Sunrise Calendar Stops Sending iCloud Credentials Back To Their Servers

The increasingly popular Sunrise calendar app faced a bit of a brouhaha last week, after a couple of well-respected developers (namely, Neven Mrgan and Instapaper creator Marco Arment) pointed out that the application asked the user to punch in their iCloud credentials with little indication of what happened to them next.

Given the amount of sensitive data that tends to be transmitted over iCloud (iMessages, backed up photos, email, etc.), such a request was iffy, at best — certainly not the sort of thing you want to become the norm.

Making things slightly worse, the company was in turn taking those credentials and transmitting back them to their server (though they note that they were not storing them.) They were sending the credentials in a secure way — but still: if it’s at all avoidable, sending important credentials back to the mothership isn’t good practice.

This morning, Sunrise pushed out a patch that makes things a little better. They’ll still need you to punch in your credentials, which is a bummer — but now, at least, they’re handling authentication within the app itself. Instead of sending your username and password back to their servers, they send a unique token that allows them to access your iCloud data without ever sending your actual username/password off of the device. And if you decide that you don’t want Sunrise to be able to access your data? Just change your password, which renders the token useless.

It’s not a perfect solution, as it does still require the users to trust a third-party with some pretty precious data. In this case, since Sunrise is now being quite transparent about how they handle the data, that’s fine. But it’s still not something that apps should be getting users comfortable with doing. Until/unless Apple builds in some sort of iCloud permissions dialog that allows for the user to grant a service like Sunrise access to data (sort of like the way Facebook handles Facebook logins within apps), however, this is the best route they’ve got.

It’s been just 9 days since concerns about Sunrise’s methodology were raised; good on them for moving quick.

Ask A VC: Manatt’s Peter Csathy On The New Golden Age Of Content

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Manatt Digital Media Ventures’ Peter Csathy joined us in the studio to talk about the return of content, his firm’s investment strategy and more.

One of the topics Csathy and I talked about was the renaissance moment for content, whether that be video, long-form, or social content. Csathy himself previously was the CEO of Sorenson Media, which provides encoding tools and a platform for video distribution for media companies and online publishers and also was the CEO of digital video startup SightSpeed, which was acquired by Logitech.

Why is content back? And what are the distinct properties that are driving viral content? Csathy answers those questions and more in the video above.

Airbnb Is Testing Out An Affordable Cleaning Service For Hosts In San Francisco

Peer-to-peer lodgings marketplace Airbnb has been focused on finding ways that it can help its hosts improve the quality of experience for guests that stay in their homes. As part of this effort, the company is trialing a low-cost cleaning service for some hosts on the platform.

According to an email sent to a host in the San Francisco Bay Area that was forwarded to TechCrunch, Airbnb is piloting a program that will make cleaning services available to some people who make their homes available on the platform. The email claims those services will be “affordable, easy to schedule, and can be tailored to include amenities such as linen service and gift baskets.”

In a statement from an Airbnb spokesperson, the company confirmed the trial, saying: “We’re always testing ways to make the experience on Airbnb better. This is a test we’re looking at in one market.”

Airbnb is working on a number of ways in which it can better support the people who list their homes on the platform. It recently brought on a new head of hospitality, Chip Conley, and created a Hospitality Innovation Lab in Dublin aimed at determining best practices for hosts.

It’s also introduced a new suite of mobile apps that are aimed at making the listing process easier. At the same event in which those apps were unveiled, Airbnb announced that it would relaunch Airbnb Groups to enable hosts to communicate and share tips with each other, and even toyed with the idea of offering up smartphones to hosts as a way to improve response times to guests and boost overall bookings.

But chief among the ways that Airbnb hosts can improve the quality of stay for their guests is through cleanliness of the spaces that they list. Those who frequently have Airbnb guests staying with them already know this, and many so-called “super hosts” already schedule regular cleaning sessions between stays.

Doing so can be expensive, however, and can eat into the money that hosts make — especially those who rely on income from Airbnb to help them pay their rents. At $55 for a three-hour cleaning, the price is slightly below what you might get from a service like Homejoy, which generally charges $20 an hour (in San Francisco, at least). Individual cleaners can run even higher, depending on the size of the home or how much cleaning is needed.

Offering hosts a somewhat discount price is a nice perk, especially for those who regularly rent out their homes to other members of Airbnb. It also improves the overall quality of their stays, could lead to better reviews, and overall increase the likelihood that hosts will have future guests.

Full text of the email sent to our host contact below:

Hi [XXXX],

We’re excited to invite you to try a new cleaning service we’re piloting for a select group of Airbnb hosts! Airbnb Cleaning is affordable, easy to schedule, and can be tailored to include amenities such as linen service and gift baskets, too. Pricing starts at $55 for a 3 hour cleaning.

We built this service to address what Airbnb guests care about most (things like odors, stray hairs, and refrigerators!). We also worked with hosts like you to understand how to cater to personal hosting styles and home setup preferences. We’ll save your preferences and set up your space exactly the way you want it every time.

Click here to learn more!

If you have any questions, simply reply to this e-mail and we’ll answer it promptly.

Happy hosting,

Airbnb

Apple Said To Be Focusing On Health With iOS 8 And iWatch, Following Exec Meeting With FDA

Apple’s plans for iOS 8 focus on redefining health tracking via mobile devices, according to a new report from 9to5Mac, which has a terrific track record when it comes to rumors it has sourced itself. The report details a new marquee application coming in iOS 8 called “Healthbook” that monitors all aspects of health, fitness and workout information, including vitals monitored via the new iWatch, which is said to pack a bevy of sensors and to be “well into development” according to 9to5Mac’s sources.

The health monitoring app called “Healthbook” will come pre-installed on iOS 8, which, if true, would be a huge blow to third-party apps including those made by Fitbit, Nike, Runkeeper and Withings just to name a few. It would track and report steps, calories burned, distance walked and more, including weight fluctuations, and blood pressure, hydration levels, heart rate and more.

Apple’s focus on health in iOS 8 is given credence by a number of new reports from this week, including the news from the New York Times earlier today that Apple execs met with the FDA late last year to discuss mobile medical applications. Apple also reportedly hired Michael O’Reilly, M.D. away from a position as Chief Medical Officer of Masimo Corporation in July 2013. O’Reilly is an expert in pulse oximetry among other things, which is used to non-invasively take key vitals from a user via optical sensors.

9to5Mac’s report details functionality of the proposed “Healthbook” app, which, as its name suggests, takes a lot of cues from Passbook. It’ll offer swipeable cards for each vital stat it tracks, letting users page through their medical and health information. The report cautions that this functionality could be taken out prior to the final release of iOS 8: With the FDA’s involvement, one concern might be getting the necessary approvals to market the software as a potential medical aid.

As for the iWatch, the new report doesn’t add much in terms of firm details, but it does suggest we could see a release before year’s end, and offers that it could feature sensors that provide data to Healthbook. That app could also use existing third-party monitors and devices designed for iOS to source data, however. One more tidbit about the iWatch suggests that maps will be a central feature of the device, and navigation on the wrist is actually a prime potential advantage of smartwatch devices that has yet to be properly explored.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on these developments, and will update if we learn anything more.

Keen On… Hacking Gender: How Women In Silicon Valley Can Become Jane Bond

Despite incremental improvements, the gender bias issue in Silicon Valley remains an important one. Last month, in response to the furor over an interview about female hackers, Paul Graham announced a conference dedicated to female founders. But I beat Graham to it, producing a sold-out event last week at the San Francisco office of BloombergBETA entitled Hacking Gender.

One my panelists was the very successful writer, social media guru and public speaker Nilofer Merchant whose email signature line says: “Sent. By. Bond. Jane Bond, that is”. So I asked Merchant how all women in the Valley can, like her, become Jane Bond and overcome bias.

“Have grit,” she advises. And “perseverance”. What women (and men) need to understand, she says, is that “bias exists.” It’s ingrained in Silicon Valley and results in women not being seen by men. And so they don’t get jobs or investments or leadership roles.

But Merchant does see things improving. While she thinks that Graham needs to admit he’s biased, she is much more positive about Marc Andreessen’s recent confession on Twitter that only 11% of his followers are women. That’s how you hack gender, Merchant says, by acknowledging the problem, talking about it publicly and then trying to fix it.

A Coup For Coupons.com As Site Files For $100M IPO On The NYSE, Trading As Coup

The march of the 2014 initial public offerings commences, with the latest one of the oldest brands on the internet. Coupons.com has just filed papers with the SEC for an IPO on the NYSE, trading under the name COUP, and raising $100 million.

The move was long anticipated, most recently with Paul Sloan jumping from his position as editor-in-chief at CNET to take up head of communications to lead the effort.

First established as a site for newspaper coupons, more recently the company has been trying to convert its brand recognition into a business fit for a more social and mobile age. In December Coupons.com acquired Yub for $30 million to add loyalty networks to its service and position itself as a better bridge between offline and online commerce. In March 2013, it acquired KitchMe, a Pinterest-like recipe service.

Founded in 1998, Coupons.com has raised some $277 million in venture funding but it is a loss-making business. During the nine months ended September 30, 2013, the company says, it generated revenues of $115.3 million, growing 51% compared to the same period in 2012 but at a net loss of $12.8 million. That net loss was a decrease of 75% over the same period in 2012, the company says.

The news comes a day after Box reportedly filed a “secret” IPO.

More to come.

Gillmor Gang Live 01.31.14 (TCTV)

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin MArks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session today at 1pm Pacific. Have you found us on Facebook yet? http://ift.tt/1aWOd9g

BrightFunnel Raises Funding To Build Smarter Marketing Predictions

Marketing startup BrightFunnel is announcing that it has raised a small “advisory round” of slightly less than $1 million from some big-name investors.

Co-founder and CEO Nadim Hossain served most recently as the vice president of marketing at PowerReviews (which was acquired by Bazaarvoice). In that role, and in other jobs as a marketing executive, Hossain said that with his background in economics and econometrics he expected to be “swimming in CMO insights,” but that turned out not to be the case.

Instead, Hossain said he found “production tools” with limited analytics, at least on the level of what a CMO would want to know.

“I remember being at a board meeting in May of 2011, and they asked me questions where I didn’t know the answers,” he said. ” My self identity is as someone who can get at the numbers and get at the truth, and I had to make guesses. It just made me feel not authentic and wonder, why don’t I have the answers? These are knowable questions.”

So at BrightFunnel, he’s trying to build tools that will given him the answers that he was looking for. The eventual goal, Hossain said, is to create “the Google self-driving car for marketers.” In other words, customers should be able to identify how much money they want to spend on a campaign and what their revenue targets are, and with BrightFunnel’s recommendations, the marketing plan should basically run itself.

The company isn’t quite there yet. Instead, Hossain said, it’s more like navigation app Waze. Its current features include identifying the marketing “levers” that can lead to increased revenue, as well as analyzing performance trends by campaign and channel. BrightFunnel also integrates with marketing automation systems including Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-On, and Hubspot.

And yes, it offers predictions about the revenue impact of marketing campaigns. Hossain estimated that those projections are within 10 to 20 percent accuracy — not just on the conversion rate but also how long it will take to close the sale, which is particularly important for the business-to-business marketers that BrightFunnel is targeting.

One of Hossain goals is to improve that accuracy, which he said is “blows [marketers] away” but is not quite up to snuff for statisticians.

Anyway, here are the investors:

Paul Albright, former CRO, Marketo

David Gutelius, former Chief Social Scientist, Jive Software

Ryan Holmes, founder and CEO, HootSuite

Steve King, former CEO, DocuSign

Scott Kleper, founder and CTO, Context Optional (Adobe Marketing Cloud)

Tim Kopp, former CMO, ExactTarget (Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud)

Chris Maeda, former CTO, KANA Software

Mark Organ, CEO, Influitive and co-founder, Eloqua (Oracle Marketing Cloud)

Venkat Rangan, CTO, Clari and founder, Clearwell Systems (Symantec)

Russell Siegelman, former VP, Microsoft, and Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Facebook Paper, Lenovo-Moto, Carbon 3D Printing, And Coffee!

Looking for a way to get through Friday? Here you go.

Facebook launched a news reader app called Paper. (Teens will love it.) And Google sold Motorola to Lenovo for $3 billion, which made earnings week interesting. And, in the land of startups, we explore a new Carbon 3D Printer and a Keurig Coffee machine. So you can print yourself a cup-holder, which will store your fresh cup of coffee, as you drive to work on this blessed Friday.

We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington, and Romain Dillet.

The Superbowl is in two days, and the work week is almost over. We’re almost there.

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right here.

Click here to download an MP3 of this show.

You can subscribe to the show via RSS.

Subscribe in iTunes

Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Aereo Sells Out Of Capacity In NYC

Aereo, a TV streaming service looking to change the way we consume media, has just sold out of capacity in New York City.

Founder and CEO Chet Kanojia confirmed the news via Twitter.

The company launched in 2011 with NYC as a pilot market, and has since expanded to 11 markets total. The service, much to the chagrin of major network broadcasters, acts as a remote, mini antenna, letting subscribers pull OTA TV signals out of the air and stream them live across any internet-connected device.

And if that weren’t enough, users have the option to use Aereo as a remote DVR service for as low as $8 month.

That said, Aereo has worked tirelessly to ensure that this type of business is actually legal. In much the same way that it’s legal for an individual to use rabbit ears to access broadcast television, it’s legal for an Aereo user to rent out an individual Aereo antenna and access, or record, TV content.

However, a single antenna that sends a signal to multiple, separate users is illegal. In other words, Aereo needs one antenna available for every active user of the service, and at this point, there’s simply not any room left for new users in NYC.

Some have misreported that this is a product of power issues, though recent conversations I’ve had with founder Chet Kanojia suggest that Aereo has been trying to build out more capacity to keep up with subscriber growth.

For a startup, it’s not a bad problem to have. Though, if the company wants to foster growth in its first, and likely strongest, market, it will need to offer extended capacity as quickly as possible.

Broadcasters must be equally displeased by this news, considering that they’ve been bullying Aereo in the courtroom since the service launched. It started with a lawsuit in NY, which migrated to Boston, and again to Utah, until most recently the Supreme Court decided to hear the case and make a final, federal ruling.

Based on the track record, I predict Aereo will win in court and will lead the revolution as a stepping stone from bundled TV packages and middle men to an on-demand, TV consumption structure.

Here’s Aereo’s official statement on the matter:

We’re fortunate that Aereo continues to experience strong growth across all our markets. Our team has been working overtime to add more capacity in our existing markets. As soon as additional capacity is added, new consumers will be notified that they can sign up and create an Aereo account.

To Counter Investor Signaling, YC Partners Can No Longer Be The First Money Into The Incubator’s Startups

Y Combinator has long allowed its partners to invest their own personal money in the’s incubator startups–often times partners put money into these startups before institutional investors and angels have a look. Unfortunately, whether a partners (or partners) put money into a YC company started to become a signal to outside investors of the good bets in the incubator. It makes sense–these partners are often integrally involved in helping build these companies inside of Y Combinator. So they would know which startups have the legs to be successful, and potentially have insider knowledge into which startups have the potential for going the distance. To mitigate this signaling effect, Y Combinator is implementing a new policy whereby YC Partners can’t be the first money into a startup from the incubator.

Specifically, YC partners can’t be in the first $500,000 a company raises, unless it’s 3 weeks past Demo Day.

As YC co-founder Paul Graham explains to us, the danger of letting the partners at an incubator invest in the startups is that makes it harder for the ones the partners don’t invest in to raise money. In the early years of YC, this wasn’t as much of an issue because Graham was the only one investing, and he wasn’t systematic about it. But in the last few batches, investors started treating the companies that had investments by YC partners as an indication of what YC thought of the startups.

Currently YC has about a dozen partners involved including Paul Buchheit, Garry Tan, and Geoff Ralston. What’s also of interest is that any funds that YC partners operate will also fall into this rule as well well. So the new fund started by Tan, now part-time partner Harj Taggar, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, will not be able to be the first money into a startup.

This is clearly a founder-friendly move, and evens the playing field in some ways for startups to raise money from outside investors. It’s no secret that Y Combinator’s class sizes have steadily risen, and in the effort to save time and optimize their money, investors look for signals on which startups to invest in. Of course, YC partners investing in a startup is just one of many signals investors are looking at when evaluating a startup at the seed stage.

YC also recently debuted a new, easier convertible equity model for founders.

Photo Credit/Flickr

VC Lip Reading Video Is The Best VC Video You’ll See Today

If you’re familiar with the ‘Bad Lip Reading of The NFL’ videos on YouTube, you might get a charge out of this hilarious mashup created by startup MeetBall. It puts the same spin on a collection of clips of VCs and founders and was created on a challenge from ex-Googler and Homebrew investor Hunter Walk. If you’re interested in seeing some of the most well-known investors, founders and VCs in the industry say things like ‘I want to smell your gum’ then this is for you.

I think this wins the internet today. Thanks MeetBall.

Purr Pebble Smartwatch App Vibrates Your Life Away In 5 Minute Chunks

Yesterday, a new faceless “watch” called Durr that simply vibrates every five minutes got a big feature over at Verge. It’s an interesting concept, and in his article Aaron Souppouris compared the experience to that of wearing a Pebble. That inspired a Pebble developer to try to accomplish the same thing, albeit without the need for a brand new device, and the result is Purr, an app for the upcoming Pebble OS 2.0.

The Purr app mimics the Durr’s functionality exactly, vibrating the Pebble on your wrist every five minutes, and presenting nothing on the display at all. It simply deactivates the Pebble’s screen, rather than presenting any kind of watch face or any other information. The idea behind both the Purr app and the Durr watch are the same: To remind you every few minutes that time is passing, and possibly to inspire you to enjoy time more by noting that fact.

There are some key differences between both approaches, however: The Durr lacks any screen whatsoever, meaning you won’t be tempted to check your other apps or watchfaces. Plus, notifications from your phone still make it through when you’re using Purr on the Pebble, which is either an advantage or a downside depending on how committed you are to the philosophy behind the design of the Durr. Also, as Purr is in beta and running on pre-release Pebble OS 2.0 software, it currently exhibits some odd behavior; specifically, vibrations repeat a number when each five-minute period is up, and the pattern or sequence doesn’t seem to follow any rhyme or reason. These are issues that Purr developer James Brooks says he’s working on resolving, however.

A watch that’s literally constantly reminding you of time slipping through your grip, and by extension your own mortality, is a little bit of an outlier need from a gadget. But it’s a perfect early example of how Pebble’s new SDK 2.0 can unlock a lot of potential for developers. We’ve only just begun to see the value of a smartwatch as a platform, but the overall flexibility is beginning to show.

At UC Davis, Amazon Demonstrates A Novel Way To Bypass College Bookstores

Why should college students waste their precious party days standing in line, when they can order Ramen from Amazon prime? The University of California at Davis recently inked a deal with Amazon to offer student essentials, from Calculus 101 textbooks to mac and cheese, on a new university bookstore website that gives 2% of sales back to the school.

According to the school’s university paper, the Aggie, UC Davis was the first such partnership Amazon announced. Now officially a-go this week, UC Davis is giving Amazon the power to blanket the campus with promotion. There’s even an Amazon student ambassador

“During finals week of Fall Quarter, we had several ambassadors all over campus handing out free pizza and other goodies to fuel the students while they study,” said fourth-year political science Major, Ting Jung Lee said who is now acting as Amazon’s rep.

The discounted Amazon prime membership also seems to making the rounds on student boards:

Students are awash with discretionary spending, which they normally spend in shops around the campus. Amazon sells most of these items and more, from dorm decorations to official t-shirts. So, it makes sense that the University wants to take a cut that they never took before with the sourranding shops.

I’ve witnessed stunts like these work in the past. Back in my college days, I used to see college co-eds in short shorts handing out Red Bull at streaking events and during finals. For brands, college students are a demographic with delightfully transparent desires and well-known spending patterns.

Amazon is aware of it’s Walmart/Godzilla reputation among struggling businesses. It attempted to partner with indie bookstore to sell it’s Kindle reading tablet, which got a mixed reception. College bookstores don’t have the same heartstrings to pluck, so it makes sense for them to partner rather than fight.

With enough momentum from the UC Davis experiment, Amazon won’t just partner with bookstores, it will be the bookstore.

Publishing Platform Issuu Hires Jeremy LaCroix, Formerly Of AOL, To Lead Design

Online publishing platform Issuu is announcing that it has hired Jeremy LaCroix as its head of product design and user experience.

Joe Hyrkin, who became CEO last year, told me LaCroix was particularly suited for the job given his experience with both the digital and traditional publishing worlds. LaCroix’s career includes design/art direction at The Industry Standard and Wired before becoming creative director at CBS Interactive, and then head of UX/design and product for mobile at AOL. (LaCroix left AOL, which owns TechCrunch, in October, and has since done freelance design work for Medium.)

Issuu was actually founded in 2006, before the current wave of mobile and tablet publishing, but unsurprisingly, Hyrkin said its focus has been shifting increasingly to mobile. The company recently updated its Android app, and he said, “We’re not going to be only Android-based for that much longer.”

Other goals include improving publisher monetization — Hyrkin said Issuu already helps publishers make money by allowing them to supplementing their print ads with additional digital content, and by allowing them to link to online stores, but he added, “This year we’re starting to put together what I hope are innovative and very creative advertising opportunities.”

The company says it sees 5 billion page views across 15 million magazines, catalogs, and newspapers each month.

“The common perception is that magazines are in a death spiral,” LaCroix said in the release about his hiring. “I disagree. In fact I’d argue there have never been more publications being produced in human history. The problem today is distribution and Issuu provides a truly unique and compelling method for content to find people.”

Meet The First 10 Companies To Take Part In Founders Fund And SOSVentures’ LEAP Axlr8r

Late last year, a couple of venture firms sought to invest in LEAP Motion’s gesture control technology by helping developers to build businesses around it with an accelerator. Today, the LEAP Axlr8r is opening for business and announcing the first 10 participating companies in the program.

LEAP Motion, of course, has built an $80 hardware device that allows any user to control what’s happening on their computer through an interface that tracks the movement of their hands. It’s had more than 70,000 developers sign up to test out and build apps for the device, but few actual apps have been launched so far.

The LEAP Axlr8r seeks to change that, by taking LEAP Motion’s technology to the next level. With backing from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, as well as SOSVentures, the firm behind hardware accelerator HAXLR8R, the incubator sought out startups doing interesting things with the next-generation gesture control platform.

Like other incubators, LEAP Axlr8r provides participating companies with a small amount of funding — in this case, $25,000 — and puts them through a three-month program that is designed to refine the products and services they’re seeking to build. Housed near LEAP Motion headquarters in San Francisco, those companies will have access to the engineers who built LEAP Motion technology, as well as a number of mentors who can help with other aspects of the design process.

The whole thing ends in a Demo Day on May 9th. We’ll be tracking their progress and are looking forward to seeing what they release. The first 10 companies participating in the accelerator include:

• MotionSavvy – Giving voice to the deaf and hard-of-hearing through real-time American Sign Language translation


• Diplopia – Restoring depth perception for the 5% of the population affected by amblyopia (lazy eye) through virtual reality computer games using Oculus Rift and Leap Motion


• Sterile Air – Creating the “Operating System” to enable a computerized, sterile surgical OR


• LivePainter – Enabling real-time DJ-ing and VJ-ing as performance art via live web collaboration


• Ten Ton Raygun – Gamifying physical rehabilitation therapy for Stroke and other injuries to make rehab fun, quicker, and measurable


• Mirror Training – Making robots an extension of your own body using Leap Motion and video. A DARPA spinoff revolutionizing robotic arm control with a natural user interface and visual feedback for the user


• GetVu – Creating a next-gen augmented reality platform that mixes computer vision with human vision in a wearable device


• Illuminator 4D – Easily create interactive, holographic environments for retail, and in-home usage


• Crispy Driven Pixels – Reinventing 2D and 3D creative software through a new, natural user interface


• Paralagames – Improving hand-eye coordination through games controlled by the hand

Miggo Camera Strap Protects Your Gear, Too, So You Don’t Need A Bulky Camera Bag

A new Kickstarter project takes a useful thing and makes it even more useful, by offering a strap that not only carries your DSLR but also protects it when not in use. It’s the perfect way to minimize your equipment when you’re out shooting on a trip and don’t need your full camera bag and gear, and it’s so deceptively simple, it’s a wonder it doesn’t already exist.

The Miggo strap is designed by Israel-based industrial designer Ohad Cohen, who was a founder of professional camera bag maker Kata, which remains one of the leading makers of bags for pros and hobbyists. Cohen was the first product designer at Kata, then later was in charge of R&D, so he knows a thing or two about creating camera gear.

Miggo is designed around the philosophy that while there’s plenty of interest in photography since the advent of smartphones, people avoid high-quality cameras and gear because of the convenience factor of using their mobile devices. To alleviate that, the Miggo combines a sling strap to secure your camera with a wrap that protects it when not in use. It also comes in a grip variety for those who prefer tying their camera to their wrist to prevent drops. Both versions quickly tie around both camera lens and body to provide a secure protective layer, which then allows you to chuck the camera into a shoulder bag or backpack along with all your other stuff, instead of having to use a segmented, padded camera bag designed specifically for protecting gear.

It has a tripod mount adapter built-in so you don’t have to remove it to take time-lapse or other stabilized shots, and there are versions for both standard DSLRs and smaller-bodies compact mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras, like Sony’s NEX series. Early backers can pre-order for $30 while supplies last, at which time it goes up to $35 for the Grip + Wrap or $40 for the Strap + Wrap.

I’m so tired of lugging my 70-lb. bag of camera gear around airports that this seems like a very appealing option when I don’t feel like I’ll need my entire kit. The company anticipates shipping the Miggo by June of this year, and development has progressed to the point where prototypes are essentially ready to ship (once a proper production line is established). Miggo hits the sweet spot between affordability, convenience and smart design, so it’s very likely they’ll reach their modest $20,000 goal quickly.

Twitter Acquires Over 900 IBM Patents Following Infringement Claim, Enters Cross-Licensing Agreement

Twitter announced today that it has acquired over 900 patents from IBM, and that it has entered into a cross-licensing agreement with the Internet services and software company. IBM had issued a complaint against Twitter previously for patent infringement, as reported in an S-1 filing ahead of the social network’s IPO late last year.

IBM was seeking a settlement according to that document, and while Twitter appeared ready to defend itself, potentially in court, this deal today indicates that instead the two companies have come to an agreement that involves Twitter buying some of IBM’s intellectual property. In the original filing, IBM had cited “at least three” patents it suggested Twitter infringed upon, so the scope of this deal is obviously much broader.

This is a song we’ve heard before: Facebook acquired 750 IBM patents back in March 2012, just ahead of its own IPO. That patent trove was designed to fend off infringement accusations coming from Yahoo, however, rather than IBM. IBM also sold 1,000 patents to Google back in 2010, and the one-time PC maker is still the leading patent holders in the world, having held 6,809 patents as of earlier this month, followed by Samsung at a distant second with 4,676 patents. There’s no word on the specific nature of the patents involved, but we’ve asked Twitter for more info and will update if it becomes available.

Box Said To Have Filed For IPO, Could Go Public As Early As April

Cloud-based storage company Box is said to have filed an IPO, according to an initial report from Quartz, later followed up by confirmations from The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. It did so quietly, filing the paperwork recently (possibly at the beginning of this week), according to the reports, and also silently, something it shares in common with Twitter, and which is made possible under a provision of the JOBS act for companies that drive less than $1 billion in yearly revenue.

Box, which is often compared to similar service Dropbox (which raised $250 million at a $10 billion valuation recently), only just closed funding of $100 million in December, at a valuation of $2 billion. The timing of that funding round seems unusual, given the intent to IPO, but Forbes says that round was actually about lining up international investors and getting a new, stronger business portfolio to show off to Wall Street during the process of going public.

Unlike its competitor Dropbox, Box has a strong focus on enterprise storage and file sharing. This should help it produce more consistent quarterly results that a Forbes source tells that publication will reassure and please investors.

Originally, Forbes had reported that the IPO could take as long as until summer to become public and get underway, but a second source says the company is actually looking to go public as soon as April, if all goes well. A Box spokesperson had only the following to offer:

We don’t have anything to share at this time. We’re focused on continuing to build our business and expand our customer relationships globally.

Inq Mobile, One Of The First Facebook Phone Makers, Shuts Down

Inq Mobile, one of the first companies to build a Facebook phone, announced that it has shut down with a message on its site (h/t Android Police). The U.K.-based, Hutchison Whampoa-backed company didn’t say why it decided to close. We’ve emailed them for more information.

Inq, which was founded in 2008 and pivoted a year ago to focus on mobile software, said it will no longer update Material and SO.HO, its apps. Material, a news reader, released its final editions on Jan. 28, while social media aggregator SO.HO will not be updated after today, though it will continue to function. Support pages for the Cloud Touch smartphone and Inq’s featurephones remain on its site.

The timing of Inq’s closure and Material’s shutdown is interesting because several of tech’s largest companies have recently started to offer their own news apps and tools. These include Yahoo’s News Digest; Twitter and CNN’s Dataminr; and Paper by Facebook, which will launch next month.

Inq Mobile began as a maker of low-priced Android smartphones. It was one of the first companies that collaborated with Facebook to create a social smartphone in 2011, around the same time HTC and the social network struck the partnership that yielded the Salsa and ChaCha.

Inq’s Cloud Touch, which was released exclusively in the UK three years ago, had a custom Facebook wrapper built on top of Android, and an early version of SwiftKey. Though cheaply priced (starting at $50 with a subsidized contract), the Cloud Touch couldn’t compete with Samsung’s rapid takeover of the Android market. The company pivoted and started developing mobile apps one year ago.

Material, which TechCrunch covered when it launched its iOS version in August, was a social magazine app that used Inq’s “interest extraction engine” to look at the Facebook and Twitter accounts of users and figure out what kind of articles they wanted to see. Content was delivered in two daily editions.

At its launch, Material already had strong competition from popular social news readers like Flipboard, Zite, and Pulse.

Inq CEO and co-founder Ken Johnstone told TechCrunch at the time that Material differentiated from other news readers by offering an easier set-up than its rivals because all users needed to do to power Material’s algorithms was connect their Facebook or Twitter accounts.

“For somebody who has invested a lot of time in Twitter and Facebook anyway, this is about getting a return on that investment,” Johnstone told TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas.

Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook’s news aggregation products all feature some human curation, but, like Material, they also rely heavily on algorithms to customize content for each user. Inq had planned to monetize Material by harvesting enough data to build an advertising business, but its failure to do may be a cautionary tale for other developers of news readers.

Though algorithms are necessary if a news aggregator wants to scale up (and collect enough data to be profitable), they still can’t replace the discernment of a human editor. Like Feedly, Pulse, and Zite, Material’s customized content stream suffered from problems like miscategorized stories, irrelevant content, and “the overall feeling you get from flicking through an edition is not a cohesive, editorially unified whole, but an algorithmically generated bunch of mostly random stories with (at best) a few loose, overlapping themes,” as Natasha put it.

Founder Stories: Kakul Srivastava On How Tomfoolery Will Make Our Work More Social And Fun

Mobile messaging and mobile communications tools have grown like a weed on the consumer side — but what about in a work context? With more and more people buying better and better smartphones, taking them into work, where employers are beginning to pay for them and the services, are the conditions ripe for a breakout on the enterprise side?

To hear Kakul Srivastava break it down, it appears the answer is “yes.” Srivastava and her team at Tomfoolery (which just this week was acquired by Yahoo) are on a mission to create fun and social software for people at work, based on the belief that our work and personal lives are intertwined. To that end, her company built software for workers to be more social and transparent. She has a deep reservoir of experience to draw from, with long-term stints at some of the big Valley companies. During that time, she realized she had to “unlearn” what she’d been exposed to in larger companies, as those large institutions had more processes, methods, and rules around working, which she believes impacts speed and creativity.

Srivastava also shares a personal part of her journey, as the mom to two little kids, of how she’s able to balance being a caring mom and startup founder all wrapped up into one person. To hear Srivastava share her attitudes in her own words is inspiring, and I’d encourage folks who want to dip their toes into the water of startup founding (especially those ones with kids and families) to perhaps some draw some knowledge from what she has to share.

Editor’s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.

Clinkle Gets Hacked Before It Even Launches

Clinkle is the hottest app around to have done mostly nothing. The stealth payments service, which has raised $25 million from big-name investors, has yet to publicly launch. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be hacked.

Today, a guest user posted a list of 33 usernames, user IDs, profile photos, and phone numbers to PasteBin. Based on the data provided, it seems as though these users are Clinkle employees who are testing the app.

Founder Lucas Duplan is on the list (yep, that’s his Clinkle profile pic, shown above), as well as former Netflix CFO and Clinkle COO Barry McCarthy. Former PayPal exec Mike Liberatore, now Clinkle CFO, is also listed.

The data was seemingly accessed through a private API that Clinkle has in place. Referred to by the hacker as “typeahead”, the API appears to be the basis of an autocomplete tool, allowing uses to type a single letter (like ‘A’) and find all usernames starting with that letter (like ‘Adam’ and ‘Andrew’). [Note: Twitter has a similar tool with the same name — it's unclear if they're one and the same.]

Clinkle seems to use this API in their own app (presumably so users can find friends when making a payment), which has allowed one hacker to search user names, leading to the associated user IDs and phone numbers.

Here’s what the hacker had to say:

Results from Clinkle typeahead API. It requires no authentication. The app stores writes results to disk automatically. This is much worse than Snapchat’s breach. Phone numbers masked as courtesy.

In other words, whoever broke into the app didn’t need a userID to access Clinkle’s list of testers or their personal information, which seems to be saved on a Clinkle server.

But to be fair, Clinkle’s breach isn’t quite the same as Snapchat’s, considering the information of 4.6 million Snapchat users was released, as opposed a small group of employee testers.

Here’s Clinkle’s explanation for the breach:

You’re describing visibility that was purposefully built into the system as part of our preliminary user testing and was always intended to be turned off. As you can see from the list, we’ve been testing internally and registrations have been limited to Clinkle employees. We were using an open API, which has now been closed. That said, only names, phone numbers, photos, and Clinkle unique IDs were accessible.

Clinkle points to a Stanford student as the alleged hacker but that has yet to be confirmed.

Clinkle, rumored to launch later this year, currently has both an iOS app in iTunes and an Android app available in the Google Play store for those who wish to join the waiting list.

Based on the size of the app (52MB) and the unzipped files uncovered after downloading it, it seems like the full Clinkle app is out there, rather than a placeholder app built for wait list registrants.

Right now, the app has a waiting list wall, which “VIP” members can bypass once an administrator grants permission. This likely allows Clinkle to demo the app to investors and partners without having to go through some cumbersome download process.

During the process of fundraising, I’m sure that little trick came in handy. Not so much today, though.

The hack produced some interesting data about the team that works on Clinkle.

Founder Lucas Duplan is listed as the first user (User ID: 1), with a picture that very much resembles him holding cash money. The CFO, Barry McCarthy, is also listed with a legitimate profile photo, as is the Head Of Comms, who confirmed the validity of the images and the data.

The photos from Clinkle’s Team page, where 22 unidentified Clinkle employees are pictured alongside goofy pseudonyms, also seem to resemble people in the leaked profile photos. Finally, we can put faces to names.

So what are the implications?

Well, Clinkle hasn’t actually launched yet, so it’s very possible that the team hasn’t been focusing on security. However, security and trust should be top priorities for a payments company. Especially for a company so young.

Clinkle was founded by a group of more than a dozen Stanford students in 2011, and has stayed under the radar while key employees finish their degrees. The company was partially funded by Stanford professors before raising $25 million in a party round. Over 18 investors participated.

The WSJ, followed by every other news outlet, proclaimed this the biggest Stanford startup exodus in history. Clinkle was all the rage.

Seriously, Silicon Valley wouldn’t shut up about it.

In fall, however, two rounds of layoffs left many wondering if the Stanford-fueled payments startup was really the Messiah of trade. The company slashed around 30 employees, and then another 16.

Around the same time, screenshots and videos of the app in action were leaked, letting Clinkle’s cat out of the bag.

Rumors circulated that the company was going through leadership issues. That those promised equity weren’t getting it. That folks were overworked and underpaid. That there was no transparency about the product timeline, or the product itself. That 22-year-old Lucas Duplan was taking home a six-figure salary and mistreating employees.

Today, the same questions as before creep back into our consciousness.

What have they been doing with all that money this whole time? Posting profile photos that confirm our worst fears? Whether the breach was a result of intentional openness or unintentional laziness on the part of Clinkle is unclear, but the photo doesn’t lie.

Barry Sternlicht, Former CEO Of Hotel Giant Starwood, Invests In HotelTonight

Last-minute hotel booking startup HotelTonight just announced that it has landed a personal investment from Barry Sternlicht, founder of Starwood Capital Group and former chairman and CEO of Starwood Hotels & Resort Worldwide.

Sternlicht, who has been described as the “king of hotels“, is also joining HotelTonight as a strategic advisor.

“He knows everybody in the hotel industry,” HotelTonight CEO Sam Shank told me, later adding, “When we launched, there was a lot of doubt that we were beneficial to the industry. … Getting the top guy in hotels to back us and to support us, that’s validation that we’re becoming grown up.”

According to Shank, Sternlicht should be able to help HotelTonight improve its hotel experience and also reach broader deals with large chains, which is particularly important for coverage outside of major cities. Shank declined to specify the size of Sternlicht’s investment, except that it was “a significant dollar amount.”

“Booking windows are shrinking and customers are going mobile, trends which position HotelTonight perfectly for the future,” Sternlicht said in the release. “But there’s something more that attracted me – it’s that HotelTonight is proving booking by booking that both hotels and distributors can win.”

HotelTonight says it has been downloaded more than 9 million times and now works with 10,000 hotels in 250 destinations. The company raised a $45 million funding round last summer.

CrunchFund Is Raising $40M For Its Second Fund, According To Filing

CrunchFund, the early-stage investment firm that’s basically one giant conflict-of-interest statement for TechCrunch, is raising $40 million for a second fund, according to a regulatory filing.

I’ve emailed partners Michael Arrington and Patrick Gallagher for confirmation, and I’ll update this post if I hear back. (CrunchFund’s third partner, TechCrunch alum MG Siegler, left to join Google Ventures last year.)

Arrington, of course, is the founder of TechCrunch. He launched CrunchFund in the fall of 2011 with a $20 million fund. AOL, which acquired TechCrunch a year before, was a big investor. (The announcement of the CrunchFund led to much journalistic handwringing and Arrington’s eventual ouster from this site, though he remains involved in TechCrunch’s conferences.)

Since then, CrunchFund has backed a long list of companies (long enough that TechCrunch writers sometimes have trouble keeping track), with recent investments in video-sharing app Mindie, location-sharing app Highlight, and journaling app Heyday.

Following MG’s departure and some ensuing speculation about the firm’s future, Fortune’s Dan Primack took a look at the firm’s results thus far, concluding that it shouldn’t have any trouble raising a second fund, and that the mix of investors was likely to change.

Google Pleased With Hardware And Nexus Performance; Talks Nest, Glass And Other Wearables

Google’s earnings call doesn’t feature CEO Larry Page this time around, which is a disappointment in terms of product discussion. But Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora discussed briefly hardware during the call, flagging the search giant’s growing satisfaction with the Nexus line and with the Nexus 5 in particular.

Arora said that Google is seeing “strong interest in Nexus hardware,” and “great reception for Nexus 5,” especially during the holiday sales period. That’s due to the marketing team’s performance creating ads and also fostering a retail environment conductive to purchases.

On the subject of Nest, Google reiterated the line it’s been touting so far, which is that they saw the goals of Nest and themselves in alignment. Google wants to help Nest scale, it said, and will continue to devote resources to this goal. That’s somewhat different from what TechCrunch heard recently, which suggested that the learning thermostat and smoke detector weren’t really the focus of the deal; instead, Google wants to put the Nest team in charge of all of its hardware projects.

Asked whether the Motorola acquisition will affect their hardware plans, Arora said that he thinks their continued investments in other areas should show that they’re still committed to hardware.

“As you know from the Nest acquisition, Glass and wearables, we’re continuing to innovate,” he said about their ongoing hardware projects. It’s an interesting characterization, because Google has yet to make anything public around wearables beyond Glass, yet Arora separated it out as a new category. Late last year, we heard that a Google smartwatch might be right around the corner, however, so this could be a tantalizing hint that this kind of device (or other wearable efforts) could indeed be on the horizon. Remember that Google acquired WIMM Labs last year, which made an Android-powered smartwatch.

Yahoo Detects Mass Hack Attempt On Yahoo Mail, Resets All Affected Passwords

The details are a bit sparse right now, but Yahoo has just disclosed by way of their Tumblr that they’ve detected what they’re calling a “coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts”.

Yahoo didn’t disclose how many accounts were affected, but we’ve asked for clarification and will update the post accordingly. It’s possible that they’ve yet to nail down an exact number. Given that it was enough to disclose the news in a public blog post, it’s presumably a non-trivial amount.

The (sort of?) good news: it doesn’t appear that Yahoo’s own servers were compromised — instead, it looks like someone is firing off a bunch of login attempts using emails/passwords secured from an unnamed “third-party database compromise”. In other words: the attackers got someone else’s database of usernames/passwords, and are mass-checking for accounts that use them same credentials on Yahoo Mail.

In response to the attack, Yahoo has reset the passwords of all accounts that appear to have been affected.

Story Developing

Zynga Lays Off 314 Employees, Or 15% Of Its Workforce

Paired with the news of a big half-billion dollar acquisition, Zynga is also laying off about 15 percent of its workforce, or about 314 employees.

This is part of a cost-reduction plan that is supposed to generate $33 million to $35 million in savings this year, excluding a $15 million to 17 million restructuring charge.

In an interview today, CEO Don Mattrick said these jobs would mostly come out of “infrastructure” areas and wouldn’t involve shutting down any individual studios.

Zynga has roughly 2,000 employees at a time when better-performing competitors lack anywhere near the same kind of headcount. Supercell, which sold half of itself for $1.53 billion last fall to Japanese carrier Softbank, currently has about 130 employees and was producing just shy of $200 million a quarter in revenue in the beginning of last year.

Since Mattrick took over the company from founding CEO Mark Pincus, the company has engaged in a series of layoffs, cut out middle layers of management and shut down poorly-performing games. Last summer, they let go of about 520 people, or 18 percent of their workforce.

Equidate Launches A Secondary Market For Early Startup Employees To Sell Shares

It was once a rare practice, but employees are now finding more ways to unload vested shares in their startups along the way.

While employers have typically tried to control these sales, a new marketplace called Equidate is opening up that will let employees sell equity with or without the startup’s consent (although Equidate would prefer to collaborate with employers).

Over the past decade, many companies like Facebook have elected to wait longer before going public. That meant that longtime employees wound up with their wealth mostly tied up in the stock of their companies with few options to diversify their holdings. At the same time, certain investors wanted access to a growing pool of pre-IPO tech companies.

So companies like New York-based SecondMarket cropped up. They have helped facilitate employee share sales for privately-held companies like SurveyMonkey, which raised about $800 million in January of last year.

Equidate’s critique of SecondMarket’s model is that if you are an employee that wants to sell shares, you have to do it through your company.

“It’s difficult if you want to sell shares as an individual,” said co-founder Sohail Prasad, who was previously a product manager at Zynga and an early employee at Chartboost. (But these restrictions also exist because as secondary sales have become more popular, companies have also wanted control. They want to manage the flow of private information of their financial performance and they want to know who their shareholders are.)

So what Equidate has done is that they’ve created contracts tied to the value of an employee’s shares, which have to be vested and owned by them. (Employees can’t participate if they just have options or if they have restricted stock units.)

“It’s similar to a collateralized loan. No shares are trading hands,” Prasad said. Prasad said that an Equidate contract allows an investor to buy rights to the economic upside of a share, while avoiding the legal hoops a company has to go through when it’s adding extra shareholders to its cap table.

Gil Silberman, Equidate’s other co-founder, created the contracts after working as a lawyer with companies like LinkedIn, Craigslist and OpenTable.

They’re launching with four companies on the market including Dropbox, BitTorrent, Chartboost and Buzzfeed. They would like to bring more Series B stage companies or so onto the platform, which means they’d sit in between early-stage solutions like Funders Club and then big late-stage rounds.

For now, Equidate will only allow accredited investors, who either have a net worth of more than $1 million or make at least $200,000 a year, to participate.

The four-person company hasn’t shared any details on how much it has raised to date or who its investors are.

Foursquare Can Now Satisfy Your Appetite At Home With Integrated Seamless And GrubHub Ordering

Seamless and GrubHub have partnered with location-based check-in service Foursquare to help you retain your precious pear-shaped physique and avoid exerting even the bare minimum of effort: You can now order delivery from restaurants near you right from within the app, on the Android, iOS and web-based versions of the Foursquare app.

Over 20,000 restaurants that fall under the combined GrubHub Seamless umbrella are available to U.S. Foursquare users as a result of the new partnership, covering hundreds of cities across the country, according to Foursquare’s official blog post announcing the news.

Participating restaurants will show an “Order Delivery” menu item alongside links to view the restaurant on a map, call or see its menu in the in-app listings. The best way to find restaurants that feature this integration is to search for the type of cuisine followed by “delivery” within Foursquare, the company notes.

Previously, you could check-in to restaurants where you’d ordered food with Delivery.com, as Engadget notes, but you still had to go somewhere else to get the job done. Now, you can virtually go somewhere you never actually were, and also stuff your face with its consumables, all while only partly clothed. Nirvana, I am in you.

Photo courtesy flickr user Mark Turnauckas.

Forgotify Only Plays Spotify Songs That No One Has Ever Played Before

Indie music? Pffft. Indie music is way too main stream, man. All the cool kids are into music that no one has ever heard.

Meet Forgotify. Forgotify tears through Spotify in search of songs with zero plays, playing only the songs that no one else has ever listened to.

Certainly, there can’t be many of those, right?

Wrong. According to data that Spotify released in October of last year, 80% of the 20-million-or-so songs on Spotify have been listened to. That means 20% of the songs have not. That’s 4 million songs with zero plays.

Of course, there’s… probably a reason that most of these tracks have zero plays. Spotify isn’t necessarily known for setting the bar to entry very high, so a number of these tunes sound like amateur covers of a KidzBop cover that was, itself, based on a rough recollection of a song given by someone who’d heard it once, years ago. That is to say, most are not very good.

Some, though, are perfectly fine. When you find the (increasingly rare) gem, it’s like a teeny, tiny victory over the universe. You’ve found the signal drowning in the noise.

One crazy thought: when you listen to a song on Forgotify, it increases that song’s play count… meaning that, if this thing is working correctly, no one will ever hear it again. Each experience becomes ephemoral.

A crazier thought: Forgotify itself is, in a way, ephemoral. If the rate at which people are using Forgotify exceeds the rate at which Spotify adds new tracks, Forgotify is theoretically eating itself with each new listen.

You can find Forgotify here. If you actually want to listen to a trick, you’ll have to be signed in to Spotify.

[Meanwhile, the radio in my room is playing "Royals" by Lorde for the 87th time this morning.]

Branch Founder Josh Miller Joins Betaworks As Part-Time Venture Partner

In a blog post today, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick announced that Branch founder Josh Miller would be joining the technology studio as a part-time venture partner. There he will “be focused on working with seed-stage companies in New York,” according to Borthwick.

Miller, in case you forgot, is the guy who successfully “negged” Facebook. As founder of Branch Media, he had written a few critical words about Facebook before, you know, being acquired by Facebook. But he’s also widely regarded as a pretty awesome and thoughtful product guy, which is no doubt part of the appeal for Betaworks.

Betaworks, which bills itself as “a company of builders,” is a technology studio and investment firm that finds, builds, and invests in a wide range of interesting products. It’s home to products that include Digg, Instapaper, Dots, Bitly, and Chartbeat — some of which it acquired, some of which were built in-house.

Betaworks also makes investments in other companies in the New York ecosystem, which is how Borthwick and Miller came to know one another. Branch was one of the companies that Betaworks had invested in, and it even spent nine months working out of Betaworks.

We’ve reached out to Borthwick to find out more about how Miller will fit in with the team and what his role will be, and will update when we hear back.

Human Revamps Tracking System For Its Fitness Monitoring App

Human is a slickly designed fitness tracking app that works without any hardware devices. You just launch the app, set it up and you’re all done. Launched in September, the app received its first major update.

“First and foremost, the update is a massive upgrade to our tracking system,” co-founder and CEO Renato Valdés Olmos told me. “Apart from improved accuracy and battery life, Human now also tracks indoor and stationary activity, as long as you have your phone on you.”

At heart, Human remains a passive iOS app designed to help you stay healthy. The goal is to move for 30 minutes every day, and to keep up with this simple habit. The company calls it the ‘Daily 30′. As it is extremely simple, keeping up with Human is easier than with competitive fitness systems.

After setting up the app, you can forget about it. Whenever you reach the goal, you get a push notification alerting you that you are staying healthy today — it’s as simple as that.

But there was a flaw. Until today, only outdoor activities were tracked. You could dance all night long without reaching the Daily 30. Now, Human tracks indoor activities and adds them to your Daily 30. You don’t need an iPhone 5S, as long as you have an iPhone 4S and up, you are good to go.

Other refinements came with the update as well. There are a few more stats now, you can see your streak and get badges. And of course, you can still tap on the big number to get more details about your activities. For example, as Human works with the phone’s GPS, you can even see where you ran last night.

While Human is much simpler than Fitbit and others, it all comes down to staying healthy — and it actually works. “The metric we’re really proud of however is qualitative,” Valdés Olmos said. “Humans move 40 percent more 6 weeks after downloading the app, a steady habit change.”

The next step for Human is to go beyond the Daily 30. You can reward users for some activities for example, and Human users should see that in future updates. As long as the emphasis remains on design and simplicity, the app will still be different enough to convince casual fitness app users.

Canada’s Wind Mobile Offering Unlimited U.S. Talk, Text And Data Roaming For $15 Per Month

Roaming is the worst, but a new plan from Canadian network operator Wind MobileZ, which is one of the few carriers not a part of Canada’s big three telecommunications companies, is going to start offering subscribers an unlimited roaming plan beginning Monday, February 3rd for just $15 per month.

The roaming plan inconceivably comes with unlimited talk, text and data across the U.S. Rogers, one of the leading Canadian service providers, offers a paltry 500 MB of data, along with unlimited sent texts and 100 minutes for $80 to compare (and that’s the most you can get). Bell offers 500 MB for $50, with an extra $30 required for talk and text (so same as Rogers) and Telus offers 300 minutes and unlimited text, with only 300MB of data usage for $65.

It doesn’t take a comparative mathematician to figure out that Wind Mobile’s deal is a heck of a lot cheaper than anyone else’s. In fact, as a frequent U.S. traveler myself, I’m tempted: I generally pay at least that much, and usually a bit more picking up a prepaid sim card from a U.S. carrier when I pop over for a work trip. Of course, to make that work, you need to sign up for a Wind plan to begin with, which has its own limitations because of the network reach of the alternative carrier, and the wireless frequencies used by its network. Also, it’s worth keeping in mind that Wind’s main roaming partner in the U.S. is T-Mobile, and that it’ll provide either 2G or HSPA (3G) speeds for data. Also, just like Wind’s unlimited plan at home, the roaming one will be subject to throttling depending on usage.

Wind Mobile had to withdraw from Canada’s wireless spectrum auction earlier this month, after it essentially decided it couldn’t pony up table stakes to compete with the big boys. This new move should attract at least some switchers who were on the fence, especially among the frequent travellers, but overall the picture is still a bleak one for anyone trying to break the rule of the big three in Canada’s wireless industry.

Flink Is An Addictive Mobile Fashion Experience To Discover New Looks

Meet Flink a brand new mobile app that will become the perfect time waster for fashion enthusiasts. It’s a well-designed app to browse new looks on your favorite fashion blogs in a native app. The overall experience is very addictive.

When you first open the app, you can instantly follow a selection of some well-known fashion blogs. After that, it works a lot like Frontback and Mindie. You are immersed in the picture. It fills up the entire screen.

With one swipe, you get to see another look, and another, and another. Maybe you really like what this woman is wearing. So you can swipe right to see other pictures. With one tap, you can see where this dress or this handbag come from.

But contrarily to Frontback or Mindie, it isn’t a social app — it’s a content app. Flink has made a beautiful fashion blog reader for mobile, a sort of Flipboard for fashion.

You can like and share a look, but what’s interesting is how you can get lost in the app. Every now and then, a button appears saying “3 new looks available”, you just have to tap it and you will get brand new professional pictures.

And of course, you can spend countless of hours looking for new fashion bloggers and tweaking your list of bloggers to what you really want. When you like a look, it is saved in a separate tab, so you can always go back and find it later.

Comments are public and Flink could end up creating a community of passionate fashion curators.

What about copyright? Flink has reached out to dozens of popular fashion bloggers, and they were eager to see their content in the app, except a couple of people. Flink bets on fair use to show the pictures. With each post, there is a link to the actual blog post — it works a lot like an RSS reader or a read later service in the end. If a blogger complains, the team promises to remove its content from the app. This strategy worked well for Pinterest, and there is no reason that it won’t work again.

Mobile Gaming Company Pocket Gems Says Its Reached $82M In Revenue Last Year

Sequoia Capital-backed mobile gaming company Pocket Gems is releasing revenue numbers for the first time, saying that it saw $82 million in revenue last year.

That’s a best for the company, which was founded in 2009, and reflects 32 percent year-over-year growth. Pocket Gems also says that it remains profitable and now has 175 employees.

The revenue comes primarily from in-app purchases — CEO Ben Liu said one of the keys to the company’s success has been its early focus on the free-to-play gaming model, with “very little advertising.” (According to an eMarketer report last year, full download fees remain the biggest source of revenue in the US mobile games industry, but they’ll be overtaken by in-app purchases in 2014.)

Liu added that even though mobile gaming is one area of tech where Silicon Valley (and the rest of the United States) hasn’t been leading the way, “We think that’s about to change. We’re about to enter a period of major technological changes and disruptions where it’s going to be really hard to engineer the best products.”

In Pocket Gems’ case, he said the company will be launching a new 3D engine for multiplayer mobile games later this year.

More broadly, he said Pocket Gems is planning “a couple of big releases” that are meant to showcase its approach to two big questions: “How does it mean to experience a story on mobile?” and “What does it mean to play with your friends on mobile?” On the first question, Liu suggested that attempts at storytelling in mobile games have been “rudimentary.” On the second, he noted that the social mechanics in most mobile games are asynchronous or focused on promoting the game virally. (Pocket Gems’ is already placing a big emphasis on live multiplayer gameplay.)

The company announced last year that its titles, which include Tap Paradise Cove & Animal Voyage: Island Adventure (pictured above), had seen more than 100 million downloads.

Incredible Labs, Maker Of Mobile Personal Assistant App Donna, Is Acquired By Yahoo

Incredible Labs, the startup behind mobile personal assistant app Donna, has been acqui-hired. The team, minus co-founder Scott San Filippo, will join Yahoo, and Donna will be shut down.

We’ve written a fair amount about Donna since it was launched last spring. The app sought to make life easier for users by proactively anticipating things that they would need and providing it to them. For the most part, that meant notifying users that they’d have to leave for a meeting, providing directions, and even emailing contacts automatically to tell them you’re running late.

The Incredible Labs team joining Yahoo includes Kevin Cheng, who held product roles at Yahoo and Twitter; Arshad Tayyeb and Spence Murray, who had worked for DoubleTwist and Netscape; and Bloom founder Jesper Andersen. In a separate blog post, San Filippo said he is not joining Yahoo

Incredible Labs had raised $2.5 million from investors that include Khosla Ventures, Betaworks, Maynard Webb, CrunchFund, Ashton Kutcher, and other angels.

Donna will be shut down, spelling the end for one of many apps built to improve personal productivity through software. Other apps in that category include Sunrise, Tempo, Any.do Cal, and Fantastical, among others.

P2P Lending Pioneer Zopa Closes $25m From Hedge Fund For UK Expansion

Zopa, at nine years the world’s oldest and largest peer-to-peer lending company, has closed a £15m ($25m) funding round from Arrowgrass Capital Partners, an alternative asset manager (more commonly known as a Hedge Fund). This is its third major funding since 2009. The company had previously raised $56.6 million in VC to date. Zopa will use the funds to scale up in its home UK market via a number of means, one of which may be a major marketing campaign, though that has yet to be determined.

Arrowgrass is HQ’d in London, with assets under management of approximately $4.6bn. Henry Kenner, CEO of Arrowgrass, has joined the Zopa board as a non-executive director.

Giles Andrews, CEO and Co-founder of Zopa, said growth accelerated markedly last year as Zopa’s longevity in the market meant that people could trust it, combined with the fact that the UK government lent money on the platform, plus other competitors appeared, adding validity to the market. Lending Works appeared in in January this year, for instance.

Zopa – the first lender in the world of its type – allows savers to beat the bank lending rates by lending money to people looking for low cost loans. Borrowers can cut their borrowing rates, and savers see their money grow at market-leading rates, hence the attraction.

The company says it lent £180 million in 2013 alone, and is projecting to reach £500 million lent in total, ahead of new regulations due in April 2014. Since 2005 its customers have lent over £455 million through the platform. Some estimates put the UK’s peer-to-peer lending industry at a £1 billion per annum by 2015.

This round follows a December 2012 investment, led by Augmentum Capital, which is backed by RIT Capital Partners PLC, the FTSE-listed £2bn investment trust in which Jacob Rothschild and family are substantial investors. Other major investors include Bessemer Venture Partners.

The Parce Idea Is A Smart Wall Plug That Can Control Your Appliances From Afar

Another day, another smart home device. Today we introduce the Parce Idea, a clever, compact wall plug that allows you to monitor your energy usage and control lights and appliances from your smartphone. Each plug costs $69 and they connect to your Wi-Fi network and then Parce’s cloud system to show you energy usage, allow you to plan shutdown times, and manage your total electricity usage in the home.

This is obviously not a new idea – WeMo by Belkin is a surprisingly robust system – but the key here are the analytics. As we discussed at CES 2014 this year, we are entering the era of the quantified home. Devices like CubeSensors and Alima add some amazing capabilities to our traditionally dumb spaces while security devices like Canary and energy controllers like Nest keep us safe and warm.

High design and low cost is making relay-powered systems like the Parce easier and easier to make and, although they’re still way below their goal, it’s interesting to see them trying to crack a space that many utilities companies would love to control.

Practically Green Raises $3M To Help Companies Manage Sustainability Programs

Practically Green says it has raised $3 million in Series A funding for its online tools that encourage employees to act more sustainably.

The company launched with a product focused on consumer sustainability, but it has since shifted its focus to powering similar programs for customers like NBC Universal, eBay, MGM Resorts, and Unilever. Founder and CEO Susan Hunt Stevens told me that 90 percent of those programs are “employee-facing”, but companies can use the Practically Green’s technology to create their own consumer sustainability programs, too.

When setting up their programs, customers identify the areas of sustainability that are most important to them — environmental sustainability is the obvious one, but the company says it also includes things like family and fitness. Then they can choose the actions that they want to encourage (“from riding your bike to work to eating more healthy”) or create actions of their own, which are then encouraged and tracked through a variety of company channels including mobile apps, intranet, and email.

Other features include recommended products, explanations on “Why This Matters” and “Your Impact” to motivate employees, and information on who at a given organization has already accomplished a given goal.

Stevens said there are sound business reasons for embracing these programs. First, there are the cost savings from activities like using less energy. (She said some customers are seeing savings of as much as $100 per participant.) Second, it helps companies attract employees who want to work for sustainable organizations. And finally, some businesses see sustainability “as key to innovation and competitive advantage.”

The funding comes from CommonAngels (a network of Boston angel investors), Pan-Asia, LaunchPad Venture Group, and Clean Energy Venture Group. Stevens said she was particularly pleased to be bringing top software investors and top cleantech investors into the round, because she believes Practically Green sits at the intersection of both industries.

The company is also announcing that it has hired Mark Bissell, an early employee at SuccessFactors, to be its head of customer success.

With New Funding From Omidyar, Versa Launches Its Network For Sponsored Op-Eds

Versa is launching a new network for sponsored op-eds, which it calls Featured Perspectives.

The startup is also announcing that it has raised additional funding led by The Omidyar Network (the firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar), bringing its total seed round to $2 million. Other investors include the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as well as Quotidian Ventures.

We last wrote about Versa when it raised the first part of its seed funding ($1.3 million) and was called ElectNext. At the time, the company was offering publisher widgets that would display contextual political data, but founder and CEO Keya Dannenbaum told me yesterday, “We discovered the core problem [for publishers] — finding a way to monetize previously unmonetized parts of their site while hopefully enhancing the newsreading experience.”

Hence the creation of the Versa Media Network, which connects online publishers with organizations willing to pay to have their opinions and content featured in related articles. You can see some examples from Versa’s initial publishers — in this article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, a news account of Pennsylvania Gov. Corbett’s statements on gay marriage is followed by a comment from Human Rights Watch criticizing Corbett. And this column in RealClearPolitics looking at the problems with the Obamacare website is accompanied by a comment from benefits company Maxwell Health offering its own thoughts on the issue.

Dannenbaum said Versa has built technology that analyzes news articles as they’re published and flags the ones that may be relevant to organizations that have signed up as a potential contributors. Then, once a contributor gets an alert and decides to write something, she said it becomes “a human process” of writing a comment and submitting it for publication.

Timeliness is definitely an issue, she acknowledged — if someone submits an additional perspective days after an article has gone up, it’s probably not going to be seen by that many readers. However, Dannenbaum said the average response time is under an hour.

She argued that this approach benefits readers, too. Traditionally, news stories and op-eds have been “sectioned off” from each other, but online, it makes more sense to present these things “side by side.” In addition, she suggested that many organizations are trying to accomplish similar ends already, by posting anonymous comments that back up their views. So having a sponsored comment or op-ed unit makes things more transparent.

As for the quality of these Featured Perspectives, Dannenbaum said that whatever content guidelines a publisher has, they’ll also apply to Versa’s content. Plus, publishers will always have the right to remove a Featured Perspective from their site, no questions asked.

With the technology moving out of beta testing and the new funding and, Dannenbaum said the company is ready to expand its publisher network. And while most of the early uses focused on political content, she argued that Versa can be used more broadly: “I don’t think this setup is vertical-specific.”