Privacy app maker files EU antitrust complaint against Google

U.S. tech firm Disconnect has filed a complaint to EU antitrust regulators against Google's ban on its privacy app, accusing the Silicon Valley giant of abusing its dominant market position.

Disconnect, set up four years ago by former Google engineers, says its app protects users of the Android operating system from invisible tracking and malware distributed through advertisements.

It said Google had abused its position by blocking the app from the Google Play store last year, and had gained an unfair advantage over competitors by integrating its own privacy and security services into its own products.

"They said we interfered with the ability of third parties to serve ads. Google was not willing to engage in a dialogue," Disconnect Chief Executive Casey Oppenheim told Reuters on Tuesday.

Google said Disconnect's complaint was groundless.

"Our Google Play policies have long prohibited apps that interfere with other apps - such as altering their functionality, or removing their way of making money. We apply this policy uniformly and Android developers strongly support it," spokesman Al Verney said.

The European Commission, which opened a probe into Google's agreements with smartphone and tablet makers using its Android operating system in April, confirmed it had received the complaint on Tuesday and said it would assess it.

The EU competition authority's Android investigation is one of two into Google's business practices. The other, more advanced, inquiry focuses on whether the company distorts web search results to favor its own shopping service.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Pravin Char)

YC-Backed Taskpipes Is SaaS To Simplify Using Lots Of (Other) SaaS Platforms

(GNN) - If there was a neat label for startups whose raison d’être is to take the strain out of dealing with other startup services then Taskpipes would be wearing that badge proudly on its lapel.

The YC-backed, U.K. founded b2b startup is attacking what it says is a growing data-management problem for businesses — created by the proliferation and adoption of SaaS platforms. So, in other words, those shiny, cloud-based platforms which promise to streamline your business processes by taking various data-processing tasks off your hands are actually introducing a new headache by fragmenting your data across multiple silos.

That means businesses using multiple SaaS platforms are having to engage in manual data-wrangling when they need to work across these different data buckets, or pull data-sets into other pieces of software for processing. It’s this SaaS-generated data-processing headache that Taskpipes has seized on as another business opportunity.

Its solution, another SaaS platform (obviously), makes it easier for business to grab data from these various third party repositories and set up rules to perform whatever data processing operations they need done. So yes, it’s SaaS platforms all the way down.

“Taskpipes is an online platform that allows you to automate these repetitive and regular time-consuming tasks that people do to manipulate data, to basically connect different platforms together,” co-founder Fraser Atkins tells TechCrunch.

“It automates repetitive data processing tasks that people normally do in Excel. Maybe you have a load of data stuck in your ecommerce platform and the only way you can get that into you accounting software is by downloading a raw CSV data, dumping it into Excel, performing a filter to remove a load of data you don’t want, then sorting the data, reformatting the columns to then upload it into your accounting software.”

“The number of SaaS platforms is just exploding,” he adds. “It’s been totally ridiculous recently. And although each SaaS platform makes that specific aspect of your business more powerful it then means whereas before you ran everything through a few spreadsheets, now you have your data in all these different places.

“When you download the data from one of these platforms and you want to put it into the other one the data’s obviously not compatible.”

Isn’t it a bit hard to automate the bespoke manual pieces of data processing that businesses need to do to tie up their usage of various SaaS platforms? Atkins says not, given that the series of steps businesses are performing to get one set of data into a compatible format for processing elsewhere are always the same — and can therefore be defined as processing rules in Taskpipes to be run automatically after you’ve set them up once (thereby cutting out tedious and time-consuming manual repetition). So its pitch to businesses is time- and efficiency-savings.

Isn’t this much like macros in Excel? It is, concedes Atkins. But Taskpipes is targeting its SaaS platform at people who aren’t capable of writing VBA macros or indeed Python scripts — offering a simple interface that even non-Excel whiz kids in the business should be able to get to grips with.

“We’re like the central node in this network of all your different data. Because whereas maybe five years ago you’d have most of your data in an Excel spreadsheet, maybe a couple of SQL databases, now people have their data across all these different third party platforms so how do I get my data from Mixpanel into Salesforce without having to either spend ages writing the integration code or having to do it manually every single day through Excel.”

It’s also aiming to improve on macros by offering more granular controls. “The problem that macros present is that they’re really opaque, they’re really hard to edit afterwards, and they also can’t do really cool things — you couldn’t set a macro up very easily to run every single day,” he adds. “You couldn’t integrate it with these different platform and so we feel that we bring a lot more functionality than a lot of the existing solutions which people are basically hacking through Excel at the moment.”

The Taskpipes beta was launched around seven weeks ago, and thus far it has a “handful” of paying customers across a range of industries. It currently supports any platform that can export data to CSV format. But next up it’s planning to expand to add integrations with third party platform APIs so it can fully automate pulling data down, excising the need for humans to upload the raw data. So cutting out another step.

“Where we want to move with this, and the next stage we see in product development, is actually providing integrations — so we automatically pull your data from Salesforce, we pull your data from your Shopify store and we automatically upload it to your accounting software, to your Mixpanel account — so that getting data from one platform to another is no longer a hassle,” he says.

“We sometimes explain the concept to people and they come back to us and say ‘oh, that’s basically like IFTTT for data processing isn’t it?’. That’s a nice way of putting it,” he adds.

On the competitor front, Atkins names elastic.io, which self bills as ‘integration platform as a service’ — which is presumably one label for this type of layered service that manages other services. The difference between elastic.io and Taskpipes is the latter is aiming its platform at people with no technical background. “We want to make this completely accessible because the people who are doing this manually at the moment are the people who are the non-technical people. So they are the people we’re targeting,” says Atkins.

Funding wise, Taskpipes has pulled in around $140,000 so far, via YC and also a small portion of that seed coming from the U.K.-based Entrepreneur First accelerator program which it also went through. The team is presenting at YC’s Winter demo day this month, and will be looking to raise more funding to build out those API integrations and scale up its SaaS for managing SaaS use.

Callr Releases A Mobile App To Make Conference Calls Less Of A Hassle

(GNN) - Do you hate conference calls? Do you hate having a thing just appear on your calendar with some sort of dial-in information that you always forget and then you have to go to your calendar with phone in hand and dial some numbers and then wait for a digital voice to welcome you and ask for a code and then you have to dial some more numbers? And if at any point you get any of it wrong, you have to go back and try to get the numbers right again?

Well, a startup called Callr has solved at least some of those problems — namely the need to search for, find and dial those elusive conference call numbers yourself. And now it has an iOS app and an Android app that will make it even easier for you to manage calls you’re scheduled to make.

Callr works like this: You hook it into your calendar and it automatically ingests all the details for upcoming calls. Then, when it comes time for your meeting to start, Callr dials into your meeting for you, then calls your phone and instantly connects you.

Callr saves you at least a few minutes of fumbling with dial-in codes and whatnot, and also makes sure you dial in to your meeting on time. (Actually, it generally dials you in a minute before a meeting starts, just to make you look good.) If you happen to miss a call, or can’t pick up at the very moment a call starts, Callr allows you to just call it back and it will automatically connect you to your conference.

Anyway, it’s been one of my favorite new tools ever since I started using it a few months ago. And with its new mobile apps, Callr is making managing conference calls even easier.

The main advantage to the app is that it gets new users signed up faster, since it can simply connect with the phone’s calendar to ingest meetings. It also provides more granular tools around snoozing calls if you can’t pick up right at the time they happen. Finally, Callr on your smartphone will allow deep linking with meetings that are supposed to happen on Skype, allowing users to quickly get connected through the messaging platform’s mobile app.

While Callr has only been available for the last four months, it’s connected 14,000 calls for users, according to Callr founder Mike Endale. (It doesn’t count calls that aren’t connected.) And people are actually listening in on those calls. Endale says the average call lasts 17 minutes after users are connected.

Anyway, the Callr app. Try it. It’s awesome.

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Sparrow Flies Away, As Google Finally Pulls iOS And Mac Email Apps From Apple’s Stores

(GNN) - As Google sharpens the focus on its new Inbox email app, the company has quietly made another move on the email front: it appears to have pulled the Sparrow iOS and Mac apps from their respective Apple App Stores.

Google, as you may remember, acquired the French startup Sparrow, including its staff, its email management apps and its technology, back in 2012.

Google’s last cache of an active page for the $2.99 iOS app was made on February 12, while the $9.99 Mac app was last seen on February 13, and the free Mac app Sparrow Lite was also last seen February 12. Right now, if you really want it, you can still download Sparrow for Mac directly from Sparrow’s own web site.

Inbox — the “smart” email app that helps you manage your inbox — got a mainly positive review from us when it launched in October 2014. It has been in a closed, invite-only service since then, with occasional, strategic openings of the floodgates to let in more users quickly. In January, Google released some early stats about usage that noted 70% of early adopters were Android users, and how many people were using its other features like “Snooze” to read later, Highlights and Bundles.

Sparrow flying away for good shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, but it has been a long time coming. At the time of Google’s acquisition in 2012, reportedly for under $25 million, Sparrow/Google more or less stopped big developments but kept the apps operational and pledged support for existing users.

“While we’ll be working on new things at Google, we will continue to make Sparrow available and provide support for our users,” co-founder and CEO Dom Leca wrote on the site’s homepage at the time of the acquisition. The sale to Google saw a lot of backlash and lament about the eventual fate of the apps.

At the time of the sale, Sparrow was one of the most popular iPhone utility apps. When it first launched on iOS, people praised it for offering a simple, easy-to-use, gesture-based email management service, managing to create what Apple itself, and Google, had completely failed to do for email on the iPhone. It managed to hold on to is high ranking for months after the sale to Google without any apparent effort, before eventually tumbling into neglected obscurity, ending as the 842nd most downloaded app, according to AppAnnie.

The last update to the iOS app was made in October 2013, to add iOS 7 compatibility; it never added iOS 8 support. Sparrow/Google also played around a bit with the price, changing it from $2.99 to $4.99 at one point. The Mac apps never got updated.)

Meanwhile, former Sparrow team members joined Google. Some, such as product designer Jean-Marc Denis, went specifically to work on Inbox. And many other competing email apps have been launched and updated in the meantime. Currently, Gmail and Yahoo Mail are in Apple’s overall ranking of most-popular free apps.

Now it appears that with Google’s bigger push to make Inbox is clear Gmail alternative, Google has done some of its infamous and regular spring cleaning. (Could it be that Google’s on a mini-spree: just last week, Google shut down Helpouts, a Hangouts-based service where you could pay to get people to help you with tasks over its video conferencing service.)

We have reached out to Google, and the Sparrow support email, to ask for further details and will update this post as we learn more.

Don’t Be Google

(GNN) - Dear Google: what happened? Android sales are falling. Chrome has become a bloated hog. Analysts are calling you the new Microsoft, or, much worse, “the new Yahoo!” And most damning of all: you have squandered our trust. You used to be special, Google. Or at least we used to believe you were special.

But you seem more and more like just another megacorporation.
Does that sound harsh? Consider the Zoe Keating kerfuffle:

YouTube gave Keating a take-it-or-leave contract, some terms of which were unacceptable to her. Some of the terms were also pretty hard to understand […] As YouTube now explains it — following a public debate following Keating’s blog post — Keating has a relatively simple choice […] These responses go against descriptions of the agreement presented to Keating (and transcribed by her) by YouTube previously, and presumably represent an update to the contract’s terms.

At best, Google is guilty of incredibly confusing and heavy-handed communication, something they have long been (rightly) accused of. At best. But, as Jamie Zawinski put it:

This sounds like Google using the same strategy they used with Google Plus: instead of creating a new service and letting it compete on its own merits, they’re going to artificially prop it up by giving people no choice but to sign up for it. Except in this case the people being strong-armed are the copyright holders instead of the end users. (So far, that is! Wait for it.)

Consider “Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job“:

As Google abandons its past, Internet archivists step in to save our collective memory … Google Groups is effectively dead … Google News Archives are dead … Projects that preserve the past for the public good aren’t really a big profit center. Old Google knew that, but didn’t seem to care […] The desire to preserve the past died along with 20% time, Google Labs, and the spirit of haphazard experimentation.

…or, as VICE puts it: “Google, a Search Company, Has Made Its Internet Archive Impossible to Search.”
Consider “Google to shut down GTalk on February 16, will force users to switch to Hangouts“:

Again, Google exhibiting 90s era Microsoft behavior. But they're like totally not evil or anything.
— 1.0.0-alpha (@steveklabnik) February 13, 2015

Remember the good old days, a decade ago, when everyone admired everything Google did? What happened?

…I believe I may have an answer or two to that question.

Google has long been a bizarre swan of a company. To the casual eye, it’s a billion Android phones playing YouTube videos, its nonpareil search engine, plus its Google X moonshots and miracles, robot dogs rescued from the military, SpaceX funding rounds, etc, all cruising effortlessly along. Call that Awesome Google. But under the waterline, a gargantuan advertising machine paddles desperately, propelling Awesome Google towards its applause. Call that Mammon Google.

For all those analysts cavils, Mammon Google is still a colossal money-making machine, and both it and Awesome Google employ thousands of the smartest people alive (including — disclaimer/disclosure — multiple personal friends.) I fully expect Google to overcome the business challenges it faces…

…but I no longer expect to be particularly happy about this.

We’ve all been conditioned to see Awesome Google, but of late, Mammon Google seems harder and harder to ignore. Why is this? There seems to be no need for this. Mammon is still pouring money into Awesome. So what happened to the golden glory-days Google we knew and loved?

It’s true what Ben Thompson of Stratechery says: Google today is very reminiscent of Microsoft in the 90s. They too were the beneficiary of a seemingly endless, unassailable, firehose of money. But instead of spending that money on moonshots, Microsoft became a much-loathed corporate predator that wasted colossal amounts of time and money on infighting and horrors like Microsoft Bob and Windows Vista. Why has Google apparently taken a few steps down that cursed primrose path? Why is Mountain View in danger of becoming the new Redmond?

Why indeed. It turns out that Google is literally the new Microsoft:

Where Google employees formerly worked. Most from Microsoft. pic.twitter.com/uJcI1Q2B6D
— Bill Gross (@Bill_Gross) February 14, 2015

(And we’re not just talking about low-level engineers here. Vic Gundotra, the former head of Google Plus, was a former Microsoft executive; which kind of explains a lot.)

This may help to explain why Google is, I believe, slowly but steadily losing our trust. Nowadays, when you interact with Google, you don’t know if you’ll be talking to Awesome Google; Mammon Google; …or a former Microsoftian whose beliefs and values were birthed in Redmond, and who, as a result, identifies a whole lot more with Mammon — and with bureaucratic infighting — than with Awesome.

Say what you like about Apple, and I can complain about them at length, you always know what to expect from them. (A gorgeous velvet glove enclosing an exquisitely sleek titanium fist.) But Google seems increasingly to have fragmented into a hydra with a hundred tone-deaf heads, each with its own distinct morality and personality.

That wouldn’t matter so much if trust and awesomeness — “don’t be evil!” “moonshots!” — weren’t so intrinsic to the Google brand … which, to my mind, gets a little more tarnished every year.

Google Glass Exits X Labs As Explorer Program Shuts Down, Team Now Reports To Tony Fadell

(AsiaTimes.ga) The Google Glass project is entering a new phase today as the company is moving it out of its Google X skunkworks and turning it into a standalone project within the company, a Google spokesperson confirmed to us today.

As part of this change, Glass will now be overseen by former Apple executive and Nest founder Tony Fadell. Just like before, the day-to-day operation will be run by Ivy Ross while Fadell continues to run Nest inside of Google. It’s worth stressing that Glass will not become part of Nest.

If you still want to buy Google’s current version of Glass for $1,500 — and chances are you don’t — you will have to hurry: Google will put a halt to its Explorer program next Monday. A new version of Glass will likely be released later this year, most likely around Google’s annual I/O developer conference.

As a Google spokesperson told us, the idea behind the Explorer program was always to see how people would use the technology. Now that Google has received quite a bit of feedback — both good and bad — it decided to close the program in order to focus on future versions of Glass. The company will, however, continue to invest in Glass at Work for enterprise developers and companies.

Things have gotten rather quiet around Glass lately and software updates have been few and far between since last summer. Google also shifted its marketing away from consumers and toward business use cases. With Fadell in charge, we will likely see another shift in strategy around Glass, especially if he brings some of Apple’s secrecy to this project, which was, until now, mostly developed in public. (tc)

Google’s Copresence Looks Like A Cross-Platform AirDrop

GNN - Google has a new service in the works that could allow users of Android devices to share media with others nearby, even if those users are rocking iOS devices like iPhone and iPads instead of gadgets running Google’s mobile OS. The so-called Copresence feature, revealed by an Android Police source digging around in the latest Google Play Services APK, would allow devices to use location information or Bluetooth to authenticate based on proximity, without requiring contact list approval as does Android Beam.

The Copresence feature would then share information using either Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi direct to actually shunt info back and forth, and would enable the sharing of maps, music, photos, websites and more, and would likely sport a strong integration with its Hangouts chat application, based on the graphics uncovered in the Services APK. It would make a lot of sense to see this housed in the Hangouts app itself, too, but there’s also an API for Chrome that’s been revealed previously, and Google has a broad patent, so this, like the Cast function for Chromecast, could be something that we see made available to developers to include in their own software on an app-by-app basis.

Apple’s AirDrop on iOS allows for sharing between iOS devices that are near one another, across networks and with the option of sharing beyond your address book, but it doesn’t allow for sharing between ecosystems. The iOS 8 update and Yosemite mean that it can now shuttle things between mobile and desktop, but you still have to be an Apple device user to partake. Google’s Copresence feature would apparently go beyond that limitation, in the same way that its Chromecast abilities extend to the iOS ecosystem, while AirPlay remains an Apple-only affair.

According to Android Police, Google Copresence will debut sometime in “the coming weeks,” so hopefully we don’t have to wait long to get our hands on what looks like a very useful feature. With the release of Google’s next-gen mobile OS Android 5.0 Lollipop just around the corner, it sounds like a good time for Copresence to make its debut.

AdDetector will make sure you never mistake a sponsored story for a real one

#GNN Tech - Sponsored news stories — or what are more politely known as "native ads" are becoming a fixture of the web, yet it isn't always so easy to tell when an article is sponsored.

Google engineer Ian Webster is now trying to solve that problem with a browser extension called AdDetector, which searches out native ads and drops a bright red bar over the top of the page announcing that what you're viewing is a paid promotion.

The extension doesn't work flawlessly, but it did detect most of the sponsored pages that I tested it on. It's been set up to work with a close to 50 sites already, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, several Gawker Media sites, and two Vox Media sites, including The Verge.

Advertisers are drawn to native ads because they fit in with the rest of a site's content and are, to some extent, less obtrusive.

The problem for news organizations is that, without prominent labeling, sponsored stories can be easily be confused with actual articles from the publication, especially if a reader doesn't know to look for them.

Making the situation worse is that different sites handle labeling in vastly different ways, so it isn't always clear where you should even be looking.

AdDetector's huge red banner probably isn't the solution that any site will decide upon, but it'll certainly make native ads very hard to miss.

VIA ENGADGET
SOURCE ADDETECTOR

Amazon Now Piloting CPM Ads With Select Amazon Associates Publishers

#GNN Tech - #Amazon has launched a display ad network, in the form of Amazon CPM ads, to members of its online affiliates program, Amazon Associates. Select members of the program have recently been invited to test the new advertising option, which will feature both display ads from Amazon as well as other “high-quality” advertisers.

The program is currently in a pilot testing period – some of the Amazon Associates have seen the option appear in their online accounts, while others have not.

Dave Zatz, who runs the popular website, Zatznotfunny.com, was one of the first to be invited to join the program, and blogged about the details, explaining that he has been a member of Amazon Associates in order to post the occasional link to the site or tweet, in order to help generate revenue and endorse worthy products.

According to Amazon’s description of the new CPM ads, the ads are tailored to the user using Amazon’s personalization technology. You’ll be paid for each impression you serve, and you can specify a target CPM minimum. If Amazon can’t meet the CPM target, your ad request will then be “passed back” to your specified ad network.

Zatz tested the new feature for a couple of hours, and found that there were still some kinks to be worked out – there were a few periodic rendering issues where his logo didn’t show, or the ad font settings were inherited by other areas of a page, for example, he says. In addition, Amazon didn’t appear to honor his target CPM ($2).

Unlike Google AdSense, which is primarily pay-per-click, Amazon CPM Ads are impression-based, Zatz also notes in his blog post.

The ads are offered in a variety of formats, including 728×90, 300×250, 300×600, and 160×600, but Associates users are not able to block or choose which advertisers show up on their websites.

CPM payout minimums will be the same as those for the Associates program itself, but will be issued separately from other program earnings, says Amazon, in its online documentation.

The website also confirms that participation in Amazon CPM ads is only available by invitation currently.

Amazon has not responded to our requests for more information on the program or when it would be more broadly available, but if it chooses to do so, we’ll update with those details. However, much about how the new CPM ads work can be found in the Q&A here.

Secret Update Removes Photo Library Access As It Faces Renewed Claims It Isn’t So Anonymous

#GNN Tech - Secret has a new update out for Android, with an iOS equivalent arriving sometime next week. The app changes include the addition of Flickr image search, which requires the “exchange” of the ability to use pics from your photo library, in a move clearly designed to limit users from sharing potentially damaging pics of people they know. You can still take a pic on the fly and share it, but you can’t dip into the archive, which could help stop users from sharing images of their exes in the buff, for instance.

Other updates going out in the new version include the ability to poll contacts via a “Yes or No” poll, as well as more new tools aimed at shoring up the potential for the anonymous social network to do damage to individuals and their reputations.

The analyzing process implemented by Secret to detect names has been improved with the power to detect keyword, sentiment and photos of people who might also be questionable. The app will present its warning when it finds these new types of questionable content, and if the poster proceeds, the post will be flagged for review by Secret to make sure it’s safe.

Secret is also going a step further with its real name policy, and isn’t just warning users against posting, but is actively blocking posts with the names of individuals when it can, and are devoting resources to improving this aspect of its app.

These updates are timely, for a couple of reasons: First, Secret faces legal action in Brazil, where a judge has granted a temporary injunction against it being made available in either Google Play or the App Store. This has resulted in Apple blocking its availability in its mobile software store in order to comply with the order.

The problem in Brazil was sparked by at least one user claiming that pictures of them were shared on the network by an anonymous poster, including their personal details, so the update here seems designed directly to address that through blocking of the camera roll and automatic detection and deletion of real name posts.

Second, Secret faces renewed scrutiny about the actual anonymity of its app after a new Wired report reveals that simple hacks (more like address book tricks) can reveal Secrets attached to a specific address book.

Secret has responded already, saying it has plugged the gap, but the workaround resembles ones we’ve seen before, so it raises the question of whether a permanent solution will ever render posts anonymous in a lasting way. For its part, Secret says these exploits have never resulted in a significant outing of user identity, and they are always addressed as soon as they’re discovered.

The company has been pretty good about responding to issues quickly, which is key as it operates in clearly sensitive territory. The question that remains is whether it can stay out ahead of these recurring issues while also pushing the product forward in a meaningful way.

Investment Banking 2.0 Says “Hello World!?”

#GNN Tech - Editor’s note: Jacob Mullins is the CEO of Exitround, a software-powered M&A marketplace for buyers and sellers of companies.

David Gelles wrote in the New York Times this weekend about how large tech corporations have been conducting more M&A deals with less input from traditional investment banks. Because of my company’s insight into buy and sell-side M&A interest, I wanted to provide some additional insight into how we see the M&A world changing.

But first, a little history to explain this evolution: Investment banking is a 300-year-old industry; the first transaction on record was the British East Indies Trading Company merging with its largest competitor in 1708. Since that day, investment banking has been entirely conducted under human power. These people are arbiters of information, connecting people within a particular sector of expertise or geography.

In an analog world, this worked, as finding the most strategically relevant business has been difficult. But we’re in the digital age. Businesses can achieve awareness and distribution far easier than in the past, enabling strategic acquirers to identify them earlier, without the need for human subject-matter experts.

In the past, buying stock on a physical trading floor in New York required an insider personal network to consummate the trade. In the past, finding love required a close-knit network of friends and family to help you find that ideal match. In the past, finding the perfect home required paging through newspapers and walking through open houses. Today, structured data and intelligent matching algorithms have solved each of these problems.

In the past, buying a company required people with subject-matter expertise to help identify the right M&A target and all the related data and information you needed to make the decision. Today, intelligent matching algorithms and proprietary data sets that span the globe enable buyers to identify the right target within minutes and connect within a matter of hours. The world of investment banking is a-changing.

On one end of the market, billion-dollar deals are starting to move in-house at large, highly resourced companies like Google and Facebook, as detailed by Gelles. Similarly, in the long tail of tech M&A, transactions under $100 million, where 88 percent of deals are done, the majority of corporate acquirers may not be as resourced up as the tech majors to go it alone, or hire an M&A adviser. However, because of software innovation in the space, enabling efficient prospecting at a highly disruptive cost, access to highly relevant M&A deals is becoming democratized to even corporate development departments of one.

There are 1,205 sell-side companies across 36 different countries in Exitround’s marketplace. On the buy side, there are over 1,450 individual companies, each looking for very specific strategic targets for M&A and corporate development expansion. This matrix of over 1,700,000 potential M&A connections is far beyond the limits of a human being’s ability to connect the relevant end-points.

Structured data, machine-learning algorithms and proprietary data are revolutionizing the way buyers and sellers of companies connect, not only more intelligently, but also more quickly.

Today on Exitround, the average connection time between a buyer and a seller is 17.8 hours, compared with the weeks or months needed in a traditional M&A process. And finding that correct target comes by way of mathematical relevancy between the two companies, as opposed to coffees, lunches and sit-downs to “explore opportunities.”

All this isn’t to say that investment banking is dead. In fact, great bankers can be incredibly valuable to a process in negotiation, extracting as much value as possible for the client, deal structuring to minimize tax burdens and integration. But as with all other large industries, modernization and technology has finally reached the doorstep of Goldman Sachs.

Are they ready to open the door and say “Hello”?

IMAGE BY SHUTTERSTOCK USER ISCATEL (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Google buys travel guide app startup Jetpac

#GNN  Tech- SAN FRANCISCO: Google confirmed Monday it has bought the startup behind a Jetpac mobile application that creates insightful travel guides by analyzing pictures from social networks such as Instagram.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jetpac said that its application would be removed from Apple´s online App Store in the days ahead and that it would stop supporting the software in the middle of September.

"We look forward to working on exciting projects with our colleagues at Google," Jetpac said in an online post.

Jetpac mines publicly shared pictures for visual clues to insights such as "bars where women go, the best views, or where the hipsters are" and then presents users with city guides suggesting spots that might be of interest.

Jetpac boasts visual guides recommending local haunts in about 6,000 cities "from San Francisco to Kathmandu."

Google did not comment on its plans for Jetpac, which could be woven into the California-based Internet titan´s own social network, mapping service, or personalized recommendation features.

Jetpac was founded about three years ago and is based in San Francisco. (GNN)(AFP)(AIP)

#GNN Tech - How People Are Filling In When AI Can’t Do The Job

Since Siri became a part of iOS in 2011, the idea of having a digital assistant that can help us get things done just by asking has been a central thrust of the big smartphone platform owners.

Less than a year after Apple rolled out its AI companion, Google followed suit with Google Now, a service that preemptively sends notifications based on contextual clues like your location, your email inbox, and traffic data.

Announced at this year’s Build conference, Microsoft also has a smart assistant: Cortana, named after the AI from the Halo franchise of games on the Xbox. Microsoft says Cortana is designed to act like like a secretary, reminding you about the things that you want to bring up when you call your wife on your way home.

Despite the niftiness of having your phone tell you to leave work 15 minutes early to make it to your flight or Siri and Cortana cracking the occasional joke, the limitations to these assistants are clear. Siri can set a reminder, but she can’t help you schedule a meeting; Google Now can suggest some restaurants nearby, but it can’t book you a table at your favorite place.

Enter premium digital assistants like Fancy Hands and Jarvis. For a monthly fee, these services can handle requests that make Siri and Cortana look like barely functioning alpha builds

How do these assistants accomplish such advanced tasks? Does Jarvis know what kind of food its users like? Can it tap into your schedule while looking for flights to see what might work for you? Can it actually interact with people via email without sounding like a processed form?

Yes, but not because the startup has managed to create an advanced artificial intelligence that just happens to be flying under everyone’s radar. Instead, what they’ve done is create a TaskRabbit for digital tasks: on the other end of every request is a college-educated worker sitting at a computer, searching for the best food around your office or using price-comparison tools to find flights.

Even with the convenience that comes from modern apps, looking through Yelp for a decent place to take a business associate to dinner can still take quite a while, especially if you’re the indecisive type to begin with. I’ve spoken to a few users of these premium digital assistants, and one use case that kept coming up was getting three or four options to choose between to simplify decision-making processes. People just want someone to do the boring, trivial tasks for them.

In a few years, many of these tasks will be accomplished by software. Apple, Google, and Microsoft aren’t standing still with their efforts, and new companies (including one founded by the creators of Siri) are looking to create services that learn and tie in to all of your favorite apps to create digital assistants that are aware of your circumstances and the nuance of tasks that you want done.

But until then, it’s interesting to see humans essentially slotted into these services like cogs in a machine. The interfaces are there for users in the form of apps (or text and email for Jarvis, which means you can use it via Siri’s messaging capabilities), the data is there, but the ability to parse complex requests (or to take simple requests and understand what they mean in context) is years away.

And when that technology does arrive, I can’t help but wonder if these services will go away, or simply move further up the “experience stack.” Imagine it: People with too much on their plate could pay a company like Fancy Hands to manage aspects of their life that are just too tricky or awkward or just take a few seconds too long to handle with an AI assistant; and workers at that company could use AI in concert with traditional applications to become even more productive.

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Judge rejects $324.5 million settlement over Apple, Google hiring

#GNN - NEW YORK: Four Silicon Valley companies including Apple and Google failed to persuade a U.S. judge to sign off on a $324.5 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit by tech workers, who accused the firms of conspiring to avoid poaching each other's employees.

In a ruling on Friday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, said the class action settlement was too low, given the strength of the case against the companies. Intel and Adobe were also part of the proposed deal.

There is "substantial and compelling evidence" that late Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs "was a, if not the, central figure in the alleged conspiracy," Koh wrote. The judge provided details in evidence of anecdotes involving Jobs and other Valley executives to show why she thought the workers deserved more.

Representatives for Apple and Google Inc declined to comment. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said the company is disappointed Koh rejected an agreement "that was negotiated at arm's length over many months," but appreciates that Koh provided additional information on her views.

Lawyers for the workers, along with an Adobe representative, were not immediately available to comment.

In their 2011 lawsuit, the tech employees said the conspiracy had limited their job mobility and, as a result, kept a lid on salaries. The case has been closely watched because of the possibility of big damages being awarded and for the opportunity to peek into the world of some of America's elite tech firms.

The case was based largely on emails in which Apple's Jobs, former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt and some of their rivals hatched plans to avoid poaching each other's prized engineers.

PARIS BLUES
Koh referred to one email exchange which occurred after a Google recruiter solicited an Apple employee. Schmidt told Jobs that the recruiter would be fired. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt's note to a top Apple human resources executive with a smiley face.

Koh also disclosed a 2006 exchange over Google's plans to open an engineering center in Paris. Google sought to hire three former Apple engineers for the project, but Jobs objected. Jobs wrote that his company would "strongly prefer that you not hire these guys." Google then told Jobs it had scrapped plans for the Paris center, "based on your strong preference."

The four companies agreed to settle with the workers in April shortly before trial. The plaintiffs had planned to ask for about $3 billion in damages at trial, which could have tripled to $9 billion under antitrust law.

Plaintiff attorneys argued Koh should approve the deal because the workers faced serious risks on appeal had the case gone forward. Some tech workers filed objections to the settlement, however, saying both sides should go back to the negotiating table in the hopes of obtaining a larger amount.

Daniel Girard, a lawyer for one of the objectors, said he is "very pleased that the court agreed with his position." It is unclear whether objectors would be included in any future settlement negotiations.

In her ruling, Koh repeatedly referred to a related settlement last year involving Disney and Intuit. Apple and Google workers got proportionally less in the latest deal compared to the one involving Disney, Koh wrote, even though plaintiff lawyers have "much more leverage" now than they did a year ago.

To match the earlier settlement, the latest deal "would need to total at least $380 million," Koh wrote.

The judge also said the plaintiffs had strong evidence to prove how the no-poaching deals impacted wages. In response to hiring pressure from Facebook, Google co-founder Sergey Brin announced a policy in 2007 of making counteroffers "within one hour" to any Google employee approached by the social networking company.

Google then tried to entice Facebook into a no-poaching deal, Koh wrote, but Facebook refused. The Facebook threat eventually led Google to alter its salary structure and increase all salaries by 10 percent, Koh wrote.

A further hearing in the case is scheduled for September 10.

The case is In Re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California 11-cv-2509.

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Google: No Comment On Possible Google Algorithm Update Over The Weekend

#GNN - #Google: No #Comment On Possible Google Algorithm Update Over The Weekend     Was There A Google Panda Refresh Last Friday?

On Friday, August 8th, there appears to have been a Google algorithm update that Google said they will not comment on. It may likely be a monthly Google Panda refresh but we cannot confirm if there was an update and if so, if it was Panda or not.

I reported the details at the Search Engine Roundtable, citing webmaster chatter, reports sent to me directly from webmasters who recovered on August 8th, as well as the various automated tracking tools. SearchMetrics also shared screen shots of sites impacted by this unconfirmed update.

Here are screen shots of the tracking tools showing significant changes to the Google search results Friday through the weekend.

Dan Petrovic said this was the second largest update in 2014 that he has seen. Dan said this is “the second biggest spike in 2014 only slightly behind the 17 May (PayDay Loan 2).”
One webmaster emailed us a screen shot showing how his site was hit by another unconfirmed update on January 9th but recovering on August 8th.

 Again, Google would not confirm or deny there was an update on August 8th.

How to Eventually Become a Millionaire Using Your SEO Knowledge

#GNN - There are many types of #SEO services you can offer and running your own websites might even be more profitable.

With a wide range of clients you get asked to offer your expertise in many forms, but which ones are the most lucrative?

Here are a few potential career choices for an SEO expert to make.

Teaching SEO

Gathering up-to-date SEO knowledge can be a daunting task that requires a lot of time and effort. If this isn't your daily business you can easily lose touch.

Working with outdated SEO information can even ruin you. SEO is also a hard profession to learn because it involves so many other fields of expertise.

A good teacher is hard to find. Companies should pay top dollar for somebody that can help their team stay up-to-date for both the technical guidelines and possibilities and everything involved in link building.

For a single training of about 4 hours you can easily ask between $600 and $1,200. Most companies require at least four of these to get some grasp of the things involved in SEO.

An advanced SEO expert can teach to in-house teams, freelancers, online courses, and SEM agencies.

SEO Consultancy

An SEO consultant doesn't only teach, but he also provides clear instructions for in-house teams to execute. He checks their execution and directs all the involved tasks and specialized people.

Most SEO consultants are mainly technical consultants that work with website builders. A good SEO consultant should also be able offer strategic guidance that is focused on the ROI of unpaid search traffic.

Selecting the right keyword combinations, determining what texts need to be added to which pages, setting the guidelines for copywriters, monitoring results, and setting up link building are all the tasks of a good consultant.

At this time $150 an hour is a good rate for a broad SEO expert. Most consultants make even more money by selling their consultancy as a fixed fee. Just make sure the client's expectations are clear.

Products and Services

Most companies that rely heavily on search traffic have their own teams for the day-to-day SEO tasks. Setting up teams for certain services can often be challenging and there are many tasks they gladly outsource.

An elaborate keyword research offers valuable marketing information. When you really want to get to know your audience and when it involves recovering search volume trends, competition levels and conversion rates it can easily take two days to create.

Some expensive tools can make keyword research somewhat easier, but a client normally doesn't have access to these. You can easily ask $2,000 for good keyword research.

With unpaid search traffic comes a lot of copywriting. This will often be billed on a per page basis. These so called landing pages can be added for each individual keyword. Depending on the quality and length of a page, prices range between $20 and $60.

When a client works with some outdated CMS that's inflexible for SEO purposes, it's often smarter to build them a new site or additional section in WordPress, osCommerce or other simple open source platforms. These already take many SEO aspects into account and little customization should be needed.

Creating a website in WordPress can range from $5,000 to $500,000. A lucrative business if you use cheap labor.

Link building involves a strategic part, but also requires a lot of manual labor. Getting in touch with all those other website owners and convincing them to link to a website is very time consuming.

It can easily take an online marketer a day a week to make partnerships and acquire links. Something many companies gladly outsource at $60 an hour. Because link building requires a continuing growth as the competition is active, a fixed monthly amount (often $1,000 a month and up) is probably the industry standard.

Conversion optimization comes in many forms and service types. I haven't seen that much industry standardization, but because taking conclusions out of all the available data requires a lot of expertise, an hourly rate of $150 is quite common.

All these services seldom come as a one-time thing. That is why many SEM agencies like to sell them in packages. A mix of copywriting, link building and monitoring starts at $1,000 a month, even for SMEs. If that is too expensive, they should rather do everything themselves.

Revenue Share

All the previous examples show that SEO is often time consuming and expensive for a client. Therefore offering a share of their revenue from SEO traffic allows them to keep the cost within limits and ensures very motivated SEO firms.

For the SEO firm it is often smartest to keep a mix of low initial fees and a revenue share percentage that in many cases earns more than a fixed fee. The risk of under achieving should be limited and the influence on the revenue should be large (whatever metric is used).

Depending on the margins on a product a 5% fee on all revenue from unpaid search is not uncommon. I've even worked with a conversion attribution model where 50% of all direct and indirect sales from unpaid search got paid.

Having Your Own Websites

Working for clients is fun, but using your expertise in industries where product fulfillment is easy or where great affiliate programs (or other business models) exist is often much more lucrative. The greatest advantage of working without clients is the freedom and control you have over the perfect SEO situation.

Link building becomes a lot easier when you don't represent some big brand and when you can easily start many websites within the same industry. Finding the right industry where the competition still leaves a lot of gaps in their SEO approach and where margins are high is the only hard part of having your own websites.

From Steady Income to Millionaire

When you need a steady income to get by, start out with the services at the beginning of this article. Once you've made sure you can pay the rent for some time to come, having your own websites is the only chance to become a millionaire from your SEO knowledge.

(GNN)(searchenginewatch)(AIP)

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