When you walk inside an Apple store and start swiping one of their iPads, a clingy, colorful shirt wearing person usually attaches themselves to you and gives you the verbal rubdown of the features. It's part of the Apple Store experience! But what if that Apple Store employee was a fake? What if they scared you away with rumors of diseased products, advice to buy Android phones and unbelievable steals? Well, it'd be pretty damn funny.
It's Friday night. Time to cut loose, get fancied up, and go hit the town. Here's some brand new apps to dress up your phone for the weekend.
Peer-to-peer lodgings marketplace Airbnb has been focused on finding ways that it can help its hosts improve the quality of experience for guests that stay in their homes. As part of this effort, the company is trialing a low-cost cleaning service for some hosts on the platform.
According to an email sent to a host in the San Francisco Bay Area that was forwarded to TechCrunch, Airbnb is piloting a program that will make cleaning services available to some people who make their homes available on the platform. The email claims those services will be “affordable, easy to schedule, and can be tailored to include amenities such as linen service and gift baskets.”
In a statement from an Airbnb spokesperson, the company confirmed the trial, saying: “We’re always testing ways to make the experience on Airbnb better. This is a test we’re looking at in one market.”
Airbnb is working on a number of ways in which it can better support the people who list their homes on the platform. It recently brought on a new head of hospitality, Chip Conley, and created a Hospitality Innovation Lab in Dublin aimed at determining best practices for hosts.
It’s also introduced a new suite of mobile apps that are aimed at making the listing process easier. At the same event in which those apps were unveiled, Airbnb announced that it would relaunch Airbnb Groups to enable hosts to communicate and share tips with each other, and even toyed with the idea of offering up smartphones to hosts as a way to improve response times to guests and boost overall bookings.
But chief among the ways that Airbnb hosts can improve the quality of stay for their guests is through cleanliness of the spaces that they list. Those who frequently have Airbnb guests staying with them already know this, and many so-called “super hosts” already schedule regular cleaning sessions between stays.
Doing so can be expensive, however, and can eat into the money that hosts make — especially those who rely on income from Airbnb to help them pay their rents. At $55 for a three-hour cleaning, the price is slightly below what you might get from a service like Homejoy, which generally charges $20 an hour (in San Francisco, at least). Individual cleaners can run even higher, depending on the size of the home or how much cleaning is needed.
Offering hosts a somewhat discount price is a nice perk, especially for those who regularly rent out their homes to other members of Airbnb. It also improves the overall quality of their stays, could lead to better reviews, and overall increase the likelihood that hosts will have future guests.
Full text of the email sent to our host contact below:
Hi [XXXX],
We’re excited to invite you to try a new cleaning service we’re piloting for a select group of Airbnb hosts! Airbnb Cleaning is affordable, easy to schedule, and can be tailored to include amenities such as linen service and gift baskets, too. Pricing starts at $55 for a 3 hour cleaning.
We built this service to address what Airbnb guests care about most (things like odors, stray hairs, and refrigerators!). We also worked with hosts like you to understand how to cater to personal hosting styles and home setup preferences. We’ll save your preferences and set up your space exactly the way you want it every time.
Click here to learn more!
If you have any questions, simply reply to this e-mail and we’ll answer it promptly.
Happy hosting,
Airbnb
There isn't much choice among 7-inch Android tablets with high-resolution screens -- the Nexus 7 is frequently the only practical option. However, it's about to get a proper challenger. China's TENAA has certified the Huawei MediaPad X1 7.0, a small ...
The one thing you can say for certain LG G Flex is that it commands attention, mostly because it is curved. Beyond that, the questions start flooding in. Why is it curved? Why is its screen so mediocre? Why would you want to buy it? Unfortunately, after using the phone for several days, I still don't have an answer.
Ouya’s original hardware featured just 8GB of storage onboard, but a temporary Limited Edition all-white version launched during the holidays doubled that to 16GB. Now, the game console startup is making that a permanent feature of its newest hardware, an Ouya console with a solid matte black finish that also offers better Wi-Fi connectivity and a “refined” controller design.
The new 16GB version adds $30 to the MSRP of the original, coming in at a total of $129 for the console and one controller. It goes on sale at Ouya.tv, as well as Amazon and Amazon.ca starting immediately, and the original 8GB model will continue to be sold as well at its original $99 price point (which is discounted to $69.99 currently on Amazon.ca)
As for what’s been improved about the controller, Ouya says that the joysticks and buttons are “better” and that the controller has less lag time overall. We’ve asked for more specifics around the improved Wi-Fi, but have yet to hear back with any details. The new console also ships with the latest Ouya firmware, which is said to improve all-around performance for the Android-powered hardware.
Ouya has faced some challenges lately, including the departure of one of its key founding team members, VP of Product Muffi Ghadiali. The company has not released any sales data recently, so there’s no telling how it’s performing, but the introduction of a new SKU seems a little unusual given the relatively modest nature of the tweaks.
Developers on the platform recently shared some numbers regarding their software sales on the console with Gamespot, which could be an indicator of hardware sales strength. Feedback was mixed, but overall the impression given was that sales by no means represent runaway success. Ouya has raised $23.6 million in funding to date, including its initial crowdfunding campaign and a Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins.
If you were jonesing for a 16GB OUYA console but didn't snag the limited white edition, we have good news: you just got a second chance at buying your dream Android gaming system. The company plans to launch a standard 16GB model in matte black (aka ...
Online publishing platform Issuu is announcing that it has hired Jeremy LaCroix as its head of product design and user experience.
Joe Hyrkin, who became CEO last year, told me LaCroix was particularly suited for the job given his experience with both the digital and traditional publishing worlds. LaCroix’s career includes design/art direction at The Industry Standard and Wired before becoming creative director at CBS Interactive, and then head of UX/design and product for mobile at AOL. (LaCroix left AOL, which owns TechCrunch, in October, and has since done freelance design work for Medium.)
Issuu was actually founded in 2006, before the current wave of mobile and tablet publishing, but unsurprisingly, Hyrkin said its focus has been shifting increasingly to mobile. The company recently updated its Android app, and he said, “We’re not going to be only Android-based for that much longer.”
Other goals include improving publisher monetization — Hyrkin said Issuu already helps publishers make money by allowing them to supplementing their print ads with additional digital content, and by allowing them to link to online stores, but he added, “This year we’re starting to put together what I hope are innovative and very creative advertising opportunities.”
The company says it sees 5 billion page views across 15 million magazines, catalogs, and newspapers each month.
“The common perception is that magazines are in a death spiral,” LaCroix said in the release about his hiring. “I disagree. In fact I’d argue there have never been more publications being produced in human history. The problem today is distribution and Issuu provides a truly unique and compelling method for content to find people.”
The latest update for Sony's PlayStation mobile app is out for Android and iOS, and it's surprisingly video-focused. Thanks to the new Live from PlayStation section, available game streams can be browsed directly from your device -- although they ...
Inq Mobile, one of the first companies to build a Facebook phone, announced that it has shut down with a message on its site (h/t Android Police). The U.K.-based, Hutchison Whampoa-backed company didn’t say why it decided to close. We’ve emailed them for more information.
Inq, which was founded in 2008 and pivoted a year ago to focus on mobile software, said it will no longer update Material and SO.HO, its apps. Material, a news reader, released its final editions on Jan. 28, while social media aggregator SO.HO will not be updated after today, though it will continue to function. Support pages for the Cloud Touch smartphone and Inq’s featurephones remain on its site.
The timing of Inq’s closure and Material’s shutdown is interesting because several of tech’s largest companies have recently started to offer their own news apps and tools. These include Yahoo’s News Digest; Twitter and CNN’s Dataminr; and Paper by Facebook, which will launch next month.
Inq Mobile began as a maker of low-priced Android smartphones. It was one of the first companies that collaborated with Facebook to create a social smartphone in 2011, around the same time HTC and the social network struck the partnership that yielded the Salsa and ChaCha.
Inq’s Cloud Touch, which was released exclusively in the UK three years ago, had a custom Facebook wrapper built on top of Android, and an early version of SwiftKey. Though cheaply priced (starting at $50 with a subsidized contract), the Cloud Touch couldn’t compete with Samsung’s rapid takeover of the Android market. The company pivoted and started developing mobile apps one year ago.
Material, which TechCrunch covered when it launched its iOS version in August, was a social magazine app that used Inq’s “interest extraction engine” to look at the Facebook and Twitter accounts of users and figure out what kind of articles they wanted to see. Content was delivered in two daily editions.
At its launch, Material already had strong competition from popular social news readers like Flipboard, Zite, and Pulse.
Inq CEO and co-founder Ken Johnstone told TechCrunch at the time that Material differentiated from other news readers by offering an easier set-up than its rivals because all users needed to do to power Material’s algorithms was connect their Facebook or Twitter accounts.
“For somebody who has invested a lot of time in Twitter and Facebook anyway, this is about getting a return on that investment,” Johnstone told TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas.
Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook’s news aggregation products all feature some human curation, but, like Material, they also rely heavily on algorithms to customize content for each user. Inq had planned to monetize Material by harvesting enough data to build an advertising business, but its failure to do may be a cautionary tale for other developers of news readers.
Though algorithms are necessary if a news aggregator wants to scale up (and collect enough data to be profitable), they still can’t replace the discernment of a human editor. Like Feedly, Pulse, and Zite, Material’s customized content stream suffered from problems like miscategorized stories, irrelevant content, and “the overall feeling you get from flicking through an edition is not a cohesive, editorially unified whole, but an algorithmically generated bunch of mostly random stories with (at best) a few loose, overlapping themes,” as Natasha put it.
Clinkle is the hottest app around to have done mostly nothing. The stealth payments service, which has raised $25 million from big-name investors, has yet to publicly launch. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be hacked.
Today, a guest user posted a list of 33 usernames, user IDs, profile photos, and phone numbers to PasteBin. Based on the data provided, it seems as though these users are Clinkle employees who are testing the app.
Founder Lucas Duplan is on the list (yep, that’s his Clinkle profile pic, shown above), as well as former Netflix CFO and Clinkle COO Barry McCarthy. Former PayPal exec Mike Liberatore, now Clinkle CFO, is also listed.
The data was seemingly accessed through a private API that Clinkle has in place. Referred to by the hacker as “typeahead”, the API appears to be the basis of an autocomplete tool, allowing uses to type a single letter (like ‘A’) and find all usernames starting with that letter (like ‘Adam’ and ‘Andrew’). [Note: Twitter has a similar tool with the same name — it's unclear if they're one and the same.]
Clinkle seems to use this API in their own app (presumably so users can find friends when making a payment), which has allowed one hacker to search user names, leading to the associated user IDs and phone numbers.
Here’s what the hacker had to say:
Results from Clinkle typeahead API. It requires no authentication. The app stores writes results to disk automatically. This is much worse than Snapchat’s breach. Phone numbers masked as courtesy.
In other words, whoever broke into the app didn’t need a userID to access Clinkle’s list of testers or their personal information, which seems to be saved on a Clinkle server.
But to be fair, Clinkle’s breach isn’t quite the same as Snapchat’s, considering the information of 4.6 million Snapchat users was released, as opposed a small group of employee testers.
Here’s Clinkle’s explanation for the breach:
You’re describing visibility that was purposefully built into the system as part of our preliminary user testing and was always intended to be turned off. As you can see from the list, we’ve been testing internally and registrations have been limited to Clinkle employees. We were using an open API, which has now been closed. That said, only names, phone numbers, photos, and Clinkle unique IDs were accessible.
Clinkle points to a Stanford student as the alleged hacker but that has yet to be confirmed.
Clinkle, rumored to launch later this year, currently has both an iOS app in iTunes and an Android app available in the Google Play store for those who wish to join the waiting list.
Based on the size of the app (52MB) and the unzipped files uncovered after downloading it, it seems like the full Clinkle app is out there, rather than a placeholder app built for wait list registrants.
Right now, the app has a waiting list wall, which “VIP” members can bypass once an administrator grants permission. This likely allows Clinkle to demo the app to investors and partners without having to go through some cumbersome download process.
During the process of fundraising, I’m sure that little trick came in handy. Not so much today, though.
The hack produced some interesting data about the team that works on Clinkle.
Founder Lucas Duplan is listed as the first user (User ID: 1), with a picture that very much resembles him holding cash money. The CFO, Barry McCarthy, is also listed with a legitimate profile photo, as is the Head Of Comms, who confirmed the validity of the images and the data.
The photos from Clinkle’s Team page, where 22 unidentified Clinkle employees are pictured alongside goofy pseudonyms, also seem to resemble people in the leaked profile photos. Finally, we can put faces to names.
So what are the implications?
Well, Clinkle hasn’t actually launched yet, so it’s very possible that the team hasn’t been focusing on security. However, security and trust should be top priorities for a payments company. Especially for a company so young.
Clinkle was founded by a group of more than a dozen Stanford students in 2011, and has stayed under the radar while key employees finish their degrees. The company was partially funded by Stanford professors before raising $25 million in a party round. Over 18 investors participated.
The WSJ, followed by every other news outlet, proclaimed this the biggest Stanford startup exodus in history. Clinkle was all the rage.
Seriously, Silicon Valley wouldn’t shut up about it.
In fall, however, two rounds of layoffs left many wondering if the Stanford-fueled payments startup was really the Messiah of trade. The company slashed around 30 employees, and then another 16.
Around the same time, screenshots and videos of the app in action were leaked, letting Clinkle’s cat out of the bag.
Rumors circulated that the company was going through leadership issues. That those promised equity weren’t getting it. That folks were overworked and underpaid. That there was no transparency about the product timeline, or the product itself. That 22-year-old Lucas Duplan was taking home a six-figure salary and mistreating employees.
Today, the same questions as before creep back into our consciousness.
What have they been doing with all that money this whole time? Posting profile photos that confirm our worst fears? Whether the breach was a result of intentional openness or unintentional laziness on the part of Clinkle is unclear, but the photo doesn’t lie.
Google’s earnings call doesn’t feature CEO Larry Page this time around, which is a disappointment in terms of product discussion. But Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora discussed briefly hardware during the call, flagging the search giant’s growing satisfaction with the Nexus line and with the Nexus 5 in particular.
Arora said that Google is seeing “strong interest in Nexus hardware,” and “great reception for Nexus 5,” especially during the holiday sales period. That’s due to the marketing team’s performance creating ads and also fostering a retail environment conductive to purchases.
On the subject of Nest, Google reiterated the line it’s been touting so far, which is that they saw the goals of Nest and themselves in alignment. Google wants to help Nest scale, it said, and will continue to devote resources to this goal. That’s somewhat different from what TechCrunch heard recently, which suggested that the learning thermostat and smoke detector weren’t really the focus of the deal; instead, Google wants to put the Nest team in charge of all of its hardware projects.
Asked whether the Motorola acquisition will affect their hardware plans, Arora said that he thinks their continued investments in other areas should show that they’re still committed to hardware.
“As you know from the Nest acquisition, Glass and wearables, we’re continuing to innovate,” he said about their ongoing hardware projects. It’s an interesting characterization, because Google has yet to make anything public around wearables beyond Glass, yet Arora separated it out as a new category. Late last year, we heard that a Google smartwatch might be right around the corner, however, so this could be a tantalizing hint that this kind of device (or other wearable efforts) could indeed be on the horizon. Remember that Google acquired WIMM Labs last year, which made an Android-powered smartwatch.
