This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Nintendo 2DS, Pebble, And Unikey

The Nintendo 2DS is just like a 3DS, except for the fact that it’s cheaper and has no 3D. Deal breaker or deal maker? Meanwhile, Matt still seems to fancy the Pebble smartwatch, while the rest of us are sick of hearing about it. And finally, the Unikey Kevo (currently available for pre-order) will make its way into homes in about a month with plenty of competition from Lockitron and others. But which is the better product?

We discuss all this and more on the latest episode of the TC Gadgets podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, and Darrell Etherington.

Enjoy!

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Strike Social Analyzes The Performance Of Your YouTube Videos For Free

A new startup called Strike Social says its tools give YouTube publishers a way track how their content is performing on the video site and on social networks, and at a pretty compelling price — free.

The first big piece of the Strike Social product is a number, called the Strike Score, that reflects the overall performance of your YouTube content. CEO Patrick McKenna said the company looks at “more than 100 datasets” from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to calculate the score, and tracking that number over time should give you a sense of whether your performance is improving.

You can dig in to get more detailed data too, looking at the total number of views, engagements, and subscribers for your channel, and at the performance of individual videos. Publishers can also look at what people are saying about the video, sort those comments based on the size of each commenter’s social media following, and respond to specific remarks from within Strike Social — in particular, McKenna that the tools are “more actionable on the Facebook side” than the competition.

So why offer these tools for free? Well, McKenna wants to charge eventually for premium services, but he said everything that he showed me will remain free, and that the company will also be selling advertising tools. (When the company’s Frequently Asked Questions page addresses the free question, it says, “Strike Social is chock-full of YouTube marketing experts and we hope to earn your online video promotion business.”)

He acknowledged that paid products offer some features beyond what Strike Social can offer for free, but he argued that the product is competitive, with advantages like the Facebook engagement features mentioned above, and for that reason “it’s going to be tough” for competitors to justify their prices to clients.

(In that specific discussion, he didn’t mention a specific company, but vidIQ came up at a couple of other points in our discussion. When I asked about his pricing, co-founder and CEO Robert Sandie pointed out that vidIQ also offers a free version, while he said pricing for the premium plan starts at $2,000 a month.)

McKenna also described the current product as version “0.1″, and he said he wants to add features that give more insight into the distribution channels, geographies, and social networks where content performs best, and to provide more recommendations around publishing and advertising videos.

Lockbox Raises $2.5 Million Seed Round To Help Encrypt Your Stuff

It’s hard to trust the cloud. With the NSA coming in one end and hackers coming in through the other, complete encryption is key. That’s what Lockbox is for. The company, founded in 2008, has accepted $2.5 million in seed funding to further roll out their Client Portal and iPad app.

Lockbox offers end-to-end encryption. The system encrypts and compresses files before accepting them into the cloud. These files can then only be opened by users who have the right key. At no point in the transfer can anyone read the file until it is decrypted. “The Client Portal compresses, encrypts, and digitally signs each file before it is uploaded into the Cloud. Files can only be decrypted and read by the invited recipients,” said Lockbox CEO Peter Long. “This makes the information inaccessible to everyone else – including the cloud storage provider and even Lockbox.”

The company has 6,000 paying users and has thus far sold to legal and financial clients. However, given the Internet’s predilection towards insecurity, it could be a good investment for the average Joe or Josephine. The team also built the Bouncy Castle framework that is used to secure Android devices. The company is using the cash infusion to complete their iPad app which allows for encrypted file sharing from iOS as well.

The system works by first encrypting files on your desktop and sending them to the Lockbox cloud. There they can only be read, on the desktop, by users with the right key. Long sees this as a solution for those forced by regulatory concerns to maintain a tight ship. “The Client Portal targets financial planners, accountants and insurance brokers who have a desire to use cloud, but have regulatory or business requirements for secure and private (encrypted) document exchange. Prior to the availability of Client Portal, alternatives were insecure, inefficient and expensive.”

Their Client product is the only one popularly available right now and may be an interesting tool if you’re looking to send sensitive – or not so sensitive – files to clients, friends, family, or the NSA.

Augment Makes Augmented Reality Useful For Salespeople With Its New ‘Business Catalog'

While augmented reality has been around for a while, Augment is trying to monetize it with its platform. The company just released its Business Catalog feature, targeted toward salespeople. For $30 per month and per user, you can carry around all your catalog on your iPad and show how it would look like to your client. It makes sense for furniture, merchandising displays or even art prints.

“Our biggest competitor is choosing not to use augmented reality,” co-founder and CEO Jean-François Chianetta told me in a phone interview. “Thanks to our platform, you can upload and visualize your 3D models as augmented reality objects in minutes,” he continued.

With the business catalog, everybody on the sales team has the same 3D portfolio on their tablets and phones. Everything is downloaded to the devices so that they don’t have to worry about connectivity. Comparatively, the free account is much more limited as you can only see a few test models and upload your own models to your own account for testing purposes — you cannot deliver your models to your team and you need to be always connected.

The premium offering was already available in beta for a few months. More than 3,000 users tried it out. But, starting this week, they now have to pay the subscription fee.

When asked who Augment’s potential clients were, the answer was very straightforward. “We work with companies who already use 3D models,” co-founder and CMO Mickaël Jordan said. “We support 3ds Max, Maya or even SketchUp files,” he continued. So far, 8,000 users have uploaded 3D models to the platform.

Companies like Curioos use Augment for its digital art marketplace. Before buying an art print, you can figure out what print size you should order for your living room, and how it would look like over the fireplace.

There’s another part to Augment’s business. The company also creates advertising campaigns using augmented reality. For example, clients can create a booth to promote DVD sales in a supermarket and let anyone take a picture of his or her friend with a famous movie character. The character will be in 3D thanks to the Augment app. In many cases, companies need to hire an agency to create a special app — when you work with Augment it’s easier as you can build your campaign on top of its existing platform.

Back in April, the French startup raised $300,000 (€220,000) from multiple angels. It plans to raise more funding in the coming months. Now that the company generates revenue, it will be a compelling argument to convince VCs.

MoPub's Optimizer Lets Mobile Publishers Automatically Prioritize Their Most Lucrative Ad Networks

MoPub is releasing a new tool called the Optimizer that should allow mobile publishers to take an entirely automated, hands-off approach to managing their ad networks — and increase revenue too.

The team gave me a demo of the new feature, saying the technology uses a “waterfall” approach, moving down a list of possible networks from which to serve an ad, starting with the one that had the highest estimated CPM (price paid per thousand impressions). Normally, MoPub prioritizes those networks based on CPM estimates provided by the publisher. The problem: Those estimates are often wrong. (MoPub has been trying to address the lack of transparency and data about the performance of individual ad networks with its new dashboard.)

Now, when publishers hit the Optimizer button, MoPub will automate that prioritization process based on its own data and the data it has acquired from various networks, so that it can predict the likely CPM, clickthrough rate, latency, and more on a given ad. Ideally, for each impression MoPub should be serving an ad from the network that’s likely to make the most money for the publisher.

“It seems like a really simple concept, but our publishers haven’t seen anything like it before and they’re basically blown away,” said Marketing Director Elain Szu.

The data used for prioritization is supposed to be as specific as possible. In other words, when possible, MoPub will calculate CPMs and so forth using data specific to that publisher and that geography, but when necessary it will use more general data, and in some cases, when there’s really no data available, it may just fall back on the estimates provided by the publishers.

Not every publishers is going to embrace this for all of their campaigns, Szu added. Instead, she suggested it could be particularly useful for small publishers who don’t have the resources to manage their ad networks in a very hands-on way, as well as for larger publishers who may have a number of geographic segments to monitor. Those larger publishers may want to pay close attention in more mature markets like the United States while taking a more automated approach in small-but-growing markets.

The MoPub team also showed me the results of some early campaigns, particularly how the share of ads from different networks shifted when the Optimizer was turned on, and continued shifting over time. (In some cases the Optimizer would even shift money away from the MoPub Marketplace to other ad networks.) In each case, the CPMs went up compared to past performance and compared to apps that weren’t using the Optimizer — you can see one example in the (anonymized) chart above.

Bitmonet Monetizes Your Blog Through The Power Of Bitcoin

Bitmonet – think “Bitcoin Monetization” rather than “Bitcoin Impressionist Painter” – is a platform for creation microtransaction-based paywalls on your blog or content portal. While most people don’t like paywalls, most people are also going to have to start expecting them and this open source service definitely makes a lot of sense.

Founded by Bo Li, Ankur Nandwani, and designer Valerie Chao, the site adds very basic functions to your average blog. When you click on a link, a window pops up asking for a few cents to read a post and a little more to buy an hour’s worth of access or a day pass. This obviously requires access to and a willingness to use Bitcoin although you could pay in another currency.

The team launched the app using the BitPay API, a service that allows for nearly seamless BTC integration. They have a full tutorial on how to implement the platform here. You can see a demo of the platform here. It is an open source project and the team is releasing the code today.

Bitmonet’s origin story began at a hackathon.

“I spend 2-3 hours every day reading news from all over the world,” said Nandwani. “Over the last few years I have noticed that more and more newspapers are setting up paywalls. Now if I want to just read an article, it doesn’t make sense to pay $20 for a monthly subscription. So I was trying to solve this problem. At the same time I was researching investment opportunities in Bitcoins by talking to people in the Bitcoin community, when this idea clicked to me and I ended up developing the prototype at the Bitcoin Hackathon.”

“Our goal behind BitMonet is to increase Bitcoin adoption. Hence we have made BitMonet free and easy to install. Also, it is completely customizable, giving the publisher complete control of how they want to monetize their content,” said Nandwani. “They can monetize a single [piece of] content, or they can offer time-metered subscription services.”

The team is focusing on publishers right now and will soon move on to game makers and other content creators. There are other services, like Gumroad and even Apple’s own payment system that creators can use but this looks to be one of the first with BTC support. While this is obviously still a niche tool, it’s interesting to see how seamless Bitcoin payments can be using open source and a little API magic.

FwdHealth Tracks And Reports Your Health To Employers In An Effort To Cut Insurance Costs

There’s no doubt that the cost of healthcare in the U.S. is a hot topic of debate, but a new startup called FwdHealth is looking to join the conversation. The idea is pretty simple.

FwdHealth is an app that links up with all of your existing fitness and wellness apps (for now that includes RunKeeper, MapMyRun, and FitBit, but the list continues to grow) and sends that data, aggregated and organized, to your employer. As it stands now, employers are reimbursed for having a healthier workforce, but sending that proof to the insurance companies isn’t always so simple.

FwdHealth allows employers to track the health and wellness of their employees, respond accordingly, and catch a break on costs after demonstrating that their employees are healthy.

Eighty-seven percent of the over $2 trillion spent annually on healthcare goes to the cost of the care itself, such as the work doctors do, emergency room visits, medication, and procedures. While most health tech companies are looking to reduce processing and administration costs, FwdHealth is focusing on reducing the need for care, thereby reducing the overall cost of health care at a particular organization.

To that end, FwdHealth focuses on giving employers the power to incentivize their workforce into healthy living, inevitably saving on health care costs in the long term.

FwdHealth is a SaaS solution that runs on a tiered subscription model with customers ranging from employers to insurers, or anyone in charge of population management. FwdHealth will also be offered as a white label technology so that city employee wellness plans won’t run into any conflicts of interest.

For now, the app is only available on Google Play, but the web dashboard and an iOS app will be available in early fall.