Netflix Co-founder Join...

Getable , the artist formerly known as Rentcycle, started out with a mission to bring the rental industry online, offering free, realtime reservations for consumers along with business management tools for local rental shops. It’s an ambitious goal, and one that found almost immediate support from investors . However, in tackling such a big obstacle, the startup quickly learned that it would need to go deeper, so in March, it re-branded as Getable, rebuilt its website, and took a page from OpenTable’s book, launching a more robust in-store rental management solution for local shops. In so doing, Getable made its cloud-management tools available to businesses through both web and iPad apps, allowing businesses to organize inventory data, customer information, payments, view analytics, while managing in-store reservations through the same system they use for online reservations. Like Square meets OpenTable for the whole rental industry. The OpenTable influence in Getable’s solutions for the rental industry is no accident. As part of its seed funding back in August , OpenTable Founder Chuck Templeton joined the startup’s board of directors. In turn, Getable co-founder and CEO Tim Hyer also struck up a relationship with Jeff Jordan, the former chief exec at OpenTable and current partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and both Jordan and Templeton have since, to varying degrees, helped to shape the startup’s approach to the market. And, while it’s certainly a steep hill to climb, that market is a big one, as rentals collectively represent an $85 billion industry. Unsurprisingly, Templeton and Jordan are not alone in seeing both a huge market opportunity and big potential for Getable’s business model. That’s why the startup is today announcing that Marc Randolph , the co-founder and visionary behind Netflix will be joining Templeton and Collaborative Fund Founder Craig Shapiro on the startup’s board of directors. Obviously, this will not be Randolph’s first experience with online rental platforms, having been at least partially responsible for the video rental industry moving online, much to Blockbuster’s chagrin. He also currently serves on the board of BookRenter.com and has invested in P2P car rental marketplace, Getaround. “The idea of shared access is a concept I first embraced at Netflix,” Randolph said in a statement. “I’ve since had the chance to deepen this commitment through my involvement with Getaround, BookRenter, and Quintess. Getable brings the same kind of access to consumer products, everything from tuxedos and power tools to sporting goods. Moving a traditionally offline industry online is always an exciting challenge.” If payment systems are played correctly and find the right fit for the type of business they serve, they can have the potential to completely alter the customer experience at that local store, including the entire flow of business on the floor. But it’s not easy introducing small merchants, who are used to their offline systems, to a new model. It requires them having to put their entire store, including the way it operates, and flows, in the hands of a new system and technology — in this case, Getable. It’s for this reason that the startup has cleverly decided to focus on a particular geography and a particular vertical. In conjunction with Randolph joining its board, Getable is announcing its first official vertical focus: Bike rental. Like so many others, the majority of bike shops still organize their rental reservations with pencil and paper. And considering Hyer estimates that 2,500 bikes are rented per day to tourists in San Francisco, Getable is focusing its efforts at home, forging partnerships with top bike rental chains like Blazing Saddles, Bay City Bike and Big Swingin’ Cycles, all of which will be using Getable’s tech to run their store operations. Since rolling out its in-store solution last month, Getable has already received commitments from businesses representing more than 50% of all bike rental volume in San Francisco. And with some veteran leadership experience on its board, Getable will be looking to accelerate expand its reach to an even greater extent in the coming weeks. OpenTable and Netflix have both followed extremely successful trajectories in their push to digitize rental services, so you can’t ask for much more than to have their founders in your corner. For more on Getable, check ‘em out at home here.

Cometh The Hour, Cometh...

Poor old Android is having a bad year. (Especially compared to last year .) Apple’s iPhone is soaring in China , and apparently overtaking Android in the crucial American market. Oracle’s lawsuit against Google has led to several rather awkward claims, eg that the word ‘license’ in the phrase “we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need” referred to “not a license from anybody”, a kind of license with which I was previously entirely unfamiliar. CEO Larry Page’s own testimony was labelled as evasive: “His denial of knowledge and recollection contrasts with evidence,” wrote Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents . What a headache. Way back in 2005, Android head honcho Andy Rubin wrote in a prescient email : “If Sun doesn’t want to work with us, we have two options: 1) Abandon our work and adopt MSFT CLR VM and C# language – or – 2) Do Java anyway and defend our decision, perhaps making enemies along the way.” Just imagine if they’d taken the first road. It’s not widely understood in the industry that Microsoft’s .NET infrastructure is more open than Java in many ways; it and its flagship language C# are ISO and ECMA standards, available to anyone and everyone, legally bulletproofed by the Microsoft Community Promise . Imagine if the Android OS ran on an entirely different technical architecture. Wait, no. Don’t imagine it: examine it. Like a vision from a parallel universe, it now exists. Way back in 2001, Miguel de Icaza realized that if he ported .NET to Linux, he would open Linux up to a huge new developer community — and vice versa. The Mono Project was born. it wound up in Novell’s hands, where it continued to mature. Last year much of the Mono team founded a company called Xamarin , whose MonoTouch software lets developers write native Android/iOS apps using .NET technologies. Android apps run on Google’s Dalvik virtual machine. “Dalvik’s fairly immature, and Mono vastly outperforms it,” says Xamarin’s CEO Nat Friedman. “So we started thinking: hey, what if we translated the entire Android OS to C#? It would run faster, and it wouldn’t have any legal problems.” First it was just a thought experiment. Then it became more of a science project. And then the Xamarin team actually did it , by adopting and improving a tool named Sharpen that translates Java to C#, and using it to translate the entire Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) codebase. They did get a few side benefits — that improved tool, and better graphics handling — but mostly they did it for fun, aka the love of making something better. Oh, and they’ve now open-sourced the whole thing , under the name of XobotOS. What does this mean? Good question. Maybe it’s an impressive technical achievement that’s ultimately inconsequential except as a bright feather in Xamarin’s cap. (If the idea was to get developers’ attention, they’ve certainly succeeded.) Maybe it’s Plan B for Google, in case there is some (unlikely) legal catastrophe. And maybe the next company that thinks about forking Android for their own use — as Amazon did with the Kindle Fire, and as RIM had to have at least considered last year — will decide to go the Xobot route, for better performance, for legal cover, as a major differentiator, and to appeal to the huge and thriving .NET developer community. On the other hand, existing apps would either have to run on the IKVM virtual machine atop Mono (after tweaking it to handle Dalvik .dex files) which would mean a performance hit, or be Sharpened to C# and recompiled. Still, at the very least, it’s a technically impressive and interesting feat. And who knows? Watch this space. It just might turn out to be a genuinely disruptive one as well.

How The Pebble Smart Wa...

The Pebble smart watch – a clever little device that connects to your iPhone or Android device and, oddly enough, tells the time – was a twinkle in the eye of founder Eric Migicovsky just a few weeks ago. Now the product has reached $2 million in funding. And if that weren’t enough, InPulse , the company that makes the Pebble, only ever asked for $100,000 over the course of the entire project. It’s not only a testament to the watch itself, which from what I’ve seen is pretty damn cool, but a testament to the power of Kickstarter and crowd-funding in general. We decided to have a little chat with Mr. Migicovsky to figure out how this incredible success story came to be. Here’s what we learned: TechCrunch: Tell us about the team. Who are you guys and how did you come together on this? Eric Migicovsky: The core of the team is from the University of Waterloo. I studied system design engineering there. The Pebble is one of those classic four-year/overnight success stories. We had been working on smart watches for four years, but things have taken off in the last couple days. I had the idea about four years ago, while I was studying industrial design in Europe. I’m a big cyclist and wanted to be able to see what was happening on my phone without having to take it out on my bike. I wanted access to emails, texts, and calls without potentially dropping an expensive phone. So… I built a prototype, got some friends aboard the team, and then after we graduated, we just kept working on it. In 2011 we launched InPulse, our first watch, and we got accepted into Y-Combinator. We moved from Waterloo to The Valley at the end of 2011. Pebble is basically the evolution of InPulse. We have a ton of amazing customers and users that have been giving us feedback on what it’s like to use the watch, and so we’ve taken what we’ve learned — people want to run apps on their watch, be able to customize the digital watch face, etc. — and went back to the drawing board. That led to a watch that supports iPhone and Android with an e-paper screen. This means it looks great in sunlight and has excellent battery life (7 days). TC: What led you to the idea of a watch in the first place? EM: I like the idea that a watch is something that people wear on their body. It’s a personal object that they wear all the time. My thinking is: if you can succeed in making something people will wear every single day, you know you’re doing something right. TC: What do you think caused people to fund you so quickly? Were you surprised? EM: We were pretty surprised, yes. We had set our mark for $100,000 over the entire length of the project. An Engadget article spurred the first bit, but when we woke up on Wednesday morning and saw that we had hit our funding mark within two hours that was pretty amazing. TC: There have been a lot of smart watches and many have failed. Why make this one? Why now? EM: There are definitely a couple of competitors in the market. I think that everyone is iterating, and we’re simply iterating faster than anyone else. We have a smaller team, which gives us the ability to respond to customers needs faster and create software that people want. There are only six people on the team right now, so we’re pretty tiny. And we’re closer to our customers. We respond to emails within hours — I’ve personally responded to thousands — and we even go to grab beers with our customers to see how they use the product in their everyday lives. TC: What’s next for Pebble? EM: We kind of have our work cut out for us right now. We’ve got a pretty good manufacturing plan in place. We didn’t predict this in any way, but we have a plan in place for a large manufacturing run. We’ve already ordered components, and they’ll be ready for when we go into production. TC: What advice would you give to people using Kickstarter to get funded? EM: It’s like any other marketing effort. It’s not easy; you have to put a lot of effort into it. We spent weeks working on just the Kickstarter page, months maybe. We wanted to make sure that we conveyed our value proposition very well, so we focused on the customization angle. In order to jumpstart a project like this, we weren’t just looking to sell it. We were looking to build a community. We made sure we had a hacker special on the page to get people thinking about apps we could write for the watch. One thing we wanted to focus on with Kickstarter was our actual product, the Pebble. Other projects have extraneous stuff like t-shirts and buttons. We think that’s cool, and have even backed projects like that, but we wanted to focus on delivering an amazing watch. We focused on Pebble.

YES! Batch’s Photo-Shar...

Remember Batch , the photo-sharing app that lets you share iPhone photos on Facebook, Twitter, and via email? Wait, before you roll your eyes - photo-sharing app? Sigh… – let me stick up for Batch: it’s one of the good ones. But today’s update makes Batch even better than before because it addresses one of the major pain points I had in using the app – something that I’ll admit led me to drop it after initial tests – Facebook album support. Prior to the newly updated version, Batch allowed you to create albums and share them on Facebook, but the photos themselves remained within Batch’s service. When users clicked a shared link, they were taken to Batch, not a Facebook album. But with the update, that has changed. Batch now uploads all of the photos to Facebook for you. And it does so incredibly fast. I also have to point out that Batch actually lets you name the Facebook albums whatever you want. It doesn’t just lump all the photo uploads into a bucket called “Batch Photos,” or something dumb like that (which I’ve seen other apps do). The change may finally allow Batch to live up to Mike Arrington’s earlier suggestion that Batch “may be the perfect mobile photo sharing app.” I’ll admit, it definitely had a lot going for it when it launched last fall, but I (like many of Batch users, apparently), found that I still wanted to share photos directly on Facebook. That is, I wanted the photos to reside on Facebook itself, not within a third-party service. Batch’s lack of support for that particular option, had even allowed newcomers to come in and try to fill that need. For example, with Popset , a new YC-backed mobile app, one of the app’s key selling points was its support for exporting entire albums to Facebook. Says Batch CEO Brian Pokorny, the latest update is in line with the company’s orginal direction. “We always have allowed users to share links to Facebook and Twitter, and heard from our users they’d like to be able to upload the entire album as well. We found this to be a better experience that enables users a more robust utility to share multiple photos from their phone,” he explains. Batch’s update now fleshes out what was already a well-built service. Working on top of Facebook’s social graph, the app would automatically match you up with your Facebook friends upon first launch, and with its year-end update , it even took pains to make the entire onboarding experience clever and inviting. The app also supports thumbs up/down, comments, private sharing, automatic album updates, a news feed of shared photos, and more. The new version has added support for photo tagging, too, including photo tag notifications, but these appear to work in-app only. I tagged folks in my latest batch, shared to Facebook, but those tags didn’t copy over. Surely that’s coming next, though. (And sorry, I’d link, but my photos are private. Just try it yourself.) The new version of Batch is available now . For our earlier review, check out the Fly or Die episode here .

Facebook Already Made F...

A German court ruling against Facebook this morning is likely moot because the social network had already made changes to address the court’s mandates. See, back in 2010 a German consumer organization complained Facebook’s Friend Finder inviter feature didn’t adequately inform users their imported contacts would be used to send invites, according to Friending Facebook Blog . But Facebook has since made numerous changes to Friend Finder, including adding a disclaimer, providing an improved contacts manager, and adding unsubscribe options to email invites. It probably won’t have to make any significant changes in response to this ruling. According to the complaining Verbraucherzentrale Bundesve r consumer group (translated): “The court ruled that the user would have to be clearly informed that their entire address book is imported by Facebook’s Friend Finder and is used to send invitations to friends. While the Facebook application has been modified slightly, in the opinion of the vzbv not be sufficient. ‘The fact that Facebook imports the entire address book is still not readily apparent,” writes vzbv Board Gerd Billen.’” Facebook won’t receive the actual court papers including the rationale for the ruling until a few days from now. At that point it will learn if the ruling was based entirely on the 2010 version of Friend Finder, or if new versions were considered. A spokesman tells me, though, “We will take a close look into the details of today’s court decision as soon as they are available and then decide on the next steps. Facebook Ireland Ltd, which provides our service to people in Germany, is committed to adhering to European data protection principles as demonstrated by the recent report of the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner.” Facebook has informed me that contacts imported by Friend Finder have never been automatically invited to join the service, and that users have always had to actively click an “invite” button. However, if invitees didn’t respond, it would automatically send up to two reminders. To make Friend Finder more privacy friendly since 2010, Facebook has added an unsubscribe button to its email invites and reminders. A contact manager  lets users delete existing contacts or prevent reminders from being sent. Most importantly, Facebook now shows a “See How It Works” link in Friend Finder that reveals the following disclaimer that sounds pretty much exactly like what the German court is requesting that Facebook add: “Facebook won’t share the email addresses you import with anyone, but we will store them on your behalf and may use them later to generate friend suggestions for you and others. Depending on your email provider, addresses from your contacts list and mail folders may be imported. You should only import contacts from accounts you’ve set up for personal use.” Over the past six months, deep privacy audits by the  U.S. Federal Trade Commission  and the  Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner haven’t found problems with how the new version of Friend Finder informs users how contact are used. Facebook has agreed to seek safer alternatives to transmitting data over plain text, and tell to users that deactivating contact sync doesn’t remove previously synced data. Neither of these commissions had complaints about how the core functionality of Friend Finder works or is explained, so the Germans would have to be feeling pretty feisty to conclude that more changes were necessary. At most, the words “entire address book” might need to be added to the current disclaimer or reminders might not be able to be sent in Germany. As the social network is still trying to sign up users in Germany where it has a lower than average penetration rate of roughly 27 percent, these changes could have negative impact on Facebook’s business if required, but it would be a small one. Really today’s ruling shows the inability for the world’s courts to keep up with the pace of high tech and product innovation. Had the complaint been heard in 2010, it could have spurred Facebook to make changes sooner. Instead today’s hearing was likely a waste of German taxpayer’s money.