Computerinfo

Monday, August 20, 2012

5 Considerations For The Flash Market Now That Texas Memory Is IBM’s Darling

IBM’s acquisition today of Texas Memory Systems (TMS) is more proof that customer data demands will fuel a new wave of flash technologies to replace the hard drive systems that have dominated the market for the past 30 years.

The acquisition points to a number of shifts in the flash market. Alliances are changing, private companies face threats from publicly traded companies and the giants themselves now have to prove they have the chops to compete with the feisty startups.

In particular, eyes are on Fusion-io, which has had a cozy relationship with IBM. But now Texas Memory is IBM’s new darling so it raises questions about the impacts on the market.

Fusion-io has been tearing up the flash market with its PCI-flash card technology. IBM has made it the centerpiece of its high-end solid state storage offerings. Texas Memory competes with its RamSan family of caching cards. But TMS is privately held and that makes it difficult to compete with Fusion-io, which had its IPO last year and now has revenues approaching $700 million.

With that in mind, here are five considerations, based upon rumbles in the market and research I received from investment firm Sterns-Agee, which follows the flash market and Fusion-io:

IBM had to ask itself: Why are we not developing this IP ourselves? Now it can do that with Texas Memory in-house.Privately held companies will get snapped up as it will be increasingly difficult to compete with publicly traded companies such as IBM, Fusion-io and EMC.The Fusion-io team is an ambitious lot. And it has been making rumbles about developing to what amounts to an operating system for the storage system. Expect to hear more about this move at VMworld later this month. IBM saw these moves and said it is time to make a split.The pressure is on EMC that has to see some better results from VFCache, its flash equivalent, if it does not show better results in the first half of 2013. Will it have to make a bid for Fusion-io? That’s the big question.Look out for NetApp – they are the dark horse and could make a resurgence if EMC does not make the strides that the market expects from it. NetApp also now has a partnership with Fusion-io which spells more trouble for EMC.

The demand for SSD is a huge shift and proof that the storage and service providers will go through a major overhaul of their infrastructure to keep up with the massive scale that we will see as almost everything we can imagine begins to generate data of some kind.

There are billions, if not trillions at stake here. This should be a fun one to watch.

Texas Memory Systems, Inc. (TMS) is a privately-held 33-year leader of the enterprise data storage and digital signal processing industries. Since 1978, TMS has specifically focused on high bandwidth, low latency enterprise data storage and digital signal processing systems. The primary feature of TMS products has always been very high performance, and TMS achieves this performance without resorting to overly complex circuitry, overburdened software designs or unwieldy protocols. This emphasis on design and architectural simplicity allows TMS to deliver...

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Kayak For Textbooks: How BIGWORDS Raised $80M, Went Bankrupt, Then Got Profitable Again

Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

In 1998, seeing an underserved niche in the textbook market, Jeff Sherwood and his three co-founders launched BIGWORDS. By the beginning of 2000, they had grown from a team of four to a team of 250, had a warehouse in Kentucky, raised close to $80 million in outside funding, made a few commercials featuring Tom Green and even had a $100 million acquisition offer from a young Amazon. Although it stings a little in retrospect, Sherwood tells us that the board shot the offer down because it believed BigWords could be a billion-dollar company.

Not to be. The bubble burst, and less than a year later, the company was bankrupt and was forced to close shop — a familiar tale for those who went through the dotcom crash. And like so many others, the BIGWORDS team dispersed after the company closed shop and was left to pick up the pieces and move on. But now, after changing directions and getting smart, BIGWORDS is profitable and growing.

Sherwood, in contrast, couldn’t let the idea rest. He still saw a valuable brand and potential in BIGWORDS, so he decided (against better judgement) to borrow money from his dad. He bought the site, trademarks and domain at the company’s bankruptcy hearing and started again from scratch.

Today, nearly ten years later, BIGWORDS.com has no venture capital backing or celebrity endorsements and is a fraction of what it once was, but it’s growing and growing steadily. It’s a far more stable business, having reached profitability early on. In fact, Sherwood tells us that the company has seen a 15 percent year-over-year growth rate over the last five years and that this year BIGWORDS.com will do $20 million in referred sales. (He’s even paid his dad back on that early loan.)

Why is it “working” the second time? In the aftermath of the crash, the market was littered with dotcom failures, and so the founder remained focused not on PR or marketing, but being slavish to the company’s customers — to building a service that would, simply put, help students save money on textbooks. Plus, he puts 50 percent of the company’s revenues back into growth every year and made a vow to anyone willing to sign on that BIGWORDS wouldn’t expand or deviate from its mission “until they got textbooks right.”

While the company does do grassroots marketing on over 285 campuses, Sherwood says that it’s been hard to get the message out. Textbooks aren’t the sexiest topic. Actually, the mere mention makes most students grimace. Not only that, but if you’re looking to buy textbooks, the market offers plenty of options. Consumers have Amazon, Chegg and over 20 other sources where they can buy or rent textbooks.

But, avoiding the mistakes of the first go-round, BIGWORDS.com today doesn’t want to be an Amazon or a Chegg. That is to say Sherwood wants the site to be the best place to get textbooks online, but doesn’t want to deal with inventory, shipping, processing and all those margin-lowering supply processes.

Last week, Amazon launched its own textbook rental service to compete with the likes of Chegg and Barnes and Noble, and Sherwood says that the first company Amazon called to partner with was BIGWORDS. Why? Because today BIGWORDS is a price comparison tool, designed to bring price transparency to the space and give students advice on where to find the best prices on textbooks, no matter they live — Amazon’s new service or otherwise.

In other words, the company wants to sit in the middle of (and work with) all these textbook rental and sales marketplaces — to be an unbiased broker of information by becoming the equivalent of Kayak for digital and traditional textbooks.

Behind tuition and room and board, textbooks represent the largest source of costs today for college students. But anyone who’s searched for textbooks knows that the cheapest source for one textbook may not be the best place for another, so now gives students the ability to pick and choose, automatically finding the right permutation. Students can select four books, putting them in their shopping cart.

In the below example, you can see that retail price is $690.72, but BIGWORDS’ default setting crawls all textbook vendors for purchase and rental and brings back the best choice — for each book. Below, it recommends renting all four for $165, with 76 percent savings, but there’s also a “Considered Buyback” tool that will show you the price you’ll pay after you sell the textbooks back, if you instead choose to buy them. (More on that below.)

The company has contracts with each of its affiliate sites, searching and aggregating their inventories and serving them to the consumer. The student pays no extra money, prices are shown exactly as they appear on other sites, there’s no price hiking, and like Kayak’s lead-gen model, eBay (or whoever else) kicks the company a small commission when they deliver a sale.

While the industry is changing fast, moving to more interactive, gameified and mobile textbooks experiences, Sherwood says that it doesn’t matter to them how students are consuming, they will support those choices and find ways to give students the cheapest options. The site supports eTextbook rental and buying services, and Sherwood says they could care less whether or not students buy or rent their books.

However, the company did run a survey of all the top sites in January and found that students ended up paying less in aggregate when they bought textbooks and sold them back, rather than renting them. So the company just launched a “Considered Buyback” tool, which users can turn on with each search. The tool takes the price of the used copies and subtracts how much they would be able to get for selling it back and compares that on each of its affiliate sites.

And so far, it seems to be working. The founder said that students, on average, spend $1,137 each year on textbooks, compared to average annual savings of $1K on BIGWORDS. That statistic alone, Sherwood says, is proof enough that the service is helping to alleviate a huge pain in the wallet for students.

The site doesn’t have the sexiest site design — in fact, it’s pretty hideous — but it does offer iPhone and Android apps for those looking to use the service on the go. So really it’s the utility that leaves an impression, not the award-wining design. BIGWORDS is operating in a niche market and it just doesn’t have the same value that an airline price comparison site like Kayak has in the big picture, but as long as it can stay platform and rental/purchase agnostic, it would be surprising if this site didn’t get another chance to take Amazon up on that acquisition offer.

High school and college students will always need textbooks, and whomever can find those cash-strapped studiers the cheapest option stands to become a valuable service — both in their eyes and in those of affiliates and investors.

Hipstamatic Out Of Film? Camera App Lays Off Engineers And Others

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More

Is Hipstamatic, the iPhone photo app that was an early hit on the App Store, on the rocks? TechCrunch understands that Synthetic, makers of the app, has recently had to let go of much of its engineering staff, among others, as part of a wider restructuring as it looks for cash. A number of public tweets (embedded below) also point to people leaving.

The news comes as a surprise, given that Synthetic says that it has been profitable since the second week after it launched. It is projected to make $22 million this year (from $10 million in 2011). Contacted for a response to the news, a spokesperson confirmed that Hipstatmatic is restructuring but nothing more: ”Business is moving forward as usual, and we’re heads down focused on making beautiful, creative and fun products for our community and the world.” The company to date has never had VC backing.

TechCrunch has been told from a reliable source that among those who are no longer at the company are Jon Wight (iOS Engineer), Justin Williams (iOS Engineer), and Stuart Norrie (designer), who were all let go today with severance. Kevin Smith (iOS/Rails Engineer) left on his own earlier in the week. In fact, our source says that apart from the “core team,” everyone (including the office manager, and the social media manager) is being let go. There are some who work there on contract who may be exempt from this move.

Hipstamatic’s app costs $1.99 to download. More recently the company, founded by graphic designers, has been focusing extending itself to other services like this iPad magazine.

As a paid app, Hipstamatic competes against a number of free and freemium apps that offer many of the same features of taking photos, applying filters and then sharing these pictures. Instagram is perhaps the most prominent of these. Ironically, before Instagram got gazumped by Facebook, it had struck a landmark deal with Synthetic for Hipstamatic photos to get imported into people’s Instagram feeds — the first deal of its kind. Pre- any news of Instagram getting acquired, the move hinted at possible business models that involved printing and other services that Hipstamatic offers to its users, which Instagram did not.

Hipstamatic currently has 4 million users, but it’s not clear how fast that number has grown, and whether it is picking up users now as quickly as it was in its earlier days. Hipstamatic may have had a blockbuster amount of downloads in its early days, it may have been hard to sustain that. And as you go down the App Store charts, it gets harder and harder to be seen. It’s a slippery slope.

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Y Combinator-Backed MicroEval Aims To Take The Pain Out Of Performance Reviews

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More

MicroEval, a startup in the current class of startups incubated by Y Combinator, is taking a new approach to the often painful process of employee performance reviews. The basic idea: Instead of having a single review every six or 12 months, break it up into quick bits of feedback that can be collected every week or so.

Co-founder Ryan Jackson says the idea came, in part, from a friend of the founding team, who went in to a performance review and was criticized for things like coming in to work at 10 instead of 9, and focusing too much on their laptop during meetings — in other words, feedback that really shouldn’t have waited six months.

Is that really a technological problem? Doesn’t it just suggest that some bosses need better communication skills? Jackson says that the issue is, in part, generational — that the old way may have made sense in the past, but technology has conditioned younger workers to expect “more frequent feedback.” By moving a largely paper-based process online, MicroEval makes it easier for supervisors to deliver feedback at that pace.

Jackson says the team’s goal is to offer evaluations that can be completed in less than a minute. They should consist of just a few questions, where supervisors hit a button to rate things like your productivity, your teamwork, or whatever is most important to them, and offering additional comments as needed. As an example, Jackson created a form that allowed me to rate his interview skills — there were three questions, and it took about 30 seconds to fill out. (You’re doing just fine, Ryan.)

microeval-evaluate

MicroEval offers some “pro templates” as samples for customers, but Jackson says the service is entirely customizable, since most companies want to create their own evaluations based on their needs and cultures. Companies can also customize the frequency of the evaluations — for some teams, it might make sense to fill out evaluations every week, for others, it’s more like every month.

Companies can also upload their org charts to MicroEval, so that all the relevant folks get regular evaluation requests. And if someone thinks they need more feedback from their boss, they can request an evaluation, too.

This probably won’t eliminate the need for those big, annual or semi-annual evaluations, Jackson admits — especially since that’s usually when people get raises. But MicroEval should make them a little less stressful for both sides. There should be less surprises for the person being evaluated, because they’ve been getting feedback the whole time. And a supervisor, meanwhile, doesn’t have to start an evaluation from scratch, and can instead draw on all the data that’s already in the system.

Jackson adds that over time, he wants to make it easier to “integrate all forms of feedback.” For example, if you give a killer presentation, your supervisor shouldn’t have to wait until the weekly evaluation to point that out — they should be able to log into MicroEval at that moment and note that your presentation was awesome.

Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take an idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with “good” ideas over companies with experience and a business model. The company made its first investments in Summer 2005. Y Combinator selects companies to finance and consult with twice a year. They are located in...

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MicroEval will help you create modern, helpful performance reviews. It’s the day of your annual performance review. You’re nervous, and rightfully so! After this meeting you’ll know whether or not you got that raise, if your work has been acceptable or if you should start looking for a new job. No one likes them. In fact, we didn’t even like them…that is until we decided that they didn’t have to be this way. Why shouldn’t performance reviews be helpful? Why shouldn’t...

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Sunday, August 19, 2012

Online Payments Service Braintree Acquires Social Payments Startup Venmo For $26.2M

It’s a busy day in the mobile payments world and it’s about to get busier: according to the New York Times, Braintree, the startup that powers the credit card payments systems of companies like OpenTable, Fab.com, AirBnB and Uber, just acquired Venmo, a social payments platform make and share payments your friends, for $26.2 million. Venmo’s investors include Accel Partners, Greycroft Partners, RRE Ventures, betaworks, Founder Collective, Dave Morin, Sam Lessin, Dustin Moskovitz,VaynerMedia and Lerer Ventures. The company raised a $1.2 million seed round in 2010 and a Series A round in August 2011. The service only opened its door to the public in March 2012 and has been growing quickly ever since.

According to the New York Times’ Janna Wortham, Venmo’s team will continue to work from its New York offices and will not relocate to Braintree’s headquarters in Chicago. The Venmo will continue to develop its current service. Wortham also notes that Braintree CEO Bill Ready “hopes that Venmo’s established footing among the early adopter tech crowd will help foster its adoption and gain an edge against other payment processing start-ups, such as Stripe and Dashlane.”

Just a few weeks ago, Venmo launched its redesigned app with a focus on its new “news feed of payments.” At the time, Venmo co-founder Andrew Kortina told our own Josh Constine that he believed Venmo’s social approach to payments would “succeed where apps like Blippy that automatically shared your credit card charges failed” because the company’s focus is on payments to friends which “naturally involve a social experience.” That company says it is currently processing about $10 million every month.

Braintree itself raised about $34 million from Accel Partners in June 2011. At that time, Braintree founder Bryan Johnson noted that his company was “growing, profitable and bootstrapped.” By September 2011, Braintree was already processing about $8 million worth of transactions every day.

Braintree powers payments for innovative and high-growth mobile and online businesses. Braintree provides an easy-to-integrate API for developers while ensuring the merchants’ end users have a frictionless and secure experience at checkout. Braintree’s full-stack payments solution includes a payment gateway, merchant account, recurring billing, and credit card storage. Braintree’s solution has been proven to scale and support many of the most discerning, high-growth companies on the web, including Rovio/Angry Birds, LivingSocial, 37signals, Airbnb, Fab.com, OpenTable, Uber, HotelTonight, Heroku, Engine Yard...

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Venmo is a social payment app and service that makes it fun and to pay friends. Venmo works via SMS messages, mobile iPhone and Android apps, or the Web. Users can leave notes and comments, push their payments to Venmo’s social network and/or to Twitter, foursquare and Facebook.

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I, For One, Welcome Our iBam 2 Bamboo Speaker Overlords

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... ? Learn More

With all the rumors about a new 9-pin connector on the iPhone, what could be better than a tube of bamboo that amplifies your iDevice or Android phone in a sustainable way? The iBam 2 is basically a tube of bamboo that channels sound out and away from the phone, thereby creating a superior, bamboo-infused experience.

The sad thing? It costs freaking $63.22 and they’re only sold in Singapore so you may have hop on a slow, sustainable solar boat to pick one up. However, as you see from the above video, a honking big bamboo tube can really spruce up an iPhone.

The creators, Pasargora, are a sustainable-living maker space and a portion of the proceeds go to supporting DIY activities in Singapore, so there’s that. Otherwise, get yourself to Pier 1 Imports and grab some bamboo and rock out.

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Yes, Apple Is In Discussions With Cable Operators, And Everyone Has Known This For Months

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More

August Journalism, anyone? Just because some outlets have a short memory, let’s get this out of the way right up front: Yes, Apple is in discussions with cable operators, and has been for months. Of course, just because Apple’s strategy hasn’t actually changed recently won’t stop some other sites from acting like the heavens have opened up and Steve Jobs himself is negotiating these deals.*

Anyway, just to bring everyone up to speed about why I’m even writing this today: The latest non-news in the Apple TV saga comes from the Wall Street Journal, which reports that Apple is “is in talks with some of the biggest U.S. cable operators” about getting them to deliver live TV through one of its products — maybe a next-generation set-top box or even (gasp!) a TV.

Well, that’s great except Bloomberg reported that Apple was talking to carriers like AT&T and Verizon about some sort of TV back in February. Oh yeah, and the Globe and Mail reported Apple was pursuing partnerships with Canadian operators Rogers and BCE around the same time.

Apparently the news here is that the companies Apple is talking to are really fucking big. After all, AT&T and Verizon are relative newcomers on the TV market, compared to industry stalwarts like Comcast or Time Warner Cable.

Or maybe it’s that Apple is offering up one of its own devices as a set-top box replacement? If true, it’s not that revolutionary of an idea, and it’s not that surprising. After all, Apple has pay TV providers like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, AT&T, Verizon, DirecTV, Dish Network, etc. are all already building iPad apps… So why not get them on board with apps that would take their live and on-demand video streams over the top and put them on their subscribers’ TV, without needing a second or third set-top box? (Microsoft’s Xbox already allows cable operators to do this, and they seem just fine with that.)

So there are plenty of reasons why this isn’t news, and isn’t particularly earth-shattering, but here’s why it would make sense:

Cable companies know that users are already buying Apple products like iPads and the Apple TV anyway, so why not build apps for devices that they already own, or may want to.The current generation of set-top boxes sucks, and they could most likely build a better user interface on an Apple device with an open SDK, and update and iterate on it more quickly than some legacy piece of shit from Cisco or Motorola.Cable companies would rather have the consumers bring their own devices, rather than having to pay for crappy set-top boxes themselves and leasing them out to subscribers.

Maybe the reason we’re all talking about this is that it finally sort of shuts the door on Apple’s long-rumored plans to build its own over-the-top TV service. Or maybe it’s because the mythical iTV, which Gene Munster has been saying will come any day now, looks like it’s not coming by the end of the year after all?

Or maybe, well, maybe it’s just because it’s August and there’s nothing else going on.

==
* Seriously, Business Insider? What the fuck?

Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook Air) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod, the...

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Apple TV is a network device for both Macintosh and PC computers that allows users to download, stream, and view High Definition television shows on demand via iTunes.

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