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Thursday, February 20, 2014
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Viki, a streaming video platform that crowdsources translated subtitles, will launch a beta version of its site for Japanese viewers tomorrow. The announcement comes five months after Tokyo-based Rakuten paid a reported $200 million for Viki, which is based in Singapore.


In a press release, Rakuten said:



“The launch is a natural transition of the company’s acquisition by Rakuten in September 2013, and marks the first step in Rakuten’s move to bring together Viki’s global content, language and community-first DNA to expand the scope of Rakuten’s $16 billion digital content and e-commerce business.”



Japanese viewers can use Rakuten IDs (which is similar to Facebook Connect) to log onto Viki Japan, which will have free TV shows and movies from around the world. translated into Japanese. These include “Boys Before Friends,” an American remake of “Hana Yori Dango,” a popular Japanese manga.


Other offerings include Korean drama “20′s,” Chinese shows like “Group of Women” and Colombian telenovelas such a “Broken Promises.”


The service’s premium version, called Viki Pass, will cost 400 yen (about $3.99) a month, and supports ad-free and HD video streaming across multiple devices, along with exclusive content.


Rakuten said it will continue to bring Viki, which is already used by viewers in 200 countries, to new markets. The service now has three billion video streams and its users have translated more than 450 million words so far.


This announcement is the latest one in a busy week for Rakuten that has included the acquisition of Viber for $900 million; a $3.5 million investment in image recognition startup ViSenze; and the opening of its first European R&D center. Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani has said that he wants the company to “become the world’s No. 1 Internet services company.”





3:09 PM

Viki , a streaming video platform that crowdsources translated subtitles, will launch a beta version of its site for Japanese viewers tomor...

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So there I was, grinding my coffee beans when the grinder's AMOLED screen lit up with a message. "We're watching you, boy," it read. OK, I must've spilled some grinds, so I cleaned up the machine and brewed me up some coffee. Ten minutes later, cup in hand, I wandered down to the laundry room and began loading up the washing machine. "Peekaboo!" read the message that appeared on its screen. "Have you been naughty or nice?" Turning on the wash cycle, I fled upstairs in dignified silence and began making toast.


3:09 PM

So there I was, grinding my coffee beans when the grinder's AMOLED screen lit up with a message. "We're watching you, boy,...

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After the last two decades of consumer Internet and mobile innovation, is biotech or bioinformatics the next wave?


There are a handful of San Francisco-based startups that cross the bridge between the worlds of biotechnology and computer science.


Benchling is one of them.


Backed with about $900,000 from YCombinator, SV Angel, Founders Fund’s angel investing fund, Draper Associates and other angels, the company offers DNA editing and analysis software to biotech labs and researchers. With the entire team coming from MIT with skills in both computer science and biology, they’re competing against older, more cumbersome software solutions in the space.


“The quality of software is holding back innovation in life sciences,” said Sajith Wickramasekara, the company’s CEO. “In bio software, the people who code it are disconnected from the work that’s actually being done. So it ends up being crap.” The company’s team includes engineers who have done stints at Twitter, Palantir, Google and Facebook. Their research experience covers genetics, neuroscience, and synthetic biology.


He added that researchers collaborate by e-mailing files or using Excel spreadsheets, which is tedious.


While the company is starting with DNA editing software, Benchling’s longer-term mission is to ultimately create an app store for life sciences.


“We imagine a lab where all the hardware will talk directly to Benchling’s platform. So that when scientists carry out experiments, they won’t need to write anything down, which would cause errors.”


For every kind of data a biotech lab could produce, Wickramasekara envisions cloud-based software that would simplify the design, analysis and sharing of that data. Their second product will interface with imaging machines to analyze pictures from gel electrophoresis experiments


So far, Benchling has 2,000 academics using it and 10 different for-profit companies. They don’t charge academic researchers, but enterprise deals usually cost anywhere from $50 to 100 per person. Already, researchers are using it to make yeast produce petrochemicals without oil, produce new antibiotics and even perform computation with bacteria.


Wickramasekara thinks the market opportunity is huge. Costs for full genome sequencing are falling faster than Moore’s Law would suggest and companies like Illumina have recently unveiled machines that could do it for as little as $1,000. These lower costs will produce an immense wealth of data that will have to be studied. Not only that, there is the emerging field of synthetic biology, which will give rise to all kinds of new designs for biological organisms and parts.


As Benchling picks up more customers, their repository of data will grow and they’ll make it easier for users to search a researcher’s publicly shared data.


They’re not the only ones in this space too. Another startup, Transcriptic, just picked up $4.1 million to become the “Amazon Web Services” for the life sciences. They’re a little bit different than Benchling, as Transcriptic operates a “software and robot-enabled remote lab,” which performs studies and trials on contract for other researchers.





2:54 PM

After the last two decades of consumer Internet and mobile innovation, is biotech or bioinformatics the next wave? There are a handful of Sa...

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On the web, no one can hear you converse – or perhaps they can, but it’s not terribly easy to surface them and have a sustained, engaged dialogue around any particular topic.


Threaded comment streams do this to some extent, as do forums, message boards, and even social networks like Facebook and Twitter. But none do thematic or topic-based discussion well, according to Hubub‘s founders, hence the need for the startup.


Toronto- and New York-based Hubub launched in beta quietly late last year, and today it’s announcing its $8.5 million Series A round of funding. That money will help the company scale and add more engineering talent to its team to continue to build product, founder and CEO Peter L. Corsell explained to me in an interview. But it’s mostly business as usual, as the startup continues its mission of trying to build on what was started with the online forum, but never really improved since.


“Specifically what really gave us the idea was that we were watching the Egyptian protests, in the latter part of the Arab Spring and we looked at the way people were using Facebook and Twitter, which was both inspiring and novel,” Corsell explained in an interview. “Yet it occurred to us that there was also an unmet need to give a tool to rapidly convene passionate, engaged communities around a topic of interest.”


Thus was Hubub born, which is designed to build these communities, where users can jump in and contribute the best content, be it user-generated or collected from the best of the web, around specific topics. Hububs (the individual topic nodes created) are user-generated and user-curated, but there’s also a degree of automation where you can view auto-collected content around certain keywords, too, making this effectively an aggregation search engine, too.


“When you think about the future of search broadly, I see it bifurcating between what I would think of as more tactical queries where you have a question and there’s one right answer or a small finite pool of good answers,” Corsell said. “The other type of search is, if you Google for example ‘what were the most searched for terms in 2013,’ it’s topics: It’s ‘iPad,’ it’s Bengazi,’ it’s ‘Kate Middleton.’ What excites me about Hubub is as the community matures, it becomes a really great place to go to immerse yourself, in articles, in photos and videos and more.”


Other efforts attempting to build conversations around specific topics haven’t always fared too well: Branch nabbed a decent exit to Facebook, but even big league efforts like Google Wave fizzled quickly, and as Corsell himself notes, there hasn’t really been anything between the legacy (read: outdated) model of forums and the too fast-paced, stream-based vision of Twitter that manages to keep things on topic over a sustained period, with real back-and-forth.


Corsell thinks Hubub has the right mix of media, polls and sentiment analysis to make a real impact, and he says early traction backs up that belief. I’m still not sure that there’s a real need for this kind of platform between the existing social media giants, but Hubub’s investors in this round, which include a number of private investors, are definitely betting that there is. Hubub plans to launch its mobile client within the next few weeks, too, which could have a big impact in terms of validating the model.





2:39 PM

On the web, no one can hear you converse – or perhaps they can, but it’s not terribly easy to surface them and have a sustained, engaged dia...

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In May of last year, we broke the news that Seamless and GrubHub — two of the largest players in the online and mobile food delivery space and “arch rivals” — were coming together as part of a blockbuster merger. My, how fast they grow up. Not nine months later, the merged food-ordering giant has begun to take the next step in its development.


The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that GrubHub Seamless (really, not “GrubLess”?) has confidentially submitted a filing for what would be their initial public offering. It’s not clear when exactly the company will take their business to the public markets, but WSJ’s report puts it in the first half of this year.


Given what we’ve heard from sources, this sounds about right and would make a lot of sense. After all, both Seamless and GrubHub were rumored to be considering potential IPOs and talking to banks on their own, with reports on GrubHub’s interest in an IPO going as far back as 2012. The merger minted the largest company in the online food delivery space by a long shot, accelerating those efforts.


Together, they have raised $135 million in venture capital, and while the companies have declined to share their current revenue figures, the reports from early last year said that Seamless was projected to do over $100 million in revenue in 2013. Our conversations with sources confirmed those expectations, and our approximate projections put GrubHub’s revenue growth in the same ballpark.


In terms of coverage, the combined organization offers online food ordering and digital menus for over 28,000 restaurants in over 600 cities, as well, according to the latest numbers.


On the one hand, this means that GrubHub Seamless is going to have no problem finding underwriters for its IPO, nor should it require too much friction raising big money leading up to the initial offering. In terms of the IPO market, while it dried up a bit after Facebook’s flop, it’s been heating back up thanks to Twitter et al.


If Chegg had no problem raising $180 million-plus at a billion dollar-plus valuation given the problems it’s had making money and the perceived shriveling of its market, it’s not a stretch to imagine GrubHub Seamless outpacing that. Meaning, although it’s pure speculation at this point, don’t be surprised if the online food ordering company raises over $250 million at a multi-billion-dollar valuation.


On the other hand, this means that, because GrubHub Seamless has less than $1 billion in revenues, under new U.S. securities laws, it can confidentially file for a public offering with regulators.


The company declined to comment on the IPO rumors, but the only thing that’s really in any potential doubt here is the issue of “when.” There’s really little doubt this company is going public at some point in the next 12 months.


Stay tuned for more.





2:24 PM

In May of last year, we broke the news that Seamless and GrubHub — two of the largest players in the online and mobile food delivery space ...

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If any of your favorite sites don’t seem to be working right now, don’t panic — it’s not just you. Namecheap, the host of some 3 million-plu...

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Twitter announced its Ads API program a year ago today, allowing advertisers to run their campaigns through API partners like Adobe and Salesforce. Now it’s giving the program a new name — the Twitter Marketing Platform Program — as well as a new website.


Why the change? In a company blog post, Twitter says, “We expanded this network of partners beyond advertising alone, and today we’re pleased to introduce a new name for our entire suite of partners.” (It’s not totally downplaying the Ads API’s role on the program, though, as you can see in the badge to the left.)


The Marketing Platform Program is part of Twitter’s broader certified products initiative. Building this kind of partner ecosystem has been a big part of Facebook’s ad strategy, too.


As for the new website, it’s basically a showcase (or, as Twitter describes it, a “marketplace”) for the various partners. Twitter uses the announcement blog post, to highlight partners too, quoting both SocialCode and Kinetic Social — for example, SocialCode says it ran a Promoted Tweet campaign for “a national network sitcom” and increased retweets by 60 percent.





1:24 PM

Twitter announced its Ads API program a year ago today, allowing advertisers to run their campaigns through API partners like Adobe and Sal...

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