A Whole New Meaning For...

I love my two cats Pepper and Magic and kind of think of them like two extra children and definitely part of the family. I also travel a lot — sometimes on my own, more often with my husband and two (human) kids. So this company launching today is right up my alley, and chances are you if you live in one of the 72.9 million households (63 percent of homes) in the U.S. with pets you might feel the same: it’s called Spotwag , and it’s a service that lets you leverage your social network, via Facebook, to find people to take care of your pets — cats, dogs, lizards, whatever — when you are away. Essentially, if DogVacay is like an Airbnb for dogs, then Spotwag is the pet equivalent of Airbnb Social Connections , the bit of Airbnb that focuses on offering you accommodation alternatives with friends, friends of friends and those who may be in your alumni networks. The premise is this: it’s a challenge finding a person you can trust to take care of your pet when you leave town after you’ve decided you don’t want to go the kennel/pet hotel route, and if you use a special pet-sitter, there is a chance that person isn’t available, especially during busy holiday periods. This site helps you find people already connected to you who are willing to help out. The “willing” point is crucial — because some of us find it awkward asking friends to take on this kind of task. Also, it’s not just other pet owners who come out of the woodwork, either. While trialling the service, the co-founders Chris Wake and Kim Vogt said they were finding people who were using the service to actively request the chance to hang out with someone’s pet. ( Alexia , sounds like one for you?) Chris says he and Kim stumbled on the idea coming out of their own pet predicaments and interests in figuring how to solve them: “Kim and I met through a mutual friend over a year ago, but didn’t realize until much later that we were both independently interested in solving the same problem with boarding our dogs. Kim was hacking in her spare time, and I was out gathering data from hundreds of pet owners, trying to understand if I was the only one with this pain. Kim received one of my surveys, and later that week we met for a beer to catch up, and decided we should combine forces. And Spotwag was born!” he tells me. Before this, Kim was an engineer at SimpleGeo (acquired by UrbanAirship), and before that at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory “where she got to work on the world’s most powerful laser.” Chris previously founded two other startups — a consumer-driven group buying app focused on deals in automotive forums, and a social app built on top of Facebook and Twitter. They are also well connected. One of their advisers is Brit Morin, wife of Path’s Dave Morin. She also thought that the pet space could use more disruption, and as Chris and Kim built out the first version of Spotwag, “She was a great source of knowledge for everything from product features to PR.” The company is currently in the process of closing a seed round but declined to give details of that funding just yet. And, good news for me and others living outside the States: Spotwag is not limiting itself to the U.S. for its launch. “We are starting out in the U.S., but unlike our competitors, we are not limited quite as much by localization problems,” says Chris. That’s because it links into your Facebook network — and wherever that might be — to work. “Surprisingly, we have already seen some pockets of users pop up in different spots around the globe, and that’s simply from our own friends sharing it with others.” Pet-related social media is still a relatively untouched space, so there’s a lot of room for staking out territory — although DogVacay, and the fact that Airbnb now has an automatic redirect from Dogbnb.com , does point to a veritable pack of competitors slinking down that alleyway. In that sense, aiming as widely as possible makes sense. Like many early-stage companies, Spotwag is not factoring money-making into the model at first and is focusing instead on scaling up and making the experience perfect. But it has a great feature for rewarding users built in already, and you can see how this could be developed in future as one route to revenue: the Gift of Thanks, which owners give to sitters after you’ve come back to town. This can be money, or a bottle of wine, or — if your pet’s host really enjoyed the experience — even a framed picture of your pooch.

Ticl Her Fancy With Rom...

When you ask someone on a date, maybe you are a gentleman that likes to offer some flowers to make it official. This is where Ticlr , a startup showcased at DEMO Spring 2012 , comes into play. You can send a date idea for a nice dinner at a French restaurant with yes/no answer options. If the recipient agrees, some flowers will be sent to his or her home. This is called “tickling” and can be used in many different scenarios. Ticlr is creating another way to send gifts that claims to be easier, less stressful and more creative. Gifts can be both personal gestures (I’ll cook a nice romantic dinner) and paid gifts such as gift cards, a donation to a charity or an object from one of its partners. It fosters spontaneous gift-giving because of the inexpensive personal gesture option — a new take on gift coupons — and the motivational aspect of conditional gifts. “I began thinking about this idea a little over a year ago when I bumped into a friend I hadn’t seen in quite some time,” founder and CEO Chuck Digate says. “We caught up and chatted about a mutual friend neither of us had seen recently either. It occurred to me that there really hasn’t been a social relationship platform for expressing gratitude or acknowledging relationships,” he continues. On the website, you can find a public gift locker where users save their gift ideas. Other users can browse the locker to find a good gift idea. Ticlr also publishes gifts in the locker, and of course some of them are the products sold through their partners. Ticlr plans to have different streams of revenue: they will mainly monetize the service by taking a small margin on every product sold through Ticlr and commissions on donations to a charity. Down the road, they want to leverage their platform to allow brands to launch new products. When I asked who Ticlr’s ecommerce partners were, the answer seems to indicate that the company is still actively building its partner list. “Our initial set in a few weeks will include FTD, Hammacher Schlemmer, Gold Medal Wine Club, Zinio, DiscountMags, Golfsmith, zChocolat, Hulu Plus and a few others,” Chuck Digate says. Ticlr isn’t the only one working on improving the gift-giving process. Evidence of this lies in the competitors that already exist: GiftWoo creates gift suggestions, and Karma and Wrapp are mobile apps that make gift-giving social and a pleasant experience. The startup, which is based in Boston, Massachusetts, has received an undisclosed amount of angel investment and is looking to raise additional funds. If you want to tickle someone today, you can sign up on Ticlr’s website right now.

Better Late Than Never:...

The BlackBerry PlayBook is about to get the gift of 4G. That is of course if a random leaked image and FCC documents are believed. And why not? Even though the PlayBook is almost a year old, RIM is actually selling more now than ever. The PlayBook is a fine tablet. The OS is competent and slick. It packs all the standard BlackBerry apps and functions. Much as the iPad is a great iPhone companion, the PlayBook should be the BlackBerry user’s tablet of choice. The PlayBook is a fine tablet now . But it didn’t launch that way. The PlayBook launched last April to rough reviews. Common issues cited were the buggy OS, lack of 3rd party apps, and, strangely, RIM failed to include a calendar, email, and BBM functions. The tablet went nowhere and launched with a thud. It wasn’t until a drastic price cut and the addition of these missing features some seven months post launch that the PlayBook started moving. RIM saw a five fold increase in PlayBook sales last quarter . A 4G PlayBook makes sense in a strange way. RIM built the PlayBook to work tightly with its enterprise platform. In theory the PlayBook should work superior to the iPad in a corporate environment. Since RIM is actually now managing to sell PlayBooks, a 4G version should make traveling shower hook salesmen rather happy, since it can remotely dial the home intranet without relying on WiFi. Sure, these people might want an iPad, but IT departments can buy two PlayBooks for the price of one iPad and these tablets can be managed alongside the company’s existing BlackBerrys. Unfortunately a 4G PlayBook would flop in the consumer market like its WiFi brother. Even if it’s priced aggressively, the PlayBook lacks the sex appeal, and more importantly, the sheer amount of functions found on the iPad. Consumers looking for a cheap tablet will still look at the Kindle Fire or perhaps the rumored Google Nexus Tablet. RIM will likely launch the PlayBook the first week of May at its yearly BlackBerry World conference. The company needs to have a strong showing and a 4G PlayBook shows RIM is at least moving albeit rather slowly. If RIM is to recover, they need to get products on the market in a timely and complete fashion; that’s very clear. However, the company also needs to protect its revenue streams, and refreshing an old tablet with a relatively inexpensive addition like a 4G radio is a smart way to exploit the new demand and those still afflicted with the crackberry addiction.

Kindle Fire Update Brin...

Hey there, Kindle Fire owners — Amazon’s rolling out a brand new software update for you, and it packs quite a few worthwhile (and arguably overdue) tweaks for your budget-conscious tablet. Take sharing, for example. Oddly absent from the Kindle Fire at launch was the ability to share interesting snippets of text like its e-ink brethren, but that functionality has been added, along with the ability to tap into Amazon’s people-powered Shelfari service for what the company calls Book Extras — extra related information pertaining to the book a reader is poring through. Amazon is also positioning the Kindle Fire as more of educational device than before with support for print replica textbooks, though I’m hoping against hope they eventually work up something like Apple’s more hand-on approach . Be warned though students — speaking as someone who tried in vain to give up textbooks in exchange for their e-book editions for a semester, you’d best be prepared for a bit of learning curve. If nothing else, the update makes it easier for owners to skim through long articles online, as Amazon has also added a special reading view for their Silk browser that that strips out all the cruft in favor of a less-is-more reading experience. Also included are a handful of miscellaneous fixes that range from the minor (WiFi reconnects faster after the Fire wakes up) to the thoughtful (the time limit on movie rentals now starts when it’s first played, not when it’s downloaded). Alright, it’s not the most mind-blowing update, but Fire owners probably won’t be looking this gift horse in the mouth. Amazon has said that the update will be pushed to be devices over the coming days, but particularly anxious Fire owners can go ahead and take the plunge now . And for once, you don’t have to worry if you’re rocking a rooted Fire, as the folks on the XDA forums have already managed to score root access to the thing — you’ve gotta love that ol’ hacker spirit.

Music Labels’ Joint Ven...

Over the last decade the major music labels — and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America — have established a repeated pattern of attacking consumers in the name of squelching illegal file-sharing. Piracy, they claim, has been the industry’s undoing, accounting for an over 50% drop in sales since 1999 (the industry likes to discount the impact of legal per-song music downloads via services like iTunes, and the myriad other changes facilitated by the rise of high-speed Internet connections). Their efforts to combat piracy are often draconian: threatening tens of thousands of people with lawsuits claiming obscenely high damages; attempting to coordinate their threats with consumers’ ISPs; and, most recently, supporting legislation like SOPA and PIPA that would undermine the fabric of the Internet. Hell, Universal once pulled down a 30 second YouTube video of a dancing baby because the baby had the audacity to dance to a Prince song. Which is why my jaw dropped when I saw that VEVO, a property jointly owned by some of the biggest record labels in the world, was showing a pirated stream of an ESPN football game at its Sundance PowerStation venue last month — on no fewer than two televisions, and a pair of laptops. First, some background. VEVO is a sort of ‘Hulu for music videos’ that’s owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and the Abu Dhabi Media Group. EMI (which Universal and Sony are in the process of acquiring chunks of) has licensed its content to the site. Together, these labels comprise three of America’s ‘Big Four’ music labels — Warner Music being the lone holdout. And these Big Four make up the vast majority of the RIAA. So when you hear about the record labels suing people, or trying to get ISPs to clamp down on users, or trying to pass legislation that could destroy the web as we know it — a lot of these people are behind it. Back to the story. The scene at the VEVO PowerStation was fairly typical for a Sundance event. VEVO and a pair of other companies had taken over a local venue, emblazoning their logos on the wall in bright red and replacing the normal drink menu with an array of cleverly-named concoctions designed to help you forget you were sipping liquor at three in the afternoon. Celebrities strolled through at regular intervals, making rounds through the bar before they headed over to a room set aside to pick out their gift of furry Sorel boots. The event’s redeeming factors, at least as far as this reporter was concerned, were the tasty hamburger sliders and the Patriots v. Ravens playoff game on ESPN that was playing throughout the venue. That is, until the game was rudely interrupted — not by a commercial break, but by a bizarre buffering warning. In hindsight, I should have noticed it immediately. The shoddy video quality and jitters clearly didn’t belong to an HD feed, despite the ESPN America HD logo in the lower right hand corner. And then there’s the fact that ESPN America isn’t even available in US markets (it’s a UK-based station). But between the blaring music and having James Marsden ( Cyclops !) standing three feet in front of me, it wasn’t until the pirate flags were fully unfurled that I finally noticed them. First the buffering message appeared, then a mouse cursor — controlled by forces unseen — flew onto the TV to exit out of full-screen mode and refresh the page. I think it may have also closed a few popover ads. At this point I tried to figure out the origins of the feed. As far as I could tell, the stream itself was coming from a Spanish-language live-streaming site called TuTele.tv. But that feed had apparently been accessed via a site called Frontrow.tv, which is itself an aggregator of live sports streams. At first glance, neither site looked particularly trustworthy. But copyright on the web is a notoriously complex issue, so I went to the source to verify my suspicions: ESPN. Which confirmed that neither site has the rights to stream its content. In other words, yes — that game was indeed being pirated. In fact, Frontrow.tv has since apparently gone dark, likely as a result of a recent crackdown by federal authorities on sports sites with pirated content. Given that the venue probably had access to a cable subscription (or perhaps an antenna, given that this was broadcast over the air), I’m not sure why it would decide to go the piracy route. But I do have a strong suspicion that it was done primarily as a matter of convenience. The next day, when I made a return visit to the VEVO PowerStation, the football game obviously wasn’t on. This time the TV screens were playing VEVO music videos, which were being coordinated to match whatever celebrity was currently in the room — Tommy Lee walked in, and his music video serendipitously started playing, then the same thing happened when Deadmau5 made an appearance. My hunch is that the team hooked up a computer to the TVs throughout the venue so that they could accomplish this synchronized star-caressing — then, rather than rework their entire setup just to play the football game for a few hours, they opted for the easier route and looked for a stream on the web. Which perfectly underscores everything wrong with the media industry’s approach to piracy. They’ve long made out pirates to be lawless thieves who think they’re entitled to receive everything for free. But the reality is far less black-and-white. Sure, there are some people who will duck the bill when they can — but many of them were never going to buy the content they downloaded in the first place. And a huge swath of ‘pirates’ are driven to their ways because it’s easier to stream or download something via an illegal site, not because they’re averse to paying for content. Stick a bunch of DRM and ads in front of the media they’ve already paid for, and they may opt to go with the path of least resistance next time. Oh, and if the venue  had wanted to stream that football game online legally, they would have had a tough time doing it: the only NFL licensee that offers streaming games is DirectTV, which requires you to purchase an entire season of ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ in order to stream a game from the web. For a mere $350. Reached for comment, VEVO unsurprisingly tried to shift any blame: it says that the event was produced by a creative agency called Continuum Entertainment, and that there were several other companies involved. However, the venue was broken into different sections, and the televisions in question were clearly those belonging to VEVO’s PowerStation — and VEVO confirms that the televisions were supposed to be used to showcase VEVO videos and “original content”. VEVO also claims it wasn’t aware the game was being streamed and that it turned it off once it realized that it was (though it was on the entire time I was there, a period of at least thirty minutes). As for who actually decided to play the stream, or why, VEVO says the public had access to the computer being used so they can’t say for sure who exactly was responsible. Which is dubious (and almost certainly spin) — there was clearly someone actively controlling the computer, because they refreshed it when the connection stalled, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a random attendee hoarding over the laptop. Must have been one of those nasty pirates. In any case, were it the music industry that was on the other side of this, you can be sure they’d dismiss all of the aforementioned explanations without a second thought. And then they’d probably assess damages in the realm of $20,000 per down. We’ve reached out to ESPN to ask if it will be pursuing legal action against VEVO, Continuum, or any of the other companies involved with the event.