The National Day of Unplugging is finally over, so go on and gather ’round your screen: It’s CrunchWeek time again! It was another action-packed week in the tech industry, so Leena Rao, Ryan Lawler and I had lots to talk about when we sat down together in the TechCrunch TV studio.

Watch the video embedded above to hear us discuss Andrew Mason’s ouster from the CEO spot at Groupon (and his epic farewell memo), Marissa Mayer’s controversial decision to put an end to Yahoo’s existing work-from-home arrangements, and whether ride-sharing app SideCar will overcome its tussle with Austin’s governmental authorities to be the breakout SXSW app we’ve all been waiting for.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/03/crunchweek-groupon-fires-andrew-mason-yahoo-nixes-work-from-home-sxsws-sidecar-problem/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

Colleen Taylor johalputt TechCrunch

07:12

Their downside to pet projects is that they invariably teach you something you didn’t really want to know. This time, it was that most of the people who do what I do are doomed.

Let me explain. Mostly for fun, I’ve recently built¹ a news aggregator I call Scanvine, which ranks stories and authors and publications by how often they’re shared on social media. (TechCrunch does quite well, thanks for asking.) So I’ve been paying attention to a much broader spectrum of news during this last week…which was also the week that Marissa Mayer announced that Yahoo! would no longer condone working at home.

Oh, the hysteria that ensued. The Los Angeles Times hosted a special live video chat on the uproar. Slate had duelling columnists argue the issue; neither of them, remarkably, even mentioned the possibility that perhaps not all companies are alike. The sheer intensity of massive overextrapolation from a single data point really began to feel like:

The upside of Marissa Mayer disallowing all telecommuting in US economy is, I’m assuming, a welcome end to “Work from home!” spam.—

Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) March 01, 2013

The New York Times and Wired and The Atlantic and nearly everyone else fell back on context-free speculation. (And in Maureen Dowd’s case, content-free as well.) Only a tiny minority — notably Alexia and Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson — actually dug out some of the reasons why the decision was made.

So was it the right decision? Well, as an expert on the subject by virtue of having worked at home for many years, both as a full-time novelist and as a software developer, let me explain: oh, for God’s sake shut up and stop asking already.

Working at home has some benefits and some disadvantages, for both employers and employees. Over time, the benefits have been increasing and the disadvantages diminishing, but Marissa Mayer judged that for the very specific case of Yahoo! today, the latter were outweighing the former. Was she right? Maybe! Who knows! Does it really matter, because it’s a trend-signifying bellwether? Probably not! Is all this handwringing completely ridiculous bordering on insane? You bet!

What’s really highlighted here is not just that many traditional ‘journalists’ are phenomenologically indistinguishable from ‘bloggers’ these days, if there’s any distinction at all any more: it’s that many are not even particularly good bloggers. I’m beginning to realize that the scattered collection of one-off blog posts I find via sites like Hacker News are both more interesting and more thoughtful than most mainstream-media opinion, context, or analysis pieces. Passionate part-timers with a deep knowledge of the subject matter who also happen to be good writers are a lot more interesting than most mere scribes.

Of course this doesn’t apply to what I call High Journalism: investigative journalists digging out hidden stories, international journalists reporting from wars and disasters, the fifth estate holding the feet of power to the flames of publicity. But the problem is that most High Journalism (which is expensive and has a limited audience) has historically been financed by Low Journalism: entertainment, sports, classified ads, etc.

Which is pretty bizarre, when you think about it. It’s as if the space program and Medecins Sans Frontieres were funded by the profits from Chicken McNuggets and Big Gulps. So, of course, the Internet inevitably targeted this economic discontinuity, and Craigslist killed the classified ad, and the Entertainment and Sports and Life sections of magazines and newspapers are being eaten alive by TMZ and Gawker and Deadspin and Buzzfeed–the media equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup–and now everyone’s writing empty pieces about Marissa Mayer’s decision because it’s a hot-button issue and they need the pageviews and the mindshare and the ads.

But that’s a loser’s game. “Will Journalism Go The Way Of Whaling?” asks the title of a recent New York Times conversation between David Brooks and the great Gail Collins, and I fear that the answer is mostly yes. A few of its dinosaurs will evolve into eagles, but most will be eaten alive by the modern mammals–not just because they’re faster and cheaper and more nimble, but because, as this whole Marissa Mayer work-from-home kerfuffle shows, they’re better, within their particular domains. I hope High Journalism finds a new way to pay for itself soon, because the Low Journalism on which it’s riding, once a colossus, now has feet of clay.

¹I’m only a part-time journalist: by day I write software. Whew.

Image credit: Advancing Gingerly, Flickr.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/02/tis-a-consummation-devoutly-to-be-wished/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

johalputt Jon Evans TechCrunch

06:12

AOL today confirmed a couple of big changes at the top of the company, as first reported yesterday by Bloomberg and AllThingsD. Susan Lyne, the exec who had previously been at Gilt Groupe, is the new CEO of AOL’s Brand Group (including TechCrunch). Meanwhile, Artie Minson is stepping down as COO as the role gets restructured.

Internal memo from CEO Tim Armstrong below.

More to come. Refresh for updates.

Thank you for all the hard work on the 100 day sprint. The teamwork and alignment of resources is coming together nicely and it looks like there are going to be some exciting outcomes for consumers and customers.

One part of the sprint we have been working on is talent and we have announced a series of talented people joining AOL in our major segments of business. Moving to a segmented structure has allowed us to focus deeply on our brands and businesses. Returning to growth after 8 years of not growing is directly related to the talent we have and our ability to move the company into white space areas of opportunity while we improve our core business. Today, we are adding to the talent and focus of the company and I wanted to share some exciting news with you.

We are announcing a talent and leadership structure that is aligned with each of our operating units with the goal of increasing the communication flow and cross-segment operating teamwork. The update to our structure matches our strategy and will also put more decision making and resources directly into our brands. We have spoken many times of the work we are doing to improve our brands and product and today is another step in unleashing the power of our brands for consumers and customers.

We want to welcome to AOL a world-class talent who is recognized on a global basis for her experience in content, commerce, and leadership. She has been part of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women’s List, she has been the CEO of a publically traded brand, she is the chairman of one of the best women’s commerce businesses on the Internet, and she has been with AOL since the day we re-launched as a public company – as one of our stellar board members. Please help me welcome Susan Lyne, one of the most talented people in our space and someone who will continue to help us raise the talent and growth level at AOL. Susan is not only a world-class talent, she is a world-class person and you will see that as you get to know her. She joins Karen Dykstra, our former board member and current super-star CFO, as a leader who is moving from being a board member to being a full time AOLer. Please welcome Susan, she will be in the office today and you will hear more from her over the next week.

Susan will be CEO of the AOL Brand Group, a group that includes some of the Internet’s best brands. She will manage the AOL brand portfolio on a global basis. Susan has been a highly engaged board member and I have leaned on her often during the turn-around and having her join the company is a significant step for AOL. As part of the continued focus on our investment in the Huffington Post, Arianna will continue to report to me and we will continue the work with Susan on setting up cross-site scale as we grow the content business. Arianna and Susan have been friends for years and we will spend a lot of time working on deeper strategy for the future of the content business.

The company will be organized with Susan running the AOL Brand Group, Ned Brody running AOL Networks, and Bud Rosenthal, acting as interim CEO of AOL Membership. Susan, Ned, and Bud will report to me and will join Arianna and the other Sales, Technology, Legal, HR, and Communications leaders.

Another part of today’s announcement is that we will be restructuring the COO role within the organization. As part of the changes, our talented COO leader, Artie will work directly with me on our current and future commerce and subscription strategy and business. Artie has made meaningful contributions to AOL as part of the executive team and he is at a point in his career where he is looking for his next step and he will be doing that at AOL. Artie’s teamwork on the turnaround of AOL and his ability to look for growth opportunities in AOL’s core business is something we will continue as we look deeper into the subscription area.

We are building a company that improves our consumers’ and our customers’ lives. We’re going for world-class products and a creative organization that is backed up by a strong financial backbone. We’re going to do both – grow and strengthen. Please join me in welcoming Susan Lyne and let’s keep up the work that has allowed us to bring AOL back to life – TA

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/28/aol-confirms-susan-lyne-as-ceo-of-brand-group-artie-minson-out-as-coo-role-restructured-memo/

Ingrid Lunden johalputt TechCrunch

05:42

With big data playing an increasingly critical role in healthcare and with the pervasiveness of archaic infrastructure and lack of data portability in health systems and hospitals, data warehousing startup Health Catalyst sees a big opportunity to help fix this problem. And, at least for now, investors appear eager to buy in. In January, the startup raised a whopping $33 million in series B financing from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Sequoia Capital and Sorenson Capital.

And, today, Health Catalyst is adding more coin to its coffers, announcing that it has increased its Series B round by an additional $8 million, which sees Kaiser Permanente Ventures and CHV Capital (a venture capital fund guided by Indiana’s largest health care system) join the startup’s roster of investors. The additional capital brings its series B total to $41 million.

But why the big moola? Well, while startups like Practice Fusion have helped push Electronic Health Records to the forefront of the digital health conversation, many EHR systems aren’t all they’re cracked up to be in their promises to hospitals and health systems.

Hospitals have been using warehousing software for a long time now, but porting health data to the cloud or some other digital storage resource is one thing — actually providing visibility and insight into those data resources is another. Without the latter, EHRs instead just become a significant contributor to the $750 billion wasted annually by the U.S. healthcare system.

Furthermore, with Obamacare mandating that health providers must make the transition to digital health records in the over the next two years, the heft and quality of EHRs only stands to become an increasingly critical issue for the country’s hospitals and health systems.

By providing a data warehousing platform that has been built specifically for the healthcare industry, the five-year-old Health Catalyst believes it’s well-positioned to take advantage of Obamacare’s digital mandates and to help providers get more out of their EHR systems. Working in conjunction with EHRs (like Cerner and Epic, for example) to unlock the big data living in EHR systems, Health Catalyst aims to give hospitals and health providers the tools they need to better organize, visualize and utilize that data so they can focus on better outcomes and begin eliminating that waste.

Going forward, simply having an electronic health record won’t be enough, hospitals and providers need an agile, speedy data warehouse to help them visualize critical patient data in realtime, for example. Health Catalyst gives providers access to an analytics suite that enables them to drill down into that data and prescribe medications or suggest treatments that are based on a patient’s individual history.

Like other business intelligence tools, Health Catalyst wants to give hospitals easier access to their datasets and the ability to segment data to view data from all of its diabetes patients, for example, to better inform individual treatment — what worked and what didn’t. The startup’s software platform also allows hospitals to set up alerts to keep them informed of cost discrepancies and declining quality of care.

Health Catalyst is far from crazy in identifying a massive pain point (and opportunity) in EHRs and health data in general. It really wouldn’t be surprising to see some of the big enterprise software and storage providers move more aggressively into this space. Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, for example, all have products that could, with some adaptation, serve this market effectively. But right now they lack the clinical focus. Box.net, too, could be another contender.

For now, Health Catalyst is off to a good start, as its software has been adopted by over 80 hospitals across the U.S. and collectively impacting over 20 million patients.

Find the startup at home here.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/28/with-41m-now-in-the-bank-health-catalyst-wants-to-help-solve-healthcares-big-data-problem/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

johalputt Rip Empson TechCrunch

05:13

TuneIn, the popular online radio service that lets users listen to over 70,000 radio stations from around the world, just announced the launch of TuneIn Live, the company’s new service for helping listeners discover new audio content. Using the data it gathers from its over 40 million monthly users, TuneIn is now able to provide its users with personalized recommendations based on the stations, songs and artists they listen to.

This, TuneIn’s Director of Product Kristin George tells us, means the service can now ” recommend stations that just started playing something new in each genre every few seconds.” George also stressed that “this is just the beginning.” It took TuneIn about seven months to build this new technology into its service and ” it is now allowing discovery to happen on a level we only dreamed about.” Having 70,000 stations and more than 2 million on-demand programs in its directory, TuneIn CEO John Donham wrote in a statement today, meant that the company’s “biggest opportunity has been discovery,” but the large amount of content was also “a lot for anyone to digest.”

The new discovery engine is now available on the company’s website and in its iPad app. It will arrive on the other major mobile platforms later this year.

TuneIn was also a launch partner for Google’s Google+ sign-in launch yesterday. Now that it has integrated the new Google+ login system, TuneIn will allow its users to set reminders for upcoming live events in Google Calendar (I’m not sure how much demand for appointment radio listening there really is, but I could imagine sports fans may want to make sure they tune in to the right station when their team is playing, for example).

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/28/online-radio-service-tunein-launches-new-discovery-engine-and-google-sign-in-integration/

Frederic Lardinois johalputt TechCrunch

05:13

After selling travel itinerary startup TripIt to Concur for $120 million, the startup’s co-founders, Gregg Brockway and his team are launching their newest venture—Chairish. Chairish is an online consignment marketplace for people to buy and sell pre-owned home furnishings.

The idea came out of a pain point Brockway and his wife, Anna, found when moving into a new home, The couple explained that they had extra furniture, which was high quality and wasn’t damaged, that needed a new home. You can take these pieces to a consignment shop, but that can be a pain.

With Chairish, buyers get access to a curated selection of high quality, designer home décor of all types and styles, from “like new” to those with that are slightly damaged, but could be refurbished. All Chairish listings are pre-owned pieces straight from the owner. Buyers also have a 48-hour return policy.

Sellers can upload and sell in two ways. The standard service allows sellers to upload a photo of the piece and its share the story behind the furniture. Chairish curators will approve the listing and post on the site. Sellers get 80 percent of the total sale. Chairish will arrange pick-up, and delivery to the buyer.

The company’s concierge service, which is only available in San Francisco for now, allows for a Chairish representative to come to your home, inspect your furnishings, write the listing, and move the pieces into secure storage, with professional photographs. Chairish manages payment, and shipping logistics but will take a 40 percent commission on the sale.

Besides the Brockways, Chairish was also founded by TripIt team members Andy Denmark, Eric Grosse, and Nancy Ramamurthi.

The consignment business as a marketplace has been applied across other verticals, including fashion. Whether Chairish will be able to create a valuable business will depend on how easy they make it to actually list and ship products, especially considering the products being transacted are mostly large and cumbersome (as opposed to a handbag or article of clothing).

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/27/tripit-founders-launch-chairish-a-consignment-marketplace-to-sell-pre-owned-home-furniture/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

johalputt Leena Rao TechCrunch

05:12

Cloudflare, the content delivery network and website security company that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in 2010, just announced that the majority of the world’s leading web hosting providers now support its Railgun web optimization protocol to provide advanced caching services and to improve their web performance. Railgun, Cloudflare’s tests show, can optimize dynamic content to improve load times by an average of 143% and reduce bandwidth usage by close to 50%.

Unless you have been following the development of Cloudflare closely, Railgun is probably not on your radar yet. As Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told me last week, Cloudflare now has a presence in 23 data centers around the world so it can serve the data it caches to users as quickly as possible. It will likely add 50 more locations over the course of 2013. As it gets closer to its users, however, the company noticed that its servers are now often pretty far away from where the data originates, so speeding up the data delivery between the origin server and Cloudflare’s servers became a priority.

How Railgun Works

That’s where Railgun comes in. While regular caching services focus on objects like images, HTML, CCS and JavaScript files, Railgun takes a byte-level approach to caching based on delta compression technology. This basically works a bit like video compression, where the encoding technology focused on the differences between frames. Railgun, too, looks at files at the byte-level and then just transfers the actual bytes that have changed instead of the complete file. Because large parts of the web are not based on static files anymore, this kind of low-level approach means even highly dynamic sites can profit from this technology. Close to 40% of the data on the average site today is not dynamic, according to Cloudflare.

“To further improve the performance of an increasingly dynamic, API-driven Internet we needed to reinvent some of its 23-year-old protocols. Railgun goes beyond what traditional performance boosting technology has provided, making even highly dynamic content load faster than ever before,” Prince said in a canned statement today. As he told me last week, having fewer packets travel between the origin server and Cloudflare’s data centers also reduces the amount of overhead and lost packets.

Partners

Among Cloudflare’s Railgun partners are (in alphabetic order 040hosting, A2 Hosting, Arvixe, Bluehost, ByetHost, CoreCommerce, DreamHost, ELServer, FastDomain, GreenGeeks, HostPapa, HostMonster, Just Host, InterServer, MapleTime, (mt) Media Temple, MDDHosting, NameCheap, PacificHost, PRO ISP, SiteGround, Sliqua Enterprise Hosting, Softcloud Hosting, SparkRed, VentraIP, VEXXHOST, WebHostingBuzz, WebHostingPad, x10Hosting and Zuver.

For these hosts’ customers, enabling Railgun is simply a matter of pushing one button. The system will take care of configuring the DNS settings for Cloudflare. Some hosts may charge for the service, but most are making it available for free. Cloudflare itself doesn’t charge the hosts anything for using the service and it does, of course, also provide its usual security features and other optimization tools to their customers.

Cloudflare is also making packages for Rackspace and Amazon Web Services customers available that make installing Railgun as easy as possible for them.

As Prince noted when I talked to him last week, most web hosts are essentially still regional players (think Media Temple in the U.S. or 1&1 in Europe), as businesses tend to choose hosts that have data centers in physical proximity to the majority of their customers. Cloudflare’s Railgun now allows virtually every web host to have something akin to a global presence because the actual physical location of their data centers now matters less than where Cloudflare’s servers are located.

One of Cloudflare’s partners in testing Railgun over the last few months was Imgur, the massively popular photo hosting site. As Imgur founder and CEO Alan Schaaf told me, “speed is an important feature at Imgur, and the entire site is designed to run as fast as possible. We’re really excited to use Railgun to take it even further. Not only has it helped speed up the delivery of our HTML content so far, it’s saving us 50% on our HTML bandwidth.”

Another early user, Luxury Link, also told us that it saw a 40% improvement in load times of its site from the East Coast and a 2x improvement from London.

Written In Go

Interestingly, Prince told me, his team wrote the majority of Railgun in Go, Google’s nascent programming language. In the process of working on the technology, the team noticed that some of the built-in Go encryption functions were still slow, so it improved these and gave them back to the Go community. Go, Prince told me, is very good for building highly efficient code and the company is planning to continue to use it for other projects (and is actively hiring Go programmers, too).

Looking ahead, Prince told me that the company is thinking about putting its servers even closer to users by working with ISPs, similar to what Netflix and large CDN’s like Akamai are doing.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/26/cloudflare-partners-with-majority-of-worlds-leading-web-hosts-to-implement-its-railgun-protocol-speeds-up-load-times-by-143/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

Frederic Lardinois johalputt TechCrunch

05:12

What a day folks — mere moments talking up Asus’ new Padfone Infinity, CEO Jonney Shih just revealed that the oft-rumored Fonepad is an honest-to-goodness product. Confused? I don’t blame you.

As always, the PadFone is a Android-powered smartphone that physical docks into a larger tablet enclosure. The Fonepad on the other hand is an 7-inch Android tablet that can make phone calls. The rumors of Asus releasing an Intel-powered device have come true with the Padfone, as it sports an Atom Z2420 processor, 1GB of RAM, and the requisite 3G wireless radio to make all those tablet calls possible. On the plus side, Asus tends to leave Android alone for the most part, and the particular Android 4.1 build that’s loaded up on the Fonepad seems similarly unfettered.

If it sounds novel, well, it’s really not — Samsung baked similar voice call functionality into its Galaxy Note 8.0, and to my surprise it actually worked really well. Whether or not Asus will be able to provide a similarly impressive experience is a question I can’t answer until I track down a Fonepad for some more hands-on testing, but the price is certainly right. The Fonepad is slated to launch this April in the UK with a €219 price tag attached to it, but Asus also offered a price in U.S. dollars ($249 to be precise). It’s too early to call that a confirmation for an eventual U.S. launch (especially considering that Samsung will likely excise the voice call feature from the U.S. Note 8.0 model), but it’s enough to make you hope.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/asus-ceo-reveals-the-249-fonepad-another-tablet-you-can-talk-on/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

Chris Velazco johalputt TechCrunch

05:42

Social voting app Polar has raised $1.2 milliom from Yahoo founder Jerry Yang at AME Cloud Ventures, Greylock Partners’ John Lilly, LiveOps Chairman and former eBay COO Maynard Webb, Ash Patel at Morado Ventures, Brian O’Malley Mike Dauber at Battery Ventures, Google’s Don Dodge, Sam Pullara, and others.

Polar is the brainchild of co-founder Luke Wroblewski, a former VP at Yahoo VP and the co-founder of BagCheck, which was acquired by Twitter in 2011. The idea behind Polar came when Wroblewski and his partner Jeff Cole noticed that friends were looking for things to do during their “downtime” on their phones, when people would normally check Tweets or Facebook. He felt that there was an opportunity to allow consumers to spend this time on a mobile app using other social interactions.

Polar’s iOS app lets you vote on photos polls about fashion, film, food, and much more. It’s sort of like a “Hot or Not” for the modern world. Via the app, you can ask people for their opinions on anything, and get responses quickly, as well as upload images and other media.

Polar takes these interactions a step further by collecting data from votes and preferences to start building out a friend and interest graph that will match you up with like-minded people. And Polar has seen some impressive growth since its launch in November. The startup hit 1.5 million votes in its first month, and doubled this to 3 million votes in January. The average number of votes (users) per day is around 55.

Why the high engagement? Wroblewski says that the company’s focus on designing for mobile has made the iOS app easy to use and engaging. The company says that 87% of people who download the app vote.

The startup is also announcing an update to the app, adding the abilities to see how friends votes, finding friends within the app, skipping uninteresting pols and the exploration of Topics & Tags.

The new funding will be used towards hiring (the company has been just Wroblewski and Cole until early this year) and product development.

Check out the app update in the video below.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/mobile-social-voting-app-polar-raises-1-2m-from-jerry-yang-john-lilly-maynard-webb-and-others/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

johalputt Leena Rao TechCrunch

05:12