The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story

It started with an idea: How can we get our drinks more quickly at the bar? Dreamed up at 2 a.m. in Coloft, a Los Angeles coworking space, future founder Mike Townsend doodled up an iPad application mockup that he called Apptini to answer the question.

Apptini, a portmanteau of application and martini, wouldn’t last, but the product later known as Flowtab had been born. Its life became a startup story that most don’t tell: A company that didn’t make it. Technology as an industry worships success â€" the bigger and splashier the better. What’s often left unsaid or swept under the rug or buried under the guise of a micro acqui-hire is failure. And lots of it.

Young companies die by the hundreds in Silicon Valley, but you would hardly know it by reading your local blog. Flowtab, now a shuttered product, did something following its demise that I’ve never seen before â€" released a death chronicle of sorts. Their timeline and notes showcase the mistakes that the company made during its short life. Contracts, failed television appearances, deals that fell through, and more were published. If you work in technology, it’s a compelling set of documents.

I know Townsend, and have been in bars that at one point used Flowtab technology, so when the now former founders released their material, I caught up with both of them to talk through their history. What follows is the story of their dream, their company, struggle, failed pivots and an Australian mining magnate.

Beginnings

The pitch was simple: Flowtab would be a better way to order and pay for drinks. It would speed up service, as bartenders would no longer deal with payments, something that the software handled for the bar. No more bar tabs, no more lost or forgotten credit cards and IDs, or soggy receipts and dry pens. All that was replaced by an iPad behind the bar that displayed drink orders as they were logged by folks pecking on their smartphones. Customers then picked up their drinks when they were ready. Simple.

The idea was akin to a real-time GrubHub for the bar that you were currently sitting in. Flowtab would sport menus, and allow for tipping directly inside the app. Founders Townsend and Kyle Hill wanted to help you get your tipsy on.

Townsend took his iPad mockup and a short demo to 12 bars in the Santa Monica area, pitching a product that was utterly unbuilt. Response, Hill and Townsend recount, was good enough to keep moving on the project. Following the offline testing period, in mid-May of 2011, Flowtab put together a landing page. As Internet companies go, Flowtab had planted its flag. Two months later, the first version of Flowtab, coded in HTML5, was complete.

However, Flowtab was severely understaffed, and needed far more development firepower than it currently had in-house. Money was scarce, and Flowtab wanted someone truly top-notch. This created something of a problem. A friend of Hill’s had worked with a developer by the name of Alex Kouznetsov on an application in the past. Hill flew to see him in San Francisco. Kouznetsov, who has a Ph.D. in computer science and worked in Oakland at the time, started to contribute at nights and on weekends as the company’s CTO.

The first version of Flowtab was extremely limited. You could select the bar that you were in, pick a drink, set a tip amount, and hit order. But nothing more.

Eventually, Kouznetsov helped the Flowtab crew wrap their HTML5 up into a native shell (using Appcelerator), and get it into both the Android and iOS app stores. That launch, in February of 2012, proved premature, as Flowtab had zero bars using its technology for users to actually visit. Users of the application were therefore greeted with an empty app. Well, there were a few fake bars listed.

Ironically, Apple featured Flowtab for a week, sending it users that couldn’t actually use the app. At this stage, however, Flowtab remained focused more on talking to bar owners than acquiring users. The idea behind the focus was that, in the words of Townsend, “geographic density is absolutely key for any mobile payments application.”

That fact that Apple had noticed the app at all was good augur. The Flowtab boys were now ready to land some bars.

Bar Acquisition: Commence

Flowtab held its coming out party at the Copa d’Oro bar in Santa Monica, processing around $1,200 in transactions throughout the evening. The mayor even showed up, and ordered a Coke using the app. Getting the mayor wasn’t easy for Townsend and Hill, who admitted to emailing him around 20 times, begging him to show up. It worked. Throughout the evening, customers placed 150 orders. It was a real, if moderate, success.

From left: Flowtab co-founder Mike Townsend, Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom, co-founder Kyle Hill and CTO Alex Kouznetsov

To get people in the door, Flowtab was picking up the bill for the evening’s revelry. But that was secondary to the event proving that, when its technology flowed properly, Flowtab had built something that worked and people seemed to enjoy.

After the launch party, Flowtab was invited to present in the LA Startup Competition, an annual event. They won, besting 14 other startups, but turned down the offered investment from VoiVoida Ventures. The location of VoiVoida was far from Flowtab’s Santa Monica digs, and the company didn’t want to move. Still, the win felt good. Townsend called it a “confidence boost.”

Still in the learning stage of their venture, Team Flowtab went to the Nightclub and Bar Convention in Las Vegas. The company didn’t acquire new bar customers for its technology, but the trip did convince them that a business model idea that they were kicking around wouldn’t work: Flowtab could not be distributed through partnership with companies that sell Point of Sale (POS) systems.

Flowtab would therefore have to build its own sales team, it realized. That meant more overhead, more staff, and more work for the little company that remained dramatically under-capitalized.

By now, Flowtab had worked its way into three bars in L.A., but was seeing nothing like critical mass or organic growth. At its tender age and size, Flowtab had now decided that it needed intellectual property protection.

My IP Is My IP Not Your IP

You want to protect your IP, right? Well, maybe not. Flowtab filed a patent concerning the “ability for merchant sellers and servers in hospitality establishments to use point-of-sale applications to send one-click/one-touch order-status notifications to mobile devices of their customers.” It wasn’t a good move.

Looking back, founders Hill and Townsend describe the effort as a waste of time, and a drain on their finances. It burned “lots of energy” and yielded nothing more than an “investor talking point,” they told me. Hill explained that the largest “value that [Flowtab] got out of the patent was convincing investors that it actually meant something.”

At this early stage in its corporate life, with only a few bars on its platform, and a user base in the hundreds, Flowtab spent and invested scarce resources into something that would eventually yield it nothing.

Better Apps, So Let’s Party Our Faces Off

Landing July 1, 2012, the second version of Flowtab was done. Still coded in HTML5 that was wrapped into native code, the second iteration was a dramatic improvement on its predecessor. The bar-facing iPad app could now load drink orders asynchronously, limiting meaningless refreshes. The new version of Flowtab, like the two before it, was aimed more at responding to bartender requests than answering users’ needs.

With the new app in place, Flowtab wanted to bump up its usership figures, which meant that it planned another party. Flowtab wasn’t attracting many users on its own in the bars it was installed in, so it wanted to bring more to its locations, and do it in a very public fashion. The resulting event was a comical cockup.

Flowtab teamed up with Uber and Thrillist for the three-bar crawl. Each of the bars that Flowtab was installed in would be in play. Thrillist sold tickets, Uber ferried folks, and Flowtab was in charge of making sure that the drinks kept pouring.

“At this point,” said Hill, “we thought we were hot shit.” Three-hundred people were invited. The event was a catastrophe.

The app failed, the bars were understaffed, and drink orders piled up, leaving 35 in the queue at once in the second pub the group visited. That bar had a single bartender. It was stuffed with 150 patrons who were told that Flowtab could get them a drink, fast.

It’s great to go out and get your ass kicked.

Finally, Flowtab’s server went down, scuttling the entire operation. Hill started handing out margaritas by the fistful to keep everyone happy. The Flowtab team buckled under the stress. After the abortive bar bashes wound down, Hill went to the beach, wearing his Flowtab shirt, and sat down for an hour by himself. The app picked up a number of 1-star reviews following the debacle.

Looking back, Hill and Townsend have a slightly positive take on the experience: It’s great to go out and get your ass kicked, they told me. Not that they would ever want to go through the agony of being in charge of hundreds of people wanting a drink as their server failed again, but it was like middle school: good to have done once. Hill claims that the situation provided “fuel” to keep going.

The event did lead to product improvements, including limiting the number of drinks that could be placed into the iPad app queue at a time. This cut bartender confusion, and helped staunch lines where people picked up their drinks. If the queue was full, you had to wait.

Another lesson: Sometimes you need to wade into new territory slowly, instead of cannonballing in, guns blazing, servers crashing.

Money

Flowtab now needed two things: money and guidance. After applying to a number of incubators in the L.A. area, Flowtab couldn’t find an open door. Local groups found it odd that their CTO was in the Bay Area and part time. Concerns were also raised about the size and approachability of the market that Flowtab had selected.

However, Mike Jones, the CEO of L.A.-based incubator and studio Science, helped the small company out by introducing it to DexOne, which sells advertising in the Yellow Pages. It’s a public firm, with a market capitalization of over $100 million. So, Flowtab linked up with the guys who print and leave massive phone books outside your apartment each year. DexOne has an experimental arm, which would prove important for Flowtab as it was a potential answer to its distribution question.

Technologists aren’t always salesman, but founders should be.

Around this time, Hill and Townsend went on Shark Tank, the reality TV investment program. In Hills’ words, it was a “long and drawn out process” that was “very involved.” The show wanted drama, and in the end not only did Flowtab not land a deal, but their pitch session didn’t make it onto TV, depriving the group of any free advertising they might have hoped for.

After the accelerators didn’t bite, and Shark Tank had done little more than nibble, Flowtab decided to move north to San Francisco, where they hoped they would have more access to capital.

What about the bars in L.A.? Well, following the riotous bar crawl, they weren’t exactly enthused with the Flowtab product. The company cut loose, and following an endless wave of others, landed in the Bay Area.

The company raised $50,000 within the first month in the city.

DexOne: A Needed Friend

DexOne, the Yellow Pages company that sold nearly $2 billion of that product in 2012, was Flowtab’s shot at distribution. DexOne has a team of 12 that it partners with small tech companies to try out new things. Somewhat progressive, and perhaps interesting for a company so traditional, DexOne had what Flowtab did not: capital and manpower.

DexOne developed a pilot program to sell Flowtab in Colorado. It put six full-time sales people on the ground to push the new product. The partnership landed the largest strip club in Denver, Shotgun Willies, where the model worked moderately well. Culture, however, appeared to work against them. Folks in the strip club didn’t seem too excited about using their phones to order a drink.

The DexOne deal landed a few other bars, as well, but as in L.A., the growth was slow, and only garnered by firm grind. Back in San Francisco, the Flowtab team was experimenting with new ways to grab bars, and hopefully, paying customers.

San Francisco

Crowdsourcing might be a dead buzzword, but hiring out grunt work is as popular as ever. Flowtab, in a bid to reach more bars, hired a call center in the Philippines to call potential bars in San Francisco. The idea was to massively scale their initial outreach, and then send in the founders to lock down deals that the call center would set up for them.

The lesson according to Flowtab: Technologists aren’t always salesman, but founders should be.
After the call center didn’t perform, Flowtab hired Trevor Bisset, who promptly cut the call center on his first day on the job. Weeks later, he had landed the group’s first bar in the city, McTeague’s.

A short note on McTeague’s. The bar is located on Polk Street here in San Francisco. It’s a fine place to be Monday through Thursday, a low-key sports bar that won’t be too crowded unless the Giants are on a streak. But Fridays and weekends at McTeague’s are a complete zoo. Amateurs from four counties descend on the place, turning it into a part club, part bar, and complete goat rodeo. You can’t get to the bar, let alone get a drink.

So, if there were ever a bar that Flowtab should work at, it was McTeague’s. Anything to break the logjam would be welcome. McTeague’s remains the only bar in San Francisco to my knowledge that has a sign in the bathroom stating that drug use is not allowed, and that bar staff will be checking to ensure that things remain clean. People still do coke, presumably, but the place would prefer it if they didn’t.

McTeague’s was a get for Flowtab, but they had eyes on a bigger prize: the San Francisco Marriott Marquis. With 1,500 rooms, it’s massive. It has three bars. Landing the hotel would have been a coup. The team designed and pitched a presentation. But in the end, Flowtab’s lack of feature capability to integrate with the Marquis’s point of sale system (Micros) scuttled the idea.

Startups are human endeavors, and around this time, a friend of the company, Brandon Zacharie, started contributing for beer and pizza. The team credits Zacharie with getting them off FTP and onto Git where they belonged. According to Hill, Zacharie specifically helped the team “integrate web socket connection between the user app and the [bar’s] iPad” application.

Meanwhile In Denver

Three bars locked down but not doing much in San Francisco, the DexOne work in Colorado was ramping up. Little Flowtab found itself a bit more stretched than it could manage. The team would later liken the moment to tossing logs onto a small fire, choking it.

Flowtab wasn’t performing well in the bars close to its core team. How could DexOne flog the product successfully? Despite the fact that people were not organically flocking to the app in bars, DexOne wanted to press ahead and get Flowtab into even more locations. A doubling-down in Denver? Yes. Orlando? DexOne wanted to go there. Portland? Yeah.

But Flowtab, far away from the Rockies, didn’t have enough money to support that many cities, and had concerns about its business model, which at that point charged users $1 to file an order.

The handful of bars that were signed up in Denver through the DexOne deal paid $1,200 to get started with Flowtab. It wasn’t a small sum, but the cash went to providing them with the hardware that they needed to run the service (an iPad, etc.).

Worried about money and consumer reaction to the product in its current form, Flowtab declined the expansion that DexOne wanted.

Lyft

Ironically, one of the most successful efforts that Flowtab found to accumulate new users was killed by the ridesharing service Lyft. Don’t fret, Lyft had every right to do so. Flowtab recruited Lyft drivers to hand out free drink coupons to riders heading to bars that it was installed in. Drivers got $5 every time a rider signed up and ordered, and that drink was free for the new user. Around 30 drivers took part, and more than 1,000 drinks were given away.

Ask forgiveness, not permission was the idea here. It worked until it didn’t, and it didn’t when Lyft asked them politely to knock it off. Still, for three months Flowtab was picking up new users at a decent pace, a rare moment of encouraging growth for the company.

Empty Distribution

With a fresh $25,000 note from a technology investor at a venture capital group in Palo Alto, Flowtab had 12 active bars in three cities by January 2013 but little in the way of active users. The company set a small goal: By March 1, they wanted to have at least 50 active users, who were using Flowtab several times per month.

As a company, Flowtab was beleaguered by inconsistent usage; most folks just didn’t go back to the same bar every week, so a new user might enjoy Flowtab, but not use the service again for months until they were back in the bar they signed up in.

Order volume was low, and as a company Flowtab was starting to doubt its model. Were they only able to pick up new users through gimmicks? Would they always have to show up to a bar to get people to sign up? Order volume could spike over 60 orders in a day if Flowtab had a presence at a bar. But when they weren’t it would fall, sometimes to single digits.

It was time to prove that Flowtab could scale. With 12 bars, the company had enough market presence to test its service. It would get users to the bars, and then see if it could keep them around. Hill and Townsend came up with 12 new ways to get users, including Facebook ads. Each effort, according to  Hill, “fell flat on its face.” Nothing spurred organic growth, and Flowtab didn’t have the funds to keep buying users that were at best infrequent revenue sources.

As a final effort to see what could be done, Flowtab decided to have a much smaller party. McTeague’s and the nearby Mayes were pressed into service for the Super Bowl-themed event. About 100 attendees floated between the two bars. Unlike the L.A. pub crawl meltdown, the event cost Flowtab a modest $500.

They acquired 92 new users, which worked out to around $5.50 per. That was cheaper than the Lyft effort, which cost $5 for the drivers plus a drink for the new user.

The economics were difficult to make work. Flowtab’s $1-per-order fee meant that even at $5.50 per new account, the average user would have to make six orders in the history of their usership to allow Flowtab to break even. People were not drinking enough to make that feasible.

More Money And A New Business Model

The DexOne partnership had proven that some bars were willing to pay for Flowtab, but a few checks of $1,200 apiece were not going to float the company. Flowtab wanted to raise $300,000, but in the face of its challenges, the sum was daunting.

And with its current business model floundering, Flowtab decided it was time to pivot. So, instead of charging users to pay an extra fee to use its service, Flowtab flipped around and decided to sell advertising to alcohol companies inside of its application. About to order whiskey? Why not a Jim Beam?

It made some sense: Bars and users were not rich, but the corporate interests behind Bacardi and Johnnie Walker certainly were. And they are banned from advertising inside of a bar.

Flowtab felt that since it was a mobile application, the law did not apply to them. However, after meeting with six small and large liquor and beer companies, it became clear that Flowtab simply did not have the scale needed to land a deal large enough to matter.

Alcohol Apocalypse

February 2013 was a brutal month for the other small companies looking to execute something similar to Flowtab. BarTab, which had raised more than $1.5 million, essentially went offline. Coaster, a local competitor, in the words of Flowtab, “began losing bars.”

The shakeup of its better-funded rivals unnerved Flowtab: If folks with more money and distribution than themselves couldn’t make the model work, what shot did they have?

It was stock-taking time. Flowtab had, in its own estimation, zero organic growth and few if any regular users, and it couldn’t find a conduit to new users that would scale. New efforts would cause a minor rise that would anti-soufflé the moment the monetary influx halted.

Six weeks into the process, and given its doubts about its model, Flowtab put fundraising on ice. They had $20,000 left in the bank, and its hopes to pull off its bar model were tanking.

It was time for another pivot.

Pivot 2.0

It’s now March 2013. Flowtab had burned through a total of $110,000. It had fewer than 2,000 users, and the team had come to the conclusion that they did not have product-market fit. I suspect the team could have come to this conclusion far sooner if they knew a year prior what they knew in March.

In the end, the team decided that their problem was distance. GrubHub, which is comically successful, brings something to you that is far from you. Flowtab wasn’t saving you enough time or energy to make it a compelling experience.

However, the team had built a technology stack and had a few dollars left in the bank. They began looking for a new application for their software. After poking around golf courses, hotels, and other potential venues, Flowtab decided that stadiums were the best bet for its tech. Beer as a Service? Something like that.

In startup style, Hill and Townsend called every stadium in California â€" there are 114 if you were wondering â€" and met face to face with a few, including the Giants, Warriors, and A’s. However, even as they were starting to sour on the prospect of stadiums (too much regulation and other issues), a different company called Bypass raised $3.5 million, partially from AEG, which manages 50 stadiums. eBay-owned StubHub also took part in the raise.

If there had been a slightly open door to apply Flowtab to the stadium business, it had closed.

Flowtab was “just like……… fuck” at that point, according to its founders.

Mike Jones, Final Round

Mike Jones of Science, who had helped Flowtab land the DexOne deal, met with the company again. The team needed counsel. After explaining their stadium exploits, Jones agreed that it didn’t make sense as an avenue for the firm. The company was also all but flat broke.

“The last two years have been a huge learning experience, and we believe the real failure would be not sharing our story with the world.”

Seven days after Bypass’s raise was announced, on April 17, Flowtab was shuttered. Trevor the sales guy went to a startup in Portland. Friend of the company Zacharie went full time at a different startup, and the erstwhile CTO kept to his day job.

Jones offered to hire Hill and Townsend into Science â€" it was a non-monetary acquisition of sorts â€" where they worked on and recently launched HomeHero, a marketplace for home care of seniors.

As part of the Science deal, both Hill and Townsend are back in Los Angeles, full circle from where they started. It was a long, eventful, often ridiculous, and always stressful experience. But to hear the founders tell it, it was a rollercoaster, but one that had them grinning through nearly all of its twists and turns.

Post Script: The Australian Mining Magnate

The oddest piece of Flowtab history started with a random email that was almost deleted. A dude in Australia loved the product and the idea and wanted to chat. This was in February 2013.

The Aussie, who had made his money in mining, liked Flowtab enough to fly out to meet the fledgling firm. Three months later, a month after the company had been shuttered and the team scattered, an acquisition offer was made.

But with new roles at Science, and no team to speak of, they turned it down. Flowtab was no more. “In the end, Flowtab failed in the sense that we never IPO’d or sold the company,” Hill concluded. “But the last two years have been a huge learning experience, and we believe the real failure would be not sharing our story with the world.”

Read, examine their documents, and do not repeat their mistakes.

Top Image Credit: John Picken McTeague’s Image: Tom Hilton. Lyft Image: Alfredo Mendez Empty bar: Alexandra Zakharova Jim Beam: Jamie Giant’s Stadium: Jon Lee Clark Other Images: Flowtab

Nokia Takes Auto Ambitions Into High Gear With Connected Driving, A Cross-Platform Suite Of In-Car Navigation Services and Smartphone Apps

While Nokia continues to work on clawing back some of the once-market-leading smartphone business it has lost in the last few years to Apple and Android handset makers like Samsung, it has also slowly been building out a business based around its mapping and navigation division, rebranded as HERE earlier this year. That strategy â€" which has seen deals with the likes of Toyota, Volkswagen, BMW and Garmin for its in-car navigation systems â€" is going into high gear today. Nokia is launching Connected Driving, which included HERE Auto for embedded in-car navigation; HERE Auto Cloud for extra services like real-time traffic updates; and HERE Auto Companion, apps that will make it seamless to link up location data that you want to use or that you’ve created in your car, with what you are doing when you are outside the car and using your smartphone instead. On top of this, it’s upgrading its HERE Traffic system with a new data processing engine called “Halo.”

The launch today, in some regards, represents one of Nokia’s biggest challenges yet: it’s pitching itself as an operating system provider for other hardware makers (car companies; in-car system makers) to use as the platform for new products. Call it Nokia’s Android strategy.

Nokia is unveiling this suite of services today at the the International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Germany. As with the rest of the products in HERE, Nokia’s intention is for all of this to be interoperable with different smartphone platforms. What that will mean in theory is that while HERE Auto and Auto Cloud will be loaded on to in-car systems, the apps in the Auto Companion will be launched for multiple platforms, including iOS and Android. In practice, though, Floris van de Klashorst, VP of connected cars for HERE, tells me that it’s likely that we will see the first services to be built on the platform that Nokia itself uses for smartphones, Windows Phone.

A rundown of the new services:

HERE Auto. This is Nokia’s embedded in-car navigation service. Using cached content, Nokia says it’s the first on the market that provides comprehensive mapping data even when a user doesn’t have a data connection. This includes turn by turn voice guided navigation in 95 countries, as well as 2D, 3D and satellite map views, with street-level imagery. Van de Klashorst tells me that Nokia is now also working on an SDK (yet to be released publicly) that will let third parties integrate services directly into this experience. He pointedly tells me that this will not include ads, which users they have surveyed have said are too distracting in cars. But this doesn’t rule out placing markers, for example, for a particular pizza joint when you are driving by it looking for some Italian food. Other features that are likely to come in by way of the SDK are music services and social networking services (not distracting like ads at all, right?!). Early users of this before the wider release include in-car system maker Continental, which is using them as part of its “Open Infotainment Platform.” I’d expect other app makers and navigation service companies to be added to the list soon.

HERE Auto Cloud. Like HERE Auto, this is also designed to work with and without data connections â€" useful for when you are in remote areas, or you are in regions where you may be roaming outside of your carrier’s network. This is Nokia’s own layer of extra services around driving â€" for example real-time traffic updates, helping drivers avoid congested areas, road closures or blockages that occur en route, as well as other services such as recommendations on places to eat, parking spots, information on where to charge an electric vehicle or where to find the most inexpensive fuel.

From the screenshots that Nokia provided to me, it looks like this is one of the fruits of its relationship with Foursquare:

HERE Auto Companion. This is the bridge between what Nokia is doing in the car and what it is doing outside of it. The Auto Companion, as Van de Klashorst demonstrated to me, works both on the web and as a mobile app, and it’s actually very cool: what it lets you do is create mapping instructions or take notes of a place that you’d like to visit, when you are sitting at your computer or on your phone, and then, when you get into your HERE-powered car, those data points follow you. If you start a trip in your car, and then park it, you can continue finding your way using your handset. Taking a page from the many apps that let users control what their TVs at home are recording, Nokia says that drivers can also use the app to find their car (using LiveSight augmented reality technology) and check stats for fuel levels and tire pressure. Part of this will be based on the new HALO platform, which basically will gather data using different sensors on the car. This will be used not just for app services for the consumer but to help gather more accurate information about weather in a particular place and more.

For cars that are shared between more than one person (say, in a family) each user can have his or her own interface in a vehicle:

Van de Klashorst tells me that the big idea here is to personalize those in-car experiences: “One thing that is apparent is that people have a strong relationship both with their cars and with their phones, but the in-car systems are ice cold. People cannot influence or modify or personalise them. To make them personal is a very important aspect.”

And when you think about this, it’s a potentially interesting area when you link it up with wider trends in the automotive space, such as with car sharing services like Zipcar. “With car sharing services, this car that you don’t own becomes your car. Systems like this once will be a very important part of elevating and experience to make it your own,” he notes.

Apart from the challenges of competing against other smartphone players (including Google, Apple and BlackBerry) who also have stakes in the automotive game â€" Apple already has integrations with several car makers and there are often rumors swirling of how this will expand over time; Google has gone so far as to create self-driving vehicles; and BlackBerry has QNX â€" Nokia is doing this from a position that is not without its own challenges. In Nokia’s last quarterly earnings, Here posted sales of $305 million, down 18% over last year, up 8% on the previous quarter and it remains loss-making, with a $116 million operating deficit, which is at least marginally better than the $120 million a year ago.

Still, Nokia has in its hands a very key asset: it holds one of the biggest databases of mapping information in the world, meaning it doesn’t need to rely on third parties for it. And even with its many layoffs, it still employs hundreds of engineers that are thinking of clever ways of using that to Nokia’s advantage. Nokia has nothing to lose by trying to get out into pole position in this space at this still-early stage in the connected car revolution.

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August 7, 1994, NYSE:NOK

NOKIA is a Finnish multinational communications corporation. It is primarily engaged in the manufacturing of mobile devices and in converging Internet and communications industries. They make a wide range of mobile devices with services and software that enable people to experience music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games, business mobility and more. Nokia is the owner of Symbian operation system and partially owns MeeGo operating system.

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Hands On With The Seven Best Fantasy Football Sites And Apps

With the NFL season just a week away, fans are poring over stats, trash talking their friends, and gearing up for the real season: fantasy football. The national phenomenon has spawned five seasons of a TV show, The League, has NFL teams refitting their stadiums so that fans can track their teams more closely, and costs businesses billions of dollars a year due to distracted employees.

So, easily distracted employees, here are the coolest and most useful places to play fantasy football out thereâ€"from the household names like ESPN to a small startup that’s doing fantasy exclusively on your phone. I didn’t rank them because a lot of deciding “which one is best” depends on what type of player you are and what fits you.

ESPN

ESPN has been my go-to for years now. It has an awesome interface that’s easy to useâ€"especially the drafting tool, a great mobile app that it’s improved this offseason, and solid player rankings. ESPN’s Livecast, which shows you the scores of all the NFL games alongside your fantasy matchup in real time, is a godsend. ESPN is my personal favorite, and whether you’re a fantasy rookie or a seasoned veteran, you really can’t go wrong with it.

Yahoo

The old Yahoo fantasy football app was like watching the Oakland Raiders play. You could tell it was supposed to be (fantasy) football, but man it was awful.

The company redid their app this summer, and it’s a huge improvement. One of my leagues just switched from ESPN to Yahoo, and I have to say the two are about even so far for me. Yahoo has a nice, easy to navigate mobile app, and had a really smooth drafting tool. Yahoo even gave out report cards for each team grading their drafts right after it concluded, which was a fun little feature. The app itself prominently displays links to Yahoo’s other mobile apps, which is smart and may further Yahoo and CEO Marissa Mayer’s refocused on the company’s mobile apps.

Fleaflicker

In football, the flea flicker is a trick play where the running back takes the ball and runs towards the line before turning and pitching it back to the quarterback who then throws it downfield. Fleaflicker the site is anything but a trick playâ€"more of a dive straight up the middle. The old school site hearkens back to a simpler time, before mobile apps and big ESPN and Yahoo sites with beautiful displays, when people drafted on big boards in their basements, adding up stats on pencil and paper.

Fleaflicker goes with a clean, simple spreadsheet look that does a good job of feeling like old school fantasy football, while still offering real-time scoring and other modern-day features. It’s super customizable for the hardcore fans out there, but also has a really simple interface for the beginners.

Fanium

Fanium has an interesting take on fantasy, going solely mobile. The interface is super simple, with very little information. But this is a double-edged sword, as there are few stats or insights to look up if you really want good info on your players.

I participated in a Fanium draft (8 teams, 16 player each), and each player was given up to eight hours to make their selection. The draft went from Thursday afternoon to Tuesday morning, as not everyone was right near their phones all the time. I had mixed feelings about the draftâ€"it felt a lot like fantasy football for people who find fantasy to be a chore. I love gathering together and smack talking during a few hour-long draft.

In many ways, Fanium is the antithesis of Fleaflicker and My Fantasy Leagueâ€"it’s not customizable, with rigid preset roster sizes, and is missing some of the classic elements of fantasy football, like kickers and defenses.

At first, I didn’t like it. It felt like fantasy football for people who don’t like fantasy football. But it is a really fast, lightweight app, which is awesome if you’re out all day Sunday checking your fantasy team while watching the games. Fanium is a great intro to fantasy football, as it isn’t much of a time commitment or too much to understand, but still maintains the key awesomeness of fantasy. It could also be a great accompanying app, with the more hardcore players using something like Yahoo or ESPN and the more casual fans using Fanium. We know Yahoo loves to make acquisitions, even fantasy football startups…

The Best Of The Rest: NFL, CBS, FOX

These three are fine places to play fantasy football. I just don’t understand why you’d play on one of these sites when the experience you’re looking for will be better on ESPN or Yahoo. All three have pretty good unique content and offer the typical fantasy settings and features that veteran players are used to. CBS and the NFL have nice mobile apps, but I strongly prefer Yahoo’s and ESPN’s. Fox doesn’t even have a mobile app (seriously, what are you doing, FOX?) for their fantasy game.

The Future

Most of the smaller offerings out there are slight tweaks on the existing game. If a startup really wants to make an impact in this space, they need to make their core offering different. Several options immediately jump out:

Despite the comparable popularity in college football, no one has really cracked a good way to make fantasy football fun and engaging for college teams. The leagues are inherently very different, and current fantasy is largely based off of the NFL styleâ€"win as many games as you can to make the playoffs, keep your team healthy, then ride hot players and some luck to a championship (or so they tell meâ€"being an Eagles fan, I can’t confirm anything about winning championships). But the college game is very differentâ€"strengths of schedules and conference matter a lot more, and the goal is to go undefeated and land in the top twoâ€"err, fourâ€"spots to compete for a championship. Basing a league off of this would be an interesting departure from the typical NFL-centric leagues.

Most of the people I know who do play a version of college fantasy football have made their own systems for tracking and awarding points, as fans are left with very few options if they want to really customize their leagues. Give users an insane amount of optionsâ€"essentially just the software and storage for whatever league they want to createâ€"and you could grab a nice niche of fans who want to branch out and do their own thing.

And fantasy leagues have failed to capture the impact of individual defensive players on the game rather than merely defensive units. One running back typically has a much larger impact on a fantasy game than an entire defensive and special teams unit, which is obviously not how the actual games work. Offensive players are much easier to track, as their individual accomplishments can be recorded by how many yards and touchdowns they have, whereas solid defensive coverage or touchdown-saving tackles are harder to objectively measure. But sports statistics are getting more and more advanced, and someone will be able to figure this thing out sooner or laterâ€"might as well be the little guy or they have no shot in the long run against ESPN and Yahoo.

And as much as DirecTV’s Red Zone has attracted diehard fans who want to watch every touchdown, the bridge between fantasy football and watching games live leaves much to be desired. Whether its DirecTV, ESPN and its potential web-based TV, or another company, users would go bonkers if their fantasy rosters were connected to live games on their TVs. Sportvision, the company that created the first down line for TV, is working on technology that would allow viewers to see their players highlighted on the field (you can see Sportvision’s early mockup of this above).

Well, that about does it for me. Good luck out there, and don’t draft Aaron Hernandez. Once you’ve picked a site to host your fantasy league, Eliza Brooke has you covered with six tools to help you dominate your opponents.

Images via: here, Boston.com, Tumblr, and  Gawker.

ESPN.com is an online American sports portal covering the NFL, NBA, MLB, MLS, European Soccer, college sports, and much more.

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January 1, 1994

December 4, 1996, NASDAQ:YHOO

Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It has since evolved into a major internet brand with search, content verticals, and other web services. Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!), incorporated in 1995, is a global Internet brand. To users, the Company provides owned and operated online properties and services (Yahoo! Properties, Offerings, or Owned and Operated sites). Yahoo! also extends its marketing platform and access to Internet users beyond Yahoo! Properties through its distribution network...

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CBS Corporation is a mass media company with constituent parts that reach back to the beginnings of the broadcast industry, as well as newer businesses that operate on the leading edge of the media industry. CBS, through its many and varied operations, combines broad reach with well-positioned local businesses, all of which provide it with an extensive distribution network by which it serves audiences and advertisers in all 50 states and key international markets. It has operations in several...

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Fox Sports Interactive Media, LLC develops new media initiatives for FOX Sports and FOX Sports Net. The company operates a Website that acts as an online source of sports news, information, listings, games, and special features about programming on FOX Sports, FOX Sports Net, and FOX Sports Radio. It also operates a 24-hour sports video channel specifically designed for smartphones. The company was incorporated in 2000 and is based in Los Angeles, California. Fox Sports Interactive Media, LLC operates...

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Fanium is a sports technology company that develops fantasy sports applications for mobile devices. It was founded by Grant Gurtin when he was a junior at Brown University. Since the company was founded in 2011, Fanium has developed a suite of apps that has evolved the way that people consume their sports and fantasy content. By aggregating expert Twitter accounts and creating a unique keyword search technology, Fanium has sought to use social media advances as a key component of...

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Fleaflicker is a fantasy football site that rose in popularity during the 2005 NFL season, when many large fantasy sports providers, including ESPN.com, suffered major outages and forced fans to look elsewhere. They turned to Fleaflicker, a free, ad-supported service that offers a list of extensive features and options not traditionally available for free fantasy sports services. Among the long list of features: breaking news and weather reports, an in-depth breakdown of your team’s positional and roster strengths, a live...

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Xiaomi, What Americans Need To Know

Xiaomi’s smartphones are currently sold only in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, but its hire of Hugo Barra as Vice President of Xiaomi Global is a clear signal that the three-year-old company’s plans to break into international markets soon.

Its track record of rapid growth and savvy marketing means that it may not be long before Xiaomi, which means “little rice” in Mandarin Chinese, starts making a big footprint in the U.S. smartphone market. For those of you who are still thinking “Google-love-quad-Xiaomi-WHAT JUST HAPPENED?,” here’s a quick primer on Barra’s new employer.

Rapid Growth

Xiaomi Tech was founded just three years ago, but it already has a valuation of $10 billion after completing its latest round of fundraising earlier this month. To put that into context, Xiaomi is now on par with Lenovo’s market value of $10 billion and almost twice BlackBerry’s current market valuation of $5.5 billion.

The company only started selling smartphones in October 2011, but it recently raised its sales target for 2013 to 20 million smartphones, up from its previous 15 million goal.

Handpicked Team

Xiaomi is staffed by former employees of Microsoft, Motorola and (of course) Google. Barra joins former colleague Lin Bin, who was previously the Vice President of Google China’s Engineering Research Institute and Engineering Director of Google before co-founding Xiaomi as its President.

Xiaomi’s founding team was carefully put together by co-founder and CEO Lei Jun with the goal of creating a smartphone company that could take on Apple.

Many profiles in the Western media center on a narrative that presents Lei Jun as a startup founder who aspires to be “the Steve Jobs of China.” Lei Jun has encouraged that comparison, but it belies the fact that he is already one of China’s most influential and successful tech entrepreneurs.

Lei Jun’s resume includes Joyo.com, which was purchased by Amazon in 2004 for $75 million and is now Amazon China and chairing the board of UCWeb, the largest mobile Web browser in China. He also founded YY, which had its IPO in November.

Lei Jun has said that he wants Xiaomi to push the idea that high-end hardware can be made in China, despite the country’s reputation for manufacturing low-cost, low-quality goods. In May, Lei Jun told the GMIC conference in Beijing that he modeled Xiaomi after two unlikely sources of inspiration: a 340-year-old traditional Chinese medicine company called Tongrentang and hot pot chain Hai Di Lao. Lei Jun says these two companies taught him never to produce lower-quality products for the sake of cost, and the importance of customer service.

Challenging Samsung In China

A recent report showed that Xiaomi’s flagship Mi 2S was the most popular phone sold in China in the first half of 2013, followed by Samsung’s Galaxy S4. The Mi 2S was released in April, at about the same time as the S4.

Xiaomi still trails Samsung in overall market share. According to Analysys International, in the second quarter Xiaomi had a 2.5% share of China’s smartphone market, compared to 18.6% for Samsung and 4.6% for Apple.

If smartphones sales continue to grow at their current path, however, Xiaomi has a good chance of making a significant dent in Samsung’s market share. Xiaomi announced in July that it had sold 7.03 million handsets in the first half of 2013. Over that period, it made RMB 13.27 billion (about $2.16 billion) in revenue. That means Xiaomi sold almost the same number of phones in the first half of 2013 as it did in all of 2012, and made more than double the amount of revenue in the first half of 2013 as the $957.46 million it netted in the corresponding period a year ago.

Savvy Marketing

Xiaomi’s sales can be attributed in part to its willingness to try offbeat marketing strategies. In December 2012, Xiaomi announced that it will sell phones directly from Sina Weibo, China’s top microblogging platform with 400 million members. The unusual marketing tactic proved successful: within two days of the announcement, Xiaomi said it had sold 50,000 smartphones in five seconds, with 1.3 million additional reservations.

The company has gained a loyal fanbase by incorporating user feedback into the design of its latest sets and Android skins, which in turn helps the company keep its development costs down. Every week, Xiaomi releases a new version of miUI, its customized Android skin, which is then scrutinized by a few hundred thousand hardcore users.

Xiaomi’s smartphones are typically made available in batches of 200,000 to 300,000 on its Web site and sometimes sell out in less than an hour. Xiaomi has dismissed complaints that their limited supplies are meant to inflate demand. Instead, the company insists gauging consumer reaction before rolling out more handsets helps its keep prices down. Xiaomi is ramping up production, however, and there are signs that it may become one of Foxconn’s top five clients this year.

Monetization Questions Remain

Xiaomi’s plan is to sell high-end smartphones at or slightly beyond the cost of materials and eventually monetize through software and services. Its handsets currently range from 799 RMB (about $130) to 1499 RMB ($245).

The company has not revealed its profits, but investor Hans Tung, a partner at Qiming Venture Partners, has said that Xiaomi makes about 10% profit on its handsets.

Xiaomi still has to prove, however, that its business strategy will bear fruit. Xiaomi’s sales figures are living up to the company’s hype from a consumer perspective, but as Kim-Mai Cutler noted in May, Xiaomi still has to show that it can monetize software services, an area in which it faces competition from Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba and Tencent.

It remains to be seen what Xiaomi’s plans for its business strategy are now that Barra, Google’s former Vice President of product management for Android, is on board to head its international expansion, but we might find out soon: Xiaomi’s next big press conference, at which it is expected to launch its latest product lineup, is on September 5.

Xiaomi Inc. is a privately owned company that designs, develops, and sells smartphones, apps, and consumer electronics. Its core line of products includes the Mi 2S, the Mi 2A, Mi Red, and the MiBox digital media receiver (all of which are available for sale in Greater China). All Xiaomi products are sold exclusively via the company’s website. Xiaomi’s software products include the Andriod-based MIUI ROM, MiTalk, DuoKan reader, and MiCloud. In 2010, Lei Jun (founder and CEO of...

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With New Funding In Tow, Lendio And Creditera Are Helping Small Businesses Secure Loans And Avoid Bad Credit

Brock Blake and Levi King have founded more than six companies between them. Over the course of their various entrepreneurial endeavors, like many other small business owners entrepreneurs, Blake and King applied for dozens of business loans â€" and received dozens of rejections. When they did receive approvals, they usually came with terms, rates or amounts that made the loan more of a hassle than a help.

In 2011, Blake and King launched Lendio, a service that aims to simplify the process and help match small business owners on Main Street with the right type of loan (and lender) for their business. Rather than forcing small business owners to go bank to bank, lender to lender and wade through complicated terms and thousands of options, Lendio essentially automates the process, partnering with hundreds of lenders and aggregated more than 3,500+ loan options across those lenders to help remove the friction.

Rather than compete with small business lenders like On Deck or Capital Access Network, much like Kayak does for airfare, Lendio partners with these lenders to enable business owners to receive (what is often same-day) pre-approval, while providing their partners with access to quality candidates (and business).

Today, having helped hundreds of thousands of small business owners connect with loans, Lendio is announcing that it has closed a $4.5 million round of Series B financing, led by Runa Capital. Two of the startup’s previous investors, Tribeca Venture Partners and Highway 12 Ventures, also participated in the round, bringing Lendio’s total investment to $10.5 million.

For the average Main Street small business, sorting through the thousands of loan options can be a headache. Generally speaking, entrepreneurs have to start from scratch, with little knowledge of which loans work and which don’t, and the research required to find the right loan takes time that could be better spent elsewhere. Furthermore, it’s no wonder that, writ large, small business lending suffers from a lack of transparency, when brokerage firms charge exorbitant fees to help businesses find the right loan options.

Like Zenefits is doing for startup health insurance and benefits, Lendio is essentially attempting to become a next-gen broker, streamlining and automating the process by cutting the middle men out of the process and connecting lenders directly to those in need of capital. To do so, the startup asks business owners to answer four questions that help them build a profile on the business and get a sense of what type of loan would best suit their needs.

Lendio allows entrepreneurs to choose the best loan from a set of options it serves, then introduces businesses directly to lenders. And, in the case of some of the more tech-savvy lenders, like On Deck and CANN, Lendio has built a set of services and API tools that integrate with their underwriting platforms.

This means that, when Lendio finds a quality applicant that is a good match to one of their loan packages, it pings the lender and can get an answer on whether or not they’re pre-approved and what the loan amount will be within a matter of seconds. This isn’t true for every lender, Blake says, but the number of lenders integrated with its APIs is growing.

Lendio wants to optimize the chances of finding the right loan for every small business, but the fact of the matter is that not every business is going to qualify. The startup claims that about 70 percent of businesses are approved and, for those who aren’t, the platform offers tools to help them prepare.

But Lendio isn’t the only startup that’s trying to make the lending process less of a pain. In fact, at the end of last year, Levi King left Lendio to tackle another point of friction within small business lending: Credit. Launching earlier this year, King’s new startup, Creditera, aims to give business owners easy access to personal and business credit reports, scores and ongoing alerts through a single sign-on interface for both types of credit data.

After watching hundreds of thousands of business owners come through Lendio attempting to acquire financing for their business, he says, the biggest obstacle that stood in the way of securing a great loan came down to credit, personal or business. This, in and of itself, is the same reason why On Deck developed its own scoring system for a business’ creditworthiness â€" because so many banks rely on personal credit score to evaluate a business owner’s credit. While an owner may run a legitimate, profitable business, forced to let their own credit stand in place of their business, their personal credit score often rules them out.

With Creditera, King isn’t looking to compete with his former startup, especially considering he’s still a shareholder, he says. Instead, Lendio helps business owners get loans by matching them to the right loan and lender, he explains, but personal and business credit are the two most important qualification factors in underwriting.

So, by allowing business owners to get quick access to credit reports, scores and alerts, becoming a kind of aggregator for all the “freecreditreport.coms” of the world, King thinks Creditera could be a potential partner for Lendio and other commercial lenders. It’s also intended to be a place where small business owners can go to find educational material and resources on credit, something he believes is sorely needed in the space.

King says that he believes that there’s a huge market opportunity, considering that there are 30 million small businesses in the U.S. and many of them aren’t keeping an eye on their credit score, in spite of the fact that it’s the lifeblood of their business and has a huge impact on success. The company wants to differentiate from other options out there by offering small business a platform that combines personal and business credit with identity theft solutions into a single platform.

The business model, for now, is simple, King says, with Creditera charging business owners for access to their credit, but that could change going forward. Using this model from the get-go allowed the startup to become cash-flow positive within three months of beta, and raise $650K in seed funding, $500K of which came from Kickstart Seed Fund, and $150K of which came as royalty financing from Rock & Hammer Ventures.

For more, find Lendio at home here and Creditera here.

Lendio is a platform that helps small business owners find lenders and secure loans. After answering a few questions, users are able to compare and review loans. Once they choose a loan, they are introduced to the right lender through Lendio.

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INQ Extends Its Social Magazine App, Material, To iOS After 50,000+ Downloads On Android

Material is a social magazine app powered by Twitter and/or Facebook usage. It’s the latest project from INQ, the U.K.-based, Hutchison Whampoa backed company that used to build social phones â€" way before everyone started embedding Facebook. And before Samsung became big enough to gobble up most of the Android OEM lunch.

INQ announced its pivot away from hardware to software at the start of this year, launching Material in beta on Android in February. The Android version of Material has had more than 50,000 downloads since then, according INQ CEO and co-founder, Ken Johnstone. Today, INQ has extended Material to iOS, and updated the Android app to add an offline view feature and the ability to edit topics. The iOS version of the app has a slightly different design â€" cleaner and less dense, according to Johnstone. But is otherwise the same.

INQ’s “interest extraction engine”, which powers content creation for the social magazine by parsing the user’s Twitter and/or Facebook account, has also been tweaked since the Android beta launch to improve its ability to identify interests from social activity. As with most of these interest identifying algorithms, it apparently improves the more you use it, based on what you look at, and (in the case of Twitter) who you follow.

Material’s content is currently delivered as two daily editions: one in the morning, and a second edition that can be downloaded when it’s ready around 12 hours later. The idea being to offer up a best selection of topical, personalised content from around the web throughout the day. Sections within your magazine are generated based on your social activity, so will differ for each Material user (but can include categories like Books, Films, Technology etc). The app does let you add/remove sections if you don’t like what it’s saying about what you like.

How does Material differ to the social magazine competition of Flipboard, Zite, Pulse et al? Not hugely, really, although Johnstone claims it offers a lower barrier to entry/set-up than rivals, being as it can be powered just by signing in with your Twitter (or Facebook) account. There are also no human curated sections in Material. Content is pulled in solely by looking at activity on your social networks and matching that to stories from across the web â€" therefore his argument is that the content it finds will be entirely unique to you.

“For somebody who has invested a lot of time in Twitter or Facebook anyway, this is about getting a return on that investment,” says Johnstone. ”This product is a very easy product to use based on the work you’ve already put into your social networks. It’s heavily customised, it’s not some guy curating content for a design section, for you, which is the same as everyone else’s design section. It’s completely unique. So in that respect it offers a much more personal experience.”

Twitter on its own is likely to give better results than Facebook on its own, according to Johnstone, assuming you use Twitter enough to generate enough of an interest graph (or don’t, in my case, use it too much for work purposes â€" skewing results). But using both accounts will apparently offer the best results. “Some people will get better results than others, that’s something we’re very conscious of,” he adds. “But it should be pretty good for everybody â€" and hopefully awesome for some.”

In my experience of testing it out for a few days ahead of launch, it has the same issues as all these social magazines: a small portion of content is interesting; the majority is relatively unexciting, being only mildly relevant to some general interests; and another portion of the stuff makes you go WTF?! (In my case, I am apparently following someone on Twitter who really likes Miley Cyrus). Bottom line: the interests of the people you follow are not always informative of your interests.

Unsurprisingly, the overall feeling you get from flicking through an edition is not a cohesive, editorially unified whole, but an algorithmically generated bunch of mostly random stories with (at best) a few loose, overlapping themes. And a lot of redundant duplication. It’s computer-generated content wearing a magazine’s clothes. But that’s a charge you can level at any solely algorithmically powered social magazine.

I’d be hard pressed to rank Material against its social magazines rivals. It’s clearly not entirely optimised for my relatively specialist use of Twitter (and large number of followees) so it seems unfair to judge it based on what it delivers to me. It was also still pretty buggy â€" although Johnstone stressed the iOS app was in the final development test phase, and there were a number of known issues they were aiming to fix for launch.

However one rather key problem I noticed (and which wasn’t on a list of known issues he flagged up ahead of launch) was stories being mis-categorised â€" especially in the ‘Comedy’ section it generated. But then computers being confused by humour is not exactly a new story.

What about business model? Ultimately, INQ’s end-game here is to acquire enough users â€" and learn enough about them â€" to have the data to build an advertising business out of Material, likely based on injecting relevant adverts into each user’s magazine, much like Facebook has done with ads in the Newsfeed on its mobile apps. However Material monetisation is a long way off at this point. For now, INQ’s social magazine experiment is being funded by their long time partner Hutchison so the focus is squarely on pulling in the users â€" and pulling in stuff the users are interested in.

Some screenshots of the Material iOS app follow below.

INQ is an innovative social brand, making Social Mobiles for the Facebook generation. Born and bred in London; with offices in Rome, San Francisco and Beijing; INQ was founded in 2008 as a subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa. The company is a collective of designers and engineers with a passion to make social interactions easier. Since its inception in 2008, INQ have had a considerable influence on the integration of the Internet with mobile, through its earlier award-winning products such...

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Dispatch From The Future: Uber To Purchase 2,500 Driverless Cars From Google

July 25, 2023 â€" As part of its second-quarter earnings announcement today, local transportation and delivery giant Uber announced its biggest bet on autonomous vehicles yet, saying it would purchase 2,500 driverless cars from Google. In addition, the two companies have agreed to a deal in which Uber will share data from its local transportation services with Google, which will use it to further improve its own autonomous car-routing algorithms.

Uber has committed to invest up to $375 million for a fleet of Google’s GX3200 vehicles, which are the company’s third generation of autonomous driving cars, but the first to be approved for commercial use in the U.S. The deal marks the largest single capital investment that Uber has made to date, and is also the first enterprise deal that Google has struck for its new line of driverless vehicles.

The next generation of driverless car

It’s been just five years since Google announced it would begin manufacturing its own driverless cars, and just two-and-a-half years since those vehicles have hit the streets. But the company is already on its third car model, following the first-generation GX1000 two-seat “commuter” model and its followup GX2100 five-seat family sedan.

The GX3200, which was shown off earlier this year at the Detroit Auto Show, is Google’s latest effort to produce a fully electric, fully autonomous vehicle. The car seats four comfortably and has room for up to three suitcases in its rear storage compartment. Like previous Google models, each car acts as its own wireless base station, so that passengers can connect to the Internet through Google’s WirelessGig service.

Due to its low weight and the latest in fuel cell technology, the GX3200 can get up to 750 miles of travel on a single charge, or about 48 hours on standby mode. Like Google’s other autonomous vehicles, the GX3200 is designed to find and dock in the nearest Google PowerUP station whenever it’s not in use.

But unlike the first-generation GX1000 or the follow-up GX2100, this latest car from Google is meant strictly for non-personal use. With it, Google is targeting the enterprise market of local transportation providers like Uber, as well as various municipalities like New York and Chicago. The idea is that those cities could finally do away with their outdated taxi systems and move to a more fully automated fleet of on-demand vehicles.

An on-demand, autonomous Uber

For Uber, meanwhile, the purchase could represent a more driverless future for its local transportation service. While the company has experimented with the use of autonomous cars as part of its fleet, those cars still needed an Uber “driver” present in case of an emergency. However, since the GX3200 has been licensed for commercial use in several states â€" such as California, New York, Illinois, and Washington â€" Uber will be able to deploy the cars without drivers in several of its largest markets.

The company hopes to have its first set of driverless cars on the road by the end of the year, introducing a new service called uberAUTO using those vehicles in one or two of its markets at first. Based on the reception there, Uber says it could have the service available in up to 10 markets by the end of next year.

As part of the deal, the companies will work together to install the latest Uber logistics software directly into the vehicle, and Uber will share some of its traffic and routing data back to Google. With that data, Google says it will be able to provide more accurate real-time information to all cars that are part of its autonomous driving network.

In general, the move to so-called driverless cars and on-demand transportation services has resulted in faster commute times and less congestion in many major cities over the last five years. Uber claims that its service has reduced traffic by up to 35 percent already in many of its biggest markets, and putting more efficient driverless cars on the road should only help improve that.

Meanwhile, the move to autonomous cars, though just a few years old, is already starting to benefit drivers and passengers alike. In California, where the state is testing so-called “autopilot lanes” on the freeways, driverless vehicles can speed up to 120 miles an hour, drastically reducing commute times. And while it’s still early, Google has yet to have an autonomous vehicle be found “at fault” for a major accident, even at those high speeds.

Driver and Auto Manufacturer Concerns

That said, not everyone is happy about the idea of on-demand, driverless cars. When the news was first reported several months ago that Uber and Google were in talks, some of Uber’s drivers expressed displeasure at the idea of being replaced by autonomous vehicles, waging protests outside of its international headquarters in San Francisco.

When asked how the deal would affect its worldwide workforce on the company’s earnings call today, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said driver concerns are a bit overblown. Uber has more than 50,000 contractors as part of its driver network globally, but he said the Google fleet purchase won’t drastically reduce that number.

“This will affect a very small portion of our worldwide driver base,” Kalanick said, noting that the Google cars will only be deployed in the small number of markets where they are legal for commercial use. He also pointed out that drivers who were affected as part of the company’s uberRIDE transportation division could also transition to its uberDELIVER local delivery service, which continues to grow around the world.

The move to more on-demand transportation has also been a shock to the traditional auto manufacturers. Drastically reduced demand for cars in urban and even some suburban areas where Uber operates has sent shares in companies like Ford and General Motors to five-year lows. With auto sales lagging, those companies have introduced their own on-demand rental and transportation services, but consumer interest has been lackluster so far.

Shares in Uber, meanwhile, continue to soar. Its stock was up a whopping 10 percent in after-hours trading on news of the deal, bringing shares to an all-time high.

Uber, a San Francisco-based technology startup, is innovating at the intersection of mobile technology, car transportation & logistics. Uber captures the elite limo experience and transforms it into an on-demand service that fits an efficient and modern lifestyle.

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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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As Wix Heads Toward IPO, Weebly Looks To Expand With Big New SF Headquarters, Plans To Add 500+ Employees

Weebly, the service that lets you, your grandma and anyone else build a website for free, is growing fast. The startup launched out of Y Combinator in 2007 and today hosts over 15 million sites, which together see more than 100 million unique visitors each month. But they also expect this growth to continue, as Weebly co-founder David Rusenko tells us that his company has signed a lease on 36,000-square feet of a historic warehouse in SOMA in downtown San Francisco, which will become its new headquarters.

Not only that, but as the anchor tenant of this new space, the company has the option to expand to 50,000-square-feet, which Rusenko says the company plans to do. As a comparison, Weebly’s new office will be nearly five-times the size of its current space in Pac Heights, which is a puny 11,000-square-feet.

Besides the fact that the warehouse that will play home to their new headquarters is apparently the “last brick-and-timber warehouse in SOMA to be converted to a more modern setup” â€" and is where many of the grapes would be shipped from Napa to make wine in San Francisco, Rusenko says â€" the reason for the move is that Weebly plans to hire hundreds of new employees and it’s going to need somewhere to put them.

Weebly plans to move into the new space sometime in early 2014 and over the next year-and-a-half plans to grow to up to 600 employees globally â€" most of whom will be located in San Francisco, the co-founder tells us. When Weebly moved into their current offices in 2011, the company was just 19 employees, a team which today has grown to 80.

Yes, that means beginning soon Weebly is going to begin a long-term push that will add over 500 people to its staff, many of whom will be engineers and designers. When asked how Weebly is making this possible, the co-founder says that the company has been profitable from day one and is backed by VCs like Sequoia, so that help build confidence among potential recruits that the company is actually going to be around in a year.

It sounds a lot like Dropbox’s big move and growth spurt in 2011, doesn’t it?

But how does it plan to pay for all that? Although the company won’t share specifics on its financial performance or how much it raised from Sequoia (and only lists $650K), Rusenko says that it’s been profitable from day one and will be profitable even with its 50,000-square-foot lease. Weebly may have to raise more money to do so, but without giving too much away, the founder points to “stored value” as part of the explanation.

Although Weebly starts off free and while less than 50 percent of the revenue from a cohort of users will be collected in the first year (from users upgrading to premium services), over time, these users consistently upgrade enough that it has been able to make up for the churn. As it continues to grow, it’s been able to keep customer attrition low, while retaining (and growing) its conversion rate through quality premium products (like eCommerce functionality).

And, as Rusenko looks at the future, he thinks that there’s opportunity for Weebly to maintain its growht rate based on the growth of its market.

As more and more people come online and have serious computing power in their pockets, having your own real estate on the Web (or in an app store) is imperative, especially for businesses. However, a huge number of small businesses still don’t have much of an online presence â€" less than 40 percent of restaurants have their menus online, for example. Thus, the addressable market for startups and software that allow you, your grandma and anyone else to build a website quickly and easily is still huge.

But Weebly isn’t the only startup in this space to benefit. Wix, like its competitor, has been expanding quickly. Today, the company says, it’s at 37 million users and is seeing more than 1.3 million new users building sites every month. It now employs nearly 400 people in Tel Aviv, San Francisco an New York and has raised about $60 million from its investors.

Its users have created over 23 million websites (as of December) and since Wix began ramping up its push on mobile, co-founder Avishai Abrahami said that it has become “largest mobile site builder in existence,” with users creating mobile sites at a rate of 50K sites/month.

Again, while the company declines to share specifics, the company believes its growth rate is steady enough that it seems ready to take the next step in its development. Wix submitted a “draft registration statement” to the SEC in June, which now has it headed squarely in the direction of the public markets. And you’ll notice that Wix appears to be hiring in all four of its locations, so the growth appears to be continuing even as it prepares for its quiet period.

While the big CMS players, like Joomla and Drupal, are still growing themselves and work with a litany of the biggest companies in the world, website builders like Weebly and Wix have been gobbling up market share. The speed at which they’ve grown is a testament to the fact that people now value speed and simplicity of website builders just as much (if not more) than the power of CMSes. (And likely, in the future, whoever can synthesize them best shall wear the Site Creator Crown.)

As the tools and standards people use to build sites and apps on the Web and mobile change, these players have to change with them. This week Wix took a step toward that goal, with the release of a sort of app market for business add-ons, which offer small businesses a suite of tools they can add to their sites to help grow their business. Just as the company offers a marketplace for widgets that developers can build and sell to customers who are looking for specific tools or functionality for the front-end, this release intends to help businesses beef up the back-end.

Weebly is an AJAX website creator that allows you to create pages with template skins and content widgets. Users can easily drag-and-drop content widgets like pictures, text, video and Google Maps in WYSIWYG-fashion. They also have a new blogging platform that can be added to the navigation bar of your personal Weebly page. Weebly has opened up its API to outside developers so they can create embeddable widgets for both the Weebly pages and blog platform. Users can track their...

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Wix.com (www.wix.com) is the world’s leading do-it-yourself web publishing platform which enables users to design, publish, maintain and host free websites without having to learn to design or code. Founded in 2006 by brothers Avishai and Nadav Abrahami and Giora (Gig) Kaplan, Wix has revolutionized the web by developing a cutting edge publishing platform that to the average user, is intuitively simple. Wix offers everyone the opportunity to develop complex, stunning and professional sites with ease; sites that previously would...

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