UberConference Aims To ...

We all hate conference calls — having to dial in, manually enter a room code and sometimes having to enter a passcode on top of that. Once you’ve actually logged in, there’s a whole lot of talking on top of one another, and a lot of re-introducing yourself so that everyone knows who’s talking at any given time. UberConference , which was created by Firespotter Labs and is being launched as part of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt, hopes to fix all that by providing a visual interface to all others on the call. Audio conferencing is not just a pain in the ass, but it’s also a huge business — a $3 billion business — that’s mostly controlled by big telco providers, such as AT&T and Verizon. By providing an easy-to-use alternative, UberConference hopes to disrupt the existing market . Rather than entering in a whole bunch of dial-in codes to gain access to a conference, users will be sent an email and text message asking them to join. To log in, they need only dial the conference number, and will be automatically authenticated based on the number that they’re calling from. They can also choose to have the service dial them at the time the conference call is scheduled to start. UberConference will let you check out details of everyone who is on the call, through a web browser or iOS app, and will highlight who is talking at any given time. The service provides management tools for the call organizer, which allows him or her to add, drop, or mute callers. While UberConference might not be able to fix the sound quality of calls, it can give users more control to silence disruptive users, Firespotter CEO Craig Walker said during the Q&A section of the Startup Battlefield presentation. It will also provide everyone detailed information about all attendees, such as their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter info. The Firespotter team hopes to offer UberConference under a freemium model, in which the underlying service will be free, but some advanced features will be available to those who wish to pay for them. That will include the ability to pay for a number, larger conference sizes or maybe transcription. Even with those paid features, UberConference plans to charge significantly less than existing service providers.

Incident Launches The g...

The gTar by Incident is disruption defined. It takes the guitar, an instrument with a steep learning curve, and adds a bit of digital wizardry in the form of an embedded iPhone to make learning dramatically easier. The company brags that their modern take on the guitar allows for three levels of difficulty, rather than the traditional single really difficult one. But thanks to the iPhone and a clever app, this $450 electronic guitar essentially teaches users the ins and outs of the instrument. The startup recently turned to Kickstarter to raise $100,000. However today they gave the crowd at Disrupt a musical treat — a demonstration at Startup Alley. And the device seemed to work as advertised. After docking an iPhone in the guitar’s body and loading the app, the neck comes alive with a series of interactive LEDs along the fretboard. In Easy Mode, these lights illuminate in sequence with the teaching app, showing the user which string to play. Medium takes it up a level by forcing the player to use the frets and the strings. However, the gTar’s Smart Play function only plays the correct string. Thanks to sensors rather than traditional pickups, the guitar will only play the appropriate string. But, as the user improves, the guitar does away with some of the nanny features, allowing the user to have, for better or worse, full access to the guitar’s musical capabilities. The Free Play mode allows for even more options, letting the player turn the guitar into a wide-range of instruments thanks to its iPhone core. The gTar seems to have all the right goods to disrupt a space as old as string instruments. This could be the high of Disrupt NYC talking, but it feels as if this could be, or perhaps lead to, the guitars for the Guitar Hero generation. Disrupt Q&A q: From a user perspective, will gTar players be competent at playing the guitar or is this a way for people to fulfill a guitar fantasy? Or is this an actual learning tool so they can pick up a guitar and jam solo? a: On one hand, yes this teaches people the fundamentals on how to play the guitar. These are real strings. They take the same amount of pressure. On the other hand — and I get this all the time — does this actually teach people to play the guitar? That usually comes from people who don’t know how to play. But yes, this teaches people how to play the guitar. q: How do you handle pace and rhythm? a: The app does move with the tempo of the song accurately. We were playing with some display techniques to show people. We are going with an MVP solution. The capabilities of the technology is a lot larger than we can demo. q: From a song library perspective, can you create a song from my iPhone or is it limited to your library? a: Our content platform is developed on a platform we built and we deliver songs directly from our crowd — kind of seamlessly so that the user doesn’t really see it. The platform doesn’t take the songs from iTunes; that’s definitely not a trivial problem. We have first parties to help get songs onto the platform. It takes about 30 minutes per song. q: Is there a speaker built-in? a: So you can either use the iPhone’s speaker and thanks to a cavity in the body under the pickup, it amplifies the sound a bit. we are going to be providing a headphone adapter. But you can pop it into a Marshall amp. q: Can you say how much it costs wholesale? a: We’re going to be releasing through Kickstarter. We’re going to release at $450. The way we’ve structured our cost of goods, we’re working with a manufacturing partner in China, who are a really great group of people. Out of the last six months, I’ve been there three. We’ve spent the last 3 months with them. We are building it clean and lean. What Kickstarter really helps us do is to ascertain how many people want to buy it. And for a hardware business that’s very important for us to know.

SpokenLayer Wants To Ad...

What if you couldn’t just read an article on your favorite blog or news site, but also listen to it being read out aloud by the author or professional voice talent? That’s what SpokenLayer , which is launching its public beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt , is working on. The New York-based startup is partnering with a number of well-known publishers, including The Atlantic, National Journal, Engadget and TechCrunch. SpokenLayer is currently only available as an iOS application, but the company plans to add other platforms soon. What makes SpokenLayer different from your run-of-the-mill text-to-speech engine is that the company is working with professional voice talent and also lets authors record their own articles. Writers can use the company’s iOS app to just record their articles or, if they have better audio equipment at home, through SpokenLayer’s website. As the company’s founder and CEO Will Mayo told me last week, SpokenLayer plans to sign up more premium publishers in the near future, but is also working on its self-service platform at the same time. Working with voice talent, after all, doesn’t scale well in the long run (despite the fact that New York has a deep pool of local talent the company can draw from). The company also encourages authors to record their own text. This, says Mayo, allows readers to form a more intimate connection with the writers, who can also use this tool to emphasize some of the nuances in their texts. As there is obviously a bit of lag between the time a story is published and the time SpokenLayer can record it, the company first makes a basic text-to-speech version of the article available to listeners and the replaces it as soon as the recording is available. Mayo told me that he is quite aware of the speed at which stories move on the web these days and promises to get the high-quality recordings out before a story ever has a chance to go viral. As Mayo told me, the idea behind SpokenLayer was born out of his own needs. Dealing with dyslexia himself, he grew up listening to books and textbooks as audio. Then, after finishing graduate school, he started working on SpokenLayer, which he hopes will make “something [he] found so useful available for the largest body of content ever published, the web.” So far SpokenLayer has been bootstrapped and currently has four employees. Disrupt Q&A: Q : How many languages do you support? A : Currently it’s only available in English. Q : Why do you think podcasts never fulfilled their promise? A : Distribution was a problem and it never quite hit the mainstream Q : How difficult is this to add to publisher’s site? A : Listen buttons will be available for publishers, but the easiest way is for publishers to give SpokenLayer their RSS feed and be featured in the app. Q : Do you need publisher’s permission to record their texts? A : It’s a gray area, but that’s why SpokenLayer is working with a small set of publishers. Q : How did the founders meet each other? A : We ran into each other by coincidence and met at various hackathons and other events.

CrunchFund Took A Stake...

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, CrunchFund’s MG Siegler took the stage to interview Tumblr CEO David Karp . But not before disclosing that his fund was now an investor in the New York City-based blogging platform. Neither provided further details of the investment on stage, but we’ve been able to find out a little bit more about the CrunchFund’s stake in Tumblr. For one thing, the CrunchFund investment wasn’t part of a follow-on round or a new fund raise for Tumblr, but a purchase of common stock from some of Tumblr’s early-stage investors. And while it isn’t taking a huge stake in Tumblr, relative to the startup’s overall investor base, the investment has been described as “significant” to CrunchFund, which has raised $20 million. CrunchFund partners had been interested in owning a piece of Tumblr for a while, according to a source. But the fund didn’t exist and wasn’t ready to invest at the time that Tumblr last raised money — an $85 million round from investors like Richard Branson, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, the Chernin Group, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, and Sequoia Capital that closed last September. Altogether, Tumblr has raised $125 million over four rounds of funding, and now has 105 employees based in New York City.

Imgur Partners With Bri...

Imgur has built a massive audience for the sometimes amusing, sometimes adorable images and memes that it hosts. Now it faces another challenge: Making money. With 2 billion monthly page views , advertising seems like an obvious business plan. The problem, says CEO Alan Schaaf, is that “the Imgur audience has always hated ads.” So yes, the company runs a banner ad on each page, but the audience probably sees it as a necessary evil. They probably won’t be happy with a second ad, Schaaf says, so a different approach was needed. That was the impetus for a new ad that’s running today, prepared by creative agency Mekanism for Brisk iced tea. Instead of just running another ad, Mekanism and Brisk created an image that borrows from the Scumbag Steve meme . It looks pretty similar to other Scumbag Steve images, with a photo of Steve accompanied by a dick-ish message — except this time, the message is promoting Brisk (you can see the ad above). Mekanism even got approval from the “real” Scumbag Steve (i.e., Blake Boston, the guy in the photo) to use the picture. This is going to be Imgur’s first experiment with a new Promoted Image ad unit, where the Brisk ad will be featured in Imgur’s image gallery. The hope is to run campaigns that don’t feel like ads to the Imgur community, but rather just other pieces of content. And even though it may look like a whipped together image, Mekanism Brendan Gahan’s says the look and message was carefully considered, going through round after round of revisions. The edginess of user-generated content sites can sometimes scare brand advertisers away, but Chris Oates, who manages the Brisk brand for owner PepsiCo, says this kind of ad made sense, since meme-style content seems to resonate with Brisk fans. Schaff admits that there’s some controversial or offensive content on the site, but he says Imgur works hard to make sure that the images featured in the gallery are advertiser-friendly. “Most viral content is not offensive content, it’s not pornography,” he says. “It’s really good, quality content.” Brisk plans to follow the Scumbag Steve ad with another ad, with a new meme, in a few weeks.