AllThingsD » StartUp

Jetpac Transports Friends' Photos to the iPad for a Truly Personal Travel Magazine (Video)

Drake Martinet — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:09:19 +0000

Facebook is full of clever little apps that deliver interesting but useless stats and graphs to the user.

After getting authorization, an app spins its wheels, hoovering up all the data it can and finally spitting out some pretty graph, friend-web, or stat sheet about which “Harry Potter” character a user is most like.

Not that I’d know anything about that.

But a new cadre of applications is rising above this fray and attempting to deliver a deeper set of services based on the data users so willingly fork over.

Jetpac, a new Web app from co-founders Pete Warden, Derek Dukes and Julian Green, is one such service.

What began life as a simple Facebook-connected Web application is quickly growing out of its Web-browser box and into something novel.

Jetpac’s initial user experience is simple: Connect a Facebook account and Jetpac will return a personalized visualization of where a user has traveled, where all of their friends have been and how much of the world they’ve collectively covered — all tidily bundled up in a vintage-travel-inspired Jetpac.com profile page.

To get the data, Jetpac crawls the captions of every image ever shared across a user’s entire Facebook friend group.

Warden said that translates to an average of 200,000 photos accessible to each Facebook profile, with slightly more than a quarter of those being geolocatable based on a word search of the captions.

“We realized that people do the work of telling us what photos are important and travel-oriented by choosing to take the time to name them,” Warden said.

“People don’t caption pictures from the local bar with the location, because their friends would know. They put the location in the caption when location is an important part of what they are sharing.”

But it’s a fine line between helpful serendipity and photo-stalking.

Warden knows better than most about the dangers of over-creepy geolocation. Back in April, he and a colleague uncovered the iPhone’s location-tracking “bug,” which made national tech news. Their discovery caused Apple, Warden’s former employer, to update its software and eliminate the location-storage issue.

But photo crawling is just the means to an end for Jetpac, which is aiming to launch its iPad app in late January.

The app, which is still in active development, is part photo viewer, part friend-powered travel magazine and part vacation-destination browser.

The app organizes all of the user’s friends’ photos into location-based albums, which can be searched and browsed based on various criteria.

The version I saw was unfinished, but the mixture of photos, friends and places that the app presented felt like a new kind of media experience — one where my friends were part of the story of a place. I was able to see who had only uploaded the requisite tourist shots, and who had spent more time in a given place.

As with many clever ideas, much stands in the way of a successful Jetpac takeoff.

Facebook users are accustomed to a certain kind of relationship with Facebook apps, and the thought of making one connection to the Jetpac Web service, then instantly getting a customized experience on the iPad, may be too foreign for some.

Cutting-edge media problems aside, the tech behind the app isn’t flawless, either. Identifying places by their name can be tricky.

Warden said: “We couldn’t figure out why we were seeing lots of pickup trucks in albums, and then we realized it was called the Chevy Tahoe.”

Apparently, Jetpac can have similar problems differentiating between people who’ve been to Chad and people who know a guy by that name.

Word-nerd jokes notwithstanding, the service’s eventual monetization strategy is also unclear — though it’s not hard to imagine how compelling a product like this could be for the travel industry.

But many start-ups in Silicon Valley don’t focus on making money from the earliest stages, and while Jetpac will eventually have to cross that bridge, the whole construct of a personalized media experience, based solely on the free content pulled from a user’s Facebook account, is a compelling idea — one that will likely be remixed and reissued by others before it finds the right niche.

I talked with Warden and Dukes in their San Francisco office, where they shared some of the big thoughts behind their fledgling app. Enjoy:

[ See post to watch video ]

Start-Up Slader Looks to Solve the Math Homework Problem

Drake Martinet — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:36:25 +0000

Slader, a quiet New York-based start-up, is picking away at what the school-attending quarter of this country’s population would probably list as the biggest pain point in their young lives.

Homework.

Of course, textbook publishers, test-prep services and an army of private tutors have been making a fortune from it for decades.

But co-founders Scott Kolb and Kyle Gerrity are building a service to take homework help, or at least math homework help, in a new direction.

For those readers who haven’t been assigned math homework in a while, let me set the stage.

A high school pre-calculus teacher, using one of five or so major math textbooks on the subject, assigns homework — let’s say Chapter 1, Section 1, problems 1-30. Remember to show your work.

Most of these text books have solution sets in the back, usually only for every other problem.

Are you having terrible high school flashbacks yet?

The answers in the back are almost always just that, numerical answers, and offer no help to someone who hasn’t any idea how they might arrive at that answer on their own.

Solutions is where Slader steps in.

Slader spent all last summer with a bunch of math nerds, developing step-by-step solutions to most of the math problems in most of the high school math books used in this country — at last count, that’s about a million solutions in 275 textbooks.

Slader users, who are a mix of math students and the parents tasked with homework help, log in to the Web-based service and spend “points” to see the fully-formed solutions, and, hopefully, to learn something as well.

Users pay for blocks of points, or subscribe for an allotment of points every day, or they buy “gold,” which is transferable to other Slader users and can be converted to points.

While this might sound overly complicated, the reason for the monetary obfuscation has to do with the convoluted economics of high school finances.

Co-founder Kolb explained:

“Our customers are sometimes parents who have credit cards, but we are also seeing demand from students, many of whom do conduct transactions online even if they don’t have a card to do it with. Kids buy pre-paid debit cards with cash, pay friends with credit or debit cards to buy things online, or use PayPal.”

Economics aside, the Slader team does have some serious issues ahead if they intend to scale beyond the current beta product.

According to Gerrity, every three years or so textbook publishers issue new editions of their math books that are then adopted at different rates across the country.

It’s that variation that turned the roughly 100 distinct math texts Slader covers into 275 versions, and in most cases, “Problem 47 would become problem 48 in the next edition,” Gerrity said. “We have the data, but every time [textbook publishers] release a new edition, we have to go through the whole thing with a giant Excel spreadsheet, even though it’s 99 percent the same.”

That means staffing is a huge part of scaling, and for a small start-up, that means a need for outside money, which it has done without thus far, aside from a small angel investment.

And growth won’t simply come from adding more textbook solutions, either.

Gerrity said that Slader’s current growth is driven by word of mouth within high school friend groups.

“We’ll see a sign-up from some school we’ve never seen before, and pretty soon there will be 12 more,” Gerrity said. “A little Facebook digging will reveal that all 12 are on the track team together or something.”

Kolb said he hoped to better monitor, track and understand that kind of viral growth, but that problem is certainly complicated enough to be the value proposition of a whole separate company.

Barriers aside, the 2010 U.S. census puts Slader’s potential market size at near 20 million high school-aged people, not to mention the parents and teachers whose job it is to help with all that math homework.

Even regional market domination could mean big business for the start-up, but Slader hasn’t arrived at that solution just yet.

I met up with Kolb and Gerrity during a recent fundraising trip to the West Coast, and shot a little video interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

Want to Lunch Like Larry or Snack Like Sergey? Kitchit Launches the NetJets for Personal Chefs. (Video)

Drake Martinet — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:01:42 +0000

Imagine lifting the silver lid on a carefully prepared, elegantly plated and perfectly seasoned culinary masterpiece, only to realize … your dog is pawing at your leg, begging for a bite.

That experience, or something like it, is precisely what the new start-up Kitchit is trying to bring to its users’ homes.

Launching today, in invite-only beta, the Web service allows anyone with a credit card to book a top-tier chef to prepare the meal at their next dinner party.

The company, which was part of Stanford’s StartX incubator program, just finished raising a seed round of funding. The value of the round is undisclosed, but it counts super-angel Dave McClure among the early investors.

The three founders — CEO Brendan Marshall, CTO George Tang and Chief of Product Ian Ferguson — came together months ago to build a business around the idea of “democratizing fine dining,” said Marshall.

Buzzwords aside, Kitchit is opening up what was a previously gray market of transactions made by foodie insiders — or people who happened to have the connections necessary to find chefs who were looking to make extra money cooking outside the confines of their primary jobs at high-end restaurants.

With Kitchit, even a fish-stick aficionado can arrange for such a meal.

It’s the exact same kind of hidden economy that companies like Airbnb have built a business on disrupting.

But what does this new opportunity mean for the user/eater?

Potential diners visit Kitchit.com and pick from a stable of preapproved chefs — about 40 at last count — who will prepare their haute cuisine in the client’s home for any number of guests.

Kitchit takes care of billing, scheduling and making the connection with the chef, taking a cut of the payment.

The end result, said Ferguson, is “a five-star meal cooked for you and your guests in your home, for less than you would pay in a restaurant.”

And while the prices fluctuate with the cost of ingredients and demands of individual chefs, Ferguson’s math does seem to hold, even if it doesn’t promise an enormous bargain.

He explained that the average per-plate cost of a Kitchit dinner party is somewhere between $50 and $100.

Still, being able to eat at home and drink wine without a restaurant’s precious liquor markup must mean some savings, right?

While it’s tempting to draw an immediate correlation between Kitchit and a company such as Airbnb, CEO Marshall insisted the two were after different markets.

“We’re really more like NetJets for now,” he said.

Beyond the initial focus on high-end dining, Kitchit faces some sobering costs of scaling that Airbnb doesn’t.

For one, the cost of onboarding new chefs is high.

Ferguson noted that many chefs “don’t do a great job of writing their own bios, and few have enough high-quality photos of dishes they’ve prepared — but that’s also exactly why Kitchit can succeed.”

Kitchit, in a sense, has to serve two masters, at least according to Ferguson.

“Our chefs need to see value in using Kitchit, as well,” he said. “It has to make their lives easier, and make it possible for them to make extra money more reliably than other methods.”

And while the eating public never sees it, Kitchit provides a management interface and a host of other services to chefs who book events using the platform.

Kitchit has also started negotiating bulk deals on certain expensive ingredients, such as caviar, so that it can drive the cost of dinner parties down further.

As for what’s next, its founders said the company will spend its time and money growing the stable of chefs and expanding to other markets.

That’s in addition to plenty of “delicious business development meetings,” said Ferguson.

The trio of well-fed founders recently sat down for a fairly lengthy video chat about the launch of Kitchit and the difficulties of building a tech business that sells such an analog service:

[ See post to watch video ]

AOL Music Boss Jumps to Start-Up

Peter Kafka — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:51:17 +0000

AOL Music’s most recent boss has left the company after a year. Jeff Bronikowski is now heading up corporate development and strategy for Echo Nest, a Boston-based start-up that provides data for streaming music companies.

AOL will fill Bronikowski’s position by promoting two of his deputies: Lisa Namerow will be responsible for most of the AOL Music properties, and Geno Yoham will oversee the company’s surprisingly durable Winamp platform.

At Echo Nest, Bronikowski’s job will be to generate new business for the the four-year-old start-up, which makes most of its money licensing data services to companies like MOG and Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio. One of Echo Nest’s key offerings: Tools that let music services create their own “discovery engines,” a la Pandora’s Music Genome Project.

Last year the company raised a $7 million round led by Matrix Partners.

Prior to AOL, Bronikowski had headed up Yahoo Music and put in time at Vivendi’s Universal Music Group. Earlier this year, AOL Music, which is primarily a free Web radio service, reintroduced a subscription offering.

Kara Visits Under the Radar!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 07:43:55 +0000

Yesterday, I was a judge on a three-person panel at the Under the Radar: The Business of Web Apps conference, held at Microsoft’s (MSFT) Mountain View, Calif., campus in Silicon Valley.

The event, sponsored by Dealmaker Media, was a very good version of many such conferences held often around the region, where start-ups come to show themselves off in what amounts to a geek version of “American Idol.” There were just over 30 companies there yesterday.

In other words, entrepreneurs come to make a PowerPoint pitch before the panel and the audience and then we get to ask questions and make comments, a la Simon Cowell.

(I tried to channel Paula Abdul, but 10:45 a.m. is much too early to start drinking–um, it’s just Diet Coke!–for me!)

The companies I judged–with Stephen Stribley of Microsoft Office-Live and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners’ Prashant Shah–were in a category called “Manage Up.”

That meant they were all essentially in the enterprise-software-as-a-service arena that has gotten–and will get–increasingly hot.

The group I judged included: Act-On Software (an on-demand Internet communication and collaboration service), Magento (an open-source e-commerce), Mumboe (an online document-management service), and NetBooks (a Web-based business-management system).

All were interesting and promising, although all had issues, from security to marketing challenges to, of course, bigger competitors.

I did a video of snippets of the presentations of all four in a row, starting with Act-On, as well as a little interview with one of my favorite VCs–but only because he is funny–Mitch Kertzman of Hummer Winblad. He was there to support several of his investments, including SlideRocket (an Internet presentation application).

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Day 2 at the TechCrunch40 Conference: More Video, More Snacks, Mint Guy

Kara Swisher — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 08:17:46 +0000

Our John Paczkowski of Digital Daily continued to brave the potential for falling ill from start-up fatigue from his hysterically funny live-blogging of Jason Calacanis’s and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch40 conference, while BoomTown continued to wander the halls in search of snacks and a safe haven from PR minions.

To no avail, although we did have a great debate with Techmeme‘s Gabe Rivera about the ethics and rules of blogging and (sometimes lack thereof). Conclusion: We did not always agree, but Rivera is one smart cookie. (Also, the actual cookies and churros at the conference were mighty tasty.)

In this video, we talk to some folks, including the voluble Calacanis and the guy from Mint (whose expressive eyebrows actually rival those of John Paczkowski, also in the video), the start-up that won the conference’s best-in-show $50,000 grand prize.

Also: BoomTown will soon be trying out a new camera a la that annoying hat-camera guy, so get your Dramamine ready.

[ See post to watch video ]

BoomTown Went to the TechCrunch40 Conference and All You Get Is This Lousy Video

Kara Swisher — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 08:51:51 +0000

While we subjected our stalwart John Paczkowski of Digital Daily to the onerous and potentially mind-numbing task of live-blogging Jason Calacanis’s and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch40 conference, BoomTown broke some news (on the Yahoo-Zimbra $350 million deal), wandered around and basically schmoozed.

In addition, cupcakes were had.

(The day also included a pricey payback lunch for a bet I lost about News Corp.’s acquisition of Dow Jones.)

Thus, here is my video on the event that featured tech start-ups, Web start-ups and–did we mention?–more tech and Web start-ups.

And, as usual, Scoble!

[ See post to watch video ]