Virtusize Brings Its Virtual Fitting Solution To The UK, Signs Deal With Fashion Retailer ASOS

There are an abundance of startups trying to solve the problem of how to “try on” clothes online, with a range of different approaches and technology â€" a competition we’ve previously likened to a space race where nobody has yet landed on the moon. Today, Virtusize launches its virtual fitting solution in the UK via a partnership with ASOS. After a successful six month trial, the “Fit Vitualiser” button is initially being rolled out on the product pages of over 2,000 of the online fashion retailer’s own brand clothes.

Shunning Fits.me’s 3D modeled approach which uses robots or something like Metail that enables a shopper to upload and see a 3D visualisation of themselves in order to virtually dress up in potential purchases, Virtusize lets customers to compare specific measurements of an item they are looking to buy with a similar item they already own. By displaying and overlaying 2D silhouettes of both garments, the startup says that customers can more accurately compare sizes and, ultimately, choose the item that would fit them best. It’s a compelling pitch and has obvious cost savings over the up front work involved in 3D visualisation of a retailer’s entire catalog.

That said, it also means that Virtusize’s solution focuses more on how a garment will fit a customer, not so much what it will look like on them. The latter is quite subjective but could also contribute to high return rates, which is what all virtual fitting solutions are trying to reduce.

In addition, Virtusize’s solution requires that a customer already owns a supported garment in order to compare sizes or that they measure a favourite (and similar) item of clothing at home and entering the data manually. Presumably that’s why ATOS has chosen to start with its own brand clothing as returning customers will be more likely to own a comparable garment, and the company has the size and fit data more readily at hand to apply to Virtusize’s technology.

In terms of how it approaches the virtual fitting problem, Virtusize’s closest competitors are the likes of Clothes Horse and Truefit which recommend size based on what the consumer wears in other brands. However, these solutions lack a visual presentation and only produce a number/letter to denote size. Therefore, says Virtusize, they don’t capture how a specific style will fit as garments vary in terms of style etc. regardless of if they are technically the same size and have historically worked out well for the customer.

Founded in Spring 2011, Virtusize launched with Nelly.com (the largest online retailer in Scandinavia) as a pilot customer during the autumn the same year. It makes money by charging web shops a monthly subscription fee for using its solution. The fee is determined by monthly page views on the product pages where Virtusize is available. With the addition of ASOS as a partner, the startup now claims to be the leading online fitting solution in terms of availability with over 30,000 garments at 23 web shops and approximately 50,000 users per month.

Virtusize has raised £1 million in seed funding. Among the startup’s backers are Swedish listed investment company Öresund and a number of angel investors including Fredrik Åhlberg, former Head of Growth at eBay Europe. As a reference point, earlier this month Fits.me closed a $7.2m series A round. Meanwhile, Metail has raised £2.7m in total.

Virtusize is a virtual fitting solution helping online retailers to illustrate size and fit online. With Virtusize consumers can compare a garment they want to buy with a garment they already own, and thereby remove the guesswork from online shopping. The fit solution is currently available at 25,000 garments at 22 web shops across Europe and helps online retailers to reduce fit-related returns and increase conversion. Virtusize is a Swedish company founded in 2011. Funded by listed Swedish Investment...

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Metail is a virtual fitting room service for fashion retailers that allows customers to create a 3D photo-realistic model of themselves from just two uploaded photos, in only a few minutes. Customers can then try on clothes, see how they fit and create and share their looks. Once a customer has made their model, they can login to their Metail profile with any partner retailer using the service. Metail was started in 2008 by CEO and Founder Tom Adeyoola...

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Fits.me develops virtual fitting room solutions for online clothing retailers. The subjective nature of “fit” as it applies to clothing and fashion has inhibited online apparel sales for years â€" in 2012 the overall proportion of garment sales from online channels was still only 14-15%. The essential problem is the inability of shoppers to try on clothes to check the fit before they choose their size. According to Mintel, widespread inconsistencies in sizing between different brands and retailers...

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ClothesHorse solves the problem of “what clothes will fit me?” when shopping online. At the point of sale on third party e-commerce websites, shoppers are told what size will fit them based on their own unique body. At our destination website, ClothesHor.se, shoppers can discover new brands that will fit them based on their body and current favorite brands, akin to Pandora for clothing. Our data-driven platform is licensed by online apparel retailers and enables them to increase conversion...

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Spotify Quietly Starts Rolling Out The Discover Tab In Its Web App In The UK And Nordic Markets

Back in December 2012, music streaming service Spotify provided an update on how it was going to double down on social recommendations to increase music listening on its platform by launching two new features, Follow and Discover. While the Follow feature, aimed at friends, started to get rolled out in March and April, it turns out that Spotify has also been rolling out the Discover feature, too.

Spotify actually announced the news in a very short post some two weeks ago on one of its community forums, just in time to coincide with the launch of another music discovery app, on Twitter. On a thread originally started in December when the features were first announced, Spotify community manager Rorey Jones wrote earlier this month:

“We know you’ve all been eager to see the discover features rolled out so we just wanted to let you know we’ve begun rolling out the brand new Discover tab to a very small percentage to folks in the UK and Nordic countries on the desktop application of Spotify. We’ll be rolling it out to more customers in the coming weeks.”

Spotify also lists documentation for the feature on its developer site.

We have two screenshots of how the Discover feature looks, one from a reader and another posted in that community forum, with both from its desktop browser app accessed via http://play.spotify.com/discover:

and…

These look not unlike the preview that Spotify offered us of the Discover feature in December.

Here’s what we can see about how it works so far. While Follow, as Josh wrote in March, will help users adopt Twitter-style following to pick up recommendations and playlists from friends,  Discover will be another way to learn about new music, and spend more time in Spotify.

This time, however, the focus is on third-party apps, which Spotify will now be able to highlight and promote to users â€" providing a service to the app developers, and hopefully increasing time spent on Spotify in the process. In effect, what Spotify does is not unlike Twitter, except that all algorithms and features lead back to its own platform and its own music catalog.

“Discover,” it seems, will be replacing the “What’s New” tab, with a more interactive, pinterest-style montage of new releases, trending playlists, trending songs, music trending in your area, songs directly in the stream, with options to save music to existing playlists, save new playlists, and to follow playlists.

What seems to be the case is that while Discover continues on a limited rollout, Spotify is still tweaking it.

One app maker, Share My Playlists, is working on a new feature for the Discover tab that it has yet to launch: playlist reviews within the Discover tab.

“The idea is to offer an extra layer of curation and discovery for users: we will hand select the best of our playlists and write a review for them,” noted founder Kieron Donoghue. “These reviews will be surfaced in Discover if the content of the playlist we have reviewed is deemed to be of interest to the user by Spotify.” A mock-up of how that will look is here:

According to one Spotify app developer we contacted, Discover has a two-fold purpose. Yes, it’s there to increase music listening, which is important for Spotify’s business model around advertising, as well as to attract more users for subscription services, and more engagement potentially for other paid services that it launches down the line. But it’s also a way to help apps get discovered, something which has been an issue up to now for some of them.

“One of the reasons why Spotify launched the Discover tab is to make the Spotify apps more visible to users. A lot of Spotify’s users don’t even know apps are there,” he said. “So by making Discover the default ‘homepage’ for all Spotify’s users and surfacing relevant content from the apps, Spotify hopes that more people will use [the apps] and of course stay in Spotify longer, increasing engagement and usage.” Users do not need to be signed up for these apps for them to get recommended.

Interestingly, more than one developer TechCrunch talked to didn’t have a firm idea of how, exactly, Discover worked. At what point does one app get priority over another in Spotify’s recommendation engine, for example? “It’s a good question,” one developer replied. “No one really knows. I think it’s very manual right now.”

Another emphasized the use of a recommendation engine based on your own listening history. “I think Spotify simply selects whatever content it deems to be most appropriate to you, based on your listening habits. It will have content from all partners and whichever is most relevant, you will see. I guess that’s the fairest way, too.”

We are reaching out to Spotify for more details about Discover and where it might roll out next.

Spotify has created a lightweight software application that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with virtually no buffering delay. It was launched in the fall of 2008 and had approximately 10 million users by September 2010. Spotify offers streaming music from major and independent record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Users download Spotify and then log onto their service enabling the on-demand streaming of music. Music can be browsed by artist, album, record...

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Beyond The Box Launches A TweetDeck For Sports To Bring Realtime News And Analysis To Your iPad

Like many avid sports fans, Shailo Rao, Sagar Savant and Vam Makam are well-familiar with how frustrating it can be to find quality, relevant sports content â€" especially on Twitter and other social media. Rao tells me over coffee that, as a PhD student at Stanford, he spent years trying to create and maintain a single realtime feed of content he actually cared about. Because no company or publication was addressing this at the time, he was forced to manually curate a huge roster of RSS feeds from his favorite websites and Twitter accounts.

Not only was that process extremely time-consuming, but with people shifting to native apps, mobile websites, the growth of the unfiltered interest graph on Twitter (sports updates mixed with tech coverage, for example) and the explosion of sports coverage, the RSS feed approach just doesn’t make sense.

Unable to find a better solution, the three amigos decided to build their own at StartX, the startup accelerator program affiliated with Stanford. This week, the team launched their first product, Beyond The Box, an iPad app that allows sports fans to curate realtime coverage, players updates and analysis from their favorite sports teams in one centralized timeline. You can think of it as TweetDeck on steroids â€" for sports.

Now, I’ve been a little skeptical of the second (and third and fourth and fifth) screen revolution. To be fair, it’s a real phenomenon and will continue to grow â€" I frequently watch baseball with Twitter open on my iPad â€" but I’m not sure it’s as big (right now) as the media would have us think. However, a January report from Nielsen on “mobile sports” included an eye-opening and perhaps telling statistic: Today, nearly 60 percent of smartphone and tablet users access sports content on their device â€" at least once a day.

It’s for that very reason that the founders decided to start with the iPad to offer sports fans curated news, analysis, rumors, video, photos and player commentary in the same timeline-style feed that has become so familiar thanks to social media. The timeline curates content from more than 1,000 media sources and 2,000 players, ranking and analyzing sources based on a number of signals, including popularity, relevancy, and so on. In turn, it allows fans to personalize their feed to focus updates from their favorite teams and players.

This means that fans can get access before these quotes show up on radio, blogs, or on CNN. Furthermore, offering access to updates that come straight from players gives it a big point of differentiation from ESPN and Turner Sports coverage, for example. In this way, Beyond The Box deserves credit for attempting to go beyond the content boxes, walled gardens and content restrictions found on so many sports media properties, like ESPN’s Sports Center Feed or Bleacher Report’s Team Stream.

The app enables users to view coverage of the four major sports from both national and local media analysts and outlets, as well as from over 300 local team blogs, thanks to its pulling in content from SB Nation. As mentioned, the other major point of differentiation is the ability to get updates from players directly, especially those who have strong brands and followings on social media.

These players tend to generate more fan interest than their own team’s feeds, like, say LeBron James, who has 7-times more followers on Twitter than the Miami Heat. And it’s not just the megastars, as Stephen Curry has 3-times as many followers as his team, the Warriors. This can be a double-edged sword, however, as athletes aren’t always known for their incisive tweets and commentary on social media. They do generate interest, but if you’re looking for news straight from the analysts, this could be a point of contention. Of course, it’s left up to you to curate, so it’s fairly easy to avoid.

Going forward, the founders hope to monetize Beyond The Box by leveraging what they see as increasing interest from advertisers in the second-screen viewing experience. Rao says that consumers are increasingly using mobile devices while watching sports â€" each time there’s a time out, commercial break or fans are looking for more insight, for example â€" which could provide plenty of opportunities to integrate sponsored content or in-stream ads.

While monetization is still a work in progress, it also wouldn’t be surprising to see Beyond The Box add in-app purchases for advanced insights for those looking for a leg up in their fantasy leagues.

Next up on the roadmap, the founders say that they want to continue refining the way they curate and process content, as well as adding more breadth. Integrating more multimedia content, like photos and videos, into its timeline could be an easy way to improve the user experience. On the back end, the more big data analysis the app provides, the better it will be able to stand out. And the same can be said for information visualization, like expanding the “box score,” which really hasn’t changed in 100-plus years, for example.

These are just a few of the things that Rao says the team is considering as it moves forward. If it can follow through, Beyond The Box could be a winner. As of now, it’s off to a great start, but there are plenty of players in this space, from enormous, billion-dollar media brands to startups like SportStream and Chadwick. But, either way, it’s a good time to be a sports fan, as these startups are demonstrating that an evolution is underway.

Find Beyond The Box on the App Store here.

Entrepreneurial Excellence: Can 10,000 Hours Of Practice Make Perfect?

Editor’s note: Jon Auerbach is a partner at Charles River Ventures, a 42-year-old, early-stage venture firm based in Menlo Park and Cambridge, Mass., where he focuses on mobile technologies. Follow him on Twitter @jgauerbach.

Research over the past two decades has identified a strong link between hours of practice and expertise in sports, chess and the performing arts. In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, spent months tracking violinists at the Music Academy in Berlin. He found that the top violinists had practiced on average 10,000 hours during the course of their lives. The weakest violinists had averaged  4,000 hours.

This 10,000-hour “rule,” cited in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” is now accepted as gospel among a segment of society that believes that hours logged for young athletes and musicians is the key to success. The core of the argument is that only through what is called “deliberate” practice can the 10,000 hours pay off. By this, the experts mean practicing in the right conditions with the right motivation, mentorship and potential for eventual success. Simply studying piano for 10,000 hours isn’t enough to ensure greatness. Deliberate practice is the key.

I’ve spent some time exploring 10,000 hours in entrepreneurship and whether the theory might be fungible. The essential argument is that behind many great entrepreneurs is a life spent, sometimes inadvertently, practicing deliberately. Some of the world’s best entrepreneurs were the kids running lemonade stands, building LEGO robots and hacking computers.

When Deliberate Isn’t Necessarily Deliberate

But deliberate practice doesn’t always follow textbook rules. Sometimes it comes inadvertently. One of the best examples is cited by Daniel Coyle in “The Talent Code.” Coyle tells the story of Simon Clifford, a gym teacher from Leeds, England, who traveled to Brazil in 1997 to better understand why the Brazilians were so good at soccer.

While conventional wisdom had held that the main factors were poverty, soccer as a dominant national sport and a good climate, Clifford found that until the late 1950s, the Brazilians were not a soccer powerhouse. But during that decade, Brazil became obsessed with a type of indoor soccer called futsal. The game is played with a smaller, heavier ball in a much tighter indoor space. Because the ball is heavy and small, it can’t be kicked in the air easily. As a result, precision in passing is key.

In one minute of futsal, the average player passes six times as much as in a minute of regular soccer. And in soccer, passing precision is key in separating great from good. So inadvertently, the Brazilians were acquiring the right soccer skills through futsal in a much more deliberate way than if they had been training on large, outdoor fields. In 1958, Brazil won the World Cup, beginning a dynasty of soccer domination.

Inadvertent Deliberate Practice: Entrepreneur-Style

The theory of 10,000 hours of practice translates into generally 10 years of roughly 20 hours per week. If the same holds true for entrepreneurs, then kids need to be building things and selling things in middle school to hit their stride in their mid-twenties. Further, there’s an argument that young entrepreneurs rarely have 20 hours a week in their teen years to practice their craft, so getting to 10,000 hours might take more like 15 or 20 years.

If the same holds true for entrepreneurs, then kids need to be building things and selling things in middle school to hit their stride in their mid-twenties.

The entrepreneurial world is full of compelling stories of great innovators putting in their 10,000 entrepreneurial hours. While other kids at Homestead High in Cupertino were playing football, Steve Jobs was building a “phone phreak” device that tricked the AT&T long-distance system into letting people make free calls. Bill Gates spent much of his time at the Lakeside School programming on leased-time GE and Digital Equipment computers, including writing code that allowed them to obtain free computer time. This led to a ban of computer use for Gates and three other students.

Larry Page claims that at age 12 he knew he would someday start a business. He would spend countless hours tinkering with computers and writing code, and he was the first student in his elementary school to turn in an assignment on a word processor. In middle school, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a computer program that connected computers at his father’s dental practice to machines in the Zuckerberg home.

Soccer is not learned from sitting in a classroom; it’s learned by kicking a ball over and over. The 10,000-hour theory is just that: a theory. But if it holds water, there are some pretty compelling implications for how (and whether) entrepreneurship can be taught, where best to acquire skills and how to think about funding models.

[Image via Flickr here and here.]

Jon Auerbach is a general partner at Charles River Ventures, where his focus is identifying and investing in innovative companies that are poised to become category leaders in mobile and advertising technology. Prior to joining CRV, Jon was a general partner at Highland Capital Partners. Jon has more than a decade of venture funding experience, and he has been an active investor in numerous successful start-ups, including Starent Networks, Quattro Wireless, Optasite, and CCTV. He is a frequent speaker...

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Depop Is Another Flea Market For iOS But Also Has Sights Firmly Set On Etsy

Snap a photo of the item you want to sell, write a short description, and set a price. Sounds familiar, right? After soft-launching in Italy where it was incubated, Depop [iTunes] gets its official launch today with an iOS app that, at first glance, is the spitting image of other “flea market” mobile apps. However, the company says that its ultimate competitor is probably Ebay, while it also has vintage design and craft-oriented marketplace Etsy firmly in its sights.

In the “flea market” mobile app space, it compete with Shpock [iTunes], Stuffle [iTunes] and Osom [iTunes] in Europe, or Rumgr [iTunes] and Yardsale [iTunes] in the U.S., or Chile’s Vendly [iTunes].

Selling an item via the Depop marketplace is free and follows a familiar user-path. You take a photo using your iOS device (or choose an existing one from your camera roll) and upload it. Then you enter a description and other information such as price, location and delivery details. You also have the option to share the Depop listing via Twitter and Facebook. And that’s pretty much it.

Interested buyers can search for or browse items â€" the app utilises a grid view of photo thumbnails in a nod towards the Pinterestization of the web.  Once they spot something of interest they can read further details and start conversing with the seller to ask questions and even negotiate on price. Once a sale is agreed, the seller presses the “sell” button and a “buy” button then appears for the buyer. In that way, the seller has total control of who to sell to.

Unlike many other mobile “flea markets”, Depop does handle payment (via credit card/PayPal), taking a small commission, though the seller and buyer can still choose to exchange cash if handing over an item in person and bypass this aspect of the app, therefore doing business for free.

Another aspect that potentially sets Depop apart from others is that â€" for now â€" it isn’t location-based, thus placing less emphasis on local. Hence the need to support online payments. Instead, social is at its heart. Users can follow other users, making it easy to see when your friends have something for sale, though this is in no way unique to Depop.

Finally, the app isn’t only about individuals selling items. Depop is also pitching itself as an additional retail channel for independent shops and brands, and this is where the app begins to encroach more and more on something like Etsy. At launch, Depop cites UK independent stores Beach London, Mint Vintage and Never Fully Dressed as partners.

Since its soft launch in Italy 8 months ago, the app claims 50k registered users, and 350k items listed for sale.

Also noteworthy is Depop’s backers. After graduating from Italian incubator H-Farm, the 2011-founded startup has raised €1 million in funding from Balderton Capital and Holtzbrinck Ventures. It’s also since relocated to East London’s “Silicon Roundabout” area (apparently it was a toss up between London and Berlin, but London won).

The company is founded by CEO Simon Beckerman. He was previously founder of PIG Magazine, an indie fashion magazine, as well as Super Sunglasses. Meanwhile, the Depop team has grown from three to fourteen employees in the last four months and is hiring.

Etsy is a website that focuses on handmade and vintage items, as well as art and craft supplies. The items include art, photography, clothing, jewelry, edibles, quilts, and toys. Etsy is modeled after open craft fairs that give sellers personal storefronts where they can list their goods. The company charges users a flat listing fee (of 20 cents per items), and takes a commission of 3.5% off all items sold. Since its launch in June 2005, the site has...

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H-FARM, founded in 2005 in Italy, is a Venture Incubator; its mission is to accelerate the development of Internet startups via a combination of seed investment and incubation services. The Venture Incubator is a hybrid model that reflects the dual soul of H-FARM: that of Venture Capitalist and that of Incubator. As a VC H-FARM invest seed capital, granting the finance necessary for the early stage activities; as an incubator it provides a series of services to speed up...

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Balderton Capital is the leading venture investor in the EU… Balderton has a track record of helping entrepreneurs build substantial businesses â€" with more $250m+ exits in the past five years than any other European venture firm. We have backed over 100 entrepreneurs in the last decade, and continue to look for outstanding entrepreneurs who share our passion for disrupting large markets and building long-lasting, great companies. We invest early stage, but, with nearly $2 billion of committed capital, we have the...

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Parse Isn't An OS, But It Is Facebook's Answer To Android And iOS

Facebook doesn’t own a mobile operating system, and that’s a problem. Developers don’t need Facebook to build apps, and it doesn’t get a 30 percent cut of payments. But today Facebook acquired Parse, and while it’s not an OS, it’s the next best thing. The mobile-backend-as-a-service could keep Facebook top-of-mind for developers when they pick an identity provider, integrate sharing, and buy ads.

If you wanted to make a leap of faith, you could speculate that Parse (read our full story on the acquisition) could become the plug-and-play backend of a Facebook mobile OS focused on making things easy for developers. That’s not out of the question far down the road, and is bolstered by Facebook’s recent acqhire of the Pieceable team who had built mobile app development and in-browser preview platform.

But building its own formal OS would go against a core tenet of Facebook’s mobile strategy â€" being a social layer that rides on top of iOS and Android, rather than a direct competitor.

Starting a completely new operating system would be a massive, risky bet for Facebook. It’d be expensive and draining for a relatively little company compared to Apple, Google and Amazon. Getting developers to build another version of their apps for a set of Facebook OS devices that doesn’t have traction could be a tough sell. Again, not impossible in a few years, but a serious gamble anytime soon. But for now Parse will help Facebook get closer to developers.

The “Everything But An OS” Strategy

Facebook is on a mission to get as much of the value of owning an OS as possible without actually building one. Mark Zuckerberg has explained that he only wants to build things that can benefit big chunks of its user base. That’s why it didn’t manufacture its own phone, and that’s why it hasn’t made apps that require a forked version of Android. When you have a billion users, building something with a potential to reach only 20 million of them just isn’t big enough. Facebook wants to make the world more open and connected, not just a chunk of it.

We saw one prong of this strategy with the launch of Facebook Home. It wanted to be the first thing people saw and the most frequent thing people did on their phones, but without too much resource expenditure or having to start an app store from scratch. So it built a homescreen/launcher replacement app that could run on a standard version of Android.

Another component is Open Graph. It makes it simple to add Facebook sharing capabilities to any app. It may not have the native sharing built in at the OS level, but it can still get content flowing into the news feed that it can put ads next to. And it is baked into iOS 6 at the OS level thanks to a partnership with Apple â€" also a part of the strategy.

Facebook might not earn a 30 percent cut when you download an app from Google Play or the App Store, but it does make money when you discover which app to actually download through its new mobile app install ads. Those stores are now cluttered with hundreds of thousands of apps, and until a developer climbs on the charts it’s hard to get found. So Facebook is aggressively positioning itself as the paid gateway to app discovery as an alternative to having its own app marketplace.

Parse Unites Facebook’s Dev Package

So Facebook  has all these parallel universe parts of a mobile OS. Now Parse will tie them all together. Facebook’s Director Of Product Management Doug Purdy called it the third pillar of the Facebook Platform, but to me it also feels like a doorway to the first two pillars of identity and ads. Facebook will continue operating the backend solution, which currently serves over 60,000 apps. Now they’ll be paying their monthly subscription fees straight to Facebook. So base-level, Facebook is making more money from developers, while also helping to get more great apps built.

Then, just by the nature of using a Facebook-branded product, developers may be more likely to use the rest of the Not-FbOS stack, such as relying on it as an identity provider which strengthens the need for a Facebook account among users. They might build in more sharing hooks that deliver ad-monetizable content to the news feed. And it might encourage them to consider buying Facebook install ads to get their app downloaded. The strategy of getting tighter with developers is a popular one right now, considering Twitter’s recent purchase of Crashlytics.

While many developers immediately fretted that Facebook would meddle with the service, Purdy tells me its plan isn’t to mess with what works. You might be skeptical, but Facebook surprised the world this last year by now screwing around with Instagram. That won’t necessarily stop some developers from ditching Parse because they don’t want Facebook’s eyes on its data.

Still, Parse creates a powerful synergistic vector from which to promote the rest of Facebook’s platform services. Eventually, I suspect Facebook will feature its own services a bit more within Parse. Perhaps that means even easier integration of identity and sharing for Parse-backed apps. Or Parse developers could get free credits for app install ads that could get them hooked on the traction booster.

The concept of a more complete and unified suite of platform services should excite investors, and having such a stable of great mobile talent around clearly enticed Parse’s founders.

Being too dependent on the desktop was a huge mistake for Facebook. It had to spend a billion dollars to kill the threat of Instagram and turn it into an asset. Now we’ll see if throwing everything but the kitchen operating system at mobile is enough, or whether Facebook will remain a second-class citizen on the small screen.

[Image Credit: AppleInsider]

Parse is the cloud app platform for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, iOS, Android, JavaScript, and OS X. With Parse, you can add a scalable and powerful backend in minutes and launch a full-featured mobile or web app in record time without ever worrying about server management. Parse offers push notifications, social integration, data storage, and the ability to add rich custom logic to your app’s backend with Cloud Code. Build more with Parse.

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February 1, 2004

NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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WPP CEO Sorrell: Google Will Overtake News Corp As Our Largest Media Investment This Year Or Next

Martin Sorrell, the CEO of WPP, today laid out a stark picture of how significant a role digital is playing for the advertising giant. Speaking at the FT Digital Media Conference in London today, he said that digital now accounts for 34% of WPP’s media investment, amounting to some $72 billion, rising “from zero to over one-third in about ten years, the age of Google,” he said.

Google, he said, is the second-largest recipient of that digital spend at the moment, at around $2 billion for the quarter, but that it will soon overtake the single biggest beneficiary at the moment, News Corp. Sorrell described Google as “a media owner masquerading as a tech company.”

Sorrell referred to these numbers as a preview of WPP’s quarterly results, which are out tomorrow.

He added that at the moment AOL and Yahoo are each getting around $400 million to $500 million in ad spend via WPP. Facebook, despite its size and current popularity, is only around $270 million. Twitter, he added, is “much smaller.”

With a lot of the interest in media spend focused on video content â€" TV viewing is still the most popular format for media consumption â€" you can see how significant YouTube is for Google’s wider strategy. You can also see some of the logic behind why there have been reports that Yahoo is eyeing up an acquisition or a stake in Dailymotion, a smaller but persistent rival to YouTube. Those talks have never been confirmed by either party, but we understand they have been ongoing for some time, and could value the company at around $300 million.

But video is just a part of the strategy. The reason for Google’s strength, Sorrell said, was because there are “five legs to its stall”: search, display, video (“we’re seeing increasing google penetration especially in high TV markets,” he noted), social google+ and mobile by way of Android and Admob. Android is the world’s most popular smartphone platform at the moment and by some estimates in some markets like like China is accounting for over two-thirds of all mobile sales.

Speaking on a panel with Jeff Bewkes, the CEO of Time Warner, and Thomas Rabe, the CEO of Bertlesmann, Sorrell described the other two media companies, more known for traditional media assets in publishing, television and film, as having “come to terms” with the new digital reality, making efforts to bring their products to new screens and following new consumption patterns. But he also questioned whether they are doing enough: “Their stocks are both at all-time highs,” he noted, “but is there a degree of complacency?”

Sorrell also noted that while digital spend continues to grow there remains a “disconnect” between consumer use and ad investments. In TV, about 43% of time is spent, which mirrors investment, and outdoor and radio “are about right.” But the two big discrepancies are in newspapers and magazines, where we’re still investing 20% but consumers spending 7-9%; and internet and mobile where “we’re spending 30% of our time but media only investing about 20%.”

As we have noted before, WPP’s aim is to have 40% of its business coming from digital in the next five years (that was an aim set last year), meaning that it is well on its way. Investments that WPP itself has made to boost its own ability to meet digital demand include buying digital agency AKQA and startup investments, such as leading a $10 million round in MySupermarket.com last year.

WPP plc, together with its subsidiaries, offers various communications services worldwide. It provides global, national, and specialist advertising services; above- and below-the-line media planning, buying, and specialist sponsorship and branded entertainment services; and specializes in brand, consumer, media, and marketplace insight, as well as works with clients to generate and apply insights. The company also offers corporate, consumer, financial, and brand-building services; consumer, corporate, and employee branding and design services, covering identity, packaging, literature, events, training, and architecture; a...

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Sir Martin Sorrell has been Group Chief Executive Officer of WPP Group PLC of Grey Global Group Inc. since its founding in 1986. Sorrell started his career as Marketing Associate of Glendinning Associates of Westport, Connecticut. In 1997, he was appointed as Ambassador of British Business by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and subsequently appointed to the Office’s Panel 2000 aimed at rebranding Britain abroad. In 1999, he was appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Employment...

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Time Warner, Inc. operates as a media and entertainment company in the United States and internationally. It operates in four segments: Cable, Filmed Entertainment, Networks, and Publishing. The Cable segment offers video, high-speed data, and voice services over its broadband cable systems to residential and commercial customers, as well as sells advertising time to various national, regional, and local businesses. Its services primarily comprise analog and digital video services; video on demand; high-definition television services; set-top boxes equipped...

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Bertelsmann AG is a transnational media corporation founded in 1835, based in Gütersloh, Germany.

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September 7, 1998

NASDAQ:GOOG

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...

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U.K.'s First 4G Network Now Has 318k LTE Adopters 5 Months After Launch - “On Track” For 1M By Year's End

EE, the U.K.’s first and still only 4G network operator, has broken out 4G-specific customer numbers for the first time â€" confirming that after five months of 4G trading it has hit a total of 318,000 4G-specific customers out of a total of 13.7 million postpaid mobile subscribers in the quarter (so around 2.3% of its postpaid mobile customers are on 4G). The 4G figure was broken out in EE’s Q1 results which ended March 31. The carrier has previously reported total postpaid 3G and 4G additions for its Q4 quarter, when it said it saw 201,000 net gains in the quarter. Overall EE has a mobile & fixed line broadband subscriber base of 26.4 million.

It’s worth underlining that the 318,000 figure does not consist of only new customers joining EE but includes existing 3G customers who have upgraded to its 4G offering. In its Q1 results release today, EE said ”strong take-up of 4G services amongst new and existing customers validates our data monetisation strategy”, noting that it is continuing to “successfully migrate Orange and T-Mobile customers with 4G-ready phones to high value EE 4G price plans in areas where 4G coverage is available”.

It added that it is “firmly on track” to meet its target of more than one million 4G customers by the end of 2013 â€" a target that is arguably rather unambitious, as IHS Screen Digest analyst Daniel Gleeson noted on Twitter.

EE reported postpaid mobile net adds of 166,000 for its Q1. The quarter is traditionally a weaker one for the carrier to add new customers but EE noted that Q1 2013 outperformed its past two year-on-year Q1 quarters, which saw 150,000 and 160,000 net postpaid adds respectively:

EE also said growth in underlying ARPU (average revenue per user) was up 2.2% year-on-year, while non-messaging data revenue increased to 36% of ARPU (vs 27% in the year ago quarter). In the quarter, the percentage of its postpaid customers using a smartphone rose a high of 82%, up from 78% in the previous quarter and 71% in the year-ago quarter. Driving and monetising data usage is key for carriers as traditional voice & messaging revenues continue to decline.

Commenting on the results in a statement, EE’s Chief Financial Officer, Neal Milsom, said: “Today’s results are in-line with our expectations, and we are making good progress focusing on high value segments.  We’re announcing 318,000 4G customers after just five months of trading, strong postpaid net adds and continued growth in our underlying average revenue per user.  We expect to strengthen our industry leadership position in the year ahead as the 4G roll out continues and we introduce double-speed 4GEE.”

EE said it continues to see “strong demand” for 4G from U.K. businesses, noting that more than 1,600 are now using LTE  including NG Bailey, PA News, Reed Recruitment, RAC, Tate & Lyle and United Utilities.

Regarding its 4G rollout, EE said its LTE network is on track to reach more than 70% of the U.K.’s population by the end of 2013, and 98% by the end of 2014. Last month EE announced its 4G network was now within reach of 50% of the population. The carrier is not blanketing all the cities and towns it names in its rollout with 4G coverage, but is switching on specific postcode areas in order to initially cover 80% of the centre of the city or town â€" counting only those postcode areas towards its overall population coverage target. In practice this means that there are still plenty of areas even in rollout locations where customers won’t be able to use 4G but will fall back on to its 3G network (which EE is also bolstering by increasing network density).

Earlier this month, and as part of its marketing blitz to bang the drum about 4G before its rivals are able to launch their own LTE networks this year, EE announced it planned to double the speed of its LTE network in 10 cities by the end of June, to a headline speed of up to 130Mbps. The auction for 4G-suitable spectrum was completed earlier this year, and EE’s rivals are in the process of readying or building their own networks â€" with launches likely from late Spring/Summer, according to telecoms regulator Ofcom.

Two-year mobile contracts are common in the U.K. which means potential 4G customers are likely to wait for their existing contract to run its course before upgrading â€" which makes it important for EE to keep making a noise about its network to catch the eye of possible customers who are in a position to upgrade or switch.

The carrier’s sales staff have also been calling existing 3G customers to encourage them to upgrade â€" even, in one case recounted to TechCrunch, where upgrading to 4GEE made no sense, since the customer in question did not live in a 4G-enabled area or regularly visit any 4G-enabled areas. The customer was not told this during the sales call. It was only subsequently, when they noticed no speed difference and asked about 4G coverage, that EE admitted neither the customer’s home town or workplace location were on its rollout map â€" and would likely never get LTE. So at least one of those 318,000 4G customers isn’t actually able to use 4G.

To coincide with its Q1 results, EE commissioned a survey of its 4G users which indicates that close to half (42%) are downloading more apps when out and about, while more than a third (37%) reported using less or no public Wi-Fi since getting 4G. One in five also said they are using their home broadband less.

Everything Everywhere is the UK’s largest communications company, providing mobile and fixed-broadband communications services to more than 27 million customers through the Orange and T-Mobile brands. Our vision is give the UK the best network and the best service so our customers trust us with their digital lives. We have invested over £15 billion since 2000 building Britain’s biggest mobile networks, and plan to invest over £1.5bn in the next three years to further improve our network and introduce...

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Education Giant Pearson Continues Digital Push, Acquires Flipped Classroom Managers, Learning Catalytics

Educational publishing giant, Pearson, has lately been making a push to snatch up (and incubate) promising young EdTech startups and concepts to help it compete in an increasingly tech-influenced educational landscape. Last May, Pearson acquired Certiport, the maker and marketer of IT and digital literacy products, for $140 million, followed by the acquisition of online learning services provider EmbaNetCompass for $650 million, its taking a stake in Nook Media and TutorVista, along with launching its very own EdTech incubator program.

Today, Pearson continued this march with the acquisition of Learning Catalytics, a cloud-based learning analytics and assessment system developed by Harvard University professors Eric Mazur and Gary King, along with software engineer and current post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, Brian Lukoff.

Founded in late 2011, Learning Catalytics is a platform that allows teachers to ask their students open-ended critical thinking questions and receive feedback in realtime. But beyond simply being a student response system and allowing teachers to get a better sense of what areas students are struggling with, the startup’s platform allows teachers to split their class into groups of similar ability.

The idea is that peer-to-peer engagement can help improve student understanding of core concepts, so the startup’s platform aims to make it easy for teachers to break class down into groups for based on their response patterns. This allows teachers to let students with a more advanced understanding of the topics at hand help get their peers up to speed, while allowing the teacher to supervise and curate those groups more effectively.

As students proceed through the class, they can respond to questions in class or for homework via text, numerical, algebraic or graphical responses. Meanwhile, faculty can get a better understanding of student performance through advanced analytics, which allow them to drill down into individual student data, as well as get a better understanding of student comprehension within the particular course and as compared to the class.

Fundamentally, by allowing faculty to ask questions and view feedback in realtime in a graphical representation of their students’ comprehension of the material, Pearson is adding an important new service layer for in-class feedback and communication. Pearson’s mission at this point is to become a service provider of customized tools and learning packages for teachers and for the changing profile of today’s student in higher education. That means an increased focus on flexible, blended learning services â€" at both ends of the classroom.

Pearson already has an LMS system, language learning, customizable online courses, and a host of other educational services, including the content-based services that its strong foothold in textbooks allow it to offer. Furthermore, the company knows that flipped classrooms and digital learning analytics aren’t going anywhere, and that’s why it’s made an effort to adjust: For example, today, over half of its revenue is now coming from digital products and services.

Traditionally, of course, Pearson hasn’t exactly been known as a pioneer in digital technology, so like its competitors McGraw Hill and Macmillan et al, it’s had to “go digital or go home,” so to speak. And with McGraw and Cengage both selling to private equity firms in the last month, well, it’s not exactly high-times for educational publishers.

As Pearson digitizes, like every other large company, it has to decide whether to try to build products internally or become an acquirer. In Pearson’s case, acquisitions make sense in a number of scenarios, but money is tight. I suspect that’s why the company issued its “efficacy framework” â€" to make sure its acquisitions and investments were meeting educational standards and, well, worth the investment.

This is relevant because, in Learning Catalytics, Pearson is essentially acquiring a student response system. And there are a number of more developed, well-established SRS players on the market, including the likes of the well-funded Top Hat, Turning Technologies and i>Clickr â€" to name a few. But these companies would have cost Pearson a pretty penny, and although neither company is revealing the terms of the deal, we hear it’s under $5 million.

Pearson has already partnered with Top Hat to offer as part of their bundled textbook, content and software services they provide to professors, which could ostensibly make for an awkward overlap. But we’ve heard from sources that Learning Catalytics was looking for an acquisition at this point as it hadn’t quite gotten the traction the founders hoped for, which allows Pearson to integrate a solid student response layer into their interactive learning and teaching products, without having to pay handsomely for it. And they get to keep Mazur, one of their top authors, happy in the process.

Learning Catalytics itself has been working with about 10 institutions, and offers free accounts to instructors, with student accounts running $12/semester and $20/year.

For more, find the Learning Catalytics founders’ letter to its users copied below:

We are thrilled to announce that Learning Catalytics has been acquired by Pearson. The new educational tools and novel data analytics in Learning Catalytics can now grow bigger, spread faster, and integrate better with other products and content, including Pearson’s widely used educational products. Learning Catalytics will continue to be available for current and new customers, and it will also have the ability to innovate further by leveraging Pearson’s considerable learning resources. Expect very big things to come.

We developed the technology behind Learning Catalytics in our research groups and classrooms at Harvard University but soon outgrew what fit there. To continue to innovate for our students and others around the world, we formed Learning Catalytics in July 2011. We could never have imagined how rapidly this technology would take off. More recently, it became clear to us that Learning Catalytics innovations have outgrown what can be accomplished in a startup, and so joining Pearson will help implement our ideas further and faster.

For help leading to this spectacular outcome, we are grateful to Pearson’s terrific team, Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, and especially our students â€" and other instructors and their students all over the world â€" who learned from Learning Catalytics and helped us learn from them.

Gary King, Brian Lukoff, Eric Mazur
Co-founders, Learning Catalytics

Pearson press release here.

Learning Catalytics is the complete solution for managing the interactive classroom. Our cloud-based technology enables instructors to engage students with authentic formative assessments in real time, and rich data analytics are used to drive student interactions.

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Backed Or Whacked: Life, Liberty And The Pursuit Of Laziness

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

Last week’s Backed or Whacked covered light-related products that could be controlled by a smartphone. Beyond making their way in the dark, though, modern humans have many other basic needs â€" maintaining well-being, feeling secure, and enforcing as much control over their domain as possible while exerting as little effort as necessary. The ability to achieve them with the aid of a smartphone, though, has arrived relatively recently, and the ability to crowdfund them via Indiegogo as per all of this week’s projects, even more recently.

Backed: Amiigo. Amiigo, which is Spanish for “friend in good shape who spells poorly,” is a chevron-shaped shoe clip that monitors movement, enabling you to know precisely how many calories you’ve expended repeatedly lifting the Boston Creme donut until it has been reduced to sugary crumbs. Amiigo enters the increasingly crowded contest for survival of the fittest begun by early entrants such as Nike+ and Fitbit. However, the trendy joint between the hand and forearm is where all the wriststers hang out these days. These include the Nike+ Fuelband, Jawbone UP, and other forthcoming entrants such as CES debutante Fitbit Flex and the HAPIwatch from HAPI Labs. To enter that club, the Amiigo shoe clip neatly docks into a wrist strap.

What the Salt Lake City-based team is counting on to set Amiigo apart from these rivals is more intelligence regarding the specific type of activity you’re doing. The idea of diving deeper into the nature of your exertion has been previously espoused by the developers of the $199 Basis, which employs fancy sensors to monitor the body’s reaction to exercise beyond motion detection. Amiigo, which has more than tripled its $90,000 funding goal with about 25 days left in its campaign, dispenses with the extra hardware and is due to ship to Indiegogo backers in June for about $99.

Backed: iSmartAlarm. ADT has run a legitimate business securing people’s homes and businesses. Recently, however, bigger bosses like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have told their capos that they want into the protection racket, see? Extracting a monthly fee for peace of mind, though, has heretofore taken place mostly within the customer base of those in multi-room dwellings. There have been a few alternative approaches, though, like the apartment-friendly but nonetheless professionally monitored SimpleSafe system.

For those who are comfortable handling alarms â€" false and otherwise â€" themselves, though, Raymond Meng’s team proposes iSmartAlarm, which includes a base station/siren reminiscent of the old Power Mac G4 Cube. iSmartAlarm, set to ship in April and starting with a basic package of only $79 with no monthly fees, has big plans for expansion. The company eventually seeks to include features such as sprinkler controls and GPS pet trackers.

For now, though, it is starting off with the basics â€" window/door-open sensors, motion sensors and, most importantly, that inert sign that scares away the bad guys. Should brazen intruders disregard the latter, the system can initiate taking successive photos of the perp and will send alerts to the smartphone owned by you or the vigilante of your choosing. iSmartAlarm’s campaign has been plodding along with over $30,000 raised of its $50,000 target with about 20 days to go.

Backed: Tethercell. Now that the crowdfunding world has provided the gear to convince you of your health and safety, it’s time to take it easy. Perhaps you want to turn on that FM radio on the porch a few feet away, but the thought of leaning forward displeases you. Debuting at CES along with the ultra-thin, time-telling bangle CST-01 that a future Backed or Whacked will discuss in more depth, the Tethercell may be your only hope.

Designed by aerospace engineers, the cylindrical device stuffs a Bluetooth radio into a AA battery shell, leaving enough room in the cavity to insert a AAA battery. You give up some device stamina, but gain the ability to remotely enable and disable all kinds of products either manually or according to a schedule. Tethercell can also alert you when the AA batteries in a device are running low.

Adding Bluetooth to products never intended to be controlled by a smartphone creates a wonderful twist on backward compatibility. While a shrinking number of devices that you might want to activate remotely take standard cells these days, the campaign’s Indiegogo page depicts small lamps, radios and baby monitors as examples. As Tethercell also works with some videogame controllers and many toys, the non-confrontational parent wishing for their kids to turn that damn thing off and pick up a book already can still pick one up for only $35 (although pairs are also proving popular). Recently charged above 47 percent of its $59,000 goal capacity, the Tethercell campaign has about 20 days’ worth of juice left.

Simplee Combines Mint.com And Paypal To Bring Medical Bill Payment, Management To Your Smartphone

The mobile health market is growing like a weed these days. According to mHealthWatch and eHealth Initiative, there are 31,000 health and medical-related apps on the market today. In fact, over the last year, the number of health apps jumped 120 percent, and hundreds of apps now hit stores every month. Yet, in spite of this exponential growth, the mobile health space is still in its “Wild West” phase. In other words, it’s a work in progress.

As mHealthWatch points out, there’s a lot of noise in the mobile health market, and a lot of misleading information. So, while the potential is high, there’s not enough data yet to prove that these products act as advertised and actually provide real value.

Simplee, the startup that has been called the Mint.com for healthcare expenses, wants to buck the trend of over-promising and under-delivering in today’s mobile health market. Simplee first launched its medical wallet back in 2011 to help people better manage their healthcare financials â€" to track visits, monitor benefits and pay bills online, for example.

Considering how expensive healthcare can be, and what a pain in the ass it is to manage, people are eager to find any way to streamline the process and reduce costs â€" to their sanity and their wallet. By making this appeal to consumers, Simplee has been able to find some traction: Today, it processes millions of dollars in payments each month across “thousands of medical providers” and has managed $2 billion in medical bills since launch.

Earlier this year, the startup expanded its service, bringing a B2B-style payment and loyalty platform to hospitals to allow them to distribute digital bills, among other things. The idea being to offer hospitals a medical wallet that can, on the one hand, help them increase revenues, while making it easier to deliver new features and a better billing experience for patients on the other.

Last week, the startup took the next step in the evolution, extending its medical wallet to the point of service through a new mobile app that allows people to manage and pay all their family’s medical bills from their phone, while on the go. In so doing, Simplee’s vision has been to transition from simply being the Mint.com of healthcare to a sort of Mint.com-meets-PayPal, for healthcare, expanding its medical wallet and uniting it with SimpleePAY.

The new app allows users to view their medical history while in the doctor’s office or go back through billing history to see whether they’ve met their deductible, for example. They can also view a breakdown of insurance coverage and pay by credit, debit or FSA card.

Again, that’s all well and good, but when you consider the above fact â€" that many mobile health apps make big claims about convenience and the ability to improve users’ health in a significant way â€" it doesn’t mean much without supporting evidence. So, we asked Simplee to share a little bit more about how consumers are paying medical bills online and whether or not they’ve actually been able to increase payment performance among users, for instance.

While it’s still too early to say for mobile, as Simplee just launched its mobile app last week, the founders tell us that Simplee’s online medical wallet has been able to produce an increase in self-service payments of 17 percent, which has doubled in the last six months. Compared that to 1 to 3 percent â€" what the company says is the industry norm. They also expect mobile to play a critical role in driving self-service even higher, especially at the point-of-service (i.e. at the doctor’s office).

In addition, the company says that 90 percent of its users making multiple payments after making their first, and that 40 percent of its payments come from users who have upgraded to the full medical wallet experience, which means that they get an expanded billing view with deductible status, more stored payment methods and so on.

In other words, the founders believe that this is a demonstration of the fact that users prefer horizontal payments and that the consumer side of its business is feeding the B2B-side of its payment platform. The first step was to build an online medical wallet, the next was to build a connected provider payment platform, and the third has been to connect the two and offer both experiences via mobile at the point-of-service.

In a sense, it’s not much different from what Pageonce is attempting to do on the more general consumer-side of the mobile bill payment space. Simplee is taking that and applying it to healthcare, while attempting to provide a value-add for hospitals and healthcare providers.

It’s too early to tell whether or not Simplee can significantly expand its business through its new mobile experience, but, given that it’s already established some validation online, the founders have high hopes for mobile. It’s a smart play, and could have a big effect on the way people pay their medical bills, reducing the headache and complex, paper-based billing process that continues to prevail in healthcare.

Simplee® is transforming out-of-pocket payments into a clear, convenient, and trusted experience. Our customers are innovative health care providers focused on the patient as a rising consumer. Simplee processes millions in payments across thousands of providers. Both providers and their patients benefit: Patients receive a delightfully clear bill they can understand and trust Providers get faster patient payments, more self-service, and other productivity gains Simplee®PAY is our patient payments and loyalty platform that offers clear interactive bills, flexible payment options, and proprietary technology...

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How To Build A Political Social Network That Actually Works

Editor’s note: Lucas Dailey is a UX designer and chief innovation officer at political social network MyMaryland.net. You can follow Lucas on Twitter @lucasdailey.

My political social network startup died last year, and I eulogized it in a public post-mortem here on TechCrunch. The experience (and the article) resulted in my taking over the product reins at nonprofit MyMaryland.net, a new constituent-communication startup.

I’ve been able to further test the principles I wrote about while guiding the development of MyMaryland.net, which is supported by grants and seed funding from The Sunlight Foundation, Points of Light, Village Capital, Google Grants, and Ashoka’s Youth Venture. Since launching about two months ago, the site already has 12 state senators and delegates signed up in Maryland.

Here are some tips for charting your own political social network course.

Don’t Rely On Mass Adoption 

One of the greatest traps many well-intentioned teams fall into when building their political social network is to attribute value to their product by how useful it will be once everyone uses it. That notion is particularly tempting in a market without a dominant player; you see the open field and you say to yourself, “No one has won the network-effect war yet; it could be us!” It could be you. But not if your product relies on mass adoption to have significant value.

Building the user base for a political social network is a slog that will test your resolve and budget. Entrepreneurs almost universally suffer from optimism bias and unconsciously plan based on best-case scenarios. Reaching a usage tipping point will be much slower than you think, so don’t rely on it.

To create an (un)social network, focus on how your product will provide value to its first users, not its last. If your product provides a social-optional service that people find valuable, they’ll have a reason to use it before network effect kicks in. Votizen did this well initially by printing and delivering messages to Congress. Though largely symbolic compared with an email, this appealed to some initial users as a standalone service. Pinterest launched with a strong, standalone product. People enjoy making collections of things they like â€" clothes, gadgets, cuisine â€" even if they don’t have an audience.

Launch Small And Count Wins

Of course for many startups, the user count is the most relevant measure of progress. This is not the case for political social networks. Worse, planning on mass usage could sink you. Political social networks are about political power, generally acting as a vehicle for others to exercise their power in a way previously unavailable. Your social network will succeed based on how many political wins it has, how many times it tips the scales. And wins will be easier when you have a critical mass of users.

Fifty users won’t sway a state, but they’ll win a neighborhood.

Since the tipping point of a critical mass is determined by a ratio of users to non-users, you’ll reach that tipping point fastest in small districts. Fifty users won’t sway a state, but they’ll win a neighborhood. When you can win a healthy number of neighborhoods, you’ll win the city. Win a few cities and you’ll win the state. Win a few states and the country is your oyster.

Raise Minority Opinions

Another trope in political social networking is that more participation and deliberation will lead to general-consensus solutions. In reality, most of our political disagreements are based on values that evolve very slowly, if at all. These disagreements are not generally resolved by exchanging well-structured arguments.

If you ignore the chimera of consensus you can instead focus on a more natural and beneficial diversity of opinion. Minority-supported solutions can be highly effective and may elicit passionate support from portions of the population; ideological preferences don’t always correlate with effectiveness. This can be tricky to implement and is very product specific, but empowering minority opinions can also help move outlier political solutions into the scope of acceptability to attack problems from a new angle.

No North In The Industry

Some social network verticals have a clear dominant company, such as Facebook for personal social networks and LinkedIn for professional social networks. For those that don’t, product and UX designers â€" who base some amount of their work on the existing feature vocabulary of users â€" are often tempted to pioneer new user behaviors.

Pioneering user behavior may sound great, but from a UX perspective it should be avoided.

Aol in the ’90s pioneered many of the UX behaviors that would grow to become personal social networks. Without those market-shaping features, Friendster would have had a much greater struggle.

When you’re forced to cut a new path, dig deep and search wide to find social, cultural and emotional analogues to help inform the design of your new behavior, then introduce and educate the user slowly. Pioneering user behavior may sound great, but from a UX perspective it should be avoided. Good UX builds off of existing analogous behavior to make the most intuitive UI possible.

Every Message Must Be A Success

Every social network is ultimately about conveying some form of message. That’s doubly true of political social networks where the purpose is to increase the political influence of each user. People need to feel like their voice matters, like their messages they’re sharing have some effect. Granting a feeling of success is one of the biggest challenges of political social networking, as well as politics generally. The most successful political campaigns structure volunteer activities to be as much about the volunteer as their work. The most successful political social networks give users positive reinforcement when they write a post, leave a comment or record a video.

In many political social networks, developers envision their users getting some sort of validation from an authority figure or mass of users. But your odds will be better if your political social media project creates a sense of validation without aid from other users. Gamification â€" a set of features that rewards user actions with status symbols, unlocked features or game points â€" is a popular technique that helps to provide a sense of validation. When it’s intelligently implemented it can be effective. For example, a political social network could encourage users to discuss an issue by giving its most persuasive user a “Debate Champ” tag on the post, or the user with the most followers in their neighborhood a “Block Captain” title.

In the early days of Foursquare, there were many users who were Mayors before their friends were even using the service. Apart from the game aspect, Foursquare Mayorships tapped into another form of validation: personal identity. Most decisions we make â€" what to buy, where to eat â€" reinforce our identities.

Be An Insurgent

An incremental improvement isn’t always enough: we didn’t develop a means to fly by making better and better cars, and a successful political social network won’t be an incremental improvement of a current political system. It will be a new additional system with new behaviors and capabilities outside of simply modernizing an existing process.

If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em. And if you can’t beat ‘em, go around ‘em.

Introducing a new system into politics will naturally challenge the stability of the political ecosystem and threaten the apex predator in that system: the elected official. Evolution is painful, and it’s difficult for elected officials to evolve, so don’t expect them to adopt your network even though they might publicly support your efforts.

Being an insurgent means not just that politicians don’t need to use your product, it means being successful even when they oppose it. Change.org has been successful by focusing on rallying popular support and press attention to pressure decision-makers. If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em. And if you can’t beat ‘em, go around ‘em.

Have An Ethos, Be A Reformer

A polity’s political environment is directly shaped by its governmental, electoral and legal systems. These are, sadly, so intractable that we tend to forget how directly they influence our political activity. A successful political social network will change the operation of one or more of those systems, so you’d better have a clear idea what the effect will be and why you want to change it.

Our endeavors are daunting but essential. Jefferson wrote: “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” The timing is right. The broad influence and accessibility of the web, the rise of the social network, and current research in behavioral psychology and sociology are all in place. Those of us at the center of this confluence are uniquely positioned to design new types of interactions that will renew our communities. And maybe even create a new world.

How Tencent's Walled User List Ended Up Boosting Its Userbase

Tencent’s social blogging site, Qzone, has Asia’s largest active social network user base, with 600 million (and counting) users who log in more than twice a month.

Besides Qzone, the Chinese Internet giant is perhaps better known for its flagship QQ instant messenger and the exploding WeChat smartphone messaging app.

I spoke to Peter Zheng, vice president of Tencent’s social network group. He’s been overseeing Qzone’s evolution for the past eight years. He told me that when Qzone was launched in 2005, it was initially planned as a Geocities-style blog community, before the company decided to add social aspects by linking blogs to users’ QQ accounts. “Luckily, when we started, Facebook wasn’t common in China. There were some challenges from other platforms like microblogs such as Weibo, but these [Twitter-like channels] are quite public, and people saw QZone as a more private space,” he said.

It wasn’t always supposed to be walled, but QZone inherited the company’s older QQ contact list that added people based on user IDs, not more universal identifiers like email addresses or phone numbers. And unlike what we’re used to on Facebook or LinkedIn for example, you can’t see who your friends’ friends are because of the way those lists were architected, said Zheng.

“For a while, we were concerned that that made it hard for people to expand their friends lists. Our legacy was closed, and we thought it hindered the expansion of the network,” he said. But it seemed to work out. “Over time, our users told us that they didn’t want to add contacts the way you do on Facebook. When everyone is added deliberately because you sought them out, you’re just adding buddies you want to share your updates with. Turns out that was a way to keep your friend circles tight, and our users are keener to share on Qzone because of that,” he said.

This is the mantra of some of the “private” sharing platforms like Pathâ€"some with more success than othersâ€"but Tencent seems to have stumbled upon the working formula and had its popularity multiplied by the sheer volume of users coming onboard in its home country.

^{Over 100 million users concurrently on Qzone, with most of them concentrated in China}

Another way it has fueled its user growth is an early emphasis on the mobile phone. The Qzone app was released in early 2010, and included features like photo filters and the option to record voice memos. While a typical Twitter or Tumblr user would take a photo, open it in a separate app to dress it up, then open the blogging app to post it, all of this can be done within Qzone’s app, reducing the friction to post. (Instagram was launched towards Fall 2010.)

The Qzone app has also added features that caught on with Asian users earlier than they did in the West, such as decorative water marks. “Asian users like to decorate their photos, not just filter them,” he said. Qzone’s app also allows users to add a voice clip as a status update, or tag it to a photo. “That makes it feel more personal. You can send a gift and attach a voice clip from the phone too,” Zheng said.

When he showed me a typical Qzone page, I was boggled by how busy the page was, with animations and audio. “It’s almost like MySpace,” I say.

“Sort of,” he agreed. “But it isn’t really the form factor that matters the most. Maintaining the relationship with your existing user base and keeping them happy goes a long way. You want to be on the social network that your friends are on, and always keeping it fresh means users stay happy.”

Tapping the ideas of 22,000

It is here in Shenzhen’s hi-tech district that Zheng’s 2,000 or so engineers work on Qzone. The Tencent headquarters is a sprawling skyscraper, dwarfing its myriad grey-washed neighbors. While I had problems getting my cab driver to register exactly where I wanted to be in the already famous Hua Qiang Bei cluster, simply saying “Tencent” in English got him to immediately acknowledge, exclaiming “Teng Xun Da Sha”, which translates to Tencent Plaza in Mandarin.

Started in 1998, Tencent is China’s largest Internet company by revenue, and was the first Internet company in the country to break through the $1 billion revenue mark in 2009.

My arrival at the headquarters was kicked off with a tour of the impressive lobby showcase area. A big, gleaming board reflected how many users were concurrently on QQâ€"156 million that Wednesday afternoon, with a peak of 172 million. The company counts an active user as someone who logs in more than twice a month, and by that measure, has an impressively high retention rate of 700 million out of its 1 billion total users worldwide.

^{156 million users chatting on QQ instant messenger at the same time}

“This is the same tour that our CEO, Pony Ma, gave to (Chinese Communist Party general secretary) Xi Jinping when he visited,” informed my guide in impeccable English. I asked her how long she’s been working for Tencent, and she said she’s been with the company for the past two years since she graduated. “I do not consider myself young here,” she said, shaking her head.

And perhaps she can’t. The average age of Tencent’s 22,000 employees is merely 26â€"a feat made possible by an aggressive, ongoing hiring campaign that takes Tencent to tertiary institutions in the country in order to sniff out their finest.

The constant influx of fresh blood could be one of the reasons why Tencent has kept up with China’s relatively young Internet population. China’s average age across its user base is just 25, while in the US, that number is much higher at 42.

How do you juggle ideas coming in from thousands of young, enthusiastic minds? “Unfortunately, you have to cancel projects if they don’t work after a certain time, usually several weeks or months,” said Zheng.

“There are no bad ideas, only bad execution. So we give all ideas a fair chance, but we look for teams with bad execution and we do kill their projects,” he said.

Per the company’s claims as of March 2008, Tencent is China’s largest and most utilized internet services portal. The company powers popular products like instant messaging and gaming service QQ and e-commerce and online trading platform PaiPai, amongst others.

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QQ.com is TenCent’s main brand, providing a litany of services through its portal. Most widely known for its instant messaging service, QQ also features anti-virus solutions, email, download management, premium services, live video streaming, online dating, and mobile solutions.

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Much like South Korea-based Cyworld, QZone is a virtual world and social networking application for self-expression and content sharing.

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