Banters Hits The Deadpo...

Today, the Banters social experiment has officially come to a close, as the startup’s co-founder Lauren Leto said via blog post today that the team will be no longer actively working on the site beginning June 1st. However, in spite of its tumultuous road and final splash into the deadpool, the news came with a silver lining. Both Leto and her co-founder, Patrick Moberg, will be taking up residence at Betaworks , the New York accelerator that has incubated or funded startups like bitly, Chartbeat, SocialFlow, News.me, Kickstarter, TweetDeck, and many more. As for some background, it was a little under two years ago that Texts From Last Night co-founder Lauren Leto and partner-in-crime Patrick Moberg launched Bnter , a simple way for people to share text, IM, and chat messages with their friends on the web — for all to see. The startup was backed by a cast of well-known angel investors, including Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), SV Angel (David Lee), High Line Venture Partners (Shana Fisher), and more. It later was the subject of some founder-VC drama along with Spark Capital and Tumblr , but came out alive and continued to iterate. While it initially focused on SMS, it later broadened its scope to let users share any sort of conversation, including GChat, in-person chat, email and more, and launched both iPhone and Android apps, a bookmarklet, in-depth Twitter integration, and supported Facebook Chat, Foursquare comments, GroupMe, etc. In spite of its full roster of available integrations and cross-platform functionality, Banters suffered from a clunky user experience, as its original model required users to launch the app or visit its home page, open a new post, attribute another user to bring them into the conversation, filling out various message boxes, adding tags — and then, at long last, posting. It had become too much like a CMS and had lost the lightweight feel of an SMS tool. Recognizing this process was arduous for users, Banters launched a new version of its iPhone app in January, which leveraged Siri’s technology to input conversations and quotes. The idea was to make adding a conversation to the app as easy as snapping a mobile photo. Along with its new iPhone app, the startup added more functionality, including a “like” button, activity stream and an ‘Explore’ tab to help surface the best conversations. And because it’s original name “Bnter” was tough for some to pronounce, Leto and Moberg changed the startup’s name to “Banters.” Unfortunately, try as they might, Banters ran its course. Leto said in a blog post today that, although its user base has been passionate, the platform simply hadn’t gained the traction, or user base, the co-founders had hoped it would find. As a result, beginning June 1st, the team will no longer be actively working on Banters. “We’re not outright closing the site down any time in the foreseeable future,” Leto says in her post, “but, for the sake of prudence, we’re encouraging our users to export their data here .” Although Banters is hitting the deadpool, its co-founders are moving on to new projects. Leto says that she had long been a fan of “Findings,” Betaworks’ tool that offers “a straightforward, intuitive way to share and discuss quotes from books and the web.” Seeing that Findings and Banters share similar goals, Leto and Moberg will be joining Betaworks this summer. Leto will become the General Manager at Findings, while Moberg will become Betaworks’ “Hacker-in-Residence.” Of the new move, Leto says: It’s never easy to stop working on an idea after having invested so much into it, but I’m thankful that we’ll have the opportunity to keep working on a product that closely aligns with the mission we set out with at Banters: to harness the timeless power of quotes and words, and share them in ways that have only recently been made possible by technology. It’s unclear to what extent the kerfuffle with Spark Capital handicapped the team’s ability to raise another round of capital, but as Sarah points out in the post, by the time of the botched funding, Leto had “reportedly cut her salary to zero to help the make the company’s ends meet.” Regardless, the experience didn’t end positively for either side, and it seems that Banters never found that new round of capital it needed to keep its fires lit. It’s tough, too, considering the fact that Banters seemed like it was onto a potentially big idea. Nevertheless, it’s great to see that the two co-founders have landed in a great spot and will, in some capacity, get to continue working on the idea. For more, see Leto’s blog post on the shuttering of Banters here .

Brad Garlinghouse Becom...

Box has been grabbing headlines lately because it has been nailing a big market: enterprise customers who need to easily share and store big collections of documents online. But a quiet Silicon Valley rival has also been winning a bunch of this turf — YouSendIt . Today, the company is backing up its position with some new stats, and a new chief executive, Brad Garlinghouse. He’s coming off a two-year stint as the head of consumer products at AOL, and a previous five years heading up consumer and enterprise apps at Yahoo. He also has roots as an investor and entrepreneur, so this move is going back to that. YouSendIt, meanwhile, says it has 98% of the Fortune 500 companies on it in some form (Box says it has 82%, for whatever this comparison is worth). More importantly, there’s quality revenue in this type of business. YouSendIt has nearly 600,000 paying customers on top of 30 million registered users; revenue has correspondingly shot up from $24.4 million in 2010 to $39.3 million last year. Those numbers are also very competitive with Box and other sharing services, from what I hear. Garlinghouse — who will be on stage at Disrupt New York next week to share more details — says he’s particularly excited about some other data points. Registered users have gone up 71% from the first quarter of 2011, while the paid subscriber growth in the first quarter of 2012 beat the same period the previous year. The company isn’t sharing its revenue run-rate at this point, but these numbers indicate it is going up faster than ever. All this is a big new public view of YouSendIt, which began life way back in 2004, and has managed to grow with little publicity (although TechCrunch has been on the case for years ). One way it did this, as Garlinghouse tells me, was a cleverly placed link in email users would send each other. First a user uploads a file and shares it, then they send an email telling the recipient to go get it on the company’s hosted page. But, the email includes a link that says “click here to register and we’ll store it for you.” At some point after users register and start using the service, they’ll hit the paywall. Garlinghouse is replacing six-year chief executive Ivan Koon (who is widely credited for building the guts of the business). Going forward, the new exec will be doing what some of its rivals have excelled at, which is creating an extremely simple user-facing product, and pushing the company’s brand in public.

White Label App Platfor...

Appia , an app marketplace and white-label app platform, is broadening its support for Android with the introduction of Pay Per Install App Advertising for Google Play (formerly known as the Android Market). Up until now, all the downloads generated through PPD (pay per download) were done through an Appia-powered app store, but now developers can purchase a Pay Per Install campaign and drive traffic back to Google Play. This, in turn, can then boost their app’s install numbers and rank. The news comes at a time when Appia is hitting another notable milestone: its network has passed 500 million mobile consumers worldwide. To give you an idea of their growth, when we covered the launch of their PPD service in April 2011 , the company was reporting more than 200 million mobile subscribers. In addition to this 250% growth in terms of network reach, the company also claims to have driven more than 15 million sponsored app installs over the past 12 months, with an average of more than 25 million total app downloads per month, and more than 400 million app downloads since its debut. The new support for Google Play allows developers to now run both Pay Per Download and Pay Per Install campaigns. Plus, it offers advanced reporting which will show campaign activity by platform, device, and geography (country). This allows the developers to really see where their campaign is working and where it isn’t. To generate this data, developers can install tracking via an in-app API or through server to server integration. A big difference between Appia and its competition (think TapJoy, and other incentivized Pay per Performance networks) is that the traffic Appia sends is non-incentivized. That means users aren’t offered virtual currency or other rewards in exchange for their actions. In addition, the company allows developers to buy on-deck ad placement on the app portals from over 50 major operators globally, including Vodafone, Vodacom, Telcel, America Movil, Claro, Comcel, Myxer and Zedge. Given its reach, Appia attracts big-name advertisers. Over the past 12 months, the company has seen advertisers like Facebook, AT&T, Priceline, Gameview Studios, Amazon, MocoSpace, CrowdStar, Blue Lion, Tequila Mobile, Storm8, Pocket Gems, Per Blue, Big Fish Games and others using its platform to bring in new mobile users.

Honestly.com Becomes A ...

Honestly.com, a startup that allowed professionals to submit anonymous reviews of their coworkers, has been pretty quiet for the past couple of years. Turns out that’s because the company has been busy reinventing itself. Today it’s unveiling a new product and a new name — TalentBin . Co-founder Peter Kazanjy says TalentBin addresses one of the big problems with Honestly, namely the lack of content. Rather than relying on users to create all the reviews, TalentBin looks at the content that already exists on the Web — specifically, people’s activity on a variety of social networking sites. Kazanjy calls that activity your “professional exhaust,” and argues that it contains lots of relevant information about your professional interests and accomplishments. So TalentBin aggregates a person’s activity across sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Meetup, Quora, Github, Sourceforge, and Bitbucket, then uses that data to create a searchable profile for recruiters. Comparing the product to LinkedIn’s recruiting tools, Kazanjy says, “we’re kind of like that for the rest of the Web.” In other words, recruiters can use TalentBin to take their search beyond LinkedIn, finding new candidates and new information about existing candidates. For example, Kazanjy says he conducted a search for Ruby on Rails in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he found 4,500 matching profiles on LinkedIn, 156 profiles on BranchOut, and 22,000 profiles on TalentBin. He also argues a TalentBin profile can be much richer than what you’d find on LinkedIn or a traditional resume. A profile might just say that someone was an engineer at Company X and then at Company Y, with no additional detail, but TalentBin might show that they’re constantly tweeting and posting on Quora about Ruby and therefore rank them highly in a search for Ruby engineers. And since recruiters theoretically get a better sense of your real interests and passions, that may mean you’re more likely to get approached about jobs that you actually find exciting. For now, TalentBin is focused on technical talent, but Kazanjy says it could expand into other fields where this data is relevant, which he predicts is “any knowledge worker.”  It’s also entirely recruiter-facing for now, meaning that only recruiters see the profiles, but Kazanjy says it might add features that allow people to see and correct their profiles in the future. ( Coderwall is also trying to create an aggregated profile and reputation system for programmers , but rather its model is inverted, starting out as a site for coders then maybe eventually moving into recruiting, and the name, at least, implies that it’s pretty focused on programmers.) Recruiters can access TalentBin via the website, or as a plugin to Human Resources Information Systems, Recruiting CRM programs, or Applicant Tracking Systems. This is actually the company’s second rebranding, because back in 2010 it  changed its name from Unvarnished (at the same time it announced $1.2 million in funding from First Round Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Charles River Ventures, and others). Hopefully this will be the last. Kazanjy says early signs are positive — even though today is the official relaunch, TalentBin has been in private beta testing for months, and already has 60-plus corporate customers including Intuit, Groupon, and Yahoo.

How’s The Gold Rush Pan...

There’s been a lot of buzz about how important mobile apps are for years now , and an increasing number of tech startups are launching with mobile-only strategies . But a new study indicates the sector still has a ways to go before it attracts significant money from a wide breadth of users. In fact, the majority of people who use mobile apps today do not spend any money on them at all. According to a recent study of US consumers conducted by ABI, some 70 percent of mobile app users spend “either nothing or very little” on or in applications. It turns out that, much like gambling or gaming, the mobile app market of today relies mostly big-spending “whales” to account for a bulk of its direct sales. The highest-spending three percent of all app users account for nearly 20 percent of the total spend in the market, ABI said. Now, it isn’t that a majority of mobile users are uncomfortable with the idea of spending on apps at all: Two-thirds of app users said they have spent money on an app at least once, and of those people, the mean spend is a healthy $14 a month. But the whale issue becomes apparent when you look at the median mobile spend among those users, which is $7.50 per month. This shows that a small number of “big spenders” play a “disproportionate role” in the overall market’s revenue, ABI says. It’s unlikely that this data will put the immediate brakes on the ongoing mobile app development gold rush . And it’s important to point out that a whale-driven customer base has allowed for long-term sustainability in a number of industries, in the tech space and beyond. So what should be the takeaway here? According to ABI, it’s all about balance. “Don’t get obsessed by mobile and apps, but remember also the web,” ABI senior analyst Aapo Markkanen is quoted as saying in a press release accompanying the new data. “Most of the successful app concepts either support, or are supported by, a web component.” There has been growing word for a while now that many of the companies who jumped head-first into the native app frenzy, particularly traditional news publishers, are starting to focus once again on their traditional and mobile web experiences. If the uneven revenue issue does not balance out over time, it will certainly be interesting to see how the larger landscape adjusts. Here is a visual representation of ABI’s data: