Tesco Will Work With A South African Empowerment Project To Create The First “Social” Wine. This Won’t End Well

I usually don’t like potentially viral feel-good PR BS from tech companies – let alone grocery chain Tesco – but, as a lush, I’m slightly intrigued by this campaign. Basically the chain is working with a South African empowerment group called Enaleni Community to produce a wine. To quote the release, “the wine’s grape, name and design will all be selected socially,” which means Tesco is setting up a Facebook page.

This will be interesting.

Given that the average 4channer can’t resist bombing social media campaigns and given the target, I suspect Tesco may have bitten off more than they can chew here. That said, it’s a worthy cause. Essentially the community is able to grow grapes but hasn’t had the wherewithal to make wine. Now they will.

Tesco will help the community with the winemaking and shoppers will vote on the blend, the name, and the label design. Then Tesco will sell the wine. One winner of the branding contest gets to go to South Africa to visit the community, etc. etc.

In closing, I look forward to seeing the community get a little bit of help and to drinking a fine bottle of Justin Bieber’s Monkey Kim Jong-Il Rocks pork-infused chardonnay. It will have an excellent bouquet, I’m told.

Reputation.com Buys Snail Mail Filtering App PaperKarma To Boost Its Mobile Privacy Management Business

Reputation.com, the online identity and privacy startup, has bought PaperKarma, a mobile app built to help users identify and then stop spammy snail mail. In a letter to users (embedded below), PaperKarma’s founders Sean Mortazavi and Brendan Ribera say that the app will continue to work as before; but Reputation.com notes that it will also be tapping into the startup’s software expertise for a wider remit: building up Reputation.com’s mobile capabilities, and applying PaperKarma’s address-tracking algorithms to online data as well.

“With the addition of PaperKarma, we’ve added mobile capabilities to our portfolio that empower our customers to easily take control of unsolicited contact from vendors and marketers,” notes Reputation.com CEO and founder Michael Fertik in the official announcement.

“At PaperKarma, we’ve focused on the green aspect of our app – but privacy services have always been on the roadmap,” Mortazavi and Ribera noted. “We’re excited to accelerate that vision by joining Reputation.com.” PaperKarma caused a bit of buzz last year when Apple selected it as one of the most disruptive apps of 2012, alongside Airbnb, Uber, Square Wallet, TaskRabbit and Hotel Tonight (pretty impressive company).

While many associate the idea of “online reputation” with social media marketing and companies like Klout and LinkedIn with its endorsements and influencers, Reputation.com is tapping into another trend on the internet: the ideas of privacy, online identity, and safeguarding them.

These are issues that have always been around, but for many users they still sit on the sidelines. For example, for all the people concerned with how much Facebook or Google knows about them, there are millions more who do not bat an eyelash. However, there are signs that might change: the news still emerging around the PRISM project from the NSA; the growing prevalence of ad tracking (andsolutions to counteract that); the rise of “big data” repositories that collect and track information; and of course the numerous security breaches we have seen all point back to questions of online privacy and identity management.

To that end, this topic could (and maybe should) become something all of us will think about more longer term.

This is the second acquisition this year for Reputation.com, which in January acquired UK-based rival Reputation 24/7 to help expand internationally. As with the PaperKarma deal, financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but will involve “millions” in extra investment.

Both deals are a sign of the company’s ramped-up ambitions in the wake of raising nearly $68 million in funding, including a $41 million round nearly two years ago, in July 2011, led by August Capital, with participation also from Insight Capital and previous investors Jafco Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Bessemer Venture Partners. PaperKarma had raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from SV Angel.

US military will spend $23 billion on cyber defense, create its own secure 4G network

The US Department of Defense told a Washington thinktank yesterday that it would spend $23 billion in the next four years to kick its cyber defenses up a gear. That'll include building out a "secure 4G wireless network that will get iPads, iPhones and Android devices online by mid-2014," according to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey. The DoD recently approved Blackberry 10, iOS and Samsung Galaxy devices with Knox, and General Dempsey himself was packing a smartphone he said would "make Batman and James Bond jealous." While there were no details about how such a mobile network would be locked down, he did say that all 15,000 of the Department's computer networks would be consolidated into an enterprise cloud system to increase security. All that is to combat a "17-fold" cyber warfare increase in just over two years -- no doubt including recent Chinese hacking that the White House took the rare step of recently highlighting.

WSJ: Google To Push Android Further By Making A Games Console, Smart Watch, Media-Streamer & Low Cost Smartphones Itself

Google is working on building multiple new devices to keep pushing its globally dominant Android OS beyond smartphones and tablets. It’s building its own games console and a smart watch that would connect with a smartphone via Bluetooth, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal which cites “people familiar with the matter”. Mountain View is also reportedly lining up a second version of the Nexus Q Android-powered media-streaming gadget which it unveiled at I/O last year, and gave to attendees, but never sold to the public after issues with production led to the release being delayed indefinitely.

As well as seeking to spread Android’s smartphone momentum to other device types, Google making its own hardware is intended to counter possible similar device launches by Apple, according to the paper’s sources. The sources say Google is hoping to design and market all these new Android-powered gadgets itself — and is aiming to release at least one of them this fall.

On the games console side, Google moving into making its own hardware is in part a reaction to its expectations that Apple will launch a videogame console as part of its next Apple TV product release. One of the WSJ’s sources also cited the momentum behind the Ouya Android-powered games console as another source of inspiration. The $99 console, which started out as a Kickstarter concept and went on to raise a whopping $8.6 million in crowdsourced funding — and subsequently raised a $15 million VC funding round (led by Kleiner Perkins) – went on general release this week.

The games console aspect of the WSJ‘s report also resonates with a tip we received back in April, that Google was working on a Nexus-branded Kinect-style gaming console. We were unable to confirm this at the time, and the WSJ’s sources make no mention of gesture-based controls. Google declined to comment on “rumors or speculation” at the time.

The WSJ also says Google is preparing to push Android onto even lower cost smartphone hardware. Its sources say the next release of Android — presumably the Key Lime Pie flavour — will be “better tailored to the lower-cost smartphones prevalent in developing countries with the aim of firming up Android’s market-share globally”. This could also be in preparation for a Cupertino push into the lower mid-tier, following the myriad rumours it’s readying a low cost iPhone.

But it’s not just the software that Google is making here either. According to the WSJ, Google has been developing its own low-cost Android smartphones for developing markets too — including markets where Google has plans to fund or help create high speed wireless networks aimed at bringing high speed Internet connectivity to regions lacking next gen wired infrastructure. (Presumably see also its balloon-powered Project Loon efforts here.) Perhaps Google has been unhappy with the quality of low end Android-powered devices made by its OEMs. Or wants to increase the number of devices at this price-point that include its services. Many lower cost Androids, especially in countries like China, don’t include Google services — shutting it out of any revenue generation.

Other device types that Google plans to “aggressively” target with the next iteration of Android  include laptops, wearables and appliances such as refrigerators, according to the WSJ. It plans to do this by giving Android OEMs greater freedom in where they use the platform, the paper says. It notes that PC makers including HP are already working on Android-powered laptops (specifically laptops, rather than tablet devices with detachable keyboards) running the next version of Google’s mobile OS — and says these computing devices would be designed to compete with full-fat Microsoft Windows.

Google getting into making more of its own hardware seems inevitable, given that both Apple and now Microsoft — with Surface — are taking that route. With Android so dominant in the smartphone space Google doesn’t have to worry too much about treading on the toes of its own OEMs — especially if its hardware focus is on newer device types, rather than eating into their mid- and high end smartphone businesses.

By pushing out new types of Android-powered hardware itself Google may also expedite similar releases from its OEMs, in effect seeding new markets with Android to encourage faster development and try to lock Apple out before it’s ready to launch its own iWatch et al.

See You Next Week! Details On The Balkans Meetups

I will be rolling through Sofia, Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana next week for a series of informal meet-ups. If you’re in those cities, I want you to attend. Here are the details.

Sofia (1.7) – The Roof by eleven – 8PM to 11PM
Belgrade (2.7) – KC Grad – 8PM to 11PM
Zagreb (3.7) – VIP Club – 8PM to 11PM
Ljubljana (5.7) – LP Bar – 8PM to 11PM

Assisting in the planning is Netokracija / Netocratic, the “TechCrunch of Southeast Europe.” They will provide us with locations and more specific timing but as it stands we expect to have some free beer, lots of sunshine, and a great chance to talk about your startup in an informal setting. We’ll also be scouting for Disrupt entrants for Disrupt Europe in October.

If you have a startup to pitch, please submit to Disrupt right now and we’ll talk about your presentation and application when I’m in town. We are still accepting applications for TechCrunch Disrupt Europe and applications to Berlin will be closing shortly. This is a great opportunity to get in front of a TechCrunch staffer before the event.

These will be informal meetups where I’ll talk a little bit about TechCrunch and getting the attention of media outside your own country and we can talk startups, entrepreneurship, and funding all night long.

Office 365 Is Now A Programmable Service For Rapid App Delivery

Microsoft is offering new capabilities for building business apps with Office 365 and Windows Azure — part of a larger effort to offer services that can leverage its cloud environment for rapid build out.

Rapid delivery was one of the themes Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discussed on Wdnesday, the first day at the Build conference. On Thursday, Microsoft showed how Windows Azure can be leveraged and turn Office 365 into a programmable service for quickly integrating apps and managing websites. The effort is reminiscent of Google’s work in integrating Google Apps with third-party services.

For example, Microsoft did a demo showing how Visual Studio, as Michael Miller of PC Mag points out, can be used to build a hiring application that “leverages Office 365 features such as documents and presence information.”

The keynotes and demos on Thursday were all about the cloud with an emphasis on the enterprise. Satya Nadella is president server and tools division. He gave the keynote and followed it with demos that showed new Visual Studio capabilities, auto-scaling, and how BizTalk can be used to integrate on-premise software with SaaS environments. There were also some  looks at data services but not as much as I expected to see, considering the strong offerings from Google and AWS.

Microsoft’s direction is right. The company is pushing Office 365 in Windows Azure. It reflects a deeper emphasis on the Azure infrastructure but also  its interest in marketing how it can be used as a platform for developing web sites and apps across the cloud and enterprise environments.

OUYA Gets Its Official Retail Release, But The $99 Game Console Still Hasn’t Reached Every Early Backer

The Android-powered OUYA gaming console is celebrating its official first day of general retail availability today, a major milestone to be sure for the Kickstarter-funded piece of hardware. Many thought it would never make it this far, and that it would be vaporware before anyone actually got a chance to go and purchase one, but founder Julie Uhrman and her team have made good on making sure it hit store shelves in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, listed right alongside the marquee consoles by Sony, Xbox and Nintendo.

The $99 device offers over 170 games, all of which must have some kind of free-to-try component, along with media apps like Plex and TuneIn. OUYA also touts its large committed developer base, which has over 17,000 studios and game creators signed on to deliver content for the console, including Double Fine Productions. The console ships with one controller, and you can add another for $49.99. As of this writing, the launch seems to be going decently well, as Amazon.com is already showing the console as out of stock.

So far, OUYA hasn’t received the best of early reviews. Most have found its user experience lacking, and the pre-release version was definitely a “beta” release. Virtually everyone who got their hands on a backer edition expressed hope that the console would receive more polish, along with hardware fixes when it actually shipped. And now that it has, critics are going to go back to the well for a second drink, in the hopes that the OUYA team has made some considerable advances in the ensuing two month period.

Yet not all backers could even form an early opinion about the console. OUYA employed a staggered shipping strategy to reach all of its backers, with a timeline that was supposed to ensure everyone got a console before they become generally available. OUYA’s Uhrman sent out an update to backers this morning apologizing for not getting the console in backer hands before the public release, and shifting blame to their distribution partner, to DHL, and to backers being located in international destinations.

Delays for backer reward shipments on Kickstarter are nothing new, but it is very rare to see a product hit general market availability before getting out to the project’s first supporters. OUYA appears to be stumbling out of the gate in more ways than one, but at least now the product is out there in non-beta form, and ready to prove itself as a real consumer product, or, alternatively, to fail in the court of public opinion.

Greylock Deepens Enterprise Bench, Adds VMware Cloud And App VP Jerry Chen As General Partner

Greylock continues to staff up on enterprise-focused investment partners. Today, the venture firm is announcing that former VMware VP Jerry Chen is joining Greylock’s enterprise investment team as a general partner. In his new role, he will focus investing in cloud and application infrastructure and new enterprise applications.

Until December, Chen was the vice president of cloud and application services at virtualization giant VMware (he joined in 2004). He was part of the executive team that scaled the business from 400 to over 15,000 employees and $5 billion in revenue, helping VMware grow from a virtualization software company to cloud and software-focused data center giant.

Chen was also instrumental in creating Cloud Foundry, the open source platform as a service developed by VMware. Chen was on the product management and marketing teams responsible for VMware’s application infrastructure products, including vFabric and the Spring Java framework, as well as its big-data projects. He also held investment roles at Accel Partners and AEA Investors.

Chen’s addition to the firm’s team only strengthens the deep bench of enterprise talent Greylock has been able to draw. Last year the firm added former BladeLogic CEO Dev Ittycheria as a venture partner, and Joseph Ansanelli as an investment partner. Greylock has strong bets on recent enterprise companies, including Workday, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, Cloudera, AppDynamics, Pure TStorage, Imperva and many others.

Greylock Partner David Sze tells us in an interview that the firm is draw to operators who specifically have a product background, especially in startups and companies that have seen excellence and are defining in their sector. “Jerry has all of this, he’s a deep product person who understands cloud infrastructure and more,” he says.

Chen says that in his nearly ten years at VMware, he experienced the changes in how apps are being built within  the enterprise and the infrastructure layer upon which these business applications are being built upon.

In terms of what he is specifically excited about, Chen explains that there is over $150 billion of annual spend on data center and app infrastructure. That means, he says further, that there is a huge area for disruption at the storage, network and app layers in the post-server era.

Biba Comes Out Of Stealth With $15M In Funding For Mobile-First, Password-Free Conferencing And Messaging Service

The smartphone is changing how people work but so far the applications for web conferencing have not taken much of a mobile-first approach. Biba, a new company coming out of stealth, has spent more than a year and $5 million in a Series A investment to quietly build a service that offers a lightweight way to use your iPhone, iPad or Android device to do conference calls or message people in your network.

Today the service is launching with $15 million in a Series B round led by InterWest Partners, with participation from previous investors Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures. Other investors include Enrique Salem, former CEO of Symantec and Gary Griffiths, CEO of Trapit and the former President of WebEx.

The core of the service revolves around the user’s contact list. Events are scheduled and attendees notified. In contrast to conferencing call services, Biba takes an active approach once meetings are scheduled. Attendees are reminded to register for the Biba service and again two hours before the meeting begins.

At the time of the call, Biba calls the user. There is no need for a user name or password.Those that do not register receive a toll-free number five minutes prior to the call.

Biba’s features are all built on this concept of automating the conference call and offering ways to make it as easy as possible for people to participate. For example, it show if the user can’t take the call or if they are going to be late.

A person who has a lot of background noise can be muted. If the call drops, the user gets automatically reconnected.

The messaging platform allow people to be contacted from their contact list without the need for any phone number. Messages are synced across mobile and desktop platforms. The user can see if the person they are trying to reach is available and if they have opened the message itself. They can also see when the other person is responding.

Biba is what Co-Founder Carlin Wiegner calls Freemium 2.0. In the Freemium 1.0 world, services were free. If someone using a service left the company then the IT group would have to pay a subscription fee to have that ongoing capability. In Freemium 2.0, the customer pays for granular services such as auditing of call duration.

Wiegner made his mark with CubeTree, which he sold to SuccessFactors in 2010, during those buzzy years when Yammer, Socialcast and a host of other players were competing in the fresh enterprise social networking market. Those days are over — the category is well-defined. Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion and Socialcast sold to VMware. Salesforce.com launched Chatter and has since made it core to to its service. Last year, SAP bought SuccessFactors for $2.5 billion and made CubeTree its standard for its activity stream service.

He said the idea for a more streamlined way to do conference calls came at SAP when he lead the engineering team under the SuccessFactors umbrella.  He spent a lot of time using Polycom conferencing and saw an opportunity to try and make the process less painful and mobile-centric.

Wiegner comes into a space that has competition such as Lync from Microsoft. Lync is a unified communications platform, offering a deep set of features. Biba is lightweight, more similar to a Google Docs in its simpleness and easy-to-use feaures.

What’s lacking are the sophisticated capabilties and rich, deep presence that a user gets with a service like WebEx.

But sservices like Lync and WebEx are also not mobile-first. Can they catch up? Yes, but that can also take some time when enterprise heavyweights are involved.

Position These Lamps To Shine A Light On Corruption, Or Just Anything

Some spaces are awkward. Dark corners or cavernous closets that could really use some light. And tap lights don't always cut it in terms of brightness or aesthetic quality. But Australian designer Flynn Talbot is working on the situation. His aluminum and steel lights, called Latitude, can go anywhere and point in any direction.

The key is that you can attach the suspension cable anywhere on the spherical frame around the light, so it can be directed toward anything and light your space however you want. Talbot lists "indirect uplighting, downlighting, spotlighting" as some options to get you going. There's also kind of a light of the world vibe from the globe shape. Latitude currently comes in one size, a ~24 inch diameter, but a mini version with a ~16 inch diameter is coming soon. Gotta shed light where you can.

Up Close With Kate Spade Saturday's Digital Window Shops

The future of brick-and-mortar retail is fun, flashy and doesn't require a lot of storage space. At least that's the cue from Kate Spade Saturday, the design house's recently launched weekender line, which earlier this month unveiled four digitally enhanced "window shops" in lower Manhattan.

The brand has rented out the plate glass fronts of four empty locations — 154 Spring Street, 7 West 18th Street, 175 Orchard Street and 30 Gansevoort Street — for one month ending July 7. There, passersby can get a preview of merchandise from the new line, which for now is only sold online in the U.S. Next to the merchandise is a large touchscreen where users can browse sizes and colors, and place orders for free delivery anywhere in Manhattan, as well as parts of Brooklyn, within an hour.

The windows are designed to accommodate the "Kate Spade Saturday girl": that is, the girl who brunches at The Standard, places an order for a picnic blanket on Gansevoort Street and has it delivered in time with her arrival at Central Park, paperback novel in hand. Perhaps, on a weekday, she's on her way to an event, and needs to have a dress delivered to her workplace beforehand. A courier will politely wait while she tries it on, and only take payment if she decides to keep it.

"We're redefining what it means to window-shop," says Healey Cypher, head of retail innovation at eBay, which partnered with Kate Spade Saturday on the initiative. "There's no inventory and no [store associate]."

In Cypher's mind, the future of retail — physical and otherwise — is convenience. "Consumer expectations are drastically changing, and it's led by mobile. Consumers get what they want, where they want it," she says.

Watch the video, above, to see Kate Spade Saturday's window shops in action. For more forward-thinking retail initiatives, check out this article.

OttoCat Is a Revolutionary Organization System for the App Store

The beauty of organization is efficiency, especially when it comes to product. At close to 1 million offerings, Apple's App Store is full of great inventory, but with most of it hidden in the store's setup, developers and consumers are missing out.

OttoCat is an automatic categorization system looking to reinvent the way we search and find apps. The new service uses a language analysis system to categorize the entire App Store. A patented computational linguistics and information retrieval system organizes the entire store, making finding apps as easy as browsing the aisles of a well-organized supermarket.

SEE ALSO: These Are Apple's Top Apps of All Time

"What we do is look at all of the text in the apps and find common groupings in all of those apps," explains OttoCat's founder and CEO Edwin Cooper. He says the problem with the store is there are whole categories we don't even know exist. "It's very hard to know what's there. Because an app is visible, it's popular. Because an app is popular, it's visible."

There are 23 top categories in the store (and rumors of the addition of a new category for kids), with subcategories for games and newsstand. Twenty-three categories for almost 1 million apps means most get buried. Existing categorization services are only able to search a fraction of the store because tools limit users to the keywords they choose; and if an app has never been downloaded or reviewed, it's unlikely to come up unless the exact title is queried.

"A lot of people haven't really known what's been in the App Store until now," Cooper says. "All these great developers who made these great apps really need to be recognized for what they've done."

Cooper says his research has found that only 0.5% of the entire store is available via search. Those that don't make the top 100 lists for most categories or have any ratings to be reported are lost. Cooper says 30% don't have any ratings to be reported; 70% have 10 or few ratings. Meanwhile, apps in the top 100 list can have literally millions of ratings. Because of this system, the change in the top 100 list from January through April is about 2%, he says.

OttoCat has created 500,000 subcategories, breaking up categories like entertainment into divisions based on data such as cinema, music, comedy, etc. On average, an app is cross-referenced in about 10 categories.

Right now OttoCat is just web based but built to work well on a tablet or smartphone, Cooper says. An app is on the way.

Cooper learned search as a founder of InQuira, an enterprise search tool employed by Fortune 100 companies like Bank of America. Oracle bought the company in 2011, and Cooper left to spend a year developing the technology system that would become OttoCat.

His new Berkely, Calif.-based company makes money through an Apple affiliate program; OttoCat makes 5% off the purchase price of any app bought through the site.

This opening of the floodgates has developers excited.

Osurv, the mobile research app, surveyed 93 mobile developers in the Southern California area, all with apps in the store. When queried if the App Store is disorganized, on a scale of one to 10, one being unorganized, 10 being very disorganized, the average reported score was 8.1. When asked if they would use a new service to find new apps, 91% answered yes.

Greg Cohn, the co-founder of Ad Hoc Labs, a Los Angeles developer known for the disposable phone number Burner App, says he's not sure OttoCat will catch on. But, he is open to new and improved ways to search.

"It's obviously a good thing for consumers and ultimately the developers who depend on consumer downloads," he says. "I think it's a bit early, however, to say whether a third-party provider can really get traction in this space."

Are you a developer or app user frustrated with the App Store? Would you use this service? Let us know in the comments below.

Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

RIP Snapjoy: The Dropbox-Acquired Photo Service Is Shutting Down

Snapjoy, the online photo storage service that Dropboxacquired in December, has some bad news today for its users: it is shutting down. The company noted the information in a blog post, as well as in an email it’s currently sending out to users (I am among them: I’m copying the text below).

Users have until July 24 to download their pictures and related data — at which point, they will all get deleted.

Yes, it’s often the case that when a big company makes an acquisition of a smaller one, the latter business gets shut down, either because the purchase was really an acqui-hire or because the bigger company is prepping for, well, something bigger with the fruits of that product. (Yahoo has become a very regular buyer and closer of startups, with many of those questions about where all that talent and product is going still unanswered.) But this is a somewhat surprising turn of events for Snapjoy: when Dropbox bought the company, it stopped taking new sign ups but it also committed to keeping the service open.

Given that decision to keep Snapjoy running, it looked like part of the reason for that acquisition was for Dropbox to start developing a photo service of its own, with Snapjoy as the anchor for it. (For those who are not familiar with Snapjoy, the Y-Combinator-backed company is/was a great platform that not only let users amalgamate pictures from several different photo libraries — great for people like me who have dabbled in using several, and have stored pictures in all of them — but it then had a wonderful feature that called up pictures from that bigger group in a kind of slideshow, to remind you of long-forgotten events. All of this was usable on both the web and via a mobile app.)

It may still end up being the case that Snapjoy’s technology will live to see another day, and that Dropbox will indeed launch a photo service — it seems like an obvious move for the company as it moves to do more than just offer cloud storage, by providing different services on top of that infrastructure. However, today’s news means that it won’t be a continuous process for Snapjoy’s existing users, or indeed for Snapjoy the product.

The news points to a couple of bigger issues:

For those who sometimes feel uneasy about cloud anything, this once again highlights that your cloud-stored data is only as solid as the proprietary platform that is storing it. Once that company decides to call it a day, that’s all, folks.

The other is regarding the message that this sends out to users of other Dropbox services — particularly those that Dropbox has acquired, like Mailbox. So far, Dropbox has shown no signs of planning to shut the virally-popular email service down, but Snapjoy should serve as a reminder that a picture can change in a snap.

We have reached out to Dropbox for comment and will update this post as we learn more.

Hi xxx,

After two years of building Snapjoy, the time has come for us to shut down the service. It’s been a journey unlike anything we’d imagined, and we can’t thank you enough for your support and input along the way.

As of today, June 22nd, no more photos can be imported into Snapjoy and the Snapjoy iPhone app will no longer be available. Your photos will be available to download until July 24th from the website. After July 24th, all photos and data will be permanently deleted.

To download your 450 photos, follow the steps below:
Visit https://www.snapjoy.com/export from your computer.
Login using your Snapjoy account.
Download the zip files containing your 450 photos.
Thank you,

The Snapjoy team

Virtuix Omni Takes Virtual Reality In Every Direction

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst atReticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

Now that there are enough wearable sensors on the market to track one activity per day each week, we’ve seen some sensor-based products turn their attention to chilling out already. There’s the Melon headband that helps determine how you best focus, Phyode’s W/Me wristband that aims to monitor a broad aspect of your physical state, and the PIP that uses a combination of software and biofeedback to help you learn how to de-stress.

At least one project owner is gearing up to add another technological tool to the active arsenal. Part videogame accessory and part exercise equipment, the Virtuix Omni was inspired by the success of Kinect a few years ago, itself a response to the “Wiimote controller” that defined Nintendo’s last gaming console. While both products get you off the couch, they don’t necessarily give you any place to go once you’re there.

Just like virtual reality goggles expand the viewing area beyond what is possible with conventional displays, the Omni expands where one can walk in conventional rooms where games are played. It is an omnidirectional treadmill. Indeed, the success of the crowdfunded Oculus Rift virtual reality headset that netted over $2.4 million on Kickstarter convinced inventor Jan Goetgeluk that the funding site would be a good route to market for a technology that had seen a lot of IP patents filed but few consumer products. Backers, many of whom were undoubtedly idle on their chairs as they pledged, were driven by promise (and perhaps a bit of guilt) to meet the initial funding goal in three-and-a-half hours. Two weeks and still with a month to go, the campaign has raised $860,000.

As is the case for Oculus, gaming is only the first market for Omni, which can be used in simulations, training and other applications. Even better, unlike the Oculus Rift, which has elements of input and output and requires that games be modified for compatibility, the input-only Omni is compatible with PC games out of the box and is much easier to demonstrate. Nevertheless, while both products are slated to ship in consumer versions in early 2014, VR is still a niche market.

Part of the reason for the reality check relates to the Omni’s size (about that of a standard treadmill although it’s designed to be disassembled quickly) and price, which will be around $500 or $600. That will make it more expensive than either of the next-generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft launching in the fall, with the latter including a souped-up version of Kinect. In addition, while using a Kinect can also require a wide berth, the Omni has its share of encumbrances during use, including a belt and shoes that require special soles. (The company is partnering with an existing shoe manufacturer for the uppers.)

And competition is already using crowdfunding to compete with the Omni. A simpler, smaller and cheaper omnidirectional surface called the WizDish developed in London dispenses with the Omni’s frame and integrated sensor. The WizDish is expected to ship before the end of the year for less than $300, but a demonstration video on its Kickstarter page has a first-timer stepping onto it as one a wet bathtub surface with a remote voice urging the user to be “really careful.” In these early days of omnidirectional treadmills, the feature sets — as well as some of the users — will struggle for balance.

How APIs Help Us Comprehend The Infinite Concept Of Data

Data is like oil. It only has a future value just sitting in a big pool. “Pure data,” as my fellow panelists said Friday night atAPI Days, has not proven to have much market play.

I agreed with them but it’s the wrong way to look at the matter. More so, it’s about how the data is processed and refined. Explore that dimension and it’s apparent that a data economy has emerged that has the virtual equivalence in power to oil and its impact everywhere.

But like oil, people don’t immediately equate data with everyday products or services. They know the data is there, but its uses are as infinite as space and its endless possibilities. How to understand the impact of data as an infinite concept is an intellectual exercise. That’s an important pursuit, but in our world, we need relevance to drive understanding.

The API has emerged as the means for connecting software and services. It serves as an intellectual vehicle for understanding how we can connect anything to make new things. And so it makes sense that the API itself is also discussed in an economic context. For example, the theme for API Days was all about the “API Economy.”

APIs are tangible because they are real. “Big data” is just a term. It has no meaning because it is not really anything at all. But an API is something that people use to connect services like Twitter, Facebook or Dropbox. The quantified-self movement relies on APIs to connect the data from our bodies to apps that give people new ways to measure their health. Netflix supports more than 1,000 devices with its API. About 20,000 developers use the Netflix API.

In an oil-based economy, industrial processes help make gasoline for cars or fibers for clothing. Data-driven processes help developers build software. And APIs connect that software to create new types of services that span the physical and virtual world.

3SCale Co-Founder Steve Willmott presented at API Days. His theory: software is eating the world and APIs are eating software. But by itself software has limited value. Connect it and the software turns things into programmable nodes.

By itself, data is irrelevant. The enterprise model has demonstrated that software on-premise has limited value when isolated in silos. But connect it with APIs, and transformations can occur that just were not possible before.

But are we just using the concept of an economy to describe anything that is data related? The Internet economy, the API economy, the app economy — the list goes on. All of these concepts have merit and relevance. But it is data that is the most important driver. I use the term “API Economy” quite a bit but to show its relevance to a world that is connecting things. Behind it all, it’s data that drives changes to the way we live and work.

So, yes, I agree that pure data has almost no value. But thinking of data in the context of APIs is more relevant to the way we work and live.

Snapchat Has A Patent That Could Help It Become The Defacto Camera App

While larger competitors struggle to differentiate themselves with different video lengths, Snapchat could use a different weapon to be the first camera app opened: speed. And unlike filters, this one will be more difficult to copy.

Snapchat has a patent, “Single mode visual media capture,” on its technology that allows the user to take a picture by tapping the camera button and a video by holding down the same camera button. Photos are simply taken by the tap, and videos end when you release the camera button, or after 10 seconds.

The app always opens directly to the camera screen, and this single camera, single button for both photo and video makes capturing moments simple and very fast. Vine’s recording interface is most similar, and is also quite quick, but it only does video.

By comparison, to move from photo to video in Instagram, you have to hit the video button, wait for the camera to shutter for a few seconds, move to a new screen, then press and hold to record. In Poke, Facebook’s Snapchat clone, you have to select camera or video camera before you see the capture screen; and, again, there’s loading time for the camera to open before you can capture something. Even in the standard iPhone camera app, you have to slide the dial from camera to video, wait for the camera to shutter for a couple seconds, then shoot.

Figure 2 of the patent shows the processing operations behind Snapchat’s photo and video taking apparatus.

This might seem like a trivial difference, but waste a couple seconds to switch to video or to wait for your camera app to load and the moment you were hoping to capture could be over.

The patent could also help Snapchat settle a pesky lawsuit. Frank Reginald “Reggie” Brown is currently suing Snapchat and co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy; Brown claims he was a co-founder of the company and was forced out by Spiegel and Murphy.

In a lawsuit filed in February 2013, Brown alleges:

“In addition, at this time [summer of 2011], Brown undertook the responsibility of drafting and filing a patent application for the technology used in the Application, which named Brown and the Individual Defendants as co-investors. Brown prepared the patent application and filed it with the United States Patent Office on behalf of the joint venture/partnership.”

As I wrote in March, this original patent led to a major argument:

“There was a big argument over patent filing,” the first source tells me. “Then there was a huge fight where each person said terrible things about the other and then Spiegel changed the passwords and Reggie just sat and waited to file…it was something to do with who’s name was listed first. Literally a pointless argument. The bigger thing was what happened after. I really don’t think the patent ended up being a problem. It’s pretty much just a fight between friends and people calling each other out. Not much basis for why they actually had a big split up.”

Nearly a year later, in August 2012, Spiegel and Murphy filed this patent.

Until recently, patent searches for Brown, Spiegel, Murphy, Snapchat, and even the company’s early names like Picaboo and Toyopa Group, came up with nothing.

A representative from the United States Patent Office tells me an “inventor can ask for an application not to be published at all until the patent is actually issued.” The patent eventually gets abandoned if it is never issued. The representative noted that if an application has multiple inventors, any of them can file a non-publication request.

A lawyer from the firm Lee, Tran & Liang, Brown’s representatives, confirmed the statement in the February 2013 complaint, but could not comment further due to the nature of the ongoing case.

Aiming To Disrupt Payday Lending, a16z-Backed LendUp Now Offers Instant Online And Mobile Loans

Y Combinator-incubated LendUp launched in October with backing from Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Kapor Capital and others, to bring a fresh solution to an old problem: You have to pay your bills now, but you don’t have the money to pay them. Rather than turn to predatory lenders and banks, with their high interest rates, borrow money from friends or cover your eyes and hope they go away, what do you do?

It may seem like a situation that only befalls the chronically irresponsible, but in fact, 15 million Americans turned to payday lenders to borrow money last year. Instead of ending up saddled with long-term debt from hidden fees or wrestling with Draconian terms and costly rollovers, LendUp wants to give those looking for a speedy fix to a short-term financial conundrum a way to borrow money without hidden fees, costly rollovers and high-interest rates.

The lending space at large has begun to brim with startups — like BillFloat, Zest, Think, Kabbage, On Deck and Lending Club — each of which is trying to make it easier for consumers and small businesses to get access to capital without having to jump through a million hoops. LendUp, in contrast, is positioning itself as a direct lender, using technology and Big Data to allow consumers with poor or no credit to get access to small-dollar, short-term loans (of up to $250 for 30 days) and build their credit while doing so.

Unfortunately, most credit agencies turn their backs on payday loans, so even if people are able to pay them on time, it doesn’t help their credit scores and the cycle of bad credit keeps on spinning. Most banks won’t touch these kind of loans because they’re high-risk, but like On Deck Capital(which is attempting to streamline the lending process for small businesses), LendUp uses Big Data to do instant risk analysis and evaluate creditworthiness, weeding out those who have bad credit for a reason from those who may have become victims of the system.

Along with eschewing hidden fees, rollovers and high interest rates, LendUp streamlines the application process for loans — which traditionally takes forever — by customizing the process. In other words, rather than make everyone submit bank statements, credit reports and so on right from the beginning, it crunches available data and approves those with good credit instantly. It only requests more information from you if questions arise, approving or rejecting as soon as it has enough information to make an informed decision.

Co-founders Jacob Rosenberg and Sasha Orloff tell us that they’re able to build a dynamic application that changes in realtime based on customer risk profiles and segment with a higher level of accuracy by utilizing data sources that most banks or credit bureaus don’t consider. That could be data from social media or other lesser-used credit institutions.

With its foundations in place, today the startup is taking its formula one stop further, offering instant online loans. This means that LendUp now has the ability to deposit money in your account in as little as 15 minutes, so that consumers not only can apply for and get approved quicker than than they normally would, but they now have near-instant access to that loan.

LendUp loans are also available on mobile, so unlike its aforementioned lending competitors, LendUp deposits that money into your bank account, which you can then access from your laptop or while you’re on-the-go.

Orloff, who has nearly 15 years of experience working in credit analysis at the World Bank, Citigroup and others, says that the biggest problem inherent to the current lending process is that it can take up to four days for people with good credit to be approved for loans. When you need money right away because of impending deadlines, when it’s an emergency, that’s too long to wait.

By depositing loans directly into your bank account and making that capital available while you’re on the go, the founders believe that they’re removing one of the last advantages of going to a payday loan store rather than borrowing online. Participating banks offer instant direct deposits and loan decisions through LendUp, while users with non-participating bank accounts will receive loans the next business day.

It also hopes to incentive users by offering financial education through its “LendUp Ladder,” which aims to help borrowers with poor credit improve their credit scores by using LendUp to pay their loans on time.

With its new announcement today, LendUp is removing one of the last barriers that stands in the way of short-term, payday lending that actually offers fair terms to the consumer. So, while the word “disruption” is overused in Startup Land, LendUp has begun to create a service that seems like it could have real disruptive potential in the predatory world of payday lending.

Instagram Hit 5 Million Video Uploads Within 24 Hours

Judging by the massive spike in selfies (andresponse selfies) and lunch shots in our Instagram feeds following the debut of their new video functionality, it certainly seemed like a successful launch.

Now, thanks to some stats that the team just shared with us, we know exactly how well it did right out of the gate.

In the first 24 hours after the switch was flipped, Instagram saw 5 million videos uploaded. That’s a jaw-droppingly huge number for any day one feature, but remember: Instagram does have 130 million users. Even if we assume that each of the 5 million videos came from a unique user (an absolutely wild assumption, of course), that works out to around 3.8% of Instagram’s userbase giving the new feature a spin.

In the first 8 hours alone, Instagram saw roughly a year’s worth of content uploaded.

Curiously, their biggest spike in traffic didn’t come right after launch — instead, it was a few hours later, when the Miami Heat won Game 7 of the NBA Finals. At that point, they were seeing almost 40 hours of videos uploaded per minute.

For comparison’s sake, Vine’s 13 million users reportedly upload a collective 1 million videos per day.

Scrooser Is A Motorized Scooter From The Future

The unfortunately-named Scrooser (the creators are from Dresden so maybe it sounds better in German) is actually surprisingly cool. It looks like a standard, two-wheel kick scooter but actually has a motor built in and it can go about 15 miles per hour on a good day.

The Kickstarter project has been running for 19 days and is already at $43,000. The Scrooser itself can be yours for $3,950. It’s obviously quite pricey but it looks like it could be a fun way to get around town. It has a range of 20 miles.

The design of the Scrooser is quite unique and compact. The batteries are under the footboard and the motor is in the rear wheel. Quoth the creators:

The engine (48 V; 1000 W; electrics 48 V; 20 Ah) is a direct drive motor integrated into the rear wheel rim, which means that there are no gear belts, linkages or any other additional elements that could break. The system is nearly maintenance free and very quiet. Characteristics of the custom-built brushless electric hub motor feature electric controls using high quality neodymium magnets. Brushless hub motors create the hinge moment where it is needed – exactly at the spinning rim and in the wheel, so no additional space is required on the frame body. Also, thanks to the brushless hub motor design, you will have to worry about any shortages that usually appear among back-geared motors like noises from the gearbox, oil loss, etc. Furthermore, the operating distance increases significantly because a gear or a mechanical differential does not influence the efficiency of the engine.

While seeing grown men on scooters is always comical, this powerful hybrid could make scooting cool again… maybe.

Thankful Registry Is A Wedding Gift Registry For Thoughtful Couples

Registries present an etiquette quandary for engaged couples. Open one at a major retailer, fill it with suggestions from a checklist and you end up looking greedy (how many newlywed couples really need a gravy boat?). Skip the registry, and you risk receiving multiple toasters.Thankful Registry tackles that problem by re-imagining registries as a way for couples to sign up for a thoughtful selection of items while connecting with their guests.

Bootstrapped by founder Kathy Cheng, Thankful Registry launched three months ago. Cheng worked with Web design studio Crush + Lovely to set the tone of the site. Each wedding registry features a full-bleed photo of the affianced pair and a personal message. Instead of the sterile lists seen in most wedding registries, photos of potential gifts are arranged like a catalog into categories such as “delicious,” “play” and “nest.” Items can be chosen from different vendors, separating the registry from big-box retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond that derive a large portion of their sales from the $10 billion wedding gift market. Once shoppers select an item, they are taken to the vendor’s order form pre-filled with the couple’s shipping information.

Though there are other sites, like NewlyWish and Registry Love, catering to couples who want to avoid retailer registries, Cheng says she drew on her design background to set Thankful Registry apart from its competitors by honing its elegant and simple user interface.

“I focused less on adding a bunch of features just for the sake of having features and more on the tone of the brand because I feel that in the wedding space, people are looking for something that draws them in emotionally,” says Cheng, a senior copywriter for consulting firm Smart Design. “Everyone else is about creating a wishlist and convenience.”

Cheng, who started brainstorming Thankful Registry three years ago, says she likes to take her time finding the perfect present and found shopping her friends’ wedding registries frustratingly impersonal.

“I consider myself a pretty okay gift-giver and it wasn’t cutting it. I was disappointed. I also felt that couples felt obligated to add things to their registries,” says Cheng. “Our site looks modern, it doesn’t look greedy. I thought, gifts are as much about the giver as they are the couple.”

“Couples put so much time into their weddings, but the true touchpoint that guests see outside of the actual wedding day are invitations and wedding registries,” she adds. “We don’t say things like ‘register for whatever you want’ because you don’t want guests to spend their time and heart picking out a gift that ends up just being returned for cash.”

With their gift registries independent from major retailers, Thankful Registry’s couples can add items from any site, allowing them to support smaller vendors. One couple, for example, registered for handcrafted Japanese cutlery.

“I am surprised at the retailers they pick sometimes. They are usually not retailers who are heavily represented in the wedding registry sector,” says Cheng.

Though Cheng expected almost all of the site’s users to come from the U.S., couples from different countries, including the U.K., Norway and Australia, have signed up, and she plans to make the site friendlier for international couples by making the content less U.S.-centric.

Thankful Registry is free for a one week trial, after which couples pay a $30 fee, and Cheng says it currently has a 24% conversion rate. The site also makes revenue by participating in Amazon’s affiliate program. Cheng’s next step is to create a baby gift registry with the same low-key approach as Thankful Registry, as well as versions of the site for other life milestones, including birthdays and graduations.

YouTube To Live Stream Wimbledon Matches For The First Time

YouTube has been getting deeper into live-streaming sports lately and today, Google’s online video site announced that it will live-stream the Wimbledon tennis tournament, too. The company says YouTube will stream “the key moments of the tennis, interviews, behind the scenes and press conferences” throughout the two-week tournament. The coverage, which will be sponsored by Rolex, will be available on the Wimbledon YouTube channel, starting Monday, June 24.

The Wimbledon channel debuted in 2006, and this year marks the tournament’s first foray into live-streaming the matches.

The coverage will be available “anywhere YouTube Live is available.” There are some geographic restrictions, though. The live video and full broadcast will be restricted to the U.S., Canada, South America (except Brazil), the U.K., Netherlands, Belgium, Cyprus and New Zealand. Highlights will be available globally except for the U.K., the U.S., South America, Germany, Austria and Italy. All other content will be available on a global basis.

As Google tells me, tennis is about as popular as baseball on YouTube according to searches, but both are still well behind soccer. Currently some of the most popular sports channels on YouTube that stream live video include the UFC’s and WWE’s channels, but YouTube has also recently streamed major soccer tournaments, cricket matches and similar sporting events with a worldwide audience.

Given that YouTube offers live streaming in its mobile apps, as well as through Google TV and its web-based “leanback” experience, this actually puts YouTube in direct competition with the traditional TV broadcasters that generally had a lock on major sporting events coverage.

Adobe Photoshop CC Proves That The Cloud Isn’t A Cure-All Refuge From Software Piracy

Adobe released Photoshop CC this week, as part of its Creative Cloud-only revamp of the entire Creative Suite of software products it offers. The new version of Photoshop offers some exclusive new features, which I’ve covered previously, but the cloud-based and subscription nature of the program were seen by many as a way of counteracting the rampant piracy that greets each new edition of Adobe’s software.

Fast-forward a couple of days, and Photoshop is encountering the same old problems it has always had, thanks to a pirated version hitting the web only one day after its broad release. The pirated version has some trade-offs like a lack of cloud-based functionality tied to creative portfolio network and recent Adobe acquisition Behance, as well as other CC services, but it’s functional enough for most. So is Adobe’s grand cloud experiment a failure, at least in terms of deterring pirates? Yes and no.

On the one hand, Adobe is shifting more of its services and feature to the cloud, which is accessible only with a legit subscription. and add to that the fact that it’s actually much easier now to just sign up for a Creative Cloud subscription than to go through the often complex process of installing a pirated copy of software. Adobe’s David Wadhwani recently talked to Frederic about these aspects of piracy prevention, and said that that’s more where their energy is focused in terms of discouraging product theft, in fact.

Adobe has never played up or even talked much about the benefits of going with a subscription-based model for its creative suite products in terms of piracy prevention, so it’s hard to say specifically that that’s what they were trying and that those efforts have been thwarted with the rapid breaking of Photoshop CC’s DRM. But it’s worth an Ian Malcolm-esque “Piracy, uh, finds a way” to observe just how fruitless the subscription shift has been in terms of changing at least how easy it was to make Photoshop available to those who’d secure it by nefarious means.

The cloud might not be a cure-all, but Adobe’s right that it can build in additional, cloud-based functionality that will forever remain off-limits to pirates, and convenience is a huge factor for those who do have the money to pay for products like Photoshop but simply opt not to. The other big promise of CC is that it will be subject to frequent updates to address just do its (JDIs) to improve features and address nagging issues, and that kind of stuff might not make it through to pirated versions, so it’s early yet to say definitively what kind of impact going all-subscription will have on long-term piracy rates.

Need An Artificially Intelligent Robotic System For Sorting Trash? ZenRobotics Has Them.

When Jufo Peltomaa and Tuomas Lukka were figuring out what to do next after selling Hybrid Graphics to Nvidia seven years ago, they knew it had to involve one thing.

Robots.

“Our business plan was — let’s do something cool with robots!” Peltomaa said.

The pair, plus their third co-founder Harri Volpola, are one of the most interesting entrepreneurial teams out of Finland today. Lukka is the country’s youngest ever Ph.D. after getting his degree in quantum chemistry at the age of 20 and Peltomaa is an early 1990s pop star from one of thecountry’s first rap groups, a past career he kind of wants to leave behind.

They didn’t know exactly what these robots would do, so they did hours and hours of interviews with different potential customers.

“The question we asked was, ‘How can we help you? What are you losing money on right now?’” he said. They looked at a number of industries like warehouse logistics and food companies.

They stumbled on a problem which wasn’t only just lucrative, but also interesting from a technical perspective. There were problems with getting machines to pick up oddly-shaped objects. They decided to settle on robotic recycling, with the European Union alone seeing 3 billion tons of waste each year and the regional construction industry generating 900 million tons of demolition waste annually.

They would build a system that would sort through trash and pick out things that could be recycled for extra revenue like wood or metal.

Their solution, which can cost anywhere up from a starting price of a half-million dollars, uses off-the-shelf industrial robots that are enhanced by artificial intelligence to determine whether trash rolling through on a conveyor belt is recyclable.

ZenRobotics’ system is also bolstered with several load sensors which detect things like surface area and weight.

The robots weigh trash as they lift pieces and calculate the price a piece could be redeemed for. There are also infrared scanners and metal detectors built into the system as well.

“These are the same kinds of robots that are used in Volkswagen factories,” Peltomaa said. “They are standard industrial robots. They are honed to be really reliable. What we are developing behind them is artificial intelligence software.”

They can also maintain the systems remotely so they can monitor if any parts in the system are starting to wear down ahead of time.

Peltomaa says that a client might normally pay 100 euros to get rid of a ton of waste. But if they can pick out a ton of metal, then they can sell that for about 250 euros.

The company has sold five units so far since they only started about a year ago, and believe that the total market size globally for what they make is about 8,000 units. They put together the systems locally in Finland and then deliver them to the customer.

The company just closed 13 million euros in funding from Invus, a private equity firm that has about $4 billion under management. They also pulled in a CEO who can scale the company in Juho Malmberg, who used to run Accenture in Finland and grew their office from 10 to 800 people. They also brought in Jorma Eloranta as a chairman of the board. He used to run mining and construction giant Metso, which pulled in 7.5 billion euros in revenue last year.

“We want to bring multi-billion euro thinking to our company,” Peltomaa said. “It will be our own fault if we don’t make it.”