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Monday, February 24, 2014

A lot of parents tend to want to limit “screen time” for their kids, and push them to read more books instead. Understandably so: Consuming television is generally a very passive activity, and many games on computers and mobile devices are not much better. When it comes to stimulating kids’ imaginations and building their reading and vocabulary skills, it’s hard to get better than good old fashioned books.

Adults have great digital reading experiences thanks to iBook and other apps, but such programs are not exactly kid-friendly. So for many kids under the age of 12 or so, the iPad is for games and movies, and reading is mostly done on physical books.

A new startup called Epic! aims to finally bridge that gap by bringing a totally kid-friendly bookshelf and book reading experience to the iPad. Co-founded by online gaming veteran Suren Markosian and former YouTube exec Kevin Donahue, Epic is an all-you-can-read app aimed at kids aged 12 and under that provides access to some 2,000 titles for online and offline reading. The subscription service costs $9.99 per month.

Since Epic’s experience is so visual, we asked CEO Suren Markosian to stop by the TechCrunch TV studio to show us the experience hands-on — it’s got a lot of the fun graphics and incentives you’d expect from a kids’ game, with the tactile replication of what it’s like to read a physical book. There are also some great parental features for monitoring how much time your child has spent reading each book and his or her progress and tastes.

It looks like Epic strikes the perfect balance between educational and fun, and should allow parents to feel more confident about introducing the iPad into their children’s daily lives as a tool, rather than as a guilty pleasure or time-wasting treat.

Check it out in the video embedded above to see Epic in action and hear about why Markosian and Donahue decided to focus on the children’s reading space.

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The Epic App Brings Kids’ Books To The iPad — And Makes Them More Fun, Too

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A lot of parents tend to want to limit “screen time” for their kids, and push them to read more books instead. Understandably so: Consuming...

Watch out below! Falling prices!

As the dust settles over Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm just announced a modest price drop for its Toq smartwatch from $350 to $250.

With the new Samsung Gear, the Pebble Steel, and the updated Sony SmartWatch, the Toq has stiff competition. It’s a fine device, although Darrell would argue otherwise. It’s comfortable to wear, has a nice screen, and works relatively well. Compared to the Pebble, it’s light years ahead in terms of possible functionality.

But the Toq is also more limited than others. It only works with Android devices and doesn’t have nearly the amount of developer support behind it than competitors. When the Toq was released, it was widely speculated that it would quickly fail on the consumer market. Qualcomm simply doesn’t have marketing or distribution power needed to make such a device successful.

Maybe a price drop will help move a few units. But probably not.

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Qualcomm Cuts $100 Off Its Toq Smartwatch

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Watch out below! Falling prices! As the dust settles over Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm just announced a modest price drop for its Toq sm...

Monster Worldwide announced today that it has acquired TalentBin and Gozaik, two startups offering tools for recruiting on social networks.

“The acquisition of TalentBin and Gozaik completes one key component of a larger strategy designed to help our business grow,” said Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi in the acquisition release.

The company says that both deals closed during the first quarter of this year, and that it will be sharing more details at its investor briefing on May 14.

TalentBin describes itself as a “talent search engine” that aggregates data about potential job candidates from Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and elsewhere, while also giving tools to recruiters so they reach out to those candidates. It’s actually the latest version of a company that began as Honestly, a site where professionals could anonymously review their peers.

In its various forms, TalentBin raised $3.2 million in total funding from investors including SV Angel, FundersClub, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Foundation Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Lightbank. (I should also mention that co-founder Peter Kazanjy and I met more than a decade ago when we worked together at The Stanford Daily, and we’ve remained friendly.) (I should also mention that he declined to comment on today’s news, so friendship will only take you so far …)

There’s less information available online about Gozaik, especially since its website just points to acquisition announcement. According to the release, the company allows employers to post targeted job ads on social networks.

The financial terms of the deals were not disclosed.

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Monster Acquires Recruiting Startups TalentBin And Gozaik

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Monster Worldwide announced today that it has acquired TalentBin and Gozaik , two startups offering tools for recruiting on social network...

While the combined GrubHub-Seamless entity just filed for an IPO last week, there are a bunch of next-generation food and catering startups that are aiming to fix meal delivery.

Chewse is focusing on the enterprise market. They handle one-click catering for offices throughout Los Angeles and San Francisco. Their meal ordering platform lets office managers quickly pick and pay for meals for an entire company of people, whether they are paleo, vegan, lactose intolerant, or you know, allergic to lima beans.

Started by Tracy Lawrence out of her dorm room at USC, the company has grown recurring revenue by tenfold in the last six months. They just passed 50,000 meals and are growing 50 percent month-over-month. The whole meal delivery space has become increasingly competitive in recent months with direct-to-consumer models like Munchery and DoorDash. But Chewse is specifically focused on the business-to-business space.

A lifelong foodie, Lawrence got the idea after working as an event planner in college. She saw how difficult it was to coordinate payments, people’s meal preferences and pick-up for large groups of people. It helped that she caught the entrepreneurial bug from her parents, who also ran their own business.

Lawrence says even though the Grubhub-Seamless IPO is getting a lot of attention, the company only has 0.8 percent of the $43 billion catering market. (The company made a confidential filing, so we don’t know their actual revenue figures for 2013.)

“There’s an insanely large market for growth,” she said, adding that Grubhub-Seamless will get distracted by the process of going public.

Chewse has been working on a model to scale remotely, so they can add new markets without having people on the ground. They grew Los Angeles, with a full-time team based in San Francisco, and currently service companies like Activision, DocVacay and others down there.

They face a number of competitors with different models. The Grubhub-Seamless approach is to partner with restaurants who use the service as lead generation even though they have to deal with the cost of delivery.

Meanwhile, Postmates, which isn’t explicitly for meals, is actually mostly in the food space. They make anything available on demand and they don’t need to directly partner with restaurants because they catalogue restaurant menus on their own.

Then there is a hybrid model with companies like Caviar. They partner with restaurants and provide logistics and delivery for them while taking a cut of sales.

Then the last model is more verticalized. Direct-to-consumer companies like Spoonrocket, Sprig and Munchery have a limited daily menu and bypass the need for a ton of restaurant partnerships. They make money by pushing a larger volume of one or two dishes, which are generally pre-prepared.

Chewse is backed with seed funding from 500 Startups, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, and Khosla Ventures’ Ben Ling.

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Chewse’s One-Click Catering Grows Recurring Revenue By 10X In Six Months

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While the combined GrubHub-Seamless entity just filed for an IPO last week , there are a bunch of next-generation food and catering startups...

Here in the Linux community, we're all familiar with the many benefits that come with using open source software -- customizability, interoperability, and freedom from vendor lock-in, to name just a few. Well, Linux Girl has shocking news to report. It turns out there's also a BIG PROBLEM with open source software that we've all apparently overlooked: dissatisfaction! Yes, dear readers: Open source software causes dissatisfaction and other assorted problems for its users! Thank goodness Microsoft alerted us to this worrying situation.

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News Flash from Redmond: FOSS Causes Dissatisfaction!

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Here in the Linux community, we're all familiar with the many benefits that come with using open source software -- customizability, i...

Hello, and welcome to Moviefone!!

The early 90’s was a strange time.

Computers were becoming fairly commonplace, but the Internet still wasn’t. We pumped out new technology that defined our lives for a week, only to be forgotten the next. We were still trying to figure out what the future looked like.

So many things seemed brilliant at the time, only to be rendered useless by the end of the decade. Remember pagers?

Remember when we didn’t have a universe of information tucked into a little box in our pocket?

Remember when dialing a phone number to get information from a robot was mind blowing?

Remember calling 411? or POPCORN? or Moviefone?

In the coming weeks, that last one will stop answering.

In a statement to the New York Times, Moviefone confirms that they’re going to be shutting down the dial-in number that launched the company back in 1989.

Why? Because, as you might expect, usage of the phone number has tanked. You can hardly get people to call each other any more, much less get them to call a number for something they could find online in a heartbeat.

Moviefone as a company will stick around, albeit refocused around its web services and apps.

Alas, “Movieapp” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

(While we’re waxing all nostalgic: Remember away messages? Remember when you used to be able to get away from the Internet?)

[Disclosure: AOL owns Moviefone. AOL also owns TechCrunch.]

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Moviefone Is Killing Off Its Namesake Phone Number

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Hello, and welcome to Moviefone! ! The early 90’s was a strange time. Computers were becoming fairly commonplace, but the Internet still was...

That HBO Silicon Valley show has a new trailer out, which you can watch above. (Or, go to YouTube and check it out there. I don’t care, either way.)

Anyway. This time we learn a little bit more about what’s happening with the group of ~~nerds~~ engineers in the show. For instance, we learn that what they’ve built is some sort of a compression engine or algorithm for sending content over the Internet.

“All those YouPorn ones and zeroes streaming directly to your shitty little smartphone, every dipshit who shits his pants every time he can’t get Skrillex in under 12 seconds — it’s not magic, it’s talent and sweat. That’s what the fuck we do,” says one character in the show.

Ok, then.

We also learn that venture capitalists are dicks. One offers $200,000 for 10 percent of this world-changing little startup company? Yeh, no thanks. We’ll hold out for a Clinkle-like seed round.

There’s still the bit about Silicon Valley being the center of innovation in a *snicker* TED Talk, and the main character still gets beat up by a little kid. But thankfully there are no dick jokes in this trailer.