The bookend to Yahoo’s Big News Day — a major refresh of its photo sharing site Flickr — will see the company drop its Flickr Pro pricing tiers as part of a bid to compete better with Facebook/Instagram and the rest of the crowded market in the online photo space. But it is not getting rid of paid tiers altogether: it’s keeping an ad-free tier, called Ad Free, as well as a tier for power users, doublr, respectively priced at $49.99 and $499.99 for a year of use. The Ad Free service, at $49.99, will do away with the advertising the runs along the right side of the current photo feed — and if today’s discussion of what Yahoo intends to do with ads on Tumblr is any indication, ads that may be appearing soon within your photo streams. The doublr service (again with those dropped vowels… this had to have played some small role in warming the company to buying Tumblr), priced at $499.99, gives users 1 terabyte of extra space, on top of the 1 terabyte that they will already get free as part of a Yahoo account. The Pro tiers — priced at $6.95 for three months, $24.95 for 12 months and $44.95 for two years — included unlimited uploads and storage, as well as no ads, and a particularly mean-spirited allowance: those who did upload pictures could download more than just a smaller version of them. (Meaning: those who didn’t pay up wouldn’t get the full copies until they did. Read more »
Grubless? Online Takeout Giants GrubHub And Seamless In Talks To Merge
Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems. As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online and mobile food delivery. Over the last few days, we’ve hearing about a merger between two of the largest companies in the space. Rumor has it that “arch rivals” GrubHub and Seamless are in talks which could see them join forces as part of a merger. While our sources tell us that the talks are serious, the terms of the merger are not yet clear and, of course, any potential deal could fall through. Furthermore, it’s not yet clear what kind of synergies would take place, how management of the new entity would be structured or even what the new business will be called. The two companies would not confirm on the record on any of the above. Read more »
Indoor Mapping Startup Meridian Adds Notification Zones To Their Strategy
Indoor mapping software startup Meridian , continues to evolve their product strategy with a recent update to their offering . Called Zones , the company’s newest update to their indoor mapping platform — and indoor is the key word here — allows geo-fence style app push notifications to be scheduled, by drawing polygons on location maps. When customers with the accompanying app walk into one of those indoor areas represented by the polygon on the map…Bam! They get a push notification. To be sure, it’s a real marketing opportunity and a concept underserved by the current, mostly GPS-based location awareness model for mobile devices. Differentiators There are several geo-fencing platforms out there — PlaceCast , Digby Localpoint , Wifarer and ShopKick all come to mind — so what is the big deal here? Meridian’s VP of Marketing Jeff Hardison, believes there are several differences in the Meridian approach. First of all, this notification system will work even when the accompanying app is not open nor in active use — essentially working while the app is in background mode — without significant battery drain. Other geo-fence providers might be able to do this via GPS or cell tower triangulation, but not by WiFi sensing, which is how Meridian works Read more »
Google Says Its Chrome Browser Now Has Over 750 Million Monthly Active Users
Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Android today announced that the company’s Chrome browser now has more than 750 million monthly active users. That’s up from 450 million users Google announced at last year’s I/O. This number, as far as we can see, includes both desktop and mobile users. Google launched Chrome in 2008 and since then, as Google proudly noted in today’s keynote, it has become the most popular browser in the world. It is also now, as Pichai noted early on in the keynote, a very important platform for Google that stands side-by-side with Android. Just recently, Google also decided to take more of the development process of Chrome in its own hands when it dropped WebKit and decided to start developing its own Blink rendering engine based on WebKit Read more »
Angry Birds Maker Rovio Will Now Publish And Market Select Third-Party Games
Rovio Entertainment, maker of the popular line of “Angry Birds” games, announced today that its expanding its business to include third-party titles, which it will publish, distribute and market to consumers. The new program is being called “Rovio Stars,” and makes available the company’s expertise as well as its marketing teams to other publishers. The first title to be released under the new effort is “Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage,” by Nitrome Ltd. The Icebreaker game, which follows the adventures of a lone Viking, will be followed by medieval adventure and puzzle game “Tiny Thief,” made by 5 Ants. This is the first time Rovio has included third-party titles in its lineup, the company announced this morning via a blog post and press release. “We want to help the developers to give these games that last coat of polish, publish the games and find their audience,” said Rovio’s Director of Development Kalle Kaivola. “We’re focusing on a small, select number of games, and each Rovio Stars launch will be an event of its own.” That “last coat of polish” means Rovio will actually assist its partners in finalizing game production and with post-production, the company explains. Read more »
From The Garage To 200 Employees In 3 Years: How Nest Thermostats Were Born
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind , a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs . I remember when the press first hit about Nest Labs, the guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on thermostats everywhere! A collective “huh?” went through the tech industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers at Google For Entrepreneurs ‘ office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company on a mission to build one of the world’s only great hardware/software companies in the world. There are hard workers, there are really hard workers, and then there are the Matt Rogers of the world. If you think you work hard, please read/watch our entire interview then reevaluate. He had a quick start with his first Mac product interactions being at age three. As a child growing up in Gainesville Florida, when asked what he wanted to be someday, Matt would respond “I want to work at Apple.” At 16 he was building robots and entering them into competitions with his classmates. As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon, he agreed to basically do anything (anything being to help draw bones in CAD for a robotics hand project) to get a chance to work with with the robotics lab. His Junior year he applied via Monster.com, and pestered employees until he got accepted for an internship at Apple. That summer he took on the worst grunt work project imaginable (he rewrote all the software for manufacturing for iPod), and had three months for what he described as a “one year project” — seven days a week, 20-hour days, and “basically not sleeping.” How did it pay off? Read more »
Klout Gets Into The Q&A Business By Launching Klout Experts (With Help From Bing)
So what does a high Klout score actually get you? The influence-measuring startup already offers prizes through its Klout Perks program, and there are bragging rights (unless your friends think you’re a loser for caring about your Klout score). Now Klout is asking users who are influential on a given topic to answer short, factual questions through the new Klout Experts program. It sounds like the program won’t be rolled out to every user today, but when it is, you might Klout and be prompted to answer a question like “What is the best way to care for tulips?” or “What is the best place to take your date in the city?” You’ll have 300 characters with which to offer your answer. (Why 300? Co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez said 140 characters isn’t always enough, but he wanted to keep the answers direct and to the point.) Fernandez told me that Klout is working closely with Bing on this feature, so if there are relevant answers on Klout, they’ll be featured prominently when people search for a given question on Bing. Fernandez said the search engine team is also suggesting future questions that Klout could ask its users. Read more »
Security Firm: “Syria Has Largely Disappeared From The Internet”
Page views served to #Syria via @ CloudFlare over a 15-minute period an hour ago: 6628. Page views served in the last 15 minutes: 3. — Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) May 07, 2013 War-torn Syria is reportedly experiencing massive Internet outages. Both Google’s transparency monitor and security firm Cloudflare are reporting near zero levels of traffic out of the area. This isn’t the first time the beleaguered nation has experienced Internet issues. Back in 2012, the Syrian government, in attempt to paralyze opposition rebels, cut the entire country off from the rest of the world . “Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet,” writes security firm, Umbrella, about the abrupt traffic stop today. Umbrella describes how such a cutoff is possible, “Routing on the Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Read more »
Backed Or Whacked: Bridging Worlds Without Words
Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive . Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin . One of the hottest areas of tech right now is the Internet of Things, wherein everyday objects communicate with each other. As doorknobs and clothing learn to communicate, we can only hope that they will protect their language better than the humans who have seen English reduced to abbreviated gibberish in the face of texting and Twitter. If Kickstarter campaigns are any indication, though, objects have a lot to say without speaking at all. Whacked: Lively Read more »
Ask A VC: Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi On What To Look For In A Board Member And More
In this week’s Ask A VC episode, we sat down with Index Ventures partner Mike Volpi . Volpi, who makes investments in both enterprise software and consumer internet companies, serves on a number of boards, including Path, Sonos, Lookout, Hortonworks, Soundcloud, Big Switch Networks, Zuora, Foodily, and Storsimple. We asked Volpi what his biggest challenge is as the board member of a startup, and what entrepreneurs should be looking for in a board member. He also had some interesting perspective on the latest buzz word du jour, big data, and where we’ll see the most innovation taking place in the enterprise data space. Tune in above for more! Read more »