BetterWorks, the employee perks startup led by Los Angeles entrepreneur and investor Paige Craig, has told its customers that it will be shutting down May 31.

The company offered tools to help businesses manage discounts and rewards programs for employees. In the past few months, BetterWorks still seemed to be rolling out a steady stream of new features like catering and groups and permissions. In fact, Director of Product Varun Krishna told me that BetterWorks was seeing growing interest from larger enterprises (though in retrospect that may have been a polite way of saying that it wasn’t making enough money from small- and medium-sized businesses).

However, last week the company laid off all of its sales and marketing staff and half of its operations team. It looks like today’s note to customers (which was first reported by socalTech) is the final nail in the coffin. Here’s the copy that one of our readers sent in:

Thanks for being a supporter, and a user a of the BetterWorks platform.

We’re proud to have helped make work rewarding for your team and company. I’m writing to let you know that for business reasons, as of May 31st 2012 the BetterWorks perk platform will no longer be in service to customers. We’ve been unable to sustain a large enough market and have decided to close our doors. It’s been a privilege having you as a customer and I deeply apologize for any inconvenience this creates.

Because the site will be retired, please take the following actions to make sure you are able to retain key information:

• Please print out your vouchers by May 31st: Because these vouchers have been pre-paid, vendors will continue to honor services until August 31st 2012.
• Spend May Allowance and Bonus Bucks by May 31st: As of midnight May 31st, you will no longer be able to spend budget on the platform and they will be returned to your employer. Please use any remaining funds in your account by this date.
• Memberships will cancel on May 31st: If you have gym memberships – they will be cancelled automatically at the end of this month. While it is not an obligation, many vendors will continue to offer corporate rates and we encourage you to discuss this directly with them.
• Food Ordering Closed on Monday May 28th for Memorial Day: Note that food ordering will be closed in observance of Memorial Day. During this time, all other perks are available for purchase.

Please email support@betterworks.com or call us at 1-888-601-9675 extension #2 if any issues arise and we will be happy to assist you. Thanks for believing in our vision and for using BetterWorks at your company.

Paige Craig
CEO – BetterWorks

BetterWorks raised a total of $10.5 million from investors including Redpoint Ventures. Craig co-founded the company with Geni co-founder George Ishii and Farmville co-creator Sizhao Yang.

Two big customer review platforms are teaming up: Bazaarvoice just announced that it has agreed to acquire PowerReviews.

The agreement is for up to $31 million in cash, plus stock, bringing the total estimated value to be $151 million. Bazaarvoice says the acquisition should close before the end of July.

The companies plan to combine their technology, content, and data. Both offer social commerce products that allow retailers and brands to collect and syndicate customer reviews, as well as other content. The release says PowerReviews’ self-service product will allow Bazaarvoice, which has been focused on larger companies, to expand into the small- and medium-sized market.

The combined company supposedly serves nearly 1,800 clients globally, including half of the Internet Retailer 500.

PowerReviews has raised a total of $37 million in funding from Menlo Ventures, Draper Richards, Lehman Brothers, Tenaya Capital, Four Rivers Group, and others. Bazaarvoice, meanwhile, went public earlier this year.

Entrepreneurs, please start paying more attention to healthtech. Rather than trying to build the next billion-dollar mobile photo app, go lean and deep into bigger problems. As ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi said recently, healthtech is underrepresented among startups, with many (and founders are not alone) failing to recognize the size of the market (and the corresponding opportunity): Healthcare alone is a $2.7 trillion industry in the U.S., for example.

Yet, healthtech is just as desperate in its need for brain power, entrepreneurial enthusiasm, and a little elbow grease as it was five years ago. Speaking to a crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday, the ZocDoc CEO essentially issued a call-to-action, declaring that access to healthcare “is one of the greatest challenges to face our generation.”

Today, thanks to the increasing number of health-focused startup accelerators, like San Francisco-based Rock Health and New York City-based BluePrint Health, to name a few, lacking intimate familiarity with HIPAA or med school experience is no longer a categorical disqualifier. What’s more, there are plenty of problems to tackle, some of them low-hanging, and there is in fact growth capital to be found for healthtech.

To that point: One of the first graduates of BluePrint’s healthtech accelerator is a startup called Meddik, which wants to give consumers a better way to search for health information and find targeted and personalized support. The startup is still in the early stages, so the fine points are still gelling, but the idea is to build a platform that aggregates user-submitted content, identifying the best advice, articles, and solutions based on the specific conditions and topics of interest of the individual.

Thought it’s still early in the cycle, Meddik is already finding validation from investors, as the startup is today announcing that its has raised $750K in seed funding from a flock of notable angels and early-stage VCs, including Chris Dixon, Nat Turner, Zach Weinberg, Bob Stern, Vivek Garipalli, as well as Collaborative Fund, Founder Collective, Great Oaks, and Silicon Badia.

Co-founder Tim Soo, who’s currently on leave from the University of Pennsylvania as he and co-founder Ben Shyong work towards to launch Meddik later this summer, told us that they had originally set out to build a kind of Google Search for health. Much in the same way that Noodle is currently doing for education.

But the co-founders eventually came to the realization that their scope was too wide, as crawling the entire web resulted in an unfavorable ratio of spam and junk to quality health content. Of course, this touches on a problem that’s fundamental to online health portals. Unless your leg is falling off, thanks to the high cost of health care and doctor/hospital visits, when it comes to basic health questions, our first move is to ask Google. Just as true now as it was then.

Naturally, that Google search then leads to general answers, confusing encyclopedia entries, or long-winded forums. But, what if you find someone just like you (a clone?!), who had experienced the same medical issue, ailment, or had already asked the same question and could tell you what worked — and what didn’t.

Of course, while this is a great start, that information is still anecdotal. Thus, the key, Shoo said, is to scale that experience, adding personalized, aggregated public and academic information, traditional and alternative remedies, in an effort to not just find a good answer to your health questions, but find the right answer. Which is so much easier said than done.

We still haven’t applied Web 2.0 answers where they matter most, the co-founder continued, so a health networking play “doesn’t just mean a better news feed, or a good restaurant recommendation, it means making the right health-related connection can save lives.”

Of course, even though Massoumi reminded us of the fact that health startups are underrepresented in the ecosystem, Meddik has plenty of competition — at least nominally. WebMD and PatientsLikeMe, and Healthline each offer extensive resources for patients, yet the majority of existing health solutions tend to focus on specific conditions (like chronic illnesses), which makes them inherently boxed-in. And in the case of the above examples, the barriers to entry can also be high, requiring users to fill out involved online profiles.

While solutions like Fitbit and Fitocracy are finding adoption among mainstream audiences, there’s a lot of focus on Considering most health attributes are intrinsically interrelated, the co-founders began building out a large ontology table that connects all common health language (via a Wiki and internet scraping) to actual medical code.

Companies such as WebMD, PatientsLikeMe, Healthline and Alliance Health also provide an online heath resource for patients, but Soo said those sites either have higher barriers to entry (in that users have to complete more involved profiles) or target patients with more chronic illnesses. Fitbit, Fitocracy, Nike’s Fuel band and others appeal to a mainstream audience, but they only focus on general fitness, not the larger category of personal health. Meddik wants to play across that spectrum, Soo said.

Based on those codes, Meddik calculates a clinical similarity index between the searcher and every other user connected to the site, with the goal being to create a health network, in which users remain anonymous while being able to connect with those who will be best suited to help you.

At this point, as you may already be able to tell, Meddik is still in the early stages of building its MVP. The service is in closed beta with a limited number of beta testers beginning the process of seeding its content. When the site is up and fully functional, Soo says, it will likely monetize by leveraging its unique data set to serve targeted health advertising — not unlike Facebook’s social data/advertising model.

To give readers a taste of the site, Meddik will be peeling the doors back the foor a opening its doors over the next few days to a few hundred early participants. Check them out at home here, and let us know what you think.

Knowing how users react to Facebook’s product changes is crucial to the site making the right moves, so today it closed an acq-hire of part of design research firm Bolt | Peters — specifically its leading man CEO Nate Bolt and several other employees from the six person consultancy. Those coming over will be joining Facebook’s design team that’s headed by Kate Aronowitz.

Bolt | Peters started 10 years ago and specialized in recruiting actual visitors to a website through its tool Ethnio and then observing their usage remotely so it could deliver insights on what to improve to their clients, which numbered over 90. Bolt | Peters will shut down on June 22nd, and has already spun out its Ethnio real-time research service.

Facebook tests product changes more frequently than nearly any service. Bringing in Nate Bolt and some of his teammates will help it understand exactly how users feel about changes and avoid blunders like Beacon.

Right now, Facebook typically pushes design changes to a tiny fraction of its user base through its Gatekeeper system. It then watches the usage data to see if users engage with new features or changes, and how engagement, sharing, and time-on-site change. Changes that improve these metrics often get pushed to the whole user base. Innovating and iterating in a way that pushes people’s boundaries is good, but Facebook needs to be careful not to roll out new features too far before its users are ready for the future.

Bolt | Peters will give Facebook talent with experience deducing both the sentimental reactions and actual impact on usage of its changes. That’s important because sometimes users hate things at first, like the news feed, but use them a ton and end up loving them. It had previously assisted Sony, HP, Electronic Arts, Volkswagen, Autodesk, AAA, Genentech, Esurance, the Washington Post, and more with its services including live remote research, mobile research, training, live recruiting, game research, and “UX blitz”.

Here’s the full announcement of the acq-hire from Bolt | Peters’ blog:

It turns out the Facebook design team is a great place for smart researchers. For more than ten years, Bolt | Peters has worked with our clients (plus a robot and clay dinosaurs) to improve the design of their sites, apps, devices, video games, and cars. We did that with 238 projects, 24 talks, 18 articles, 11 events, 1 book, 19 weird videos, and 1 app. But the time has come for our next adventure — at Facebook. Bolt | Peters will be closing operations on June 22nd, 2012. While we’ll miss working with our amazing clients, we’re stoked about Facebook’s commitment to user experience, and the design team is a critical part of this.

What about ethnio? Last week we announced that after five years of growth, ethnio deserved to be its own company. That has not changed. Ethnio remains committed to supporting its customers with real-time research recruiting and more. We know Ethnio is in good hands with some of the people who have worked on it for years at the helm. I will no longer be working there, but will retain ownership. You can find out more about the new team at ethnio and who will be running it by following @ethnio or watching their blog.

User Research Friday and 1197 I’m thrilled to say that our friends at User Interface Engineering will be taking over User Research Friday. They pretty much rule at events. URF lives on. And the fine folks at the New York Soho Gallery for Digital Art will be taking over our mobile photography conference, 1197. Basically, both our product and the events that we’ve enjoyed putting on will live on after Bolt | Peters closes up shop. Feel free to get in touch with us with any questions, and you can keep up with all of us individually here. Our VP, Cyd Harrell, deserves 100% of the credit for running the consulting side of the business for the past six years. She rules. Thank you, Cyd. And a huge thanks to my co-founder Craig Peters, who has been a friend and advisor for years. But especially, all the team at Bolt | Peters past and present that I’ve had the pleasure of working with – you’ve made our success possible. Thank you guys. Well. It’s been our privilege to be a part of the the interaction design and UX community as a consulting firm since January, 2002, and we plan to continue to work in that community as part of Facebook. I want to mention that this decision did not come lightly. Our clients, colleagues, team, and advisors are simply the best. They are our partners. They are our friends. And we sincerely thank you. – Nate Bolt

This is guest post by Julia Szopa , program director at the blackbox.vc incubator in Silicon Valley which specialises in moving European startups into the US.

It is not uncommon for European entrepreneurs to come to the Silicon Valley to learn how to launch globally. However, they often play “the startup game” by the wrong rules. With scarce venture resources in Europe, founders learn to compromise way too much and accept what’s typically unacceptable by those who build great, successful companies with global potential.

Having talked to dozens of entrepreneurs from outside of the U.S. shortly after they arrive to take their first steps in Silicon Valley, I have observed a set of common false beliefs that most of them share. Even if they have great products, great teams, and endless motivation for working hard in their startups, the crucial first step for them should be to get rid of some misconceptions about the startup game… ASAP.

Co-owning the company with your team is crucial to its success

As Tim Draper noticed during his recent visit at Blackbox Connect, the concept of co-ownership is often misunderstood and underestimated outside of the Silicon Valley. Giving stock options to employees with a vesting schedule, which is one of the most natural ways to establish a real sense of ownership and motivate, often takes the last place on their lists of priorities (if at all).

There are countries, like Denmark, that explicitly discourage entrepreneurs from giving shares to employees, as their tax laws impose an additional 25% tax on any shareholder in possession of less than 10% of a company. In case of an exit, a stock-owning employee would owe the Danish government around 67% of what he’d made by investing his blood, sweat, and tears into building a successful startup.

Many entrepreneurs from Europe often point out that potential employees they talk to usually don’t even recognize the value of owning shares in a startup. In the culture of scarcity the short-term tangible benefits matter much more, and too few success stories among their peers make them believe that having shares in a startup could not really bring any profit.

Giving away too much for seed money limits your agility

Standards of equity amounts given away to investors, angels or advisors in Europe are incomparable with those in the Silicon Valley. While the well-established YCombinator asks for somewhere between 6%-8% for $11K-$20K, there are multiple local acceleration programs in Europe that take as much as 10% for as little as $10K of seed funding. I’ve also met entrepreneurs who have given away 35% of their company during the seed round and they weren’t just rare foolish exceptions.

While sometimes it’s crucial for startup founders to raise whatever seed money they can, they need to understand that giving away that big of a share of the company to investors will make it harder for them to raise future rounds of financing.

Furthermore, it also minimizes the incentives to reap meaningful rewards, as it sets the frame for inequitable partnership between the entrepreneur and the investor.

There are a couple of totally legitimate reasons for small markets VCs to demand more equity for less. First, they count on small exits, as the markets are smaller. Second, they have few competitors, so they simply can ask for more and still get a good deal-flow. But that doesn’t mean that the entrepreneurs have to accept these rules of the game, just because they have to prove the concept on the home market. Of course, having achieved decent traction in home country definitely makes entrepreneurs look more legitimate in front of the VCs from the Valley, but it doesn’t prove anything about their capabilities to scale to the global market.

Thus the very common assumption that “first we need to prove ourselves locally, and then go global” is not always true. Sometimes it just makes more sense to start globally, and then localize (as most of the Silicon Valley startups do).

Making quick decisions doesn’t always mean you are desperate

Whenever a VC invited to give a talk at Blackbox Connect mentioned that it takes her or him around 4 weeks to close a deal with a start up, the audience reacted with huge disbelief. How come it can take such a short time? while back in their home countries they would talk to VCs or angels for months before they get funded.

Apparently SV is much faster with making decisions, and the entrepreneurs are expected to act quickly too. Being able to make a decision fast is not a sign of desperation.

Thinking small doesn’t protect you from failure

Almost all of the companies that come to the Valley from a different startup ecosystem bring here the fear of failing with their startup. They pitch their tiny little projects — an app for this, an app for that — believing that maybe they will not change the world, but at least they’ll build something in order to start playing the startup game and move forward. And if they fail, that will be just a tiny little failure — much easier to digest.

Non-US startups must learn that failing is always an option. While small failure is less painful, no big win comes from playing it too safe. To succeed in the world of global business, they must adopt the Silicon Valley mindset. That means making fast decisions, taking bigger risks, giving shares to everyone in the company, and being smart about financing their company growth.

Editor’s note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

“In the Studio” continues this week with an engineer who began programming at the end high school, double-majored in CS/EE in college, dropped out of Stanford’s graduate CS program to become the second employee at Mint.com, and after spending some time at Intuit (which acquired Mint), now has her own company focused on building software for the small-medium business market.

Poornima Vijayashanker is not your average engineer. Growing up in a household where electronics were regularly taken apart for fun, she started coding toward the end of high school and ended up majoring in CS for her undergraduate degree. After a brief stint as an R&D engineer for Synopsis, she wanted to dive into the Valley’s startup scene and elected to enroll in a master’s CS program at Stanford. It was there she initially met Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint, and when the opportunity arose for her to join the small team, she dropped out of Stanford and helped build the company. From that experience, she ended up at Intuit, where she started plotting her next move, and now is the founder and CEO of Bizeebee, member manage software to help small business manage their customers, inventory, and a host of other services.

In addition to building her company, Vijayashanker manages to be extremely active in the startup community, giving back so much of her time and energy by speaking on college campuses to share her story and encourage students and why she thinks technology is a great professional choice. She is also an active mentor to students and has been blogging at her site Femgineer, which has been around for five years. But, that’s enough from me, you should really listen to all the wisdom she shares in this rich video discussion.

[Note: This discussion was originally taped at TechCrunch San Francisco on April 23, 2012.]

Ok, maybe not a bouncy ball, but pretty damn close.

M-Edge came out with a SuperShell for the iPad towards the end of last year, but the idea of a bouncing iPhone seems much more appealing. The case comes in four different colors — black, blue, purple, and pink — and has a finely dimpled finish to it to help with grip.

Clearly, it’s not the slimmest case on the market, so if you’re into that minimalist thing you may want to steer clear.

At the same time, anyone who lives a rough-and-tumble life (or drops their phone more than the average bear) should consider looking into this. The corners of the case are bulkier than usual, which allows for a bounciness that you can view for yourself in the video below.

The cover is made of closed-cell foam that helps absorb shocks, and it wraps around the edges of the phone to fit securely. All ports are accessible.

If only it came in orange with black stripes we could call it the Tigger.

The M-Edge iPhone SuperShell is available now for $29.99 from the M-Edge website.

Apple is continuing its “famous person uses Siri” commercials by bringing in famous person John Malkovich to add a soupçon of Old World weltschmerz and philosophizing to what is, in short, a way to schedule a wake-up call without unlocking your phone. The commercials feature Malkovich in what appears to be the house above the nasty places in Hostel where he muses on fine meats and the meaning of life.

I don’t quite get these celebrity appearances but, in the end, I suppose they’re good for brand awareness. Siri isn’t for the geeks – it’s for the folks who may have once been in love with BlackBerries. Siri suggests a certain ease, a certain subsumed technicality that would draw in the C-level exec and, in parallel, well-known superstars. It is, in short, a little assistant that will never talk back to you, never ask for a raise, and never request that you stop cursing.

That they chose Malkovich for this one is a little odd on the surface but it makes sense: Malkovich’s audience these days is the indie-film-loving, ironic post-gen-X C-level business person who is adult enough to be able to spend a little money on a 4S yet still is wary of being marketed at. A similar demographic targeting is shown in the choice of Samuel L. Jackson (the just-below-Mensa-level adventure/action loving geek who remembers Mace Windu’s sword) and Zooey Deschanel grabs the plugged-in hipster demographic. If you extrapolated this further into an older demographic you could almost foresee commercials featuring Betty White and maybe Leonard Nimoy.

For those who find these a bit out of character, I suggest we go back and look at the Mac vs. PC ads that featured two memorable faces who, arguably, cannot be disassociated from that campaign. You can’t look at John Hodgman – even with his sassy little mustache – and not see that poor, put-upon PC being shown up by Justin Long.

The iPod advertising was genius because it made everyone think they could move like a sinuous dancer to the lilting chords of Jet. These new commercials allow a certain type of consumer to associate him or herself with a certain archetype. As inclusive as Apple seems to its fans, it’s still important to segment those still on the fence and, one by one, speak directly to them.

Insta-who? Today Facebook begins rolling out Facebook Camera for iOS to English-speaking countries, a standalone photos app where you can shoot, filter, and share single or sets of photos and scroll through a feed of photos uploaded to Facebook by your friends. Developed by Facebook’s photos team without the help of Instagram because the acquisition deal hasn’t closed yet, Facebook Camera looks a lot like the app TechCrunch leaked images of a year ago, and is designed for quicker publishing than Facebook’s multi-featured primary mobile app.

Facebook Camera lets you rapidly pick one or more photos, apply filters, tag friends and locations, add a description, and post. While its 14 filters, batch uploads, and streamlined interface are a big step up from Facebook for iOS, the design isn’t as beautiful as Instagram and neither are the photos you’ll see in it. When asked if Facebook Camera would become a direct competitor to the photosharing network it bought last month, a spokesman told me “As Mark asserted, we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently, so I anticipate some healthy competition.”

Though for now Facebook Camera is just for iOS in English-speaking countries (and will become available as soon as Apple can populate the App Store with it, if you don’t see it already) it will roll out internationally over the next few weeks as Facebook gets it translated. As for versions for Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone, I’m told “While we don’t comment on future products we are carefuly looking at what might make for agood Facebook photos experience across other platforms.”

But now Facebook has three apps for consumers — its primary app, Facebook Messenger, and now Facebook Camera (plus Facebook Pages Manager for Page admins). That means users might have to choose which to keep on their home screen, or could end up sticking all three in a folder and become less likely to use any of them.

The app’s homescreen includes a camera button for shooting new photos, and quick access to the last few images in your camera roll for instant uploading. By default you’ll see a feed of photos from your friends that’s basically your news feed but only photo posts. You can also view a feed of just photos you’ve taken or been tagged in. The feeds update in real time, you can Like with a single click, and the comment button pops up as an overlay rather than forcing you to load a separate screen. The browsing experience is smooth, though browsing can only be done in portrait mode so standard photos appear square with their sides or top and bottom cut off. You have to click them and sometimes turn your device to view them in full.

How It’s Better Than Instagram

The best feature of Facebook Camera and its one real selling point over Instagram is multi-photo uploads. This helps you tell a story or share the best photos from a day’s outing in a single post. It’s great for if you can’t decide which shot is best and don’t want to go through the sharing flow over and over. The feature basically steamrolls Batch, a photosharing app specifically designed for uploading sets. Browsing multi-photo stories is smooth too, as they appear as one story in the feed showing the first photo, but you can swipe side to side to view the rest of the set.

Rather than having to wait for a photo to load when you browse by like on Instagram, it appears as a blurry placeholder at first and then sharpens up, which is nice. Facebook Camera’s 14 filters are also more sensibly named with titles that describe how they change photos, such as Bright, Emerald, and Copper, rather than Instagram’s less indicative Hudson, Sutro, and Brannan. Facebook’s photos product manager Dirk Stoop tells me “We do hope to bring the best stuff from Facebook Camera to the other app” so filters, cropping, and batch uploads could appear in the main Facebook app soon.

How It’s Worse

Unfortunately, there are several flaws in the current version of Facebook Camera that seem especially glaring compared to Instagram. Like and comment icons and counts are overlaid on the photos, disturbing their appearance. When you click to view existing comments on a photo they take a few seconds to load, which can fool you into thinking they aren’t there. Instagram also has more filters, 17, plus light adjustment and tilt-shift that Facebook’s new app lack.

But the first thing you might notice is the photos are decidedly less beautiful than what you’ll see on Instagram. Most weren’t uploaded with Facebook Camera but rather through Facebook’s web interface, primary app, or other third-party apps, so they’re unfiltered, and weren’t necessarily taken with artistry in mind.

While Facebook may be late to the standalone photo app scene, you have to remember that while Instagram has hit 50 million downloads, Facebook has over 500 million mobile users, and somewhere around 220 million on iOS and Android. As the social network’s user base shifts to mobile, the app will be crucial to keeping people engaged.

Facebook Camera may not be perfect, but for those who don’t want to start a whole new social network for photosharing on Instagram, and want an app that sucks in photos shared by their Facebook friends from anywhere, including Instagram and Path, Facebook Camera could earn a spot on the homescreen.

Download Facebook Camera here

In what should be a very welcome addition for Android developers, Google is adding subscription billing to its app store.

That should give developers yet another to earn revenue on top of in-app purchases of virtual currency, downloads of paid apps and advertising. It will probably most benefit mid and hardcore game developers, who are more likely to have rabid fans willing to pay for monthly access. It will also help magazine publishers, who are still figuring out how to sell content on tablets.

All of the subscriptions are auto-renewing and can be set with monthly or annual fees. Developers set the price themselves.  There’s also an HTTP-based publisher API that lets enterprise-scale backend servers validate or cancel subscriptions. It’s inter-operable with subscriptions on the web, so users can take their paid access with them across devices and web destinations.

The revenue share is just the same as it is with paid apps and in-app purchases. Google takes a 30 percent cut. When Apple launched subscriptions on iOS, some publishers like The Financial Times balked at Apple’s cut and instead built HTML5 apps to circumvent the fees. Google’s situation is a little more complicated as it relies more on carrier billing, which means most of their 30 percent cut may actually go toward mobile operators.

Google hand-selected a few developers to launch with subscriptions today. One of them is Glu Mobile, which is a publicly traded mobile game developer. They’re best known for “action-adventure” games like Gun Bros and they did just over $17 million in smartphone revenue in the first quarter of this year (which was a pretty impressive 72 percent increase from the quarter before).

Google is playing catch-up with iOS in terms of helping developers make money from their apps. Mobile analytics firm Flurry found that for every dollar a developer earns on iOS, they earn about a quarter of that on Android. Most of this has to do with how Android just has fewer paying customers on file. If you look at revenue on a per-user basis (or how a paying user spends on average), it’s actually almost the same on iOS and Android. So as long as Google can get more payments information on Android users, it looks promising.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is currently the most popular Android-powered tablet, but it doesn’t feature a GPS chip. Given how important location-based services have become, that’s a bit of a drawback for many developers and quite a few apps that want to access location features on Amazon’s tablet actually crash. To avoid these issues, Kayak teamed up with Skyhook to provide location services for its updated Android app. Kayak, of course, relies heavily on location services to show its users information like nearby hotels and airport information.

Skyhook’s Android SDK allows developers to get location information across virtually all Android versions and forks like the Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s NOOK.

The service, which provided virtually all of the location features for iOS before Apple switched to its own solution in 2010, uses WiFi triangulation when it can’t use a GPS chip or cell tower triangulation to determine a device’s location.

On Android, it is worth noting, Skyhook is also enabled in a number of other popular apps, including Tweetcaster, HopStop, deCarta and OpenTable. WiFi triangulation, of course, is never quite as accurate as GPS (except for when you are indoors), but using a service like Skyhook greatly improves location accuracy in urban areas and speeds up GPS satellite acquisition times.

Dan Misener, in a fit of inspired data mining, scraped half of Kickstarter to find failed projects. He could not, it seems, find a single one. Why? Because Kickstarter hides them behind a non-searchable wall. They exist, sure, but you won’t find them with Google and they never, ever show them in their “Discover” browsing system.

And good for them.

In a general sense, Kickstarter isn’t a marketplace. It’s not like Etsy or eBay or Amazon where the slow-sellers sit next to the hot items. It is, instead, more of a competition. It’s a competition for eyeballs, for cash, and for media attention. It is more a dog show than flea market, and you don’t keep the ugly dogs on stage after the first round of judging.

What Misener discovered, in short, was that Kickstarter surfaces only successful or nearly successful projects and hides the failed ones. For example, Instaprint failed and if you search for it none of the original Kickstarter content will come up. It’s been norobot’ed.

GTar, on the other hand, is alive and well.

As is Shadowrun:

In short, in the 26,000 or so searchable Kickstarter entries there is not a single dud.

To his credit, Misener does not call this an outrage. However, as a source for potential crowdsourcing wisdom Kickstarter’s failures are as important as its successes. Although the variables are few, the configurations are many and there are reasons that project X didn’t succeed while project Y – a mere permutation of project X – pulled it off.

He writes:

It is well within Kickstarter’s rights to yank junk projects off the stage. It keeps the site fresh and vibrant and a graveyard of garbage iPod Nano straps is no one’s idea of a good time. That said, to push failed projects down the memory hole with such vigor is a bit harsh. Those who do not learn from their mistakes are, after all, doomed to make another damn iPad stand.

Crowdfunder, the Los Angeles-based startup creating an online platform for the “crowdfunding” of startups and small businesses, has launched the first public beta version of its site this week. The launch comes on the heels of Crowdfunder closing on $400,000 in seed funding from a group of angel investors earlier this month, CEO Chance Barnett tells me.

The key difference between Crowdfunder and existing sites such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo is that Crowdfunder wants to facilitate the kind of equity-based funding where investors get an actual stake in the company, rather than provide donations. For many years, only accredited investors have been allowed perform equity investing in private companies — and to receive accreditation, individuals must meet certain criteria such as having a net worth in excess of $1 million. The JOBS Act signed into law last month contains passages that remove that restriction, allowing virtually anyone to invest in private companies.

But: The crowdfunding portion of the JOBS Act has not taken effect yet — the Securities and Exchange Commission is still reviewing it — so the old standards requiring equity investors to be accredited still stand today. That means that Crowdfunder.com is not yet able to do what it aims to do.

Contests, Not Quite Crowdfunding

Despite this, Crowdfunder has had nearly 2,000 companies apply to raise funds with the site and over $17 million pledged to invest by crowdfunders signed up on the platform. So it decided to hold a “beta launch” that is actually a series of contests to be held in cities across the US, in which local startups and small businesses will compete for funding from judging panels of high-profile accredited investors.

The first of these events is being held in Los Angeles. Dubbed “Crowdstart LA,” the contest is now open to submissions from startups, who will compete to win a $25,000 prize that will be awarded in July. Similar events in Las Vegas, Silicon Valley, and New York City are on the horizon, Barnett says.

Waiting Out The SEC Ruling Period

Oonce the crowdfunding aspect of the JOBS Act gets the green light from the SEC, Crowdfunder plans to activate the ability for anyone to invest through its platform. In the meantime, Crowdfunder is optimistic about the process. Barnett wrote in an email:

“We are working with the SEC and other top players in crowdfunding to help determine how crowdfunding platforms are actually regulated. There are many companies who say they want to be in the crowdfund investment space. There are very very few companies who are actually at the table and engaged with the SEC, let alone have a real understanding of the significance of being a regulated platform for investment and securities-based offerings.”

Not everyone is jazzed about the JOBS Act and the advent of equity-based crowdfunding. Some worry that this could harm regular investors and have negative effects on companies and the larger startup ecosystem. We’re still the early days of crowdfunding in general, but it’s clear that there is definitely a sense of anticipation — both positive and negative — about the practice.

Here is an interview with Crowdfunder CEO Chance Barnett on TechCrunch TV from earlier this spring, discussing the JOBS Act and where Crowdfunder fits in:

One of the hot companies at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York this week was the real-time people-powered translation service Babelverse. Quite often, though, Google Translate-style machine translation is good enough and there is clearly a huge market for all kinds of translation services. SayHi Translate, a $0.99 iOS app that focuses on machine translation, just announced that it has now translated over 10 million phrases since its launch just four weeks ago. To celebrate this milestone, SayHi is releasing version 2.0 of its app today, which features a redesigned and easier to use interface, as well as new controls over how its spoken translations sound.

SayHi Translate speaks 33 languages and dialects, including English, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin and Russian. The app can translate between all of these. One of the nicest features of the services is that it uses a Nuance-powered voice recognition engine for 24 of the languages it supports. Thanks to this, you and the person you are talking to don’t have to write text into the app, which makes for a significantly more natural interaction if you are trying to get directions in a foreign city, for example.

With today’s update, the app now features an improved user interface and it also gives its users more control over how spoken translations sound. You can now also choose between male and female voices and adjust the speed of the spoken translations.

SayHi Translate’s CEO Lee Bossio tells me that the service uses a blend of “translation magic” on the backend, meaning that it using its own engine as well as a number of third-party services.

In my tests, the translations were surprisingly fast and accurate. Like most of these services, it works better with short sentences, but it also did a pretty good job with longer and more complex sentences as well.

Before launching SayHi Translate, the company focused on providing a similar service to enterprise customers in corporations, hospitals and government organizations. Since March, however, the company has focused on its consumer app and given that it’s been used over 10 million times now, this strategy is clearly paying off.

Huddle, the six-year-old company that makes cloud collaboration software for the enterprise, has closed on $24 million in new funding, bringing its total equity funding to $40 million.

The new round, which serves as Huddle’s Series C, was led by Jafco Ventures, with DAG Ventures participating along with previous backers Matrix Partners and Eden Ventures. WebEx founder Subrah Iyar also pitched in.

Huddle’s last funding round, a $10.2 million Series B, was closed two years ago in May 2010.

Huddle is co-headquartered in London and San Francisco and opened an office in New York City this month that will serve as a sales hub. According to the company, its revenues have tripled in size each year since its 2007 launch and had four quarters of record growth in 2011.

The new money will be put toward growth: Huddle now has 100 full-time employees split between the UK and the US, and expects to triple its staff over the next twelve months, a spokesperson says. 80 percent of the Fortune 500 uses Huddle, the company says, and its customer list includes firms such as Procter and Gamble, Saatchi & Saatchi, NASA, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Huddle does not disclose its revenue, but co-founder Andy McLoughlin told TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden in February that the company was profitable.

Huddle’s most direct competitor in size and function is probably Box, the Silicon Valley-based company that also makes enterprise cloud storage and collaboration software.

There’s a lot of talk these days about what you can do with “big data.” Here’s one of the more eye-catching uses: A startup called Recorded Future pulls data from around the Web to give customers a better handle on — that’s right — the future.

The company just announced that it has raised $12 million in Series C funding from Balderton and Google Ventures. Balderton partner and former Business Objects CEO Bernard Liautaud is joining the board.

Recorded Future says it’s continually scanning “tens of thousands of high-quality, online news publications, blogs, public niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial databases and more.” Then it analyzes that content and visualizes the data in a way that should help you answer questions about what’s ahead.

For example, the demo video below includes mentions queries like: Where are world leaders traveling next month? What’s going down in Mexico City over the next 60 days? Which source best predicts correct Apple product releases? The Recorded Future website suggests that the company is targeting three main use cases — financial services, competitive intelligence, and defense and intelligence.

The company has now raised a total of $20 million, with past investors including In-Q-Tel (the venture arm of the CIA), IA Ventures, Atlas Venture, and Google Ventures. Co-founder and CEO Christopher Ahlberg says Recorded Future is coming out of “semi-stealth mode” today — a fuzzy term, since the company has already attracted some customers (including the Defense Department) and headlines, but one that suggests we’ll be hearing more from the company soon.

While it’s far from being the only offender, the online travel industry (particularly travel search engines) is in dire need of better segmentation and targeting — for offers, deals, and all their related services. For example: Currently the top 10 percent of travelers are responsible for 40 percent of revenue and 50 percent of the profit in the industry, yet, generally speaking, they still see the same promotions and deals as everyone else.

In fact, Orbitz, Kayak, American, United, and a handful of other top travel sites still get most of their flight inventory info from ITA, which they sort and serve based on price, i.e. the cheapest ticket. Yes, cheap tickets are appealing, but if we’re looking for that which characterizes the next generation of travel sites — like the proliferation of user data profiles, personalization and granularity — then the experience demand more than basic price comparison. (Plus, let’s be honest, the cheapest ticket doesn’t always offer the best value, anyway.)

Today, Israeli startup Superfly, which offers a secure tool that combines worldwide flight information with personal travel preferences to help people organize and maximize the value of their travel rewards among other things, is quietly launching a shot across the bow of the industry’s giants — in this case, the uber popular metasearch engine, Kayak.

That’s because the startup is now able to call on the significant operational and financial experience of Willard (Bill) Smith, who was, until recently, Kayak’s CFO. Smith joined Kayak in May of last year (as the company’s first-ever CFO) to help the startup prepare for and actually move forward with its perpetually-delayed IPO.

What do we mean by “perpetually delayed”? Well, Kayak first filed its IPO docs in November 2010, and it was reported last week that the company may, just may, embark on its road show next week. Why has it taken a year-and-a-half? The answer varies depending on whom you ask, but it would be safe to point a finger at both the long-running unsteadiness of IPO market conditions and the company’s erratic earnings.

As to Smith and Superfly, the CFO officially stepped down from Kayak in March, and although he declines to reveal the reasons behind his departure, he has definitely been clear about his growing interest in Superfly. Regardless of how one paints the CFO’s departure from the most popular (but erratically performing) metasearch engine for travel pre-IPO, along with his ensuing interest in advising a next-gen travel search engine that could spell trouble for that very incumbent (although a number of pieces would need to fall into place before one could consider Superfly a legitimate threat) — but in the end it would just be speculation and innuendo.

However, it is fair to say that the above, alongside Smith’s genuine interest, equates to some great early validation for Superfly (especially as it’s operating in a crowded space where startups have to work even harder to stand out), and at the very least implies that there could be significant opportunity for travel sites that can improve upon the Kayak model. As to Superfly, Smith said of its value proposition:

Superfly is a fresh take on a common task — travel search — and while other sites may offer good results for a broad base of travelers, Superfly gets YOU the best results based on how YOU travel.

Superfly first debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2010 and later launched its flight search beta. Today, the startup is taking another step forward, with the official removal of its “beta” tag, finally making its flight search tools available to non-users.

Travel search right now is in the process of being commoditized, the former Kayak CFO says, which unfortunately results in users being treated the same way — as a commodity. However, a new generation of startups is emerging that will leverage Big Data to collect and create segmented profile data on its users to better target ads and offers to elite travelers.

For frequent fliers, earning miles and an elite status is the result of hard work, so Superfly aims to provide value by making it easy for them to organize their rewards and find flights that consider their frequent flier status. As the space stands today, 95 percent of travel search lacks segmentation and Superfly wants to help change that.

Of course, without creating value for airlines, this line of thinking means nothing. That’s why the startup is looking to tailor its approach in such a way as to transform the entire dynamic between channel and supplier from one of cutthroat competition (by showing results based on fares or distance) to one of value for both the consumer and supplier, Smith says.

With Superfly’s new tools, suppliers can now leverage its aggregated traveler data to provide valuable offers and promotions to the most influential and active members of its user base, and, in turn consumers will be able to receive these offers by joining Superfly and beginning their travel search. From there, Superfly’s suppliers can begin targeting their elite customers as they search, providing offers, deals, and more in realtime — at times when they are most useful.

Superfly also recently integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph to allow its users to share their achievements to their Facebook pages. While social functionality is essential, the real winner both Smith and Superfly CEO Jonathan Meir said, will go beyond intent to build meaningful customer profiles based on social activity, travel interests, and more.

For more on Superfly, check ‘em out at home here.

Ad startup 140 Proof is opening up a partner platform for companies that want to take advantage of its social ad targeting.

The company currently delivers ads to 50 social apps, including Echofon, TweetCaster, and Plume. Underlying the network is something that 140 Proof calls “Interest Graph Targeting,” where users are assigned different “personas” based on what they say and who they follow. Those personas allow advertisers to serve ads to people with specific interests, and the new platform makes this interest targeting available to other companies.

Among other things, co-founder and CTO John Manoogian III pitches this as a way for brand advertisers to extend their reach beyond traditional advertising like TV. For example, if an advertiser wanted to reach people interested in Glee, they could run an ad during the show, but they could also target social network users who have commented about Glee or follow Glee-related accounts (as illustrated in the image above). Interest-based targeting will also be key if mobile ads are going to make money, he says.

Several mobile and social ad companies have already signed up, including Jumptap, Celtra, and OneLouder.

It seems like 140 Proof might face one of the common challenges of platform companies sometimes — balancing the needs of the platform with the other parts of the business. In this case, an ad network might be a customer of the platform but also a competitor with the 140 Proof network. However Manoogian says the market dwarfs any individual company, so it will be “a long time before we run into any channel conflicts.”

And while advertising is an obvious place to start, Manoogian and his co-founder and CEO Jon Elvekrog see broader possibilities for the platform. For example, they say that an e-commerce site could use 140 Proof targeting to deliver improved recommendations.

Box is releasing a number of new features today, with the broad theme of addressing “the needs of our largest enterprise customers in deploying this kind of technology,” according to CEO Aaron Levie.

Those features include the ability to search files across an entire company, a new dashboard offering more granular controls for company administrators, mobile security options like passcode locks, support for multiple email domains, activity notification archiving, and a new enterprise licensing agreement. Altogether, Levie says this means big companies can manage organization-wide Box deployments “at a scale that was never before possible.” This should also help some of those larger customers address issues like regulatory compliance.

For example, Box’s search was previously limited to individual accounts. The new enterprise-wide search addresses e-discovery requirements, so if a legal issue arises, businesses can find content anywhere within the company.

The new ELA is crucial too, Levie says, because it means customers should have more predictable pricing as the exact size of their teams change, rather than paying purely on a seat-by-seat basis as in the past.

Levie adds that this is part of a larger trend, both within Box and across cloud industry. A few years ago, CIOs of large companies only wanted to use a service like Box in isolated pockets of the organization.

“Today what we’re seeing is, companies are doing the inverse,” Levie says. “They actually want their core systems to be cloud. … They would rather have the core systems be from vendors that can focus all of their energy on solving all of their core problems instantly.”

Hence the new features making that process easier. Levie also points to the successful IPOs of companies like Jive Software and Splunk as evidence of how the enterprise landscape is changing. That brings up another question: Given its growth and success, is there a Box IPO on the horizon? It may may be in the long-term playbook, but Levie says that for now, he’s enjoying the benefits of keeping the company private, so, “We’re definitely not going to do anything this year.

Autodesk is expanding its growing portfolio of iPad apps today with SketchBook Ink. The pen-and-ink app is built on a new graphical engine that’s independent of resolution, allowing the created artwork to be exported in resolutions exceeding 100 megapixels.

This, Autodesk hopes, will reinvigorate graphic artists and even doodlers about iPad content creation since the vector-based artwork can scale to massive print sizes.

SketchBook Ink joins Autodesk’s relatively large assortment of iPad drawing apps. Although powered by a new engine, the app feels very similar to the other titles including SketchBook Pro. The interface is a bit scaled, almost reorganized to make for a more intuitive user experience. SketchBook Ink launches with seven preset ink styles and two types of erasers.

“I am a frequent doodler. I mostly like to draw pictures of my dog and stuffed animals, but today, during a riveting Disrupt Battlefield session, my mind wandered to a sunny, lightly wooded retreat miles away from the nearest Internet-connected computer. So I drew this using the new SketchBook Ink app.” Said Elin Blesener, TechCrunch Community Manager yesterday after being caught messing around on an iPad instead of working.

Autodesk built the app for sharing. Artwork can be exported to the iPad’s photo library, iTunes, Dropbox, and can be shared quickly via email. The slick interface makes scaling upon exporting rather easy with options to keep it small for web use or export for print with a resolution over 100 megapixels.

“With more than 10 million downloads to date, we’re proud that the SketchBook family is changing how, where, and with what tools people unlock their creativity. People who never considered using a digital app for their artwork before, are now turning to SketchBook to produce incredible illustrations,” said Samir Hanna, vice president, Consumer Products, Autodesk in a statement released to TechCrunch.

Starting today, the Autodesk SketchBook Ink App is available for $4.99 from the App Store. But if you act fast, you can nab it for $1.99 during a special introductory promotion.