Nokia’s Here Maps Its Future On Samsung With Its First Android And Tizen Apps

Opera may have taken some of the wind out of the Nokia brand with the news that its browser will be replacing Nokia’s on the now-Microsoft-owned, winding down, feature handset business. But today the Finnish company that has remained after the Microsoft handset sale had some interesting news of its own: it’s tying up with Samsung for two new versions of its Here mapping product, a free Android version coming first to Samsung’s Galaxy line of devices, and a Tizen version for Samsung’s Tizen-powered smart devices, specifically the Gear smartwatch.
Nokia says that Here app will be available on Samsung Galaxy devices exclusively. We have asked the company when it plans to make it available to other Android handsets and will update this as we learn more. (Update: there will be availability elsewhere, but no timeline when. “HERE for Android is part of our partnership with Samsung, but we aim to make HERE available to as many people as possible,” a Here spokesperson tells me, adding that it will be sometime “later this year.” Another spokesperson tells us that Here for Samsung Galaxy smartphones will be rolled out at the same time that the Gear S starts to retail — further strengthening the link between the two pieces of news and the functionality.
The new apps are coming at a key time for Samsung, which is trying more and more to differentiate itself from the rest of the Android pack — the world’s most popular mobile platform, but also the most widely-used by a variety of OEMs alongside Samsung — and create services that are unique to its devices alone.
Samsung is currently the world’s most popular maker of Android-based smartphones and other devices, but it has a lot of competition coming after it, from established competitors like LG to those like Xiaomi from China cleaning up in its home market and very clearly looking at growing more. At the same time, it’s looking for ways of driving more interest in its new wearable device — hence tying the functionality together to incentivize consumers to stay within the Samsung ecosystem.
Mapping has been one of the “killer apps” of the new age of mobile, with location-based services helping our always-on, always-present devices becoming companions for our everyday lives and the things we like and need to do, taking things like smartphones beyond basic functions like making voice calls and sending texts to others.
For Here, the interesting thing is that the Samsung apps are the result of a licensing deal between the two companies — meaning that Here will have received some form of payment as part of it. That’s important for a company that only recently, after losing a lot of money for years, been just about breaking even — or reporting a slight loss, depending on whether you count its non-IFRS or IFRS-reported numbers. Even though maps may be a core part of our mobile usage these days, that hasn’t always translated into them being a strong revenue generator.

And the moves come as Here is undergoing a reorganization of its own: Michael Halbherr, a longtime Here exec, stepped down as CEO last week.
The Android app will work much like it does on Windows Phone and iOS devices — users will be able to access maps for some 200 countries, see turn-by-turn navigation, search for businesses and other places of interest, and access the maps using GPS when there is no network connectivity available.
The Tizen Gear app, meanwhile, will mean that users of the Galaxy smartphones will be able to sync up their maps between their devices. The idea here is that for some situations mapping will be easier to plan on one device, but to use on the other. The apps will also integrate with in-car systems and integrate with mapping apps that run across all three, such as location-sharing app Glympse.

Twitter Is Suspending Accounts For Sharing Beheading Images And Videos

Tweet a graphic image relating to a video allegedly showing the beheading of photojournalist James Wright Foley and risk having your account suspended. The word comes from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo who announced the company’s actions in a tweet on Wednesday morning, several hours after the shocking video appeared on YouTube and suddenly went viral.

Costolo also noted that Twitter has already deleted accounts which shared the images.

This action comes as Twitter users called for a solution to the graphic images suddenly appearing in feeds. Twitter and YouTube users have also called for a media blackout of the beheading video and images, attempting to not give the group behind the horrific act the attention they crave.

Even though it’s the right thing to do, Twitter’s right to remove the content and suspend accounts seems to exist in a gray area within the social network’s rules and terms of service.

Twitter notes in its Abusive Behavior Policy that it “does not screen content and does not remove potentially offensive content unless such content is in violation of theTwitter Rules and Terms of Service.” It also notes ” Users may not make direct, specific threats of violence against others, including threats against a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, or disability. Targeted abuse or harassment is also a violation of theTwitter Rules and Terms of Service.”

Yet in section four of its Terms of Service, titled Content on the Services, it also notes that “you may be exposed to Content that might be offensive, harmful, inaccurate or otherwise inappropriate, or in some cases, postings that have been mislabeled or are otherwise deceptive.”

Still, even if it’s not specifically mentioned in Twitter’s Rules or Terms of Service, the removal (dare I say censorship?) of the images is the right thing to do.

Service Marketplace Thumbtack Raises $100M Round Led By Google Capital

Thumbtack, a company that connects customers with local service providers, just announced that it has raised $100 million in new funding.

The round was led by Google Capital (the search giant’s later-stage investment fund), with additional investment from past backers Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital, and Javelin Venture Partners.

Thumbtack has now raised a total of $150 million. The new round comes just a few months after the company announced its $30 million Series C.

Apparently the funding will be used to grow the engineering team, and to launch “nationwide marketing campaigns.”

“First and foremost, Thumbtack is a great product,” said Google Capital partner David Lawee in the funding release. “As a consumer, it’s the best product I’ve ever used to hire local professionals. The bigger story, however, is the potential for small businesses: Thumbtack has a real opportunity to transform how local professionals find new customers.”

To use Thumbtack, customers fill out online forms about what they’re looking for, then the company matches them with multiple professionals who can bid for the job. The company’s branding now emphasizes the idea of using Thumbtack for bigger personal projects (as opposed to general services and menial tasks) — customers highlighted on the company website include a couple who hired a photographer to shoot their engagement pictures, an American Idol finalist who paid for singing lessons, and Whole Foods that commissioned an in-store mural.

Thumbtack says it sends $1.8 billion in annual business to more than 75,000 professional service providers. It also says that since it was founded in December 2009, it has helped customers with more than 3 million projects per year.

Uber’s API Launch Lights The Way For Sharing Economy Apps

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Convincing users to join in new collaborative consumption ventures can be a tall order, but Uber’s API launch today gives us a glimpse of how others building businesses along similar lines might be able to juice usage and find a lasting place in the virtual toolboxes of smartphone owners.

The fact is that most of the so-called sharing economy apps offer services that complement other apps and services, either in the same vein or in drastically different fields. Uber, for instance, has teamed up with OpenTable, Starbucks and United among its launch partners, as well as Hinge, which marries the hook-up app concept with the means of getting the two parties together.

It’s the proverbial match made in heaven, and there’s a lot more matchmaking to be done. Postmates, for instance, would benefit greatly from allowing businesses to build its service directly into their apps, offering delivery options where none existed before. Airbnb is gearing up to launch a developer partner platform, too, which would make it possible (for select companies at first) to build its rental platform directly into their software, which of course would be perfect for travel and tourism software.

The fact is that most of these collaborative consumption apps make much more sense as a service layer available to other app developers than as standalone businesses. In fact, you could even go so far as to say that on-demand services are the next notifications for mobile – they began as a standalone business provided by startups like Boxcar, but eventually companies cropped up that offered easy SDKs to build that functionality into any developer’s app, essentially turning the whole thing into a background service that users come to expect of any app they download.

Of course, there’s a lot more to a sharing economy app than there is to a notification layer, mobile payments gateway or in-app purchase system, which are just a few of the development components now being offered on a SaaS basis. But the natural fit between Uber and its new partners suggest there’s a lot of merit in the idea of shared real-world services providers for mobile apps – delivery, transport, accommodation, etc. are after all, just other things that it would benefit businesses to have, but that are prohibitively expensive to develop and maintain on their own.

Pivotal Expands Its Enterprise Cloud Platform To Mobile

Pivotal, the enterprise cloud platform that raised a $105 million private equity round last year, today announced a large expansion of its product portfolio today. The update introduces new services for mobile development to the company’s Pivotal CF platform-as-a-service offering that are designed to work side-by-side with the company’s previously announced data services.

The company argues that these new services will make it easier for enterprises to make the transition to becoming mobile-first, data-first organizations “that can rapidly develop and scale cloud apps, while driving continuous delivery.” The legacy platforms that many enterprises still use to power their desktop applications don’t always cut it when it comes to mobile apps, Pivotal argues — especially if they are geared toward consumers instead of just a few internal customers.

The new CF Mobile Service — which was built on top of Pivotal’s $65 million acquisition of Xtreme Labs in 2013 — will include push notifications, an API gateway and data-sync services. The service also offers IT the ability to set different policies and service level agreements to ensure that the data remain under the enterprise’s control.

As the name implies, Pivotal CF is based on the company’s open source Cloud Foundry PaaS. Given its heritage, it’s no surprise that Pivotal CF supports a wide range of open-source tools (and especially databases), including database services like MongoDB, Riak, Apache Cassandra and the Neo4j graph database.

The new mobile services will become widely available in the third quarter of 2014. The company did not release any pricing details.

SlideShare Axes Its Freemium Model, Makes ‘Pro’ Features Like Analytics Free

SlideShare, the LinkedIn-owned site that lets you upload and distribute presentations online, is turning over a new leaf today. The service, which has 60 million users, is going free. In tandem with that, SlideShare is dropping its PRO tiers, once priced at $19/month and $49/month, and making extra features like analytics, which used to come at a price, free for all.

The premium tiers were introduced in 2010 before SlideShare was acquired by LinkedInfor $119 million. At the time of the freemium introduction, then-SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha was optimistic on pricing, telling us, “Subscriptions are sexy.”

You may have had a hint of this coming if you visited SlideShare recently and tried tosign up for the Pro tiers, where you would have been greeted with a shaded window and this message:

Now, LinkedIn has made the change more explicit. “All our existing PRO users will continue to have access to the PRO features we are making free,” a spokesperson told us. “However, the PRO subscription fee will end on Aug. 20, 2014, the day we are making PRO free. We will no longer charge existing PRO users after that point.”

LinkedIn says that it will roll out a new feature every month starting in September. The first of these, according to a blog post from product manager Amit Sawhney, will be analytics.

For those who don’t already use SlideShare PRO, analytics is a feature that is very LinkedIn in its character. It lets you know who has looked at your presentations (including location), how they found the content, which sites are driving traffic to the presentation, and other engagement metrics — much like the profile viewing analytics on LinkedIn’s main site. All this gets presented in an analytics dashboard that looks like this:

After this will come the ability for you to customise your profile, which you can do with a banner, a list of your favorite SlideShares, and other features.

Other PRO perks that will now get opened to all include the ability to set presentations to private so that only specified users can view them, as well as video uploads. You can sign up here for the full list and details of when each feature will get turned on.

So why the change? A spokesperson for the company described it as a “natural next step” that “creates more ways for members to expand their SlideShare distribution and manage their deck and brand.”

But there could be bigger business motives, too. LinkedIn does not disclose how many users it had on the PRO tier, nor how many of the 60 million SlideShare users are active, but I can imagine that making the service far more functional for casual users is a play to increase the number of active visitors and uploads to the site. To date there have been 10 million presentations uploaded to the site, but when you consider how sites like YouTube (to which SlideShare has in its past been compared) host billions of videos, you can see where free might appear tantalising, especially if you are not earning huge returns on the paid version.

The other area that occurs to me is that, if LinkedIn manages to drive more traffic to SlideShare, it’s collecting a whole lot more data for itself about how business people are using its cloud-based services.

If LinkedIn has ambitions to do more in marketing services for businesses — something that its recent Bizo acquisition also points to — then it makes perfect sense for them to be collecting as much information as possible right now on who to pitch that product to and what people really want out of a new service in that vein.

The company does not break out its SlideShare revenue figures in its earnings.

LinkedIn tells me that there will not be any changes in advertising for now. “Business per usual here, no changes to advertising model with this update,” she says.

Skype Will Make Itself Less Noisy Thanks To New, Smarter Chat Notifications

Skype this morning announced a change to the way its notifications will function, designed to keep the app from annoying you with beeps and buzzes across all your devices. These new smart notifications will instead only be sent to the device you’re actually using at the time, says the company, while your other devices, including PCs, tablets or smartphones, will remain silent.

Explains the company on a blog post, this process will continue until the moment you stop actively using Skype on a device, at which point all your devices will again receive notifications, so you won’t miss anything important. (And because if you’re not signed in and using the service, Skype wouldn’t know which device you’re actually on at the time, of course).

The change to smart notifications will only take place when you pick up Skype and begin writing or responding to a notification. Chat history, meanwhile, will continue to sync across devices, the company says.

To be clear, this new feature, which Skype is referring to as “active endpoints,” is only focused on chat notifications, not phone calls, as you may wish to answer a call on another gadget – like your phone – rather than the device where you were previously Skype chatting, like your computer or tablet, for example.

The feature also follows a series of improvements Skype rolled out earlier this year designed to reduce the noise with using Skype in this multi-device world. However, from my personal experience, the system still has a few kinks. When signing in for the first time in quite a while on one device, there’s more than a bit of a lag as your prior notifications roll in, which can be frustrating when you’re hoping to quickly chat, read or respond to a friend. Sometimes, too, I’ll randomly receive notifications on mobile while signed in that are out-of-date or from older chats from earlier in the day, which catches me off guard thinking that someone is asking for my attention in that moment.

At least with this update, Skype may quiet down about these sorts of things.

Skype says active endpoints are rolling out over the next few weeks and will require users to run the most current version of Skype on their respective devices.

Hailo Launches API For E-Hailing On The Same Day As Uber

Not to be left behind in the growing feud between Uber, Lyft, Sidecar and others, Hailo has launched a public API for its taxi hailing service, on the very same day Uber announced its own. The startup, which launched in 2011 in London but has since expanded to various cities across the UK, London and Canada, originally dealt in standard taxis vs. Uber’s black car focus, but has since also moved into black car, SUV and sedan transportation.

The publicly accessible API follows an initial launch integration with third-party transit planning app Citymapper last month. The Citymapper integration worked similarly to how Uber now offers an in-app link to its own services in Google Maps, but didn’t require actually leaving the app to work. Uber’s new API means that it now can and does offer this kind of instant car booking in various third-party apps, too.

Hailo’s public API isn’t surprising, since the Citymapper venture was likely a test all along with an end goal of launching something public if it worked out. Uber’s debut of its own API likely hurried the launch timeline, for fear it get left behind as the two duke it out for high profile app partners: Though in theory there’s nothing preventing developers from including both options, it might confuse users more than help them. If you’re a dev interested in Hailo’s API, the company suggests you email them at api@hailocab.com for now to get started.

The news from Hailo today only serves to reinforce my thesis from earlier, at any rate –APIs from sharing economy startups are about to explode, and before long, you’ll be able to get just about anything on-demand from any app where it makes sense, and probably a few where it doesn’t, too.

Kuddle, An “Instagram With Training Wheels,” Introduces Social Media To Kids

A new mobile application called Kuddle is introducing a safer way for kids to get introduced to social media, while still under a parent’s watchful eye. The photo-sharing app, which is like a more restricted version of Instagram, allows children to post and share photos with friends in a protected environment, safe from cyberbullying or unwanted connections from strangers.

Founded in March by a team of Norway-based developers and designers, all with kids of their own, the idea was prompted by co-founder and CEO Ole Vidar Hestaas’s experience raising his children. His 7-year old son wanted to be on Instagram, like his older sister was, but of course that’s not allowed…or, frankly, a good idea at that age.

After looking for an app designed with the safety and security needs of children and parents in mind, and not finding anything at all, he decided to build one.

Co-founder and executive chairman, Kathryn Moore Baker, was in private equity when she was first introduced to the team, and says she fell in love with the idea.

“I loved the idea of doing something that was good for kids. I’m the mother of two girls, 18 and 14, and the whole time [the team was] telling me about the idea, I was thinking, I wished I had this when [my children] were getting their first introduction to social media,” she says.

Baker, along with other angels, including Wibecke Nagell-Erichsen and international golfer Suzann ‘Tutta’ Pettersen, also invested in the company, which has now raised just under $1 million.

How It’s Safer

The app is designed from the ground-up to offer a safer environment than something like Instagram. Children have to input their parent’s email at sign-up, but can begin to use the app right away. However, their photos can’t be viewed or seen by others until the parent approves the account via the email they receive.

Afterwards, parents are notified every time a child posts a photo and every time they add a friend. (Because children don’t have their own Facebook account and friend list, they search for friends by name.)

In addition, photos will appear only in approved friends’ feeds, and are not geo-tagged so as not to reveal a child’s location.

Importantly, there are no comments allowed on photos. While kids can caption and even draw on their own photos with provided tools, friends can only view and like those images, not respond with text.

Though based in Norway, the app is COPPA-compliant, a U.S. regulation related to software and services designed for children. Children aren’t marketed to, and their info isn’t shared, says Baker.

Should Kids Use Social Media?

Some may argue that children shouldn’t be using social media at all at a younger age, but that’s not entirely realistic. With Kuddle, they can at least have the experience of sharing on mobile with friends, while opening the door to productive conversations with parents about what’s appropriate.

Kuddle, I feel, comes just in time for today’s youngest generation, as the kids of Millennials and Gen X’ers are now receiving their first smartphones at ever-younger ages (often now in the single-digits and pre-teens!). Even PBS is urging parents to “wait until preschool” at least.

Though there’s a plethora of educational apps and games, younger children are naturally drawn to what the “big kids” use. Today, that’s social media services like Facebook and Instagram, where you’re supposed to be 13 or older to register. Many kids just lie, in order to sign up.

Kuddle, which will always be free for children and will never sell things via in-app purchases, sees this app as the first step in a larger vision for the company which will focus on helping parents make better choices when it comes to their kids’ mobile usage, possibly through subscription services.

“Our revenue streams will come from areas where we can help parents make good choices such as safer devices, child-friendly mobile subscriptions, and safer search engines,” hints Baker. These products will be developed in partnership with others, and will be marketed to parents who will make the final buying decision.

In the meantime, Kuddle is a free download on iTunes and Google Play.

Vine Finally Lets Users Import Video From Their Camera

With more than 100 million people watching Vines across the web each month, and over 1 billion loops played every day, Vine has just released an update to the app that finally lets users import video from their camera.

Twitter’s video sharing app has always required users to film new content directly within the app, using Vine’s once-unique hold-to-record feature. Now, Vine users can import video that they shot on their phone, or video they downloaded from friends or Dropbox, etc.

This means that slow motion video from the iPhone will now be supported.

When importing videos, users can choose to pull in one full clip, or choose multiple clips to comprise a video that is no longer than six seconds.

Beyond the camera roll import, Vine is also revamping the way that the camera works to offer more precision editing tools, including a button to duplicate a clip and a mute button, to knock out the sound.

The team also added a preview and undo button, which lets you look at the last clip you filmed and gives you the option to undo it.

Both the camera import feature and the ability to delete the last clip shot are available with Instagram Video, which admittedly stole a bit of Vine’s thunder but has yet to reach the same level of creativity or engagement.

Existing features like the Grid view, Ghost (which lets you see a transparent view of the last clip shot; great for the stop-motion/animation artists), and the focus lock can all be found under the Wrench icon, alongside a brand new feature. It’s called Torch view, and it helps Viners get the right shot in low-light settings.

The update is only available for iOS at the moment, but an Android release is currently in the works.

GoDaddy Acquires MailChimp Competitor Mad Mimi To Beef Up Its Email Marketing Service

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GoDaddy has closed on the acquisition of MailChimp competitor Mad Mimi, the companies are announcing this morning. The move is meant to further expand the web hosting provider’s product suite aimed at small businesses, while filling a hole in GoDaddy’s line-up where it was previously lacking a more solid email marketing service.

Until now, explains Steven Altrich, GoDaddy’s SVP of Business Applications, the company offered an older product called “Easy Email Marketing” which it’s now planning to replace with the Mad Mimi technology. In addition to simply being a weak spot GoDaddy wanted to correct, Altrich adds that Mad Mimi was chosen for its great customer service experience – something that GoDaddy wants to bring to its own small business owner customers.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Mad Mimi had very little in terms of funding, having been largely bootstrapped since its founding back in 2007. The company was also profitable, but declined to share specific numbers.

Headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, founder Gary Levitt, once a part-time jazz musician and part-time busboy, happened on the idea after first trying to build a web app for musicians like himself who wanted to offer an online press kit. He raised a whopping $7,000 from his father-in-law to hire developers, but says the project “crashed and burned” as he began to realize there was no way to build his app for that amount.

But he kept working at it, until, halfway through the project, he decided to scrap the idea in favor of an email service instead.

“I was always having a hard time finding an email service that was good for me because I was a musician,” explains Levitt. “Up to that point in 2008, all email services were identical. They were all doing templates…if you didn’t like a template you had to switch it,” he says.

So with Mad Mimi, he decided to use content blocks which would allow for better customization.

“I focused on total, basic simplicity, because that’s all I could afford,” says Levitt.

The service, when launched, slowly began to grow.

“There was no marketing, no funding, no fancy VC’s involved, or fancy launch parties, or fancy anything,” he says of Mad Mimi’s early years. “It was really just me working from a coffee shop until there were two employees, then three, then four. Then, all of a sudden, there’s 36 employees.”

Today, most of Mad Mimi’s customers – and there were around 250,000 at the time of the acquisition – were on the free tier of the service. The company was sending out 50 million-plus emails daily. It had also attracted a few big names over the years, many of which were using Mad Mimi for internal corporate communications, including Disney, Aol (disclosure: TechCrunch parent company), StumbleUpon, Timbuk2, Air Canada, Seth Godin, Kellog’s, Jelly Belly, Facebook and others.

Levitt says that joining GoDaddy made sense, as it was the “most logical partner in the world” and the two shared the same customer base.

Mad Mimi’s distributed team will now join GoDaddy (but not relocate), and the Mad Mimi technology will be offered to the larger company’s 12 million users sometime next year.

GoDaddy has been snapping up a number of small business-related startups in recent years, as it tries to compete by way of better, more modern technology for the small business customer. Other notable acquisitions have also included Locu, Media Temple,Ronin, Afternic, M.dot, Canary, and Outright.

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