Stealthy Startup timeRA...

Got FOMO? (That’s “fear of missing out” for those of you who don’t do slang.) There will soon be an app for that, or so says the $3.4 million in angel funding the stealthy D.C.-area startup called timeRAZOR has raised. In its pre-launch state, the curious company is already lining up brand partnerships with big names like Marriott and L’Oreal in preparation for its March debut. But what the heck is a timeRAZOR? According to CEO and co-founder, Jeff White  (formerly the founder of govWin ), timeRAZOR is a mobile application that will help people discover interesting and relevant things to do close to where they are. “We’re an app that keeps you connected with what’s going on so you don’t miss out on the things you want to do while juggling the things you need to do,” he tells us. Oh, so it’s like calendar 2.0 then? Well sort of. Maybe. The app is also using some sort of smart, patent-pending technology to offer serendipitous discovery of those “things going on” nearby the places you’re planning to be. This is where the brand partnerships come in, apparently. “TimeRAZOR includes a predictive marketing element [brands] find enticing. Our ability to allow brands to be inserted in the highly intimate, welcomed, non-invasive engagement with our users is very enticing,” White explains. Companies currently working with the startup include L’Oreal’s Active Cosmetics Division, Marriott Renaissance Hotels, World Adult Kickboxing Association (WAKA), Vail Valley Foundation, JetSet Studios, several local retail properties (The Shops at Dos Lagos, The Village at Leesburg and West 7th), and Boston-area HWS Group’s four minor league baseball teams. Additional details are being kept close to the chest, though. And frankly, none of this is much to go on. White says the company will announce exactly how the partners are working with timeRAZOR in the next few weeks. Also interesting is timeRAZOR’s board of advisors, which include comScore co-founder Linda Abraham , former Microsoft exec Eddie Amos and Gene Riechers , co-founder and senior advisor at Valhalla Partners . White and timeRAZAR co-founder Victoria Clark , also formerly of govWin, began work on the product back in June 2011. It looks like the funding actually closed in the fall , but the company is just now making the announcement as they ramp up to launch. It’s kind of intriguing to see that a few name brands (and other smaller brands) have signed on to participate in timeRAZOR when the service hasn’t even launched yet. However, without knowing the details it’s hard to say whether the brands were just having a case of FOMO themselves, or if there’s really something here.

Addressgate: After The ...

Editor’s note : Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me . He was a co-founder of TechCrunch.  Just.me is a stealth company in the mobile space and as such Keith’s opinions on this issue are likely to reflect his product focus. Addressgate seems like an appropriate name for what is dominating Silicon Valley headlines : Path’s mobile app uploading all of your contacts. Today Michael Arrington suggested that Path delete the data gathered and start over, and now Path CEO and founder Dave Morin has decided to do just that , and apologized. The past 24 hours of discussion has mainly been characterized by shock, horror or forgiveness. Although all well-intentioned none of these get to the heart of a very significant issue that will only get more important as the mobile and cloud architecture of consumer apps replaces the desktop and cloud combination that has characterized the past 10 years of web services. Beneath the drama there are some big issues. Here I want to try and surface them. Background to address book issues It helps to understand what is happening at a macro level in order to grasp why Path was hammered while Google Plus and Facebook largely get a free pass when it comes to the question – “who owns the address book?” The past 10 years of web apps and services created a set of assumptions about where one’s address book should sit. In the early days of Web 2.0, when Plaxo built an early cloud-based synchronization platform, it was full of controversy. In January 2006 our own Michael Arrington, writing on Crunchnotes , entitled his piece “The Plaxo Virus”, and asked: “Plaxo, can you please find a way to run your business but never, ever email me again?.” Subsequent TechCrunch pieces were notably reluctant to endorse the service to say the least. This was the dawn of cloud-based address book management. The rise of Web 2.0 and the normalization of the cloud based address book. Since then Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others have normalized the notion that the right place for your contact list, or “friends,” is in the cloud. Indeed, given the cloud-centric architecture of web 2.0, that is the only place they can be. Almost all of the functionality of these services derives from being able to host the address book and to make comparisons between the address book of person ‘A’ and other people. Facebook even goes so far as to restrict an individual’s access to the records in the address book. It considers that details like a friend’s phone number or email address are private to the friend, and thus blocks the ability of the address book owner to download the address book from Facebook to their mobile phone or other device. A user has to log into Facebook and look up those details on its web service if he or she wants to check on an email address or phone number. In this scenario Facebook is not hosting your address book, it owns it and merely gives you permission to look it up. From Web Services to Mobile Apps Now that we are moving out of the era of web services and into a mobile era, decentralization of one’s address book becomes the norm. Your phone contacts become the center of gravity for your relationships. In this world, mobile-first applications have to make a decision about how to think about the address book. Now we are mobile, where should the address book sit? Answer 1: In the Cloud They can, as Path has done, choose to still host the address book and perform algorithmic queries on it in order to provide a set of services—like friend suggestions—based off of it. It is worth noting that this decision does not require the download of a person’s address book. That was simply Path’s method of doing it. There are many other ways the goal could have been accomplished. Indeed Path’s decision to host the address book seems old-fashioned and harks back to a pre-mobile era, but it is also normal in that context. The only real crime, if one was committed, was failure to alert the user. In a mobile context this becomes an issue because it is taking something from the user. In the web era the user was putting this data onto a service via an explicit upload process. Answer 2: On the Phone A second way of thinking about the mobile address book is that its inherently distributed characteristic is a good thing, and the services that utilize it should sit on the device and be under the control of the user. In this distributed model it is still possible to provide services like friend suggestions, but without needing to host the data from the address book in the cloud. The data could remain on the device and accessed through the cloud by other devices instead. That way, nothing is stored in the cloud, it just passes messages back and forth. Clearly this architecture is more mobile centric, more under the control of the user, and not vulnerable to service providers mismanaging a person’s contact lists. In theory such an architecture reverses the web 2.0 power relationship between a merchant and a user but does not reduce the functionality that a user can expect. This set of issues reinforces once again that privacy is a product issue , not merely a policy issue. Products that empower the user to act on their address book without taking the content of it and hosting it will likely find favor in a decentralized mobile world as it emerges. Those who want to persist with hosting the address book will need to ask for explicit permission again, or face the “Plaxo is a virus” style of reaction.

Microsoft To Launch Win...

While Samsung’s new low-key approach to MWC may have some gadget fans feeling blue, Microsoft’s plans for MWC just made things much more interesting. The company has begun to send out press invitations to an event at this year’s Mobile World Congress where they will officially launch the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The invitation is understandably light on details, but the event is slated to take place between 3 and 5PM CET. Though members of the tech press have managed to get some hands-on time with early builds of Windows 8 in the past, the consumer preview is a considerable milestone for Microsoft in that the general public will finally get their chance take the new OS for a spin. The new Metro UI, seen above, is one of the most striking new additions to Windows, but other changes run much deeper than that. Compatibility with ARM processors is a first for Windows 8, and a renewed focus on getting the OS onto devices with different form factors means that Windows 8 isn’t just a rehash of the same old Microsoft philosophy. Not that the general public would even notice that. They’ll be much to busy poking around with the build’s preloaded apps and games to bother checking under the hood. That Microsoft would choose to put their latest OS in the hands of the public at a wireless conference is a bit of head-scratcher when you consider their very public exit from keynoting at CES. Recent reports point to deep connection between Windows 8 and the forthcoming Windows Phone 8 mobile platform though, and what better way to make that connection concrete than at Mobile World Congress? Developing…

Kleiner Perkins Debuts ...

Last year, venture firm Kleiner Perkins debuted its plans for a summer internship program to place top engineering talent from colleges at the firm’s portfolio companies. The benefit is two-fold: students get to work at the startup level, are mentored (and have the prestige of Kleiner Perkins on their resume) and startups get access to young engineering talent. Today, Kleiner is debuting the first inaugural class of the fellow program. As Kleiner explains, the goal of the paid fellowship is to give engineering students the experience of working on tough technical problems at startups. Fellows are placed at Kleiner portfolio startups and are also invited to exclusive events at Twitter and Zynga, where they can network. In total, 25 fellows were chosen from nearly a thousand applicants from over 100 universities. The universities the class of fellows are joining from are Franklin Olin, Rice, Princeton, UPenn, Carnegie Mellon, Brown, UCSD, University of Michigan, Duke, and University of Kentucky. Sample summer projects include working on an energy efficiency insight algorithm on Opower’s data platform, and developing graph analysis to provide data insight that will drive product designs at Klout. Kleiner portfolio companies hosting fellows include Klout, Path, Chegg, Nest, Zaarly, One Kings Lane, Opower, Flipboard, Crittercism, Nebula, Zynga and Shopkick. The Kleiner Fellows program isn’t the first of its kind among venture firms. True Ventures launched the Entrepreneurs Corps (TEC) a few years ago, which also undergraduate students in the fund’s early-stage portfolio companies for paid summer internships. And I expect we’re going to see more firms launch similar programs for their portfolio companies to access talent. Many of these smaller startups could not afford to recruit at colleges and/or compete with large companies like Google, Microsoft or Facebook for college talent. And the firms are able to help college students gain access to working at lesser known startups.

Lumia 900 Goes Up For P...

The Lumia 800 is an excellent device, and if you’re new to the world of smartphones, the Lumia 710 is quite excellent as well. But those of us who’ve been excited about the Nokia/Microsoft partnership since the very beginning have been waiting for a flagship — a real showstopper: the Lumia 900. And while we still don’t have exact word on pricing and availability, it would seem that employees at the Microsoft Store are offering pre-orders of the 900 in both black and white. Before today, we didn’t even know whether or not a white Lumia 900 would be an option, but after seeing a pearly white 800 and hearing these reports it appears that white is on the table. $25 secures your spot on the list for Nokia’s LTE-capable flagship, though how much more you’ll have to pay for the phone is unclear. We’ve heard rumors that the Lumia 900 would be at an aggressive $100 price point , but Slashgear reports that Microsoft Store employees are debating pricing between the $150 and $200 region. We expect to see the Lumia 900 in March.