Ever since it launched early last year, the HBO Go library has quickly become one of the best parts of having the premium channel, however it wasn't part of the package for Time Warner Cable customers -- until now. The two companies just announced they have to an agreement which will see access to the streaming back catalog of films and TV shows (including Max Go) open up to TWC subscribers "in the next month" after a short beta period. We're not sure if this access extends to streaming via the Roku box or if it will be blocked (as it is on Comcast and DirecTV), but iOS and Android mobile devices are definitely in on the action. Check the Time Warner blog or press release ( after the break) for more details.
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Quick Pitch: SocialFolders automatically backs up social media content and allows you to easily transfer photos, videos and files between services.
Genius Idea: Applying a Dropbox concept to the cloud.
There are many solutions like Dropbox that make moving files stored on your computer easier. Philippe Honigman has been running one such service, ftopia, for the past three years. But he’s the first to admit a gap in its functionality that is widening as people store more of their content in the cloud.
“We realized that there were a lot of solutions like ours to share the content that you have on your maschines and servers,” Honigman says, “but there were no solutions to organize and keep track of all the information on web services.”
The startup he is launching on Thursday, SocialFolder, is like Dropbox for your social profiles. The service automatically syncs your photos, videos and files from the web with a desktop filing app that you can access offline. You can, for instance, work on your Google docs while offline. When you connect to the Internet again, the changes will automatically be made in the online versions.
SocialFolder also syncs content from one service with another, allowing you to have all albums in your Flickr account automatically added to your Facebook account.
Most other services that have attempted to sync the cloud with the desktop have either narrowed their focus to one service such as Google Docs or Instagram. But SocialFolder casts a much wider net, synching with Twitter, Instagram, SmugMug, Facebook, Flickr, Picassa, Google Docs and YouTube.
Even with this advantage, the question still remains why someone would need to backup all of their social media files in the first place. Isn’t the whole point of storing files in the cloud that they are accessible from everywhere and not lost when your computer gets stolen? And when is the last time that Facebook accidentally deleted its users’ content?
“People want to have their content in their hands,” Honigman argues. They upload it through mobile applications or its tucked somewhere in a web service that they don’t want to use anymore, and they want to get it back.”
Not only do they want to get it back, SocialFlow’s business model predicts, they want to get all of it back. The paid version allows users to connect 5,000 files instead of 500 and sync with all available services instead of just three.
Eventually, the company hopes to also collect fees by serving as a secure web delivery system for bank statements, payroll and other sensitive information.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
So, it turns out we use the internet to share things. A lot of things to be exact. Clearspring, a Washington, DC-based company shows us exactly what was passed around the internet this year and just how it was shared with some fancy looking graphics to boot.
Clearspring owns the sharing platform ‘AddThis’, which you’ve almost certainly scene if you’ve visited a website in the past two years. Given that AddThis is on over 11 million sites, there’s a lot of data to be collected. Here are some of the most interesting things they found from 2011.
Facebook Owns Web Sharing - Not too much of a surprise, but Facebook makes up over 52% of web sharing.
People Love Sharing News About Death, Especially When It’s Osama Bin Laden’s - 73% of the top 10 shares were related to death and disaster. Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco notes that 28% of AddThis shares this year were about Bin Laden’s death and came on May 1st and 2nd.
Google Kills It With Chrome, Not So Much with Google + – Google’s totally awesome browser surpassed Firefox this year in social shares by browser. If they follow the same trajectory, they’ll soon overtake Internet Explorer as the most social web browser…Seriously, who still uses Internet Explorer. Google + grew a ton this year with it’s Beta launch, but has plateaued.
Way More People Shared Stories About The East Coast Quake Than the Japanese Tsunami – This is just a good example that social sharing is not always proportional to the magnitude of the event. Need more proof? Kim Kardashian’s divorce was shared almost as much on the web as news about the Super Bowl. Gross.
Big Takeaway: Huge Growth in Mobile Sharing – 2011 was big for mobile shares as it grew by 6x this year. Expect to see this stat continue to grow as more and more people bring their obsession with Facebook and Twitter to their wireless devices. We saw the power of social media to make social change in the Middle East this year and I expect mobile sharing will soon dominate the way we share information. The Occupy movement alone caused a 217% spike in mobile shares in one day alone. Can’t underestimate mobile sharing’s importance moving forward.
We don't know what the folks at Sling have in store for CES 2012 but they are finally checking items off of last years list, including announcing the launch of SlingPlayer for Google TV. Officially dubbed SlingPlayer for Logitech Revue (it works fine on the Sony hardware too) any Google TV owners can find a link to the web app under the "Spotlight" section of their menu, and only need to login to enjoy remote TV viewing. The connected device SlingPlayer experience here is similar to that of the one on the Boxee Box, however running as a web app has a few specific disadvantages. While it mapped some of the Google TV's remote functions (channel up/down, pause, FF, rew etc.) directly to the box being remotely viewed, doing a simple thing like hitting back takes you out of the webpage and app entirely without warning. One advantage over the standard Android app however is that this one's free to use, so if you have both kinds of boxes (Sling and Google) at your disposal, go ahead and try it out or check out a video preview embedded after the break.
Can you teach entrepreneurship? Bestselling author Eric Ries thinks so. He also thinks that entrepreneurship must be taught to more people if the American economy is to successfully pivot to a post-manufacturing world. According to Ries, we’ve gotten so efficient at manufacturing that even though we’re making more stuff than ever before, there are less jobs available to do it. That’s why economic survival lies in our ability to better teach the business of creativity and entrepreneurship.
Ries’ new book, The Lean Startup, has climbed to #2 on the NY Times Bestseller List, in the “Advice and Misc.” category. In the book, Ries talks about his strategies for running a successful startup, which are based on the “lean manufacturing” process that originated with Toyota.
Check out our interview with Ries for his advice on the metrics that entrepreneurs should really be paying attention to, why he thinks job titles are irrelevant in the startup world and how the lean startup model helped Instagram pivot to its present business model.
Follow Venture Studio, in association with Mashable, which is brought to you by Square1 Bank. The show is hosted by Dave Lerner, a 3x entrepreneur and angel investor. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Comedian Louis Szekely, better known as Louis C.K., is profiting handsomely from a $5 video of his latest standup routine, which he produced and distributed himself.
Instead of partnering with a studio, C.K. hired a team with six cameras to tape two of his performances at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan. He distributed the video through a website specially built for that purpose. Within 12 hours of going on sale Saturday, 50,000 people purchased the video, covering all of costs incurred for its production (around $170,000) and creation of the website ($32,000). By day four, he had sold 110,000 copies, making an additional $200,000 off the venture.
C.K. admits that $200,000 is less than what a “big company” would have paid him for rights to create the video, but the added value for the fans makes up for the difference. Had another company produced it, they would have charged $20 for a video that would have been encrypted and regionally restricted, and fans would have had to fork over their personal details for the company’s own use.
“This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again,” C.K. posted on his website Tuesday.
C.K. was also pleased to note that most people paid $5 to download the video instead of bittorrenting it, which was presumably a problem with his earlier, pricier videos. He added that he would “certainly do it again,” and if sales of this video remain strong, he’ll “continue to follow the model of keeping my price as far down as possible, not overmarketing to you, and keeping as few people between you and me as possible in the transaction.”
Although C.K. has gone on the record against social media in the past, it’s difficult to imagine this venture would have been a success without it. The comedian mentioned the video many times on Twitter leading up to and following the video’s release, and he promoted it as part of an “Ask Me Anything” special on reddit on Monday, which attracted more than 9,500 comments.
Directly on the heels of an update for its newest media streamers, Roku has released its official iPhone remote app. Apparently "inspired by user feedback", it allows users to launch or rate channels, control the box with touches and swipes, and add or remove channels from their box directly from the app itself. Probably the best news about it is that it will work with all generations of Roku hardware, and can even pair to multiple boxes. Usage requires the box and iOS device be connected on the same network, and for users to sign in with their Roku account, but that's it. Hit the source link to grab the free app now, or check out a couple more screenshots in the gallery below, then let us know how it measures up to the numerous third party solutions (like DVPRemote) currently available. Roku already promised an Android version is in the works, so we'll keep an eye out for that to arrive soon.
To date, we've generally been more adept at collecting and storing data than making sense of it. The companies, individuals and governments that become the most adept at data analysis are doing more than finding the signal in the noise: They are creating a strategic capability. Sometimes, the data comes from unexpected directions. For instance, OkCupid's approach to dating with data has earned it millions of users. In the process, OkCupid has gained great insight into the dynamics of dating in the 21st century, which it then shared on its blog.
Based upon their success, I wondered aloud at this year's Newsfoo whether a similar data-driven web app could be built to help citizens match themselves up with candidates:
Good comment from @digiphile in #newsfoo politics session: "We need an OkCupid for candidates"— Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) December 04, 2011
After Tim tweeted the observation, I quickly learned two things:
Albert Sun, Daniel Bachhuber, Ashwin Shandilya and Jay Zalowitz had built exactly that app at the 2011 Times Open Hack Dayon the day I posed the question. OkCandidate is a web app that matches up a citizen with a Republican presidential candidate. (There's no comparable matching engine for Barack Obama, perhaps given that Democrats expect that the current incumbent of the White House will be the Democratic Party's nominee in 2012.) OkCandidate presents a straightforward series of questions about a wide range of core foreign and domestic issues with ratings to allow the user to rank the importance of agreeing with a given candidate. The app is open source, so if you want to try to improve the code, click on over to OkCandidate on GitHub.
ElectNext, a Philadelphia-based startup, has focused on solving this problem. The "eHarmony for voters," as TechCrunch describes it, aims to match you to your candidate. I also learned that ElectNext won the Judges' Choice Award at the 2011 Web 2.0 Expo/NY Startup Showcase. In the video below, Joanne Wilson and Mo Koyfman discuss the startup from a venture capitalist's perspective.
The politics of big data
Creating a better issue-matching engine for voters and candidates is a genuinely useful civic function. The not-so-hidden opportunity here, however, may be to gather a rich dataset from those choices in precisely the same way that OkCupid has done for dating. That's clearly part of the mindset here: "The data on individual users we don't share with anyone," ElectNext founder Keya Danenbaum told Fast Company. "But the way we foresee using all this information we're collecting is ... eventually to aggregate that and say something really interesting in a poll type of report."
How news organizations and campaigns alike collect, store and analyze data is going to matter much more. Close watchers of the intersection of politics and technology already think the Obama campaign's data crunching may help the president win re-election. As Personal Democracy Media co-founder Micah Sifry put it back in April, "it's the data, stupid."
The hottest job in today's Presidential campaigns is the Data Mining Scientist — whose job it is to sort through terabytes of data and billions of behaviors tracked in voter files, consumer databases, and site logs. They'll use the numbers to uncover hidden patterns that predict how you'll vote, if you'll pony up with a donation, and if you'll influence your friends to support a candidate.
Alistair Croll, the co-chair of the Strata Conference, thinks it's a strategic capability. "After Eisenhower, you couldn't win an election without radio," he told me at Strata, Calif., in February. "After JFK, you couldn't win an election without television. After Obama, you couldn't win an election without social networking. I predict that in 2012, you won't be able to win an election without big data."
Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20
Hey Boston, Samantha Shih is onto your bad style habits. She’s been watching you comprise on style and fit in exchange for affordability – the ill-fitting dress shirts, baggy suit pants, tight jackets – and she’s not going to put up with it anymore. While Sam could easily serve as head of Boston’s fashion police, she’s here to help rather than scold. Sam is the founder and CEO of 9tailors, an affordable custom tailor whipping even the most hopeless of Boston’s fashion abusers into shape.
While on a trip to China in 2006, Sam commissioned a tailor to make her clothes, because as she puts it, she’s “quite petite,” and was fed up with buying clothes off the rack that had to be hemmed. Upon returning to Boston, she realized this city didn’t have tailors at an accessible price for young professionals like herself. Looking for a change of career, Sam decided to bring affordable custom tailoring to Boston through 9tailors in 2008.
Starting with men’s dress shirts and eventually expanding to suits and women’s shirts, 9tailors is focused on combining style, affordability and fit. “We’re seeing a lot of men who are just getting interested in clothing,” says Sam. “It’s great for Boston.” Despite starting in the middle of the recession, Sam says business has taken off because there just aren’t other custom tailors in Boston at 9tailors’ price point.
9tailors client, Micah. Photo via Channing Johnson
Sam likens the process at 9tailors to a 6-week version of Build-A-Bear. First, customers speak with a trained style consultant to discuss color preferences, where they are planning to wear the specific item and how often they’re planning on wearing it, etc. At the end of the meeting, the stylist submits an order to the tailors in China. About four to five weeks later, the client is invited in for a fitting to do further alterations, and once completed, the customer is given a 30-day “test drive” period with the garment. “We try to be as customer service friendly as possible, which requires a lot of trust for both parties,” says Sam.
Justin Wan, a buyer for Boston University, has purchased four suits and four shirts from 9tailors and raves about his stylist: “Kathryn Walsh puts together web albums and fabric sets for me. She helps me find the solution for my needs.”
“My favorite shirts are all from 9Tailors!” raves Randall Yee, a local lawyer, who met Sam through his wife who is also in the fashion industry. “The process of getting the shirts allowed me to be more creative when it comes to my clothes.” Yee adds of using 9Tailors for his wedding party: “Sam made things feel so easy even though she had to work with eight guys of all different sizes, shapes and styles.”
Arthur Kah-Git Wong, a program manager at Akamai Technologies , turned to 9tailors after Sam tweeted him a fashion tip about pant length. “Primarily, I like my clothes to fit and you get none of that experience with off the rack clothing, especially suiting and shirts. My body type does not often jive with ready-to-wear,” he says. After ordering a custom-fit tuxedo shirt, Kah-Git Wong followed up with four dress shirts, taking the opportunity to add personal touches to his clothing. “I love being asked on the street or at a store by strangers where I got my shirt,” he says.
9tailors client, Bryan. Photo via Channing Johnson
As the holidays approach, 9tailors has created a holiday gift guide for gentlemen and is also running a shirt giveaway through Monday, December 19. For those of you looking to upgrade your wardrobe, Sam tells me lavender is the new blue, gray suits work with everything and for ladies, blazers are timeless.
In 2012, 9tailors has plans to go national, expanding to other cities, although Sam is keeping the details under wraps for now. Additionally, the company is rolling out an online shirt builder with 3D images that allows you to actually see how fabric is imposed on certain clothes – talk about revolutionizing the way you shop. “I think it’s going to be a huge success once their website upgrade takes off,” adds Wan.
Personally, I think 9tailors is just what Boston needs. If I had a dollar for every guy on the T that could look 100x better with the right pant length and a better-fitting shirt, well, then I’d be Sam.