Thought #1 Advertising has issues.

I heard advertisers promote different app or interfaces that was either pure poison (but the users like it) or are god’s gifts to advertisers. Included in the mix are QR codes, and Apps like Shazam and Chirp (disclaimer #2, both have Android versions and may have Windows Metro and Blackberry versions. I checked the Android side of things).

QR Codes, Near Field Communications and SMS. They call it value add, I call it a layer

However, being the fanbooy of @jeffjarvis who is an author of books like “What would Google Do” and is both a university professor at The City University of New York and host of This Week In Google, I was left scratching my head and thinking “They are leaving half the value of the advertising to Facebook”.

I will go into this deeper in other articles (I have a lot to say, and finally I can use my IT, Economics and general bastardry for good and not for evil.)

Part one of the future articles is that the advertisers are so locked into old business models is that they can not see that value of the data they are giving away.

Part two will be that consumers today are the most informed in history and carry in their pockets more computing power than both Alan Turing and the Signals Intellegence Service even dreamed of. However, the data collected can still allow major errors (Like Pearl Harbour) if you do not use the data correctly.

Part three is that most business models are deader than disco dancers riding a dodo in a fight with Jesus on a velocirapptors, except for the mathematician with a very powerful calculator. And those calculators whill carry brand names of Amazon, Google and maybe Apple.

I hate to say this, lock me in a nice restaurant with tech bloggers, startup entrepreneur and technology companies who GET IT ™ will get my creative juices flowing.

travelmob is a local version of Airbnb, however the properties on offer are in the Asia Pacific area. It today anounced it has secured US$1 million seed investment.

Turochas Fuad, CEO and co-founder of travelmob said, “In raising this seed round of funding, we sought investors who would not only be a good fit but can also add value to travelmob’s growth. Our mission is to lead the social stay market in Asia Pacific and since launch, we’ve been making tremendous progress towards that goal. travelmob is delighted to have Jungle Ventures lead this round of funding and look forward to working with our investors to drive further growth and expansion across the region.”

Anurag Srivastava, Founder and Managing Partner of Jungle Ventures said, “We are excited to lead in this round of funding. Asia Pacific is the fastest growing region for tourism and the region’s online vacation rental market is set to soar over the next few years. travelmob is in the right place, at the right time. Coupled with a solid business plan and a seasoned team with strong regional experience, travelmob has the right ingredients to be successful and is well poised to be a market leader.”

travelmob differentiate itself by:

• offering a specific focus on Asia Pacific accommodation.
• Travellers today are increasingly looking for authentic experiences. travelmob’s “Social stays” connect travellers with local people who provide local accommodation and hospitality.
• travelmob facilitates the booking process for Guests and Hosts via a safe messaging platform. Payments are timely and secure.

Read here for our interview with the founders of Bigcommerce after their first round of funding.

“E-commerce is already booming and we’re really focusing on how to help our clients sell more while leveraging affordable online channels that drive qualified traffic,” said Eddie Machaalani, co-founder of Bigcommerce. “Small and medium businesses shouldn’t need a degree in design and web development to run a successful online store. They want it to be easy and intuitive. We’re radically simplifying the e-commerce experience, enabling the small business not just to compete with larger competitors, but win.”

Maples, an early investor of Twitter, has a large array of investments under his FLOODGATE company. “E-commerce is a $400 billion market growing at massive rates,” said Mike Maples. “Bigcommerce has the team and the platform to take a leadership position in a big way and we are very excited to be involved at this stage.”

The Series B round will fund accelerated product development for Bigcommerce as well as significant expansion of the sales and marketing teams. Bigcommerce has already doubled its global employee base in 2012 and plans to increase headcount by 70 percent over the next two years.

Bigcommerce  is fuelling the online shopping boom, and now power nearly 30,000 stores. Previously it could cost an entrepreneur hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up an e-commerce store. With Bigcommerce it’s just $24.95 a month.

To expand globally will require more capital, if only for localised codes. However with a strong financial base, the founders Mitchell Harper and Eddie Machaalani should be able to expand with greater confidence.

The resulting announcement is actually interesting:  A social media site for new parents, and an iPhone App to allow posting of photos from the phone directly to the site.

The logic, as explained to me by Sarah-Jane Kurtini, is that parents love putting photos of their new born online. The obvious place is Facebook, however some followers may not be interested in seeing baby snaps. So Tinybeans becomes a site that allows parents to share an account and invite family and friends to view their album.

Firstly, this allows privacy and control to be controlled by the parents. Avoiding Facebook is also a smart move because of their poor history on privacy. Thirdly TinyBeans is developing new features like paper albums and the free iPhone app.

Also, Users can upload photos via the Tinybeans website and store them in a simple calendar format. So you can build up a journal of the baby’s growth. And the Tinybeans app makes it easy to upload camera images on the go.

Co-founder, Sarah-Jane Kurtini says, “We are really excited to have made it so easy for parents to create a beautiful journal of their children’s lives. We are also helping make it simple for families to connect. We’re getting lots of feedback from grandparents who are really enjoying seeing their grandchildren grow day by day.”

For me, Tinybeans is a simple idea that is well thought out and executed. It is a tightly focused userbase who want a lot of control most social media sites do not offer. I look forward to see what innovation Sarah-Jane, Stephen O’Young and Dave Cheong will work into Tinybeans.

Being at Fishburners has been great experience. Rob has found a large amount of knowledge on such things as SEO and business skills he can draw on from other members and mentors. Rob also noted unlike most start ups, he entered the space from the other direction. Instead of building the app and then looking for eyeballs, Rob’s Lightstalking community was already active, he needed to expand and improve the experience. Even when attending a talk with someone outside of what Rob does not believe can teach him something, Rob admits he does work away from the talk learning something.

Lightstalking is a WordPress based site and uses Amazon EC2 servers for the backbone. Using a mix of off the shelf and custom made plugins, he has made a site that overs the whole of the photographic scene. With over 11,00 members and some stunning content in the form of photo galleries, Rob is currently using Lightstalking as his day job.

In hindsight, Rob would have preferred to use only WordPress plugins that where actively supported, even if he had to pay for them. If only to be able to contact (or his words, yell) at someone when a plugin breaks.This is a curse and benefit of an open platform like WordPress. There is a lot of plugin and resources available for bloggers, however many, while free, come with little or no support. However there are also a strong WP community, so getting someone to create a custom plugin or code is not that difficult.

However, in my opinion, Rob is the kind of person I could learn from, as he has made a great content rich and active community sight, almost exactly what I have in mind for my own goals in this arena.

Thanks to the kind people at Fish Burners  and with breakfast (or late dinner) supplied by Google, members of the GDG (Google Developers Group) Sydney got to watch the Google IO2012 Android Keynote live on the big screen.

The main points of the Keynote was some new features in the new release of the Android OS (codename Jellybean, or Android 4.1), the eagerly awaited Nexus Tablet (called the Nexus 7), the media streaming device Nexus Q and a demo and discussion of the Google Glass, the wearable computing device.

First off the rank was updates for Jellybean which is being rolled out to developers today, and should be upgraded on compatible devices in July (something that Google is now taking control of, so people no longer have to wait for the carriers to update the OS on devices, something they where generally slack at).

First improvement is Project Butter (I blame Steve Jobs for the smooth as butter meme). Home screen rendering, applications and widgets will get a speed boost in Jellybean. Things like wrapping icons around a widget, scaling widget real estate on the home screen and the ability to flick unwanted apps and widgets (as well as notifications, which also get some user experience tweaks).

A new tool for developers is also shipping, called systrace. This program will tap into the Linux Kernel  of android and will give better diagnostic data for both input and output. And voice recognition, voice control and voice response can now be used offline (that is not requiring network access to work). Offline storage has also been extended to Google Maps, where one city can be downloaded onto your device.

The big news with Android 4.1 is the amount of data processing of searches and application use that Google will use to make results more relevant. Location data collected by your phone will be added to the search algorithm, as well as used to provide real time data on road conditions, trip planning and possible diversions like restaurants or entertainment suggested to you based on prior searches. This can also be seen in airline information based o prior searches. Many will see this as providing better searches and results, but many will be spooked by the data collection and privacy implications on the amount of data being mined by Android for Google.

The second section of the presentation was the Nexus 7 device. A 7″ tablet with a quad core Tegra 3 chip, 16 graphic cores and standard with Android 4.1, and manufactured by ASUS.

As a device, it is not so much aimed at the iPad as with Amazon Kindle Fire. The Android Play store is very much front and centre of the device, with video, magazines, books, and the selling point that all the content is cloud based. The device will be available in Australia with a pice of $249 for the 8gb version.

With an 800×600 screen and huge graphic capacity (and the graphic improvements with Jellybean), the Nexus 7 may become the games machine that finally kills the portable Playstation and Nintendo devices. Highly detailed graphics and fast rendering mean that games unheard of on the mobile space (like immersive MMO) can now be played on a mobile device. Even the Retina display of the new iPad does not compete, due to the graphic processing power of the Nexus 7.

The supprise for me was the next item, the Nexus Q. A spherical desktop / hoe media device, it is Android with the home entertainment turned to 11. With Sonos like capabilities, it can play media in different rooms, and the Nexus 7 can be used as a playlist organiser (with built in sharing and controlling functions to allow others to share in the media experience. Again, the Q will be available soon in Australia at about US$300 (based on the difference between the US and Aus price for the Nexus 7, expect it to cost between A$350-400. The consensus from the GDG crowd is that  rather competing with the Sonos (which has comparable pricing) it needs to compete with the iTV and Airport Express, which is far cheeper (but with less features than both Sonos and Nexus Q).

Next on show was Google Glass. After Sergey Brin introduced it with a stunt filled extravaganza, the wearable device was revealed to still in the prototype stage. Only US developers at IO could pre-order the device, due to Brin advising of regulatory issues with other nations at this time. The fact that the Google Glass streamed a hangout of 4 skydivers jumping from a blimp, to the roof of the Muskone Centre, to the stage shows the potential of the device. The price has been reported to be US$1500 by CNN, so it is not quite priced for consumers as of this time.

The last thing was some Google Plus announcements. Native iPad and Android Tablet clients are coming (Android tablet version released today). New integration with Google Calendar and using a new function called events allow people to invite, collate images and videos and store them on a page for viewing after the event was demoed.

The feeling from the Keynote? There is some evolutionary changes rather than revolutionary changes coming to Android, however, Google will collect even more data of your behaviour and movement in the name of refining personal search (and of cause customer focused ads). The Nexus 7 is a Kindle and Handheld Gaming competitor, the Nexus Q is first generation, and may clash with the Google TV initiative (which was not mentioned this keynote) and may be either wrongly priced or aimed at the wrong competition. It is clear that Google is bringing better focus to the Android marketplace with its Nexus brand, and it will be interesting how OEM manufacturers compete with the Nexus 7. The Nexus Q not only has to compete with the iOS devices, but also cheap Android set top boxes and media plug in devices that are now becoming available. However it is stylish and has strong integration with the Nexus 7, so that may work to it’s benifit. A good keynote from Google.

So far, the simple game of, well, slicing fruit as achieved some impressive results:

• 300 million downloads
• 1.5 trillion pieces of fruit sliced
• 100 years of Fruit Ninja is played every day around the world
• More players than the combined populations of New York, London, Beijing, Paris and Tokyo!

These are impressive stats, especially when companies like Zinga find that mobile games players can be finicky after it spent $US200 Million for OMGPOP only to find usage of their “Draw Something” game plummet.

Te celebrate, Halfbrick had a contest for Australia’s Fruit Ninja Master. Melbourne’s Jess Nunn took out the prize (and a very large trophy!)

I spoke with one of the developers from Halfbrick at the Google Sandbox event earlier this year. Seeing a fully functioning game rendered in HTML5 was a surprise and shows that Halfbrick is innovating in the noble game space, as HTML5 will make it easier to port games to any mobile device that supports HTML5, as well as browser platforms like Google Chrome. As we can see from below, the game is available on all current smart phone platforms, (I bought it for my Xoom Android tablet).

I also noticed there was a Puss in Boots tie-in with the Dreamworks movie, so it is clear that the game has caught public attention. It is great to see Aussies able to compete with the big guns like Zinga, and EA, and it shows that Aussie game design is still world class.

Uniquely, Spotify is also the first music service to use the Freemium model.

There are three levels of service involved. The free low bitrate ad supported service, a $6.99 service which is the same without the advertising removed, and a high bitrate (320kbps) premium service priced at $11.99

Mobile streaming is supported, however there is no free subscription. I found that the android software works nicely on my Motorola Xoom tablet, installs but goes into a panic loop on my Samsung Galaxy S II, and will not install on my HTC Desire. I have not tested on iOS, but would suggest the service will work bette on it due to the more homogeneous Apple platform.

Already the music industry is complaining about the royalties paid by the service , however much of the money Spotify pays in royalties is taken by the Recording companies, and little is passed onto the performers.

As a result of royalties, some of the bands (classic example is of-cause the digital friendly Beatles) have removed their content from the service. However Spotify advertises a catalog of 12 million songs, which is larger than RDIO and MOG.

Having tested the service on both mobile and desktop, I found the desktop to be a more rewarding experience. The ability to create stations based on artists or songs reminds me of Last.FM. Also both mobile and desktop recognised locally stored music.

Premium Mobile users can also cache music for offline use (according to the FAQ 3333 songs) and the service ties in with the Sonos music system.

Many people complain that Stotify is heavily tied into Facebook, requiring a facebook sign in and uses the FB platform for the social eliminate. And unlike Rdio, Spotify is a stand alone program and not web based, which will annoy some users (I do not, I prefer the application method of delivery).

In terms of using the service, the sound quality is great, and new users can get the premium level free for 30 days.

So far this is the closest locally available service to my favourite Last.FM. I found the system easier to use than MOG and RDIO, and is the one I seem to feel comfortable with the most. Taste will vary, however with a better local content collection and a larger library, Spotify seems to be the current winner in the heating up music subscription marketplace.

Normally I shy away from news like this. However, we have covered BIG Commerce in the past, and it allows iTechReport to review the growth of this Aussie company.

From the PR release:

BigCommerce, the world’s fastest growing ecommerce platform has named Steven Power as the new Chief Revenue Officer of its global operations.

Formally from ReachLocal, Powers will be based in Austin, Texas.

Again from the PR release:

“BigCommerce is transforming the way that businesses conduct e-commerce and I’m genuinely excited to be part of it. It’s not only brimming with exceptional talent, but it is one of those amazing companies in which everyone is excited to be on board.”

Big Commerce has been advertising, and I personally heard a BigCommerce ad on the TWIT network.

Given that the VC funding of $15m allowed two offices to be created, one in Australia and one in the US, it makes sense to focus on the US market, if only because of the population size and the better acceptance of catalogue/internet shopping. It also shows that there is still a large untapped market for the BC e-commerce platform globally.

And people are noticing too, with an intriguing write up in the New York Times, showing that there is an upside to using the BC platform for retail. And as Aussie retailers struggle(like Video Game retailer GAME) companies that retail on-line with tools like Big Commerce will be able to compete on an equal basis to large retail. And given that the base price of $25 that includes Credit Card processing and SSL security, it makes financial sense too.

The issue will be if the financial slowdown post Global Financial Crisis will hinder expansion for services like Big Commerce. I do not think so, short term, as in the US the tech sector has been running stronger than the average US economy. And given both the traditional entrepreneurial spirit in the US and the cost saving using BC’s platform for traditional retailers will allow BC to expand further.

The blog has some examples on how people use BC for their retail site, and there are some impressive sites on display.

I did not know this was it’s first time it was being run, however I found the experience quite rewarding.

Organised by Catherine Eibner, it is a spin off from the “Silicon Beach“ start-up meetup. Sponsored by Microsoft Bizspark, it was not a Microsoft only event, as I had discussions with both an iOS and Windows Mobile developer/startup, as well as web based developers.

It is slightly intimidating, as I felt I had to barge in to groups to have a chat, but I was surprised and rewarded by people willing to tell me about their projects and in being a part of the start-up process. Up to now I am mainly interviewed people who are further along the start-up path, or are being mentored by successful entrepreneurs. Talking to people who are starting  or about to release their project provided some interesting information, and I hope to tell their story at a future date.

One of the most interesting chat is with Bosco Tan of Getlisted. A person who has been through the start up process a couple of times. His presence at the meet-up is one of the reasons these sessions are valuable. Creating networks with successful (and lets be truthful, unsuccessful entrepreneurs as well), as well as with industry peers is something that has recently become accepted practice. Like the world of Open Source Software, people are creating value from lessons learnt, and unlike keeping this information locked up, people find that by sharing this information adds value to the whole software development industry.

One interesting discussion I had was with someone (I forgot who, sorry!) who was looking at Kickstarter style funding. A previous company interviewed by itechreport, studioproper , is also using Kickstarter  to fund it’s next release of modular wall mountable covers. To see start-ups considering a more open funding model is quite exciting, and may be the way of the future for developers and people looking to fund ideas and projects.

Even Cafe Vivo was an interesting location. Inside the cafe in the Old American Express building (that’s how I refer to the building anyway, but I am old) across the road from the Apple store, it is the only Cafe that I have seen that has it’s own Podcast Studio, Eagle Waves Radio. It made my dinky Macbook air and USB mic look uncool. Hopefully I can start recoding some of these attendees here and at Silicon Beach.

Would I recommend attending one of these meet-ups? For my first experience I would heartily encourage readers of iTechreport to attend, especially if they are looking for ideas or help in their projects. And not just start-ups. Anyone who wants to invest in these companies should attend as well, if only to learn the pro and cons of Venture Capital, Angel Investing and bootstrapping.