can enjoy, too.

Today, the UK-based startup is announcing it’s raised $1 million in funding (which I understand actually closed, in various stages, last year). The impressive list of backers includes Passion Capital, who led the round, as well as Balderton Capital, Ballpark Ventures, and accelerator Ignite100.

In addition, a portion of the investment was raised via the equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs. Angel investors Scott Button (founder/CEO of Unruly Media), Richard Fearne, Damon Reeves (former CEO of Unanimis) and Paul Whitehead (commercial director at WeR Interactive) are also in the list of backers.

Calling itself an ad tech company, Future Ad Labs’ “PlayCaptcha” ad unit (because on one level that’s what it is) lets users verify they are human, to the same end as a traditional CAPTCHA. But instead of asking users to enter a sequence of letters and numbers from a blurry image, they complete a game-like mini challenge (though, intentionally, they aren’t challenging at all), such as moving an on-screen slider in a straight-ish line to unwrap a virtual chocolate bar.

However, these challenges are fully branded, meaning that users are engaging with well-known brands at the same time. That chocolate bar, for example, could be a KitKat. It’s utterly brilliant (and utterly depressing if you have brand overload). Of course it’s also how Future Ad Labs and the sites it works with generate revenue. Not only is it solving an end-user problem, but it’s worked out a way to make money without being detrimental to the experience.

Noteworthy is that “PlayCaptchas” have been measured to have a 92% success rate (23% higher than standard CAPTCHAs) and 90% brand recall, according to the company.

It’s also one of those ‘why didn’t anybody think of this before?’ ideas. Unsurprisingly, however, other companies are operating in the same space. Future Ad Labs’ competitors include NYC-based Solve Media, and Are You A Human.

That said, the market opportunity is huge. Globally 300 million CAPTCHAs are completed per day. Meanwhile, I’m told that Future Ad Labs is on track to hit “7-digit revenues” in 2014. I’ve also heard from a source that the company recently hired a away a VP of sales from a well-known legacy online gaming company, presumably to help boost ad revenue.

Future Ad Labs has already launched with ITV.com, National TV Awards and the BBC (it was part of BBC Labs). On the brand side it’s secured campaigns and revenue from Heinz, Reckitt Benckiser and Nestle, among others.

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Future Ad Labs Turns CAPTCHAs Into Mini-Games (And Ad Revenue)

3:54 AM

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We all hate CAPTCHAs, right? Those pesky additions to web forms that try to determine if you are a human and not a computer bot with nefario...

If you look back at what Steve Jobs did, he took a hard look at Porsche and Sony, and then he effectively built a better Sony. As Apple's star rose, Sony's star crashed, but Jobs never targeted Sony directly. He just figured out what Sony wasn't doing right, and he did that extremely well while Sony lost its way. He didn't copy Sony's products, he copied its mission. He then used Porsche-like concepts -- simplicity, focus, high quality -- to rebuild what once had been an amazing company into a far better one.

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Lenovo Takes a Page From Steve Jobs' Playbook

3:54 AM

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If you look back at what Steve Jobs did, he took a hard look at Porsche and Sony, and then he effectively built a better Sony. As Apple...

Brothers Brett and David Kopf launched Remind101 out of Imagine K12 in late 2011 to tackle what they saw as one of the key problems in primary education: The lack of simple, user-friendly tools that help teachers better communicate with both students — and their parental units. Today, in spite of how critical effective communication is within the K-12 learning equation, schools continue to rely on intercoms, PA systems, paper-based permission slips and phone trees. In other words, the same tools they’ve used for 50 years.

Remind101 released mobile apps for Android and iOS last year to help bridge that communication gap, creating a mobile platform that enables teachers to send reminders to students and parents via text and email — be they about permission slips or deadlines — and that acts as a secure, private communications network. The app caught on quickly among teachers and the demand hasn’t slowed down since.

By September of last year, Remind101 had six million teacher, student and parent users, a number which today has grown to 10 million, and over 65 million messages are being sent via the Remind101 platform each month. The 10 million user number puts the startup in exclusive company in the education technology world — a fact which has not gone unnoticed by investors.

That’s why today, a little over four months after it closed $3.5 million in series A financing from Social + Capital, Yuri Milner, Maneesh Arora and a handful of angel investors, Remind101 is adding another lump of coin to its coffers.

Today, the startup announced that it has closed a $15 million Series B round, led by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, with additional participation from its previous investors, including Social + Capital and First Round Capital. As a result of the round, Kleiner partner and veteran investor John Doerr will be joining the startup’s board of directors, alongside Social + Capital founder, Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined the board as part of Remind101′s Series A investment.

Although Kleiner Perkins has had its ups and downs of late, adding a veteran investor like Doerr is a big win for the two-year-old startup. While his own investment record, as we’ve noted before, isn’t perfect, there’s a reason that Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page has been quoted as saying that Doerr “sees the future first.”

Doerr has been a Kleiner partner since 1980, and has backed companies like Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Intuit, Amazon, Google, Twitter and Symantec. In more recent years, he’s also become a vocal supporter and evangelist for innovation, and reform in education, among other spaces. Remind101 is now one of two education companies to count Doerr as a board member, the other being Coursera, and, although an evangelist for innovation in education, one of only a handful of educational investments Doerr has made, Coursera and Dreambox Learning included.

When we asked the Kleiner Perkins Partner why he chose to lead the firm’s investment in Remind101, he answered, simply, that “all the studies have shown that when you get teachers, parents and students communicating more regularly, you get better learning outcomes.” Doerr is alluding to the long-held (and now data-backed) belief that students are more likely to succeed, to graduate and to learn more effectively with more involvement at home and with parents that are actively involved in their student’s educational career.

While this can be difficult for many families to attain, both Doerr and the Remind101 founders believe that the first step is to reduce the barriers, or make it easy, for parents and teachers to bridge that communication gap and encourage a more regular dialogue between each party.

Traditionally, education startups have had to work within the system to sell into K-12 schools; in other words, the sales process, and adoption, tends to only work (or at least be most lucrative) at the district and state levels. Of course, winning district or state contracts takes time, effort and dealing with the headache of a bureaucratic approval process. So, the other appeal then of Remind101, Doerr says, is that the startup doesn’t have to get approval from institutions to operate within their schools, nor do they have to get districts to sanction its usage.

Instead, Remind101 can sell (although this is somewhat misleading since the platform is free to use) directly to teachers. Not only that, but as Remind101′s adoption and penetration increase, Doerr sees the potential for the platform to become the access point to up-sell teachers and schools to additional, premium features. These might include the ability to sign paperwork via mobile devices, transmit and share permission slips, facilitate payments, transactions and other services, for example, all of which can be built on top of the platform. Not unlike, say, TigerText for K-12 education.

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Remind101 Gets $15M From John Doerr To Bring Free, Secure Text Messaging To Teachers

3:23 AM

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Brothers Brett and David Kopf launched Remind101 out of Imagine K12 in late 2011 to tackle what they saw as one of the key problems in prim...

Rocket Internet-incubated startup foodpanda and its affiliate hellofood have received an additional $20 million in funding from investors including Phenomen Ventures.

The new capital will enable foodpanda, which now partners with 22,000 restaurants, to expand its delivery marketplace for restaurants by launching in over 40 markets by the end of 1Q2014. In the upcoming weeks, foodpanda will arrive in Croatia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Tanzania, and Uganda. Last year, foodpanda launched in over 20 countries and released a mobile app for iOS and Android to supplement its Web site.

The latest funding brings the total amount foodpanda has raised since its launch in 2012 to $48 million. Back in May 2013, foodpanda raised $20 million, also from Phenomen Ventures, as well as Investment AB Kinnevik. Then in Sept. 2013 it picked up $8 million from iMENA Holdings.

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Both AB Kinnevik and iMENA Holdings are regular investors in Rocket Internet’s startups. Based in Sweden, AB Kinnevik is also a Rocket Internet shareholder and has invested in properties like Lazada, which is currently positioning itself as the “Amazon of Southeast Asia.” iMENA, on the other hand, focuses on the Middle East and North Africa, as its name suggests. It recently invested $7 million in Easy Taxi, Rocket Internet’s taxi-calling app.

foodpanda competes with other well-funded delivery services, such as Delivery Hero and Just-Eat.Like other Rocket Internet properties, foodpanda wants to gain an edge by focusing on emerging markets in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and part of Africa.

Not only is launching in those countries relatively inexpensive, but it also gives Rocket Internet a chance to build a massive customer service and logistics network that it can then leverage to grow startups in other verticals. For example, foodpanda’s payment system, tailored for countries with low-credit card penetration, can then be used for e-commerce businesses selling fashion and other merchandise.

[[Image: istolethetv on Flickr]]

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Foodpanda Gobbles Up $20M In Fresh Funding To Fatten Its Global Pawprint

2:23 AM

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Rocket Internet-incubated startup foodpanda and its affiliate hellofood have received an additional $20 million in funding from investors ...

French startup Wisembly just raised $2 million (€1.5 million) from Alven Capital. It’s the company’s first round of funding after three years of existence. Wisembly wants to be the only tool you ever need to keep track and streamline your meetings in your company.

“Wisembly is a collaborative solution for corporate meetings,” co-founder Romain David told me in a phone interview. “It allows you to prepare, facilitate and monitor your meetings.”

In other words, Wisembly is an all-in-one platform to assist you when you are leading a meeting — it costs between $13.50 and $27 (€10 and €20) per user per month. To prepare your meeting, you can upload documents, create a poll and more. Then, your meeting attendees receive a link and can interact.

When the meeting actually takes place, the idea is to involve as many people as possible in as little time as possible. It’s physically impossible to ask everyone what they think. That’s why everyone can interact in all sorts of way: you can comment, like, vote, or write down a quote from the meeting. It works well for both in-person meetings and conference calls. Here’s what it looks like:

Wisembly - 4

Finally, when the meeting is over, you can keep track of past meetings. You get an overview of what happened over time, you can come back and see what the most important part of the meeting was based on likes or comments. You can also see if it was an effective meeting based on various metrics.

Meetings are an important pain point in big companies — they drag on, and only a few can speak up. Wisembly wants to fix that, and it works. BNP Paribas, Accenture, SNCF, Danone and around 400 other companies already use the platform. In 2013 alone, Wisembly generated $2 million in revenue (€1.5 million).

“When we first started in 2010, we worked on something very different called Balloon,” David said. “Our prototype allowed you to interact and send content around locations — it worked really well for a conference at Sciences Po for example. But very early, we opted for a bigger vision of the product and the company, and chose to target all sorts of meetings.”

For now, the company focuses on meetings of 20 persons or more. But the idea is to keep lowering the bar to enter the market of small businesses — it’s more fragmented but bigger overall. With today’s funding round, the company will hire a dozen of people to accelerate customer acquisition.

“In five years, we want to be like WebEx, but for meetings,” David said. “When you start a conference call, you launch WebEx because everybody knows WebEx. And soon, when you start a meeting, you will open Wisembly.”

Wisembly - 2b

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Wisembly Raises $2 Million To Make Meetings Suck Less

1:40 AM

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French startup Wisembly just raised $2 million (€1.5 million) from Alven Capital . It’s the company’s first round of funding after three ye...

Monday, February 3, 2014

I normally dislike writing about the issue of women in the technology industry. The media either ends up treating female entrepreneurs with kid gloves or the conversation ends up in some emotionally charged place where people feel angry or violated. And then we’ve made little progress.

Are there systematic biases embedded in the industry? Are women not leaning in hard enough? Do we not have enough role models? All of the above?

One thing is clear, however. There are just not enough women in the pipeline starting from as early as K-12 schools. If less than 20 percent of computer science degrees are awarded to women in the first place, how can we expect a proportionate number of women to move forward into entrepreneurship or engineering careers?

So that’s why it’s refreshing to see someone intervene at such an early stage, and in such a playful, delightful way.

Linda Liukas, who founded an educational non-profit called Rails Girls that has taught programming skills to women in 160 cities globally, has switched her attention to a younger set.

She’s authoring an illustrated children’s book called “Hello Ruby,” to get girls into coding. And by girls, I don’t mean women in a pejorative sense. I actually mean girls, as in little girls from ages 5 to 7.

Liukas says she came up with the idea of her little red-haired protagonist, Ruby, while teaching herself programming.

“I would use the Ruby character as a reference. How would she explain object-oriented programming?” she said. Liukas was a business student before she started Rails Girls, which originally was never intended to be a global phenomenon. It grew into a community that has reached 10,000 women through events and weekend workshops. She then went onto work for Codecademy, the New York-based startup that teaches people how to code.

She said there’s this huge, untapped potential in younger girls that gets missed.

“Teenage girls have such energy, this unhinged energy, that shouldn’t just be expressed in repeating or reblogging,” she said. “They should be creating instead of curating.”

She remembered when she was thirteen and dabbled in web development by once making a “really ugly” website about Al Gore.

“I was 13. I had all this teenage girl passionate energy and I was really, really, madly in love with Al Gore,” she laughed. She didn’t get back into programming or web development until more than a decade later, but imagine if others like her stuck with it?

In Liukas’ project, Ruby is a little girl who makes friends with characters like snow leopards and penguins while solving problems. There are two books: one is an old-fashioned story book with a narrative and different characters. The second book is a workbook that introduces basic programming concepts like loops and variables. All of the exercises in it can be solved with a pen and paper.

liukas-ruby

“It’s going to be very tangible and crafty. You’ll be able draw and doodle all over it,” she said.

So far, she’s blown through her original Kickstarter goal of $10,000 to raise more than $268,000 for the project with 18 days to go. She added two stretch goals: at $250,000, she pledged to write parents guide and at $500,000, she’ll build a complementary mobile app for books.

“The book is only a glimpse of what’s possible,” said Liukas, who said she’s been blown away by the community’s response in beating her original fundraising goal by more than twenty-five fold.

“I’ll remember this for the rest of my whole life,” she added.

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Getting Girls Into Programming, One Children’s Book At A Time

8:39 PM

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I normally dislike writing about the issue of women in the technology industry. The media either ends up treating female entrepreneurs with...

Garrett Camp, co-founder of both StumbleUpon and Uber, is looking for help in funding his new company-building venture Expa. According to an SEC filing, Camp is looking to raise up to $75 million to bring about a portfolio of innovative new ideas.

When Camp first announced his plans for Expa last May, he told my boss Alexia that the holding company would be structured much like similar ventures from entrepreneurs Max Levchin (HVF), Evan Williams (Obvious), Michael Birch (Monkey Inferno), and Ron Palmeri (MkII). That follows a larger trend of company-building entrepreneurs backing technology studios that help to create and fund a series of ambitious new projects at once.

Camp always seemed more comfortable in the role of building early-stage companies, where he can act as a product visionary, rather than in the later stages of building and scaling a business, where operational expertise is key. Before he got to this point, he helped found content discovery platform StumbleUpon, which he sold to eBay for $75 million and later bought back, as well as Uber, which he co-founded along with now-CEO Travis Kalanick.

That said, not everything Camp has worked on has been a success: Last year, he made a push behind BlackJet, which was billed as the “Uber for Private Jets” — yes, even by TechCrunch. That idea has failed to “take off” (get it?!), and BlackJet, which was once listed as part of the Expa portfolio, is now noticeably missing.

So what’s next for Expa? It’s not clear, but knowing Camp he probably has a whole bunch of ideas that are already being worked on. We’ve reached out to him to catch up on Expa, and will let you know if we hear back.