The latest from TechCrunch
- Entech Solar Raises $6.95 Million
- From "Face Book" to FaceCash: How Aaron Greenspan Is Tackling Mobile Payments
- Is Verizon lying about the Droid's capabilities?
- Why Checking Into Foursquare With Your Phone in Your Pocket Won't Always Work
- fflick's Sentiment Engine Turns Twitter Into A Crowdsourced Movie Critic
- Mobile Video Revenues Estimated At $548 Million In 2010
- Shopkick Teams With Best Buy To End Fake Retail Check-Ins
| Entech Solar Raises $6.95 Million | Top |
| According to SEC documents , Entech Solar raised $6.95 million, primarily from Quercus Trust, which owns 54% of the company. The Fort Worth, Texas based company makes concentrating photovoltaics and tubular skylights meant to replace office and school lighting with sunlight. Entech Solar was founded in 1984, though its current name was created in 2008 when photovoltaic installer WorldWater & Solar Technology bought Entech, Inc. Quercus Trust invested $35 million then, and the fund’s David Gelbaum stepped in as Entech Solar CEO in February of this year. The company’s solar modules provide both heat and electricity by concentrating sunlight into its cells, and Entech Solar claims its electric and thermal energy output can generate up to five times as much energy as traditional photovoltaics. CrunchBase Information Entech Solar Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| From "Face Book" to FaceCash: How Aaron Greenspan Is Tackling Mobile Payments | Top |
| It’s hard to stand out in the increasingly crowded field of mobile payments. There’s Paypal, Obopay, Zong, Boku, Intuit, Bling Nation, Visa, Jack Dorsey’s Square and several others all chomping at the bit to get a larger slice of this fragmented market. And then there’s Aaron Greenspan’s FaceCash . If you recall, Greenspan is the other Harvard student who almost launched Facebook— or at least another service by the same name. Several months before Zuckerberg released “the Facebook,” Greenspan was touting his own project, houseSYSTEM, which highlighted a student search service called “the Face Book.”As the story goes, Zuckerberg and Greenspan exchanged a few e-mails but Zuckerberg forged ahead with his own plans and eventually built a multi-billion-dollar company— Greenspan was not so lucky. HouseSYSTEM failed and several other ventures, including the now defunct Qubescape, never became breakout hits. Now, Greenspan is betting the proverbial farm, and his savings, on his payment network ThinkLink and its marquee service, FaceCash. Simply, FaceCash connects a user’s bank account to a bar code. A user signs up on ThinkLink’s website (ThinkLink is part of Greenspan’s Think Computer Corporation) and enters personal information: address, bank account numbers, social security, etc., and a photograph. After a user transfers funds to FaceCash, those funds are accessible through the personal bar code via FaceCash’s iPhone/Android mobile app or the ThinkLink website. Any retailer who has signed up for FaceCash, owns a computer and a non-laser bar code scanner (a fairly common device) will be able to process Face Cash transactions. In other words, if you walked into a FaceCash-enabled restaurant, you could pay by opening the mobile app and displaying the barcode. The retailer would scan the code, check your photograph and complete the transaction. As an added bonus, you can also exchange money between users via Bump technology. While the payment process is not easier than using a plain Jane credit card, it is certainly simple enough to provide a viable alternative. FaceCash also has one clear advantage: the cost. Greenspan’s ambitious venture only charges 1.5% for each transaction. On average, a retailer pays roughly 3% for each credit card transaction. The vast majority of mobile payments providers are far more expensive. For example, Square charges retailers 2.75% plus 15 cents per sale. In addition any mobile payments provider that goes through carrier billing can be on the hook for as much as 10-50% of the cost of the transaction (carriers have only recently started to draw down their high rates ). For a retailer, there’s a clear value proposition. Join FaceCash and save roughly 50% a year on your credit card processing fees. Unfortunately, there’s a significant chicken-egg problem here. Unless there’s a large user base, retailers may not go through the trouble of signing up and installing the proper scanner (even if it’s a low barrier to entry). And if there’s not a critical mass of retailers, users will not want to go through the process of linking up their banking accounts, divulging personal information and downloading a smartphone app. The challenge of adoption is evident in FaceCash’s current numbers. Since it’s launch, earlier this year, there are less than 200 active users and six retailers in the Palo Alto area. Cognizant of this hurdle, Greenspan says he’s tackling a mixed strategy of going for local merchants and national retailers. While it will be important to build out FaceCash’s presence in key locations, like Palo Alto, Greenspan says a strong bond with major national partners is the key to accelerating adoption and bringing some much needed exposure to FaceCash. So far, they are finding some success. This week, one of the country’s largest food chains, Subway, agreed to sign-on— a major coup for the fledgling company. The partnership will start small. For now, FaceCash payments are only accepted in Subway’s Palo Alto store, but other locations are expected to adopt the service later this year. Fundamentally, I think FaceCash is a solid idea. In its current form it could not supplant the credit card (no option to get a line of credit), nor help the under-banked, but at the very least it’s a strong competitor to several mobile payment providers, in particular, the much buzzed about Square. We need more low-cost alternatives in this space, and a service that neatly bypasses credit card companies and carriers is an ultimate win for the consumer. That is, if the consumer pays attention. Will Subway be enough to tip the scales in their favor? Probably not, but it’s a notable start. For my interview with Greenspan see above, he discusses the challenge of adding users and the complications of running a mobile payments company. CrunchBase Information Aaron Greenspan FaceCash Think Computer Corporation Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Is Verizon lying about the Droid's capabilities? | Top |
| Yesterday, Verizon made it clear that while the original Droid would be getting Android 2.2, it would not be getting one of Android 2.2′s most coveted features: WiFi HotSpot. In other words, you wouldn’t be able to flip a switch and turn your Droid into a little 3G-powered router for all of your friends to leach off on the commute home. The reason for this feature’s absence, said Verizon, was that “the Droid.. doesn’t have [the] hardware to support a Mobile Hotspot”. That’s fair, right? Missing hardware is missing hardware; as I put it in the first post, you just can’t make chocolate chip cookies without the chocolate chips. Then I thought about it. What hardware, exactly, was it missing? WiFi receiver? Check. WiFi transmitter? Check. A 3G chipset, a fairly powerful CPU to handle the routing, and a reasonably sized battery? Checks across the board. That’s when it struck me: not only could the Droid totally handle Mobile Hotspot, but I’d seen it handling Mobile Hotspot before. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >> | |
| Why Checking Into Foursquare With Your Phone in Your Pocket Won't Always Work | Top |
| Updating your location in the background on mobile apps is gaining momentum as a use-case, most recently with an app allowing you to Check-In On Foursquare Without Taking Your Phone Out Of Your Pocket . Problem is—though this sounds really amazing—such uses of background location services are bound by hardware / software limitations and aren't quite ready for primetime. The Future Checkin app (which is obviously an innovative example of using Foursquare's API ) reveals why: this app specifies a 300 meter check-in radius, which is equivalent to about four city blocks. Imagine being in Union Square in New York and the app deciding to "check in"—to where exactly? You could be close to 10-20 places you've already checked into in the past. Not only could you have tons of previous check-ins within a small radius, but you may just be walking (or in a taxi) with no plans to stop anywhere. The Future Checkin app intelligently uses “favorites” to mitigate this, which are locations that you or it tags automatically when you frequent them enough, as well as recent-check-ins. For me, this reduced “nearby” locations to around eight when I opened the app in Union Square. In less-populated areas which people frequent occasionally, this could help, but in cites like New York the technology feels like it’s not yet ready for primetime. The main issue preventing these types of great ideas (granular geofencing , passive check-ins, pushed coupons) from becoming reality is the fact that GPS radios consume incredible amounts of power. For this reason Apple precluded use of GPS on iOS 4 location backgrounding. Instead, cell towers are used to approximate a subscriber's location. Cell tower triangulation has long been considered a joke. Though it's been really useful for safety features such as 911 call-locating and for applications like geo-tagging photos within a city radius, the inaccuracy and infrequency of updates really mitigate the promise of broader applicability. Also, 300 meters is overly-optimistic. Accuracy of background location on iOS 4 depends on how quickly you're moving, the relative frequency of cell tower updates, and hardware (iPhone 4 makes better use of triangulation than iPhone 3GS). In non-optimal conditions, one kilometer accuracy is about all a person could expect (a 12 city block radius!). The truth is that as much as Apple wanted to provide granular LBS with iOS 4, there's a disconnect between the maturity of the technology and the goals of the people who dream up product ideas. This passage from Apple's iOS reference library shows where Apple hopes developers will go: "You might use region monitoring to alert the user to approaching landmarks or to provide other relevant information. For example, upon approaching a dry cleaners, an application could notify the user to pick up any clothes that had been dropped off and are now ready" But it's kind of comical when you see Apple product people pushing ideas that almost certainly won't produce an "Apple experience". Unless they think that you’ll want to be alerted to pick up your dry cleaning when you are 12 blocks away, this isn't going to fly. This problem isn't limited to Apple however. Android has issues as well because successful background location depends on GPS. And today it’s simply not feasible to leave the radio connected or your phone will die within several hours. Issues such as poor indoor reception and time to first fix (TTFF) complicate this further. So what's the solution? Eventually the GPS radios inside phones will become more sensitive to location and will consume less power. Broadcom recently won the iPhone 4 GPS design (from Infineon), and it is producing highly integrated chips and multi-function radios that will do wonders to enable low power background updates. Modes like assisted GPS will allow the GPS chip to turn on and get a fix within seconds (instead of the standard 40 seconds for a cold start) even without any satellite information. They do this with aid from the cellular network (time and frequency data). In between updates, the chips will go into a “sleep” state, consuming up to 1000 times less power, but can still wake within seconds, since after the initial fix the receiver can predict where the satellites will be a certain time later. But these advancements are still a minimum of one year out, so don't get excited too soon—it's unlikely that even next year's iPhone will solve all of the hardware and software issues around checking-in with your phone in your pocket. CrunchBase Information Foursquare iPhone 4 Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| fflick's Sentiment Engine Turns Twitter Into A Crowdsourced Movie Critic | Top |
| Any time there’s a new movie hitting theaters, there’s a good chance that some of your friends (and thousands of other people) are tweeting about it. Unfortunately, there’s also a good chance that you’re going to miss or forget about those tweets. fflick , a new site that was just launched by four ex-Digg employees, is looking to help fix that problem: it’s built a sentiment engine to try to harness Twitter and turn it into a massive movie critic. From a looks perspective, fflick is well done, with a colorful design that isn’t overwhelming or cluttered. After logging in and hooking up the service to your Twitter account, you’ll see a grid of films that are in theaters and opening soon, each with a percentage rating showing the overall sentiment of the film. Clicking on a film’s logo will take you to the real meat of the site: the filtered tweets themselves. Initially you’ll see a list of tweets from your friends that are relevant to the movie you’re looking at — this could prove very useful if you are following a lot of movie buffs on Twitter, but your mileage may vary. If your friends fail you, the second tab presents a list of tweets that the site has deemed interesting, which usually means they were tweeted by a celebrity or news outlet. Finally, you’ll find the Positive and Negative tweets, which display a list of tweets that the site has automatically categorized using its sentiment engine. After looking through a handful of movies, I found that the system was pretty good at identifying both negative and positive tweets, though there were occasionally some tweets that were only mentioning a film in passing or were miscategorized. My biggest gripe at this point is that tweets that are anticipating a movie (“I can’t wait to see Inception”) and are actually reviewing a movie (“Inception was great!”) are categorized into the same bucket. In other words, just because a movie has a high positive score, it may not be any good — it might just have a lot of buzz. The fflick team says that’s actually by design, as this gives studios a chance to tell at a glance if their film is generating a lot of positive or negative buzz. They also say that they’re going to let you further slice the data in the future, allowing you to filter by criteria like age, gender, and intent. fflick is planning to generate revenue by selling the data it collects to studios (they can also make money through affiliate fees by selling tickets, and through advertising). The team also says that fflick is only the first vertical they’re going after — they have plans to apply their sentiment engine in other areas down the line. The team of four is currently raising funding, and counts Digg founder Kevin Rose as an advisor. fflick is far from being the first service to try to track sentiment across Twitter. In fact, we previously covered Flixup , which was looking to do something very similar with tweets and movie reviews (that company has now pivoted to launch Miso , a site to share ‘what you’re watching’). Mombo does this as well. Other companies that have tackled sentiment on Twitter include Tweetfeel and Rankspeed . It’s possible that Twitter itself may even offer sentiment tracking services at some point — Summize was addressing this problem back in 2007, and was acquired by Twitter eight months later to power Twitter Search. CrunchBase Information fflick Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Mobile Video Revenues Estimated At $548 Million In 2010 | Top |
| With screens on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets becoming larger and higher-resolution, watching video on your iPad or Android phone is only limited by your bandwidth, not by the screen. And as long as you are on WiFi, these tablets and touchscreen phones are perfectly serviceable video viewing devices. Revenues from mobile video in the U.S. are estimated to grow from $548 million in 2010 to $1.3 billion in 2014, according to eMarketer . The mobile video revenues are broken down into subscription, pay-per-download, and ad-supported. In 2010, pay-per download will represent 75 percent of revenues ($413 million), subscription revenues will be 18 percent ($100 million), and ad supported will be 6 percent ($35 million). By 2014, that mix is expected to be 67 percent for pay-per-download ($901 million), 18 percent for subscriptions ($235 million), and 15 percent for advertising ($206 million). Numbers may not add up to 100 due to rounding. The five-year annual growth rate of mobile video revenue overall is projected to be 25 percent, with ad-supported revenue growing the fastest at nearly 60 percent annual growth. Remember, this is mobile video advertising. The Interactive Advertising Bureau pegged total online video advertising revenues last year at $1 billion . Within three years, mobile video revenues will be at that level, but that vast majority is expected to be pay-per-download instead of free. I’m not so sure mobile devices will be so successful in creating a paywall around video over time. What do you think? | |
| Shopkick Teams With Best Buy To End Fake Retail Check-Ins | Top |
| Yesterday, we wrote about Future Checkin , a third-party app that uses Foursquare’s API to check you in to a location without you having to actually hit any buttons to check-in. In fact, you can keep your phone in your pocket and it will work. Today, shopkick is teaming up with Best Buys around the U.S. to offer something similar. But with an important twist: without doing anything, you are rewarded for walking into retail stores. And you can’t fake a check-in with their method. “ This is the intersection of the mobile and the physical world ,” shopkick co-founder Cyriac Roeding says. “You turn an offline store into an interactive experience, ” he continues. All of this works by way of a mobile application. The app is able to tell when you walk into a store (Best Buy, in this case) — and where you are in the store (that’s the future plan anyway, but shopkick demoed it today). But the key is that the user is in the store — not in the parking lot or simply close by. This works because “shopkick Signal” technology is installed in the retail stores. This isn’t about GPS. This signal can’t pass through walls, shopkick says. Again, they’re trying to make sure no one can game this system. " Check-Ins are a really nice start. Unfortunately, most of them are fake ," Roeding says. " That's not so great when you have a business model in mind that's supposed to do something for both parties ." With this tech, a consumer walks in the door and they automatically receive deals for that store. To redeem them, they can simply tell the cashier their phone number and the deal is automatically applied. There’s also a new virtual currency shopkick has created called “kickbucks” — these can be redeemed for Facebook credits, songs from Napster, or immediate cash-back rewards at partner stores among other things. You can also use these kickbucks to donate to charity. This is all about foot-traffic. So far, no one has nailed a way to entice people to actually come to the store that makes sense to the retailer, Roeding says. “ This is the physical world equivalent of an online click ,” Roeding says. We’ll have some videos up shortly showing this app (which will be out in the next few weeks) in action. CrunchBase Information shopkick Best Buy Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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