The latest from TechCrunch
- Behold: Path Comes To Android In Public Beta
- Bing Gordon: Every Startup CEO Should Understand Gamification
- Want To See Which Ads Perform Best? YC-Backed MixRank Is A Spy Tool For AdSense
- Andreessen-Horowitz Adds Jeff Jordan As General Partner, Leads $5M+ LikeALittle Series A
| Behold: Path Comes To Android In Public Beta | Top |
| Well, well, well. It looks like everybody’s favorite limited social networking and photo-sharing app has finally come to Android. That’s right, today Path announced via its blog that Path for Android will be available in the Android Market beginning today. And sure it enough, it is. Check it out . But this is by no means a finished product. Path considers Version 1.0 of its Android app to be a public beta, using it to test the waters and learn what works and doesn’t work as it ports to a new mobile OS. This maiden voyage for Android has quite a few of the familiar features that Path fans have come to enjoy, but according to Path Co-founder Dave Morin , there’s much more to come. For those unfamiliar with Path, the startup was founded in 2010 by Dave Morin and Dustin Mierau as an alternative approach to the idea of broadly sharable social information, targeting sharing among a smaller group of close friends and family. With a 50 friend limit, Path chose to offer no outside sharing features, Facebook, or Twitter. The team later amended this by adding a complementary app for Twitter photo sharing called With and has added a host of features, like Stacks , and more. Since its inception, the startup has grown in fits and starts, but has been on a kick this year, turning down a $100 million acquisition offer from Google and raising an $8.5 million round from Kleiner, Index, and more. Though the app got its start on iOS and has grown its feature set on Apple’s platform, today proves that there’s no OS bias over at Path. After all, it seems par for the course today for app developers to start with Apple before moving to Android. As is such, Path’s Android v1.0 doesn’t quite offer the full suite of features available on iOS, but it does include quite a few of the components Path is known for. Users capture and share photos with the same 50-friend limit, tag moments with people, places, and things, view friends’ moments, and make use Path emoticons to let friends and family know how you feel about their pictures and moments. Users can also take advantage of chat, see when friends have viewed their moments, and even publish a few moments to Facebook. It’s a great start for an Android public beta, and there’s more to come. As Path’s blog entry indicates, the startup will “continue to iterate and release updates with more features frequently”, and uses can expect things to improve rapidly as Path continues through beta. Path is currently available for users of Eclair version 2.1 and up . CrunchBase Information Path Android Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Bing Gordon: Every Startup CEO Should Understand Gamification | Top |
| View this document on Scribd Former EA executive, KPCB sFund lead and all around inspiring person Bing Gordon led a talk today at the sFund Gamification Summit. In his talk Gordon broke down platitudes like “gamification is important” into key actionable takeaways on how succeed with gamification, takeaways that could be reformatted and applied to any company. When asked why he went through the trouble of putting his guide to how to successfully gamify together for entrepreneurs, Bing told me, “Every startup CEO should understand gamification, because the gaming is the new normal,” referring to the fact that every one who had a Nintendo at 16 also has a brain that works in a way that’s more receptive to game elements. “We are overdeveloping the visual cortex of our customers,” he said. Gamification is as important as social and mobile Gordon told me, which makes sense, as elements like rewarding people for behavior are pure human psychology. His talk was separated into a three-pronged approach, Acquire, Engage and Retain, “All your experiences are three part experiences,” he said. The best way to acquire customers was to eliminate bounce, by creating a pleasant experience at first entry way, being said. “If you create cognitive dissonance in the first 5 seconds they bounce,” he said. Designers should aim for creating a “touchable box” or something that people want to touch. He then referred to the game’s interface as being an engine, saying that a great UX/UI guy could save a company from having to throw out thousands of lines of code and could replace five engineers. Baked in virality was also emphasized as a huge part of customer acquisition, and Gordon said that addition of Facebook profiles were responsible for 15 million versus 1 million monthly active users on Zynga Poker. Adding a friend bar meant 70 million MAUs versus two million on Farmville according to Gordon. “People come back more often when they have a date,” he said. In terms of user engagement, Gordon advised CEOs that first impressions matter, “Your job is to create a “Wow” within the first session … The value of gamification is the mechanics second and the mind of gamers first.” Things like virtual goods, showing numbers and giving badges are ways to positively reinforce users for playing your game. Letting them own part of the game by generating and submitting their own content was another way to solidify this emotional bond between creator and user. Bing also emphasized the value of avatars in games, “Any kind of avatar that people buy into can dramatically change engagement.” It makes sense, people love things that give them a sense of identity. If a game, service or anything really can give them that, then they’re hooked. Constraints, pre-announcements, and engendering social obligations to play a game were other things Gordon touched on that can contribute to customer retention. He said that the number one question on a game designer’s mind regarding a user should be “Will she come back?” and then “When?” “We’re in an era where we can have billion dollar audiences,” he closed out the talk saying. There’s no harm in using a few tried and true devices to keep people coming back. CrunchBase Information Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Bing Gordon Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Want To See Which Ads Perform Best? YC-Backed MixRank Is A Spy Tool For AdSense | Top |
| Online advertising is growing, and much of that growth is happening in display advertising . While search ads still make up 46 percent of the total over display’s 38 percent, display grew twice as fast as search in 2010. Many online businesses rely on advertising as a supplemental revenue stream in support of their business model — if not the sole source — especially from AdSense . As such, companies and startups spend a lot of time testing out different ad iterations, looks, and copy in an effort to find the most clickable ad content and the most lucrative campaigns. And, interestingly, relatively tiny tweaks to wording and content in ads can have a fairly dramatic effect on clickthrough rates, increasing them as much as tenfold. A lot of businesses end up losing valuable time and money trying out different wordings and approaches, which is why MixRank , a startup out of the latest class of Y Combinator companies, is today launching a competitive intelligence service that clues businesses into how successful the AdSense display and contextual advertising of other companies (read: their competitors) has been. If, for example, your business is advertising a similar product to another company in the space, MixRank allows users to skip past the some 80 percent of ads that lose money, and view the methods of attack that are working for their competitors. Users can also view the sites that are directing the most traffic to their competitors. To make this possible, MixRank has effectively created a search engine for AdSense that crawls pages running Google ads, and since Google sorts these ads by effectiveness, MixRank indexes this data and estimates ad performance. After crawling these pages, MixRank takes into account Google’s sorting of the ads by effectiveness, then uses this data to serve essential performance analytics. As you can get a sense from the image above, MixRank’s service yields a ton of interesting data for advertisers. Using MixRank’s dashboard, users can see that, of the different wordings WooMe is testing for their Google ads, the top phrasing has been far more successful than the other pilots. As advertisers employ different calls to action in their advertising, these businesses can now get a better sense of whether using immediacy, scarcity, or time limits, etc will be more effective in selling their products. Users can quickly test these different calls and easily see what’s working. As one can see in this example of Gillette advertising , the most successful ads don’t target sites that have the same theme as the product they’re hawking, but instead using common cases, problems, and questions to address their potential customers. The top Gillette ad for deodorant is “Interview with confidence”, for example. Mixrank Co-founders Ilya Lichtenstein, whose background is in affiliate marketing, told me that many of the seemingly pervasive daily deals sites out there all essentially play “follow the leader” when it comes to advertising (as they seem to do with business models and more). Many of the smaller sites can’t compete with the leaders like Groupon and LivingSocial, because they don’t have the resources to build a large team of salespeople, researchers, and copywriters, so they find the easiest ways to mimic the leaders. So, because it’s true that, in any highly competitive market with thin margins, there are usually only a few ads or traffic sources that resonate with customers and get big CTRs, MixRank levels the playing field. It allows smaller businesses access to the same copy, content, testing and comparative analysis that the big boys utilize; smaller operations can see where their competitors are buying ad real estate and view what type of ad copy is working best. ( Thanks to Cofounder Scott Milliken, who built most of MixRank’s architecture, the service currently indexes 93,000 sites using Google AdSense, and that number continues to grow every day. One might, of course, assume that a caveat to MixRank’s business might be intrinsic to scaling and adoption, but even as more and more businesses sign up to use the service, it seems that ads will only become more efficient at a faster rate, as each team learns from another’s experiments. And, in the end, that could be better for consumers, too. MixRank is completely free at this point, as it tests the market to see what kind of adoption it will see, but Lichtenstein told me he has plans to eventually implement a subscription model (an affordable monthly one) to monetize. And big picture plans include building a model of the whole display market, which may eventually include machine learning to work towards building a prediction engine that can tell users which particular version of a campaign might be the most successful. It’s a deceptively simple concept, but a very interesting one, so check it out , and let us know what you think. CrunchBase Information MixRank Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Andreessen-Horowitz Adds Jeff Jordan As General Partner, Leads $5M+ LikeALittle Series A | Top |
| Andreessen-Horowitz, the prestigious VC firm started by Silicon Valley veterans Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has just announced that it’s added its fifth general partner: Jeff Jordan , the former CEO of OpenTable and former executive at PayPal and eBay. In conjunction with the news, A-H is also announcing Jordan’s first investment: a Series A funding round in hot Palo-Alto based startup LAL (also known as LikeALittle). When it’s completed, the round will total over $5 million in new funding for the company. Also contributing to the round are notable angel investors who include TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington (see below). Oh, and we hear that LAL landed a valuation of over $35 million. Not bad for a startup that got its start last fall as a college flirting site. This is actually A-H’s second investment in LAL in the last few months — it also participated in a seed round in late April. Neither Jordan nor LAL had much to share about LAL’s progress aside from the funding, but it’s clear that A-H has high hopes for the company and how it will deliver local context (which is a problem plenty of other apps are trying to solve as well). As for Jordan’s addition as a partner, Marc Andreessen says that the firm has been on a two-year search as it sought to expand the team (in addition to Andreeseen and Horowitz, the other general partners are Scott Weiss , John O’Farrell , and now Jordan). Andreeseen says that over the course of many conversations with startups, Jordan’s has been a name that regularly comes up —either as someone that a startup already has, or wished they had — as a board member or advisor. You can find LAL founder Evan Reas’s blog post on the funding here . Note: As noted above, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is investing in LAL. You can read more about his investment policy here . CrunchBase Information Likealittle Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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