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Friday, February 21, 2014
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gobble_menu

For people with busy lives, coming home and making dinner for the family can be a pain. Equally as painful? Trying to find a place to go out to or order from that the whole family can agree on. Y Combinator alum Gobble is seeking to alleviate that pain by offering up personalized meal selections through a subscription delivery service.


This isn’t the first time we’ve covered Gobble. When it first launched a few years ago, the startup was focused on creating a marketplace for home-cooked meals.


Since then, the company has changed its business model quite a bit. While the marketplace idea was great for finding new and interesting dishes from quality chefs, it lacked the kind of thing that keeps people coming back for more.


So Gobble built a subscription business designed to help families and groups have great, personalized meals delivered to their homes.


This is how it works: Customers sign up, tell Gobble how many people are in their household (including how many adults and kids), and selects dates and times that they’d like to have meals delivered. They can also specify initial meal preferences or dietary restrictions.


At the beginning of the week, those customers will receive a calendar with meal options for the week laid out for them. They can add or subtract days, or change their meal selection up to 24 hours before delivery.


But here comes the fun part: Customers can rate and provide feedback on meals, which allows Gobble to create a personalized profile for them based on a “taste algorithm.” Over time, the system is designed to offer up things that are more to your liking. Kind of like Pandora, for food.


According to founder Ooshma Garg, the company is also hoping to find “the best” of each dish or cuisine in the area. Since it’s a subscription service with meals planned out days in advance, it has a high level of predictability, which means it can match up chefs, restaurants, and catering services that have excess capacity. (ZeroCater, also a YC alum, does the same kind of thing but with corporate clients.)


Gobble’s main target market is busy families, and the company charges $10 a meal for adult portions, $8 a meal for kids, and a weekly delivery fee of $9.99 for unlimited meals. For now, the service is available in the South Bay, specifically Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redwood City, and San Carlos. (See map below)


The company has raised a total of $1.2 million in seed funding, from investors that include Reid Hoffman (via the Greylock Discovery Fund), Felicis Ventures, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Morado Venture Partners, Thrive Capital, Keith Rabois, Jack Abraham, Lorenzo Thione, Ben Ling, Noah Goodhart, Craig Shapiro, and Doug Chertok.


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7:54 AM

For people with busy lives, coming home and making dinner for the family can be a pain. Equally as painful? Trying to find a place to go out...

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kakao

Korean messaging leader Kakao is negotiating with Morgan Stanley and Samsung Securities Co. to file for an IPO in Koea, according to the WSJ. The seven-year-old company is mostly known for its dominant messaging app, KakaoTalk. 133 million people are using the app. It is also the primary platform for mobile games.


KakaoTalk is the undisputable winner in South Korea. But with a population of 50 million people, the company needs to find new areas to grow. Similarly, Kakao is launching new products to improve engagement from its existing user base.


The company’s revenue mostly comes from its mobile gaming platform. Many Korean developers use Kakao as a platform to launch their games. The company is now profitable thanks to this revenue stream.


With an IPO priced at $2 billion, the company could raise as much as $1 billion. The company has raised $63 million. It could use this money to be more aggressive when it comes to international expansion, with potential acquisitions. The idea is to go faster than Kakao’s competitors.


Japanese competitor Line has at least 300 million users and Chinese competitor Tencent’s WeChat has 272 million users. In other words, Kakao won’t be able to compete against those heavyweight local competitors. But soon, these three companies will fight for the same user base in other countries in South East Asia. It’s unclear who is going to win.


But the company also tries to create new products. For example, Kakao recently announced a news service. It also provides a music service, an Instagram-like app, a Path-like social network and more. But for now, it’s still a two-legged company. The messaging platform is the growth driver while the gaming platform is the revenue generator.


The news comes after a week filled with important acquisitions in the space. Facebook acquired Whatsapp for a staggering price of $19 billion. Japanese company Rakuten acquired Viber for $900 million.


Image credit: Kakao, edited by Bryce Durbin





7:23 AM

Korean messaging leader Kakao is negotiating with Morgan Stanley and Samsung Securities Co. to file for an IPO in Koea, according to the WS...

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tango-phones

We broke the news yesterday that Google was producing a prototype 3D sensing smartphone called Project Tango. We also broke down the capabilities of the vision processor inside the device and talked about what it means for the future of phones.


Now, we’ve got an exclusive look in the video below at a real 3D indoor map of a room captured with one of the prototype devices by Matterport. Matterport, which makes computer vision and perceptual computing solutions like software that maps and creates 3D reconstructions of indoor spaces, was one of the few partners Google chose to give an early prototype of the device to.



We spoke to Matterport CEO Bill Brown about the ability of Project Tango to recreate 3D scenes. Brown says that the project has accelerated the mobile 3D capture space significantly. Mobile devices have become viable capture platforms for 3D mapping far faster than most people following the tech expected it to happen.


Matterport’s pipeline of software allows it to capture both color camera data and a full mesh of 3D data at once, and reconstruct those together into an accurate model. Matterport has been building its own cameras to meet the quality and price point of what it needed‚ but Brown says that the Project Tango device is more than capable.


“We’re getting the same mesh quality that we’re getting from our camera,” says Brown. “It doesn’t ‘look’ as good, but that’s just because it’s a prototype.”


The look and feel of the model is slightly cruder because of the lower-resolution cameras on the Project Tango device, but Brown says that those things should be rectified soon enough.


As you can see by the model, the capabilities of the Project Tango device are already very impressive, and we’re only going to see our phones get more adept at sensing and interpreting our environment as time goes on.


Matterport will be appearing at Qualcomm’s keynote at the upcoming Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. It will be showing off its 3D capture and reconstruction software on mobile devices and talking more about what it does to help people run apps that utilize those models.





7:23 AM

We broke the news yesterday that Google was producing a prototype 3D sensing smartphone called Project Tango . We also broke down the capa...

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Samsung has a new teaser out for its “Next Galaxy,” which will be unveiled February 24 at an event during MWC in Barcelona. The short video, which clocks in at just over 35 seconds, features a series of vignettes and snapshots with overlaid text offering up one-word summaries of what the new hardware is all about.


Of course, whenever a company rattles off a string of buzzwords it’s probably best not to read too much into it, but there are some specific moments during this video that call to mind previously rumored features of the upcoming Galaxy S5, and some terms are given more focus and time than others during the montage.


There’s “Wet,” for instance, which calls back claims that the new S5 will be a rugged phone with water and dust resistance. Samsung previously released an iteration of its S4 called the “Active” that offered these benefits, but it would make sense to see the company turn this into a standard feature for its main flagship device, especially given that competitors like Sony already do this with their own top-tier devices.


Other focal terms include an “Alive” segment and “Outdoor” bit, both of which would seem to reinforce the idea of a smartphone ready for rugged use. There are also a number of suggestions that Samsung could bring improved camera features to the device, including some powerful selfie tricks.


The ultimate reveal is just three days away at this point, but for the impatient, that just means there’s still around 72 hours breaking down this clip frame by frame and evaluating all the editing decisions at a granular level for clues about what’s in store for Samsung’s next-generation flagship.





5:54 AM

Samsung has a new teaser out for its “ Next Galaxy ,” which will be unveiled February 24 at an event during MWC in Barcelona. The short vide...

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Amazon and Apple just can't seem to catch a break with the advertising elite on Madison Avenue. In fact, advertising sales are a "tough slog" for both companies, mourns a feature published this week. The problem? Apple and Amazon won't reveal enough information about their customers. This is the best news I've heard all year. In fact, it just reinforces my loyalty to both Amazon and Apple. Meanwhile, it also shows how other industries utterly fail to understand the core of two powerhouse organizations.


5:09 AM

Amazon and Apple just can't seem to catch a break with the advertising elite on Madison Avenue. In fact, advertising sales are a ...

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London-based Spider.io has been acquired by Google, the company’s DoubleClick advertising blog announced today (via Re/Code). Spider.io is a startup that specialized in weeding out fraudulent clicks around online ads. The three-year old company has tech that will help Google identify bad behavior around their content in video and display ads on the web, to help them get a more accurate picture of what is and isn’t succeeding.


From Google’s official blogpost on the deal:



Advertising helps fund the digital world we love today — inspiring videos, informative websites, entertaining apps and services that connect us with friends around the world. But this vibrant ecosystem only flourishes if marketers can buy media online with the confidence that their ads are reaching real people, that results they see are based on actual interest. To grow the pie for everyone, we need to take head on the issue of online fraud.



Google isn’t revealing the terms of the deal, but the small London company is only seven strong, and this is a fairly specialized niche product so it’s unlikely to have been a huge exit. Still, the Spider.io team brings some impressive talent to Google’s ranks, including three PhDs and a an ex-Yahoo natural language processing and artificial intelligence expert.


Spider.io’s tech is designed specifically to detect attacks originating from PCs infected by malware. Often these hijacked computers are programmed by their attackers to place a high volume of ad requests, thus skewing the numbers and defrauding online advertisers out of millions of dollars. An FT article from last year revealed that one botnet last year managed to falsify billions of web-based ad clicks, sometimes accounting for as much as two-thirds of the sum total of visits to some websites.





5:09 AM

London-based Spider.io has been acquired by Google, the company’s DoubleClick advertising blog announced today (via Re/Code ). Spider.io is...

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amazon-settop-box

A new report pegs Amazon’s potential TV set-top box launch for March. Re/Code reports that the ecommerce and digital media giant is indeed still hard at work on a streaming TV device, which has been reported previous, and which was supposedly arriving in time for the holidays last year before those plans were pushed back.


Amazon’s streaming box should provide access to its content library of digital media, including titles from Amazon Instant Video and stuff that’s made available to Amazon Prime members in the U.S. for free. Amazon also has an extensive music catalog that would play well on a home theater device.


Re/Code also says that the Amazon gadget will run Android, albeit a forked version of the same, similar to the OS that powers Amazon’s Kindle Fire line of tablets. The report doesn’t offer up any information about whether Amazon’s set-top box will also be a games machine, but we’ve heard from sources close to the matter previously that it will indeed feature game support, and based on what I’ve heard recently from industry sources, that’s likely still the case despite the missed holiday shopping season window.


Amazon entering the streaming media center realm makes a lot of sense, and if it’s running Android and has access to the Amazon Appstore there’s a lot of potential for it to leapfrog some of its competitors, which have been slower moving at providing access to a truly open library of apps. The most interesting aspect still up in the air remains what Amazon will charge for such a device, and whether or not it might even become a free perk for Amazon Prime members, especially considering rumors that Amazon will increase the price of Prime subscriptions by between $20 and $40, which could be to help account for the cost of hardware.





4:39 AM

A new report pegs Amazon’s potential TV set-top box launch for March. Re/Code reports that the ecommerce and digital media giant is indeed ...

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