launch

Spotify has reached an important milestone, but Americans are still waiting for their chance to try it out.

The music service announced today that it has hit 1 million subscribers. The company reached the figure nearly two years after it tallied its 1 millionth registered user. Spotify's Web site says it now has 10 million such users.

The discrepancy in users compared with subscribers is due to Spotify's business model. The company offers a free, ad-supported version of its service, allowing people to stream music for a limited amount of time. It also has a premium service that … Read more

PALM DESERT, Calif.--In 2008, when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington told CNET that the venerable Demo conference "needs to die," he ushered in an era of extreme competitiveness in the tech start-up-oriented conference world.

Arrington issued his sinister words as part of a conversation about why he had scheduled his own conference--the TechCrunch 50--directly against Demo that year, and his general argument was that shows that charged well into five-figures to let start-ups present their wares to investors and press needed to be dispensed with.

Flash forward three years later, and the TechCrunch 50, or TC 50 as … Read more

Dave Mathews, the Dave Mathews who invented the CueCat, is at the Launch Conference today showing off his latest out-there company, NeuAer. He believes that location reporting services on mobile phones--apps such as Foursquare--are too coarse and require too much work to use. NeuAer technology uses more than just the location sensors in phones to "tag" locations, for much better resolution. But the really cool and weird thing: You can tag other people, too.

Mathews' technology, ToothTag (can we talk about that?), uses all the radio signals that come into a phone--Wi-Fi, GPS, near-field, and most importantly Bluetooth--to fingerprint a location or a person with high accuracy. Most of the real-world locations and things you care about, he says, emit a complex radio-frequency signature based on more than one transmitter. Mobile-phone location services don't use enough of these signals, he says. When it comes to mobile assets like Bluetooth headsets, you don't even have to connect to the other device or "pair" with it. In other words, once you collect the Bluetooth signature from someone you know, you could, with ToothTag technology, get an alert on your mobile device whenever that person came within Bluetooth range of you.

Don't everybody freak out at once, OK? The privacy implications of this are serious. I told Mathews I'm looking forward to covering his testimony in front of a congressional hearing if this technology takes off. But the benefits are real, too. You could drop an old Bluetooth headset into your kid's backpack and get a ping whenever he or she wandered away from you. You could set your home security system to arm when you walked out the door, or you could automatically flag the location of where you're parking your car. Contractors could start tracking their billable time when they sat down next to their client. And, of course, for dating and business matchmaking apps, there are tons of opportunities for developers to use (or abuse) a system like this.

With the location fingerprinting technology, check-ins a la Foursquare can become more automated, since they're more accurate. Mathews has a lot of ideas for this, as well.

NeuAer's business, as Mathews rightly realizes, is not so much creating the fun, useful, or terrifying new apps, but rather building the location-reporting technology and platform, opening up developer access to it, and somehow earning fees from that. At least this time (versus CueCat), he has some history to study before he launches: There's Google Latitude, for example, and Yahoo tried a similar concept with FireEagle, which hasn't exactly worked out. Mathews can learn from that. FireEagle also didn't have core mobile technology under its hood, as NeuAer does.

The first ToothTag app will be available from NeuAer for Android phones. Android exposes more of what's happening in phone radios and sensors to developers than Apple's iPhone does, but Mathews said an iPhone app will follow.

What do you think of this technology? Great new tool for location-based apps, or another blow to physical privacy? Or both? … Read more

ShopSquad is a peer-to-peer home shopping network. The service connects people shopping for specific items with live, online experts who know the space. If the user then buys an item the expert is recommending, the expert makes affiliate money minus ShopSquad's cut. The service is general but currently appears to be geared toward new parents; there are more experts and products in the baby gear department than any other.

The judges at the Launch conference, where this product was introduced, believe ShopSquad is on to something, but that the demo here only hinted at the company's potential. First, ShopSquad is heavy into video advice, which is impressive to demo but overkill for shopping advice for many people. Second, the service only connects buyers to experts who are ShopSquad users. As the judges pointed out, if it could somehow find experts elsewhere and rope them into an advice session as needed, the available pool of products and experts to discuss them would be much bigger. Conceptually this means the people writing reviews on Amazon could find a new way to profit from that work. There is still the problem of shills for certain products. An expert rating system might help keep this under control.

Tech businesses pioneered the idea of crowd-sourcing customer support, with message boards and through start-ups like Get Satisfaction. Of course, many businesses have tried to use their fans to also sell products, but ShopSquad's capability to automate, institutionalize, and help consumers profit from their expertise is quite smart. … Read more

When checking in to a hotel, the old advice goes, see the room before you accept it. Don't like it? Sniff dismissively at the bellhop, and talk your way into a better room.

Who has time for this? Start-up Room 77, launching at the Launch Conference, is building a system that gives hotel guests a look at their potential room before they check in.

In a nutshell, the company is building a database of individual hotel rooms, including for each information like distance from elevators, what floor they're on, subjective ratings from people who have stayed in them, and--the sexy feature--a Google Maps image, with 3D buildings, of the view out the window.

If you get the upcoming Room 77 smartphone app, when you're checking in to a hotel you'll be able see if the room you're offered matches what you like, and also check out the view. Bad-for-you rooms will come back red-tagged. You can request another before you leave the desk. … Read more

Daqri had one of the whizziest demos at the Launch conference. This company makes an augmented reality service that overlays 3D images onto the real world through a smartphone, using QR codes as the anchor. In other words, point your iPhone running the Daqri app at the right matrix barcode, and a floating 3D (possible moving) image will appear on the phone's screen. We've seen this effect in magazines and some ads already; Daqri is just trying to institutionalize the function.

While the presenter at the show said he wanted Daqri to become the "YouTube of augmented reality," I fear it's more likely the company will become the CueCat of the space. CueCat was a barcode scanner that consumers were supposed to use to get more information from advertisements in magazines. Barcodes ended up being important to commerce, but CueCat, which was supposed to become the funnel through which barcode advertising flowed, didn't make it.

There is, however, something very interesting happening with QR codes. While there are apps that read QR codes, like RedLaser (acquired by eBay), these little smartphone-readable printed tags could, and probably will, become much important. But only if reading QR codes becomes easier. If you have to open an app to read the code, I fear that their impact will be muted--it'd be like having to open your phone app whenever you wanted to receive a call. Ditto for SMS. There are some data types that bust through whatever you're doing on your phone and rise to the top of the UI regardless. QR code reading could be like that; as you navigate the world, your phone could pick up codes it sees to present information you might want, possibly using augmented reality, but not necessarily.

How to make this work without annoying users mightily or killing battery life I don't know. But tagging the physical world to connect it to the virtual is an opportunity for start-ups. Perhaps Daqri can pivot to become that, or perhaps as QR codes get more important its augmented reality connection service will become fundamental technology that gets wrapped into all new phones. The company is young enough and appears to have the technology chops to build a good service in this arena. I just don't want to see any company peg its future on building advertising or marketing services that require users to learn a new app. Advertising works when it goes to the consumer; the reverse is not so good. … Read more

At Launch, music industry disruptor Michael Robertson (MP3.com, Lindows, SIPphone) rolled out DAR.fm, a service that records radio shows to the cloud. Think TiVo, but for radio.

Existing online audio services offer some of what DAR.fm already does. Free services like Pandora replace the traditional experience of listening to radio stations for music. And they're better, since you get music more in tune to your tastes. If you want to listen to specific songs or just one artist, there are subscription services such as Rhapsody. Talk show listeners can get their tracks whenever they want via a podcast service, like iTunes.

So where does DAR.fm fit? Oh, and did I mention that since it picks up audio from radio stations, its audio quality is noticeably lower than other services ("sounds more like DAR.am," as elliotloh Tweeted)? Robertson is threading the needle with this business, but he does have a niche. First of all, it's free, and it gives you some of what you can only get when you pay for a service like Rhapsody: If you record your favorite radio station for a few hours, you can see all the songs played during that time and skip around to them by name, which you can't do for free with another service.

Second, it's legal, or so Robertson believes--and he does have experience battling the music industry in court. The radio stations can't compete thanks to copyright laws, and the legality of letting users record what they hear, even to a cloud service, has precedent.

Robertson also is getting his service baked into, or least working on, other products besides the browser: There are smartphone apps, plus it works on Roku, Squeezebox, and on some $150 Internet radios you can get at Best Buy, he says.

For me, the poor audio quality of DAR.fm is a stopper. For younger users, I'm not convinced that they hew to radio stations the way I did in my youth, which I think is another problem. But there may be a big enough user base who likes the new features DAR.fm offers to give it some wings. It does make saving radio shows easier than almost any other service. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--With the restaurant rating and recommendation business being pretty well locked up (by Yelp, OpenTable, Foursquare, etc.), the new game in town is apparently recommendations on individual dishes. Got a hankering for tom kha gai soup? You can check out Spork (live) or TopDish (invite-only beta) to find the best restaurant nearby that serves that particular dish; both companies are presenting in the low-rent "launch pad" sideshow of the Launch conference here.

These two services collect user reviews--ratings and pictures--of dishes to help you make the life-critical decision of where to find the best of whatever you're looking for, or if you're sitting at a restaurant, which dish to order. Both sites let you profile your tastes to help decide for you what you're more likely to like.

Spork is a bit more social at the moment. It connects to your Facebook network to prioritize food ratings from your friends. An upcoming feature will let you gift a dish to a friend via a PayPal credit for the cost of the dish. A future network update may work the credit through restaurants directly.

Co-founder Dan Cheung told me he's also considering adding a "reverse Groupon" feature to the service: If enough users like a restaurant's dish, Spork may ask the restaurant to create a coupon for it, to stimulate demand just a little bit more.

TopDish is a bit newer, still in closed beta. Its recommendations are network-wide, for the time being, and the mobile app isn't out yet. The model is largely the same as Spork's, but co-founder Salil Pandit told me his service's secret sauce will be communication with restaurants: If you run an eatery, you'll be able to see how all your individual dishes rate. This will be a free service for a while, although the value to a restaurant could obviously be quite high. "We just want to help start a conversation," Pandit told me.

The increasing granularity of data in new Web services is an important trend to watch. Highly-specific recommendation databases don't work unless there's enough volume of users and data feeding into them. Without that, you get a lot of empty records and unsatisfied users. But with everyone getting with the program of recommending things to friends, checking in, and Tweeting or Facebooking their every move, it's not surprising that companies like these (and some others, launching tomorrow at this conference) are tying to make sense of these little tidbits of opinion.

… Read more

Company number two at Launch is the somewhat scary YouEye. It's a user testing service for Web publishers. But instead of watching what users click on, it uses the Webcam on the computer to track what test users are actually looking at. That's a neat trick to do with a Webcam. Accuracy is not the same as you'd get in a controlled lab, but the presenter said it's about "as accurate as the width of two Twitter profile photos" (or about 100 pixels, why didn't he just say so?).

Users of the general … Read more