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Monday, February 17, 2014
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Beats Music is the latest of many streaming music services to hit the scene, pulling from some of the best parts of competing products to offer an excellent internet radio experience.


Once you offer up some likes and dislikes on various artists and genres, Beats then offers four separate menus for finding something to listen to.


The first is a “Just For You” tab that uses the information you’ve given to determine good playlists for you. Then, there’s the “Sentence” which works almost exactly like Songza, asking you to fill in a mad lib-style sentence with what you’re doing and how you feel. “Highlights” shows popular and trending playlists and a final search tab lets you search for playlists based on genre or artist.


The playlists themselves are really great — definitely on par with what you get from Songza or iTunes radio — as Beats compiles the playlists using real humans, not algorithms.


That said, it’s a semi-expensive service considering the competitions’ pricing. Beats Music costs $10/month, with a free week-long trial to get you started.


It’s an interesting entrant in the crowded space, but not sure it’s worth a $120 investment each year.





10:09 AM

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Web development can be a complicated process which can go on too long because so much of the time is spent on really poor communication and mis-understandings. Project managers, designers and developers have to approve lots of detail while also incorporating feedback. TrackDuck is a visual feedback and issue tracking startup for small and mid-size organisations and freelancers, with backing from Helsinki’s Startup Sauna. And it just won the startup competition at the TechChill conference in Riga, Latvia, after also winning the Login Startup Pitch Challenge last year. It would seem this very early stage startup is on a roll.


With TrackDuck clients provide feedback directly in the web site right where they are. TrackDuck needs only a few clicks to leave feedback, theres no installation or learning how to use new software.


Other pitching teams in competition included:


AirBay: a marketplace for unused airline tickets for travelers

GrowOn: The smartest devices for growing eco vegetables

Meetey: your online neighborhood

StoryRoll: Collaborative storytelling + Vine = StoryRoll


The TechChill Baltics saw over over 300 startups, investors and eco-system participants witness teams pitching to a panel of VCs. The day last week began with Infogram announcing their 1.34m Euro funding round.





9:54 AM

Web development can be a complicated process which can go on too long because so much of the time is spent on really poor communication and ...

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Microsoft and eSignature service DocuSign today announced a long-term partnership that will make it easy for Office 365 subscribers to submit and sign documents without leaving Microsoft’s Office apps.


This new solution, the two companies announced, will be available in the Office Store early next month and was built on top of Microsoft Office platform. The app will be integrated into Outlook, Word, SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server 2013. This means that Office 365 and SharePoint admins will be able to add the service remotely for all of their users, and the tool will also be integrated with the Azure Active Directory, so there is no need for a separate sign-in to use DocuSign from within Microsoft’s applications.


All the documents will be stored on OneDrive for Business (formerly SkyDrive).


Overall, this is a pretty straightforward integration, but it does make choosing Office a bit more easy for companies that rely heavily on DocuSign. For Microsoft, it is also an opportunity to talk about the ecosystem of applications that exist around its Office suite.


“Leading partners like DocuSign are building apps on the Office platform to help our customers get more value directly from their most highly used applications,” said John Case, the vice president of marketing for Microsoft Office, in the announcement today.


DocuSign for Outlook Web - 1





9:09 AM

Microsoft and eSignature service DocuSign today announced a long-term partnership that will make it easy for Office 365 subscribers to subm...

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It looks like investors think there’s a big opportunity in Hampton Creek Foods‘ mission of creating tasty, affordable alternatives to animal-based foods — the company is announcing that it has raised $23 million in Series B funding.


The round was led by Hong Kong businessman Li Ka-shing’s investment firm Horizons Ventures, with participation from Jerry Yang and AME Cloud Ventures, Ali and Hadi Partovi, Jessica Powell of Google, Scott Banister, and Ash Patel. Previous backers Khosla Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and Kat Taylor and Tom Steyers’ Eagle Cliff also invested in the new round.


“Everyone wants a clean and sustainable world and we love that Hampton Creek is committed to that goal – egg by egg,” Li said in the funding release.


As the quote implies, eggs are one of the key foods that Hampton Creek is trying to replace. I actually visited the company’s office about a year ago where I got to see the labs where different plant-based alternatives are developed and the kitchen where those alternatives are tested — and as you can see in the taste test at the end of the video below, I had a hard time telling the difference between cookies using traditional ingredients and the ones using Hampton Creek’s egg replacer.



Morgan Oliveira, the startup’s communications director, declined to share any sales numbers, but she did say that Hampton Creek is in the process of rolling out with six Fortune 500 companies. Other goals include launching its Eat the Dough product (which was featured on Katie Couric’s show) next month and its Just Scramble product this fall.


We’ve written about Hampton Creek as part the growing interest in the startup and VC world in reinventing food. When I asked Oliveira about this, she said:



I think people are starting to realize the way most food is produced doesn’t align with our values. They’re realizing that a lot of food is produced in a way that is bad for the environment, people, and animals.And that it’s just not a sustainable model. At Hampton Creek we also think that it’s incredibly unfortunate that the healthy choice is always the more expensive and inconvenient choice and we have made it our mission as a company to change that.



The company has raised $30 million total.





7:39 AM

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You’ve heard of About.me for profile pages. Well, there are plenty of gaming communities out there, but Player.me hopes to be the “about.me for gamers”. Obviously Playfire is a pretty big competitor but it would appear Player.me is trying to create a more open network that links to social more broadly.


The new privately funded gaming social platform launches in private beta today to give gamers and

games a one page online profile and centralized feed of updates.


Sean Fee, Player.me Co-Founder and CEO told me: “We’re creating a nice one page landing page for gamers and the ability for them to follow them on Player.me and get all their updates…not just the ones they post on our platform. So they get their twitter updates, facebook posts, YouTube videos and other streams.”


Features of Player.me include a page which can features social feeds and plans to incentivise players with early access to new games.


Fee says the company is currently in discussion with “a number of gaming companies and indie developers to create partnerships” that will give value to all platform members.


Unfortunately, Player.me is going to have a tough time of it cutting through the enormous amount of noise in the gaming world.


An other sites have got there first. GamesGrabr launched last year and past its funding target. It wants to be the Pinterest for games…


It’s not to say this strategy can’t succeed, but unfortunately big investors that can help a company scale are not very excited by “This For That” plays, as was spelt out recently by Union Square’s Fred Wilson.





7:39 AM

You’ve heard of About.me for profile pages. Well, there are plenty of gaming communities out there, but Player.me hopes to be the “about.me...

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MangoPay is a payments app specifically developed for marketplaces, crowdfunding platforms and collaborative consumption platforms which can accept third-party payments. It’s announced it will now accept seven more currencies: British pound, American dollar, Swiss franc, Polish zloty, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish krone; in addition to the Euro. The Australian and Canadian dollar will also soon also be accepted. New features include in-app payment using card “tokenisation”, which allows merchants to receive payments without users leaving their platform. It also has new open source development kits to make integration easier. MangoPay has 150 European clients to date.





6:54 AM

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Billing itself as the “Coinbase of Europe” Sweden based Bitcoin company Safello has raised a $600,000 investment round lead by Bitcoin advocates Erik Voorhees (co-founder of the Bitcoin company Coinapult) and Roger Ver (Angel Investor & Bitcoin evangelist), and participated in by Blockchain.info CEO Nicolas Cary and angel investors Victor & Victor. The startup has also redesigned its site for usability to position itself as ‘safest way into Bitcoin’. The startup plans to go up against major competitors in the shape of Kraken, Bitstamp, Coinbase, and BTC-E.


The cash will be used to grow in Europe and to be a ‘safe harbour’ for Bitcoin. It’s estimated that about half of the Bitcoin exchanges have disappeared since 2009.


To achieve this, Safello has registered itself with the Financial Supervisory Authority in Sweden, a country that together with Germany has been pretty clear about bitcoin taxation, and, of course, a very stable economy.


Frank Schuil, co-founder and CEO of Safello says: “Our new interface is simpler than our competitors. And we are more ‘compliant’ than the others. Our goal is keep the user interface minimalistic so it’s simpler for people to get into bitcoins.” Erik Voorhees, says Safello’s growth “has been amazing thus far.”


Stability is key in the Bitcoin market but it is hard to find right now.


Bitstamp, the manager of the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, said over the weekend that it had restored automated customer withdrawals, after they were halted for days due to a hacking attack that crippled various Bitcoin platforms, including Kraken and others.





6:09 AM

Billing itself as the “Coinbase of Europe” Sweden based Bitcoin company Safello has raised a $600,000 investment round lead by Bitcoin advo...

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