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| Square Rolls Out New Hardware for NYC Taxi Cabs | | Tuesday, March 06, 2012 3:26 PM | Sarah Kessler |
|  With a small white device that attaches to mobile devices, payment company Square has changed the way many small businesses accept credit cards. Now it's set on changing the payment experience in New York City taxi cabs, and it's rolling out a completely new set of hardware to get the job done. In a Square pilot that will start rolling out in the next few weeks, backseat TVs in 30 taxis will be replaced with iPads encased in metal sleeves, reports The New York Times. The iPads will be attached to credit card swipers that passengers can use to pay for their ride at any point in their trip -- even before the fare is calculated. Receipts will be sent to passengers' phones by email or text message. Instead of the blaring combination of news, ads and spots from NBC and ABC that play on Taxi TV -- a product of Creative Mobile Technologies and Verifone Media that is nearly ubiquitous among New York taxis-- the iPads will show information about location, fare and route. To the relief of many New Yorkers, they will be silent. Taxi drivers will be given an iPhone with which they can add toll fees and communicate with dispatch. Square has been working on a solution for New York City taxis for some time. It was originally scheduled to present its pilot to the Taxi and Limousine Commission in January, but was delayed until March after its competitors raised objections over the security of its technology. The company, which is led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, announced it was now processing $4 billion in payments each year. Image courtesy of Flickr, Phillie Casablanca |
| Is This the Best Startup Launch Video Ever? | | Tuesday, March 06, 2012 2:52 PM | Chris Taylor |
|  A dollar a month for razors, shipped to your door? Most thrifty guys and gals who wield a blade in the bathroom won't need much convincing that that's a good idea for a startup. But how to ensure that they hear about it, and that they have enough confidence in the company to sign up? Simple: create a funny YouTube video -- one with so much swagger, sight gags and bear costumes that it seems poised to go viral. That's the apparent strategy behind Dollar Shave Club, a startup from LA-based Incubator Science. The company just scored its first $1 million in funding from heavyweight VCs including Andreesen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins. We wouldn't be surprised to learn that much of that cash was handed over after a viewing of this video. Dollar Shave Club is the brainchild of Michael Dubin, the suave guy explaining the concept. Granted, not every founder could carry off a performance with this much deadpan humor and well-timed stunts. But Dubin seems a star in the making, whether or not the Club takes off. If there's one lesson we'd like CEOs to learn from the Dollar Shave Club, it is this: don't take yourselves and your product so seriously. Either that, or pretend to take yourselves and your product so seriously that you go over the top and venture into the world of parody. Have fun with it, and your potential customers are much more likely to pay attention. Dubin isn't the only entrepreneur to find success solely on the basis of a well-crafted video. Remember adventure game veteran Tim Schafer, whose amusing Kickstarter vid won him more than $1 million in seed capital overnight -- the fastest funding ever seen on the service? We've assembled a gallery of other amusing startup videos -- including one that started out as a parody and became a real service. Let us know if we've missed any of your favorites. |
| This Instagram-Printing Party Box Could Soon Be Yours | | Tuesday, March 06, 2012 12:41 PM | Sarah Kessler |
|  A peculiar lunch-box sized device called Instaprint popped up at insider events from the Grammy Awards to South by Southwest last year -- spitting out Instagram photos into the physical world. Now its creators are working on bringing the box to the masses. "Holding a physical photo in your hand is something that's been lost over the last years," explains Michael Lipton, the co-founder of Breakfast, the four-person agency that created Instaprint. "Nobody probably wants a shoebox of 1,000 of these things, but if they're at party and can walk away with one, then it's a nice keepsake." Breakfast calls itself a "physical-digital interactive agency." You may be familiar with some of its projects: It built the blimp for Conan O'brien that automatically checked into Foursquare venues as it floated over them and a tweeting bike for Livestrong. As a side project, Instaprint fit with Breakfast's agenda perfectly. The wall-hanging box prints Instagram photos from events as they're posted. It finds photos using the event's hashtag, includes likes and comments when it prints, and uploads the collection to a website for browsing later. It has a similar effect to handing out disposable cameras at a wedding -- everyone takes photos, but they get pooled in one place. Meanwhile, guests walk away with a physical artifact. Sound like something you'd like to have at your next party? Probably not yet. Breakfast only made about a dozen prototypes, and they're not exactly self-serve. Renting a device, complete with staff member to keep it running, starts at $5,000 -- a lot of money to drop on a novelty photo printer if you're not on a corporate marketing budget. Breakfast hopes that, with some tinkering, it can bring the price tag on Instaprint down to about $399. But it needs $500,000 to turn its prototype into an DIY kit, a process that involves updating and redesigning 100 parts. It's taking a stab at collecting funds -- and gauging interest -- on Kickstarter. So far, it's raised about $40,000. If the funding comes through, the company plans to be shipping Instaprints by late summer. Each device will be powered by a mini Linux computer, easy to set up through wireless internet and will be inkless (the color comes from the photo paper). Would you buy one? Let us know in the comments. BONUS: The Best Instagram Photos Ever Taken |
| Peek Into Pinterest's Palo Alto Pad [PICS] | | Tuesday, March 06, 2012 9:38 AM | Kate Freeman |
|  The Startup Spaces Series is supported by Turnstone, a Steelcase brand. Running a small business is hard enough, having a great space to work in should be easy. myturnstone.com. In an unmarked office building on a beautiful suburban street in downtown Palo Alto, the burgeoning startup Pinterest does its magic. Considering all the addicting beauty and visual orgasmica on Pinterest, the company's headquarters are in a surprisingly drab building. You'd think the up-and-coming social platform would want a giant sign that proudly proclaimed its name, given the company's meteoric rise. It seems all you need to do is step inside -- there's a lot more pizzazz within the walls of the loft-style office space, with plenty of visual touches that scream the vibe of the platform's aesthetic. With a staff of about 25 people, Pinterest is a fun yet hardworking group. And they have to be to drive more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. The website saw more than 11 million U.S. users spend an average of an hour and a half on the website at a given time -- so the product developers are constantly working to stay ahead of the site's colossal growth. Pinterest staffers keep things fun with foosball breaks, Nerf darts and lots of Dr. Pepper. But don't expect them to stay in one space so long -- given Pinterest's astounding rise in popularity over the last six months, there's a good chance that they'll be expanding into a bigger and more (p)interesting space in the near future. Check out these photos from Pinterest's snappy Silicon Valley space. Do you think Pinterest's wide-open Mountain View space reflects the company's brand and platform? Let us know in the comments. Series supported by Turnstone The Startup Spaces Series is supported by Turnstone, a Steelcase brand. Turnstone, ready when you are. For more information please visit Turnstone. |
| Facebook for the Classroom Just Got Apps | | Tuesday, March 06, 2012 9:11 AM | Sarah Kessler |
|  Facebook touts its "social graph," Twitter has established something of an "interest graph" and now education startup Edmodo wants to create a "classroom graph," too. On Tuesday, the K-12 social tool announced it would be expanding its Facebook-like platform to include third-party apps. As with Facebook and Twitter, Edmodo's apps use the platform's existing relationship map to make their developers' services easier to access. They integrate with Edmodo's dashboard -- posting, for instance, badges to a student's profile or grades to his teacher's gradebook. Apps range from simple modules like a virtual graphing calculator to complex systems like a multi-player social math game. For teachers to give their classes access to an app, they'll pay anywhere between $10 and $100 (Edmodo itself is free to use) . Each app is also available as a standalone product, but the hope is that partnering with Edmodo helps get new technologies into classrooms. Edmodo's four-year-old social classroom dashboard already has at least one user at 70,000 schools across the country. Teachers use it to manage their classes, conduct class discussions, post additional information and communicate with students and parents. Because teachers have already set up their classes on Edmodo, apps that plug into it don't have to ask which students are in which classes. Edmodo also gives these services exposure to classrooms, which is no easy feat. K-12 schools have a reputation for reluctance when it comes to new technologies, and marketing directly to individual teachers is quite a resource-heavy task for most startups. Edmodo has just launched a single portal through which any educational company can be discovered by teachers across the country. Sure, it charges a transaction fee for this access, but for many education startups, the fee is well worth the visibility. The startup's CEO and co-founder, Nic Borg, envisions the platform and its apps becoming the online hub for classrooms, similar to how Facebook has become an online hub for social lives. "It really becomes home base where all the content is being shared," he says. "Instead of handing out paper now, they're using Edmodo." Teachers using Edmodo can give specific students assignments from a variety of third-party online applications and observe progress in all of those apps from one place. That's not something they can do with Facebook (and most K-12 schools block access to the mainstream social network). Nor is it something they can do with other classroom tools such as Collaborize Classroom. While Edmodo is starting out with just 35 apps, its open API proposes a promising solution to the problem of integrating new technologies into classrooms. "We're hoping to generate a situation wherehave access to classrooms and teachers can instantly implement new technologies," Borg says. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, RichVintage |
| With Augmented Reality, Wallit App Assigns Virtual Walls to Physical Places | | Tuesday, March 06, 2012 7:45 AM | Sam Laird |
|  "People have wanted to leave their mark since the beginning of humanity," says Veysel Berk, creator of the mobile app Wallit. "Now they are going to be able to do that digitally using their smartphones." Released Tuesday for iPhone and iTouch, Wallit is hailed by Berk as the world's first "social augmented reality app." Like Facebook, it enables you to interact with your friends. Like Twitter, it only lets you write in short 140-character bursts. Like Foursquare, its digital benefits are based on where you go in the real world. But Wallit combines these features -- and more -- in an entirely new way. The app is essentially a virtual wall for physical locations. Here's how it works: You go somewhere, for example a stadium or the Golden Gate Bridge. You view the the place through your smartphone camera screen, as if taking a photo. But with Wallit, a digital augmented reality-powered wall appears on the screen next to the landmark to show posts, photos, videos and other "marks" by people there at the same time or before you (see concept shot, above). Then you can add your own mark to the wall for others to see. Wallit "records the character of places," Berk says. Most location-based apps actually focus on people, and locations are parameters, albeit highly significant ones. With Wallit, the place itself is actually the core, and people function as parameters. To ensure a focus on place without neglecting social interaction, the app has some distinctive rules. You can only post to a place if you're actually there. (You can view a wall from anywhere, however.) You can only upload a media to a wall if it was created at that location. You can request walls, but only Wallit can actually create them -- that way, each location has one definitive wall. Wallit has already created more than 700 walls around the world, including in London, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco. A "radar" function app points you to virtual walls near you. Post with an anonymous Wallit ID, or link Wallit activity to your Facebook or Twitter profiles. When viewing walls at different locations, screen-swipe between walls showing posts by everyone or just people who have linked to existing social profiles. Soon, as content proliferates, Berk says you'll also be able to see only posts by friends. When the iPad 3 launches in the not-so-distant future, Berk says there will be Wallit walls in 326 Apple stores for people to post to as they wait in line. But their posts will also go to a "Super Wall" that compiles in one place posts from every store. That grouping concept is a key function for Wallit in the future. He also plans to link related sites, for example, different football stadiums. Berk says Wallit has already secured $1.2 milllion in funding by angel investors and venture capitalists. The app will be free (iPad and Android versions are due out soon) and initially focus on building user engagement. But Berk says it won't be hard to monetize Wallit in the future. Virtual, interactive billboards will be one way. Allowing companies to customize their on-site walls will be another. Companies will also be able to buy subscriptions allowing them to access data about what people are saying and doing at their locations. From what we've seen, Wallit is cool and simple to use, with an easy user interface. The only question is whether people will want to add another social layer -- even one centered around places -- to their already-crowded virtual lives. Do you think Wallit will sink or swim? Let us know in the comments. |
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