CallApp Uses Social Dat...

One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn’t in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won’t know until I pick up. CallApp , a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It’s creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a “universal social contact book.” It’s drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users — users can edit CallApp listings, and if they choose, they can add their contact book into the company’s general database. So when you get a phone call, even if it’s from someone who isn’t in your contact list, you should be able to see information about them — say a photo, their most recent update on Facebook, and your most recent email exchange if you’ve corresponded with them. Of course, if your phone is already ringing, you’ve only got a few seconds before you need to pick up, but at least you can glance at your screen and go into the call with some basic context. CallApp should be even more useful when you’re about to make a call. Then, the social network updates can give you a way to start off the conversation, or tell you when someone has traveled out of the country, so maybe now isn’t the best time to reach them. You can also attach personal reminders to CallApp contacts, share your location with them, or set up a meeting. In some ways, the concept is pretty similar to an email plugin like Rapportive ( recently acquired by LinkedIn ) or Xobni. However, Volovitz says that bringing this information to the smartphone puts it in a different context. After all, when he gets a phone call, “I cannot wait until I can go to the Internet to see who is calling me. This is about giving you real-time, immediate, the most relevant information you can get, and the tools to execute on that information.” Volovitz also says CallApp, despite the name, isn’t just about phone calls — he estimates that he only uses it for phone calls 50 percent of the time. The app also lists and connects to other ways for reaching people, like WhatsApp Messenger and Viber. The core of the experience isn’t the phone call but the contact itself, Volovitz says. Nor is CallApp limited to personal contact listings. It includes businesses too, showing you things like Yelp reviews, Google Street View, or a menu for a restaurant where you’re thinking about making reservations. Moving forward, Volovitz says the company will be adding features that are more about encouraging “serendipity.” The app is available on Android phones (you can download it from Google Play here ). CallApp is developing a version for iPhones too, though Volovitz estimates that it will have 80 percent of the functionality of the Android version, due to “some technical issues.” Volovitz says the company isn’t monetizing the app (which is free) yet, but there are a number of possible business models, including affiliate fees. The company has raised $1 million in funding from undisclosed venture capital firms and angel investors. Disrupt Q&A Q : How does the iOS app differ? A: There are more limitations than in Android, like you have to use the built-in dialer rather than any dialer you want. Q : What are the viral hooks? A: If you use CallApp to share information with someone, they get an SMS message linking to the content and asking them to download the app. Q: Tell us about the technology. A: What we do is artificial intelligence, big data. The system knows how to link the right person to the right number, for example using location to narrow the search. Q: Why do other improved contact books fail, and why will you succeed? A: It’s all about the execution and the ambition. If you build an app on the client side, you only get a limited amount of information about contacts on your phone, versus CallApp’s crowdsourced, cloud-based approach.

Major Steal: King.com P...

King.com , the European-casual-gaming-company-that-could, is cementing its ascendance on the Facebook platform by poaching one of the key producers responsible for EA’s Sims Social and opening a new game development studio in London. The company just hired Catharina Mallet away from EA to lead the new studio, which should have 40 people by year-end (with her departure first being noted by Business Insider last week). King.com, which started in Sweden and hasn’t taken outside funding since raising $43 million seven years ago , is one of two European gaming companies that have made a serious run on the Facebook platform in the last year. While Zynga has seen its revenue growth slow and other longtime Facebook developers like Crowdstar and Funzio have mostly moved onto mobile games, both King.com and Germany’s Wooga have both climbed up the developer leaderboards. King.com has beat out EA and more recently, Wooga, for the #2 spot among game developers in terms of daily active users on Facebook , according to AppData. The number of game sessions has also blown up by tenfold to 3 billion per month, from 300 million a year ago. The company has a long, long history. It’s almost a decade old and started out building casual games for a destination site at King.com (naturally). That made for a decent business that’s been profitable for seven years. But King.com got turbo-charged when it started building Facebook games too. The company’s long history of building for an independent destination site has given it a few competitive advantages. Launching games outside of Facebook ensures that only the very best and most viral games make it onto the platform. “Because we see which games fail outside of Facebook, what we have managed to do is have a hit-proof business on Facebook,” said chief executive officer Riccardo Zacconi . It’s worth noting that Zynga and many other developers like Kixeye are ironically going in the opposite direction by pouring resources into standalone destination sites. The business now has several legs to stand on. It has a destination site for casual games, Facebook games and then mobile titles. Like Zynga, it makes money through virtual currency sales and advertising. But it also has a third revenue model. The company also recently signed a deal with AOL to provide skilled tournament games. Those are games where players have to pay a very small entry cost (like less than $1) and compete with others. This deal is financially material to King.com, although the company won’t say how much the partnership will bring in. All this said, King.com is starting to feel the competitive heat on Facebook. Zynga recently launched Bubble Safari , which looks a lot like Bubble Witch Saga, King.com’s top game on Facebook. “We have the leading bubble shooter on Facebook. While there are a fair number of copycats popping up, we’re pleased with the continued audience engagement that we get with Bubble Witch Saga,” said chief marketing officer Alex Dale . “We think that will improve further when we launch the game on mobile.” Zacconi adds that King.com’s model is more capital efficient than Zynga’s. “For one of their games, they might need 80 people,” he said. “But Bubble Witch Saga had a team of eight. To launch a new game on the web, we need two people.” He also says that the company hasn’t been feeling the effects that other game developers have as Facebook clamped down on viral channels, notifications and requests for games. He says King.com’s K-factor or viral coefficient is roughly 0.8. “For every user we get, we get almost another one for free,” Zacconi said. Keep in mind though, that number is still way down from the heights of 2008 and 2009, when apps ran wild on the Facebook platform. Other social gaming companies, which still have the institutional memory of that era, have had a harder time coping with the Facebook platform’s new realities. When Mallet comes on-board, she’ll be spearheading the development of casual games. Zacconi stresses that King.com is not going into resource management or sim games. Mallet was of the top producers behind Sims Social and she came to EA through the up to $400 million acquisition of social gaming company Playfish. Over the last year, EA’s social gaming push has faced several management changes. After Zynga poached John Schappert to be chief operating officer, Barry Cottle followed him over to spearhead mergers and acquisitions . That made room for Playfish co-founder Kristian Segerstrale to move up in the ranks and become EA’s executive vice president of digital. Another key Playfish executive, John Earner, recently left to be an entrepreneur in residence at Accel Partners .

After Walking Away From...

Following a jam-packed beta test and a jaw-dropping $4.2 million seed round, Ark people search is open for sign ups…at least for the next three days. Ark lets you sift through profiles on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other services to help you find out which of your high school classmates live in New York, see which friends are single, and connect with strangers who share your interests by layering up to 30 characteristic filters. The problem of too much social data and too little discoverability is so widespread that Facebook even discussed a possible acquisition of Ark. But instead its PhD founders decided to see how far they can ride their cute penguin logo. Soon it will launch native mobile apps with some of most useful push notifications I’ve seen. And as part of its limited launch today at TechCrunch Disrupt New York , Ark is accepting new users at ark.com/tcd until the end of the conference on Wednesday. Last month when Y Combinator company Ark made waves taking a mammoth seed round , co-founder Patrick Riley told me it didn’t choose to raise a more typical Series A because “If I can get an amazing valuation at a seed round, not give up a board seat, and keep complete control of the company, why not?” Now it’s using that money to hire some information retrieval rockstars the founders spotted during their PhDs at Berkeley. Facebook was so impressed with how Ark repurposed its data that the social network loosely discussed the possibility of buying the startup or at least acq-hiring its founders. There was no offer extended, but Riley tells me “We didn’t even take it that far. We weren’t interested. We wanted to build something bigger.” When he says bigger, he means searching beyond profiles, but moving into Greplin’s territory — allowing you to instantly search through all your social data, including public posts, private messages, and even email. If you needed to find an address of a party but weren’t sure if you received in a Facebook message or Gmail, or even any keywords, you could one day use Ark to filter for street addresses, find that apartment number on Haight street, and go have fun. Soon it will launch native mobile apps that take advantage of geo-fencing to show you relevant info about where you are. They do predictive search so when you travel to a new city, it pops up a push notification showing how many friends currently live there. Ark could lead to those offline meetups every mobile app wants to inspire. There’s rabid interest, too. Ark got 234,000 signups in the first month, and already has 15,000 beta users. Now you can join them and start social searching at ark.com/tcd . (Ark’s having a little trouble handling all the traffic TechCrunch is driving them, so if they signup page errors out, cut ‘em some slack and try back soon) In a Q&A after his Disrupt Battlefield presentation, Riley talked about how Ark is something Facebook and Google couldn’t build. Ark is data platform agnostic, while Google and Facebook would be unlikely to surface each other’s data. He also explained how Ark doesn’t mash together personal and public data in a way that can scare users the way Google’s Search Plus Your World did. Ark uses separate tabs to distinguish searches of public data vs private data only you can see. While he’s quick to admit Ark needs design work, the clear divide between data types creates a trusted relationship with its users.

Andrew Keen Weighs In O...

TechCrunch contributor Andrew Keen took to the Disrupt stage with our own Alexia Tsotsis earlier this morning to do two things — promote his new book Digital Vertigo , and tackle the problem of sharing too much. According to Keen, the more of our lives we broadcast, the more transparent we become. Fair enough, though at some point during that process he believes that we are slowly losing “some essential quality of what it means to be human” when we don’t keep secrets. As you may imagine, major social platforms like Facebook play a considerable role in the oversharing epidemic that Keen sees taking hold today. With Facebook’s identity system being adopted by scores of new websites, apps, and services, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for people to inhabit the web without registering their identity with the social network. Though more than a few people have pointed out over time that those concerned with privacy aren’t required to use Facebook, Keen thinks it’s getting harder and harder to dodge the service. Despite being a vocal opponent of the role Facebook plays in this new, more highly-shared world, Keen bears little animosity toward its exceptionally rich young founder, Mark Zuckerberg. “I don’t think he’s the devil,” Keen pointed out. “I think he’s a nice guy and he means well, but I do think he’s playing with fire.” Zuck does however give Keen “the creeps,” mostly because he has a sort of child-like devotion to his concept of identity. So what’s his answer to this looming problem? Legislation (among other things), as he feels there needs to be a way for the government to control what services can and can’t track, like the Do Not Track law that FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz called for earlier this month. Perhaps more importantly though, Keen would like to see technology that’s able to forget — only then, he claims, will the Internet be “a place for us to inhabit.”

House Beautiful Tests P...

House Beautiful is hopping on the Pinterest bandwagon today courtesy of digital watermarking provider Digimarc , which has just introduced technology allowing consumers to pin magazine images from the real world to their Pinterest boards. While functionally similar to the online “Pin It” button, the Digimarc solution uses the company’s proprietary technology to embed an imperceptible watermark in a printed magazine image. When scanned, users are immediately taken to the pre-configured Pinterest page for the image, allowing them to then re-pin it to their own boards. The downside? Well, for starters, you have to use the Digimarc mobile app for this to work, or the magazine/advertiser can integrate Digimarc’s tech in their own app, if they choose. But the “pin from the real world” functionality is not available in Pinterest’s own mobile app, unfortunately, which is how most mobile users connect with the popular social network. Plus, this re-pinning process only works with magazine advertisers who have partnered up with Digimarc before going to print, obviously. In other words, you can’t just scan any ol’ image from a magazine and then “pin it” via the Digimarc solution. So, yes, kind of a lot of work for end users. That being said, Digimarc has kicked off the launch by partnering with House Beautiful Magazine, which they’re touting as the “world’s first Pinterest-enabled magazine.” In House Beautiful’s June issue, there’s a “Kitchen of the Month” editorial where the first page of the article is “Pinterest-enabled” using Digimarc’s watermarking. In this case, House Beautiful has actually integrated Digimarc’s tech within its own newly launched mobile app. Readers can either download the magazine app, or the Digimarc Connect app for iPhone or Android . They can then get connected to the House Beautiful “Kitchen of the Month” Pinterest pinboard by scanning the magazine photos with their phone’s camera. QR codes, heads up: you’re looking a lot dorkier now.