betaworks

Giphy - Search Animated Gifs on the Web

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:20:12 -0400

A few months ago, we “announced” Giphy - a search engine for animated GIFs. I’m using quotes because, to be honest, we weren’t really ready to announce it. The product started taking off and we felt it was best to give the couple hundred thousand folks and countless publishers that started using it a place to direct their feedback, bugs, and feature requests. Needless to say, there was a lot of duct tape holding the search engine together — until today. The Giphy team, started by hackers in residence Jace Cooke & Alex Chung, have been hard at work building a robust search engine, responsive site, realtime crawler, and most importantly (for us) a way to handle attribution.

While a lot of what we’re launching with this “version 1.0” is behind the scenes, some of the new features you’ll notice are a sexy homepage, a browse mode, much faster searching, and about a dozen featured GIF artists with their own pages to host original content. This is the first step we’re taking to help organize a historically fragmented community, and give GIF artists around the world a legitimate platform to start the next big Internet meme.

- paul

Telecast - TV quality entertainment on your phone

Wed, 08 May 2013 10:46:00 -0400

The promise of video entertainment on mobile devices is a theme that quickly emerged in our hacker in residence group. Matt Hackett was particularly frustrated that despite the simplicity of an iPhone and iPad, it’s incredibly time consuming to find video entertainment worth watching. Traditional mobile video apps did one of two things - they either pulled uninteresting video from social streams, or they relied on extensive keyword searching only to find a semi-entertaining 30 second clip.

At the same time, traditional television, for all it’s flaws, still does one thing well - when you turn on a TV and switch to a channel you like, you’ll get professionally programmed video designed to (hopefully) entertain you. Why can’t we do the same thing on an iPad or iPhone?

Matt and a small team of builders, including Jason Morrow (product design), Juan Alvarez (iOS), Mike Byhoff (editorial), Grant Custer (front-end extraordinaire) spent the next 3 months working to fix this problem: Enter Telecast.

We believe in what makes TV special, professionally sourced and programmed shows. At the same time, we feel the most interesting video content now exists on the Internet. Telecast brings you three 5-minute bursts of seriously good, personally tailored video every day.

One thing’s for sure - you’ll love the shows. Download Telecast now and give it a shot.

- paul

Telecast is currently only available in North America, additional markets coming soon!

Dots - 25 million games later

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:48:00 -0400

We recently launched Dots to an amazing response. In just one week, Dots has been downloaded 1 million times, has become the #1 app in 8 countries, and is a top 5 app in 15 other countries. Our Twitter and Facebook streams were quickly filled with friends, colleagues, celebrities, and complete strangers talking about the game and challenging others to beat their Dots score. Needless to say, we’re thrilled with the response.

There’s a lot to do, and we’re working hard to release an update shortly with a few bug fixes, new features, and iPad support. Check out the blog on Dots to see what we have planned (plus a few tips and tricks).

- patrick & paul

Dots - a game about connecting

Wed, 01 May 2013 11:24:19 -0400

About 3 months ago, Patrick Moberg started experimenting with various iOS interaction designs as part of the hacker in residence program. We didn’t set out to build a game, but quickly realized there’s a desire for well designed mobile entertainment so that’s where we focussed. Patrick worked for a few weeks to build something that looked beautiful and provided you some level of stimulation. After a few days playing one of the initial concepts, we were all completely hooked. Several betaworks employees and their partners clocked hours and hours of playtime off a fairly rudimentary pilot. Over the next few months, we refined the scoring, design, and overall aesthetic to come up with what we simply call Dots - a game about connecting.

As you play you earn “dots” which is the game’s currency for advanced powers. You can earn these by playing or via in-app-purchases, but both routes produce the same outcome. One of the principles Patrick established from the start was to never take advantage of players — so you can always earn your way to powers if you don’t want to pay for them. You’ll never reach a point in the game where you have to shell out cash to keep playing or advance.

We think it’s simple, beautiful, and fun. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

- paul

Blend.io — make music together

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:25:49 -0400

A decade ago, a band called The Postal Service started making songs by sending instrumental tracks back and forth through the United States Postal Service. Oddly enough, the process of musical collaboration hasn’t evolved much since then.

Music creation today often includes messy email threads and quirky hacks by the industry’s most determined. And though music creators are so passionate about sharing and distributing their work, there isn’t really a “beta” community for them to share it in. Yes, countless products have been built to help people discover, share, and listen to music — but we feel that music collaboration has been left out of the digital revolution.

Today we’re announcing Blend.io, a collaboration network for musicians. With Blend.io, musicians and producers can share in-progress tracks. And they can connect with other musicians to collaborate on works in progress. Blenders can browse artists and their projects or comment on and remix tracks.

The vision is to enable collaboration for all musicians, but we’ve decided to focus on electronic music to start — specifically targeting users of Ableton Live and Maschine. We’ll add additional support in the near future, but want to make sure we get it right for this initial audience.

The community is invitation-only at the moment, but if you’re actively using Ableton Live or Maschine, request an invite — we’ll approve requests as fast as possible!

- paul

Poncho — a much simpler weather service

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:32:00 -0400

For centuries human beings have been trying to predict the weather, or more precisely what will fall from the sky today. The history of meteorology as a science goes all the way back to Aristotle. Over a century ago, meteorology became advanced enough to start (sort of) reliably predicting weather patterns. But as computing power increased, we hit information overload — and we needed a human to boil down the sea of numbers into simple advice. We were not sure exactly what it meant when the barometric pressure was falling, but weather forecasters told us to bring umbrellas, and we did.

But then a funny thing happened. The internet and, more recently, smartphones began to deliver real-time weather information. While this certainly looked like progress — more data available anytime, anywhere — the experience actually got worse instead of better. Weather again seemed like a sea of numbers. We want to fix that. And so Poncho was born.

Poncho explains the weather in plain, clear English — just like weather forecasters used to do. But, this time, it’s personal, local and timely.

Instead of providing you with more data and visualizations to interpret, it gets to know you — when you wake up, how you commute to work, if you have pets to walk — and then gives you personalized advice. There’s no app to install or update, no graphs to interpret. Poncho will tell you just what you need to know to get your day started, and nothing more.

Poncho is initially launching in New York City. If New Yorkers like the concept as much as we hope they will, we’ll start rolling out to additional cities in the coming weeks.

- paul

Betas Work

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:21:00 -0400

The past few months have been a little extra-busy at betaworks. While our studio companies continue to grow at a fast pace, a handful of builders (hackers in residence) have been heads-down creating a new wave of products.

Now, we’re entering a new stage of building that we’re very excited to share with you - beta.

Starting this Wednesday, we’ll launch one beta product each week, for six weeks. We did our best to create beautiful, simple, bug-free software, but also set an aggressive timeline to ensure we focus on the most important features.

If you’d like to be first on the list to hear about the products, make sure you join Openbeta.

- paul

Spring betaworks update

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:25:46 -0400

No more Google Reader? Digg swoops into the rescue:

http://blog.digg.com/post/46251309499/whats-next

Grand St., an Online Boutique for Electronics, Raises $1.3 Million:

http://nyti.ms/ZcY0aI

DrawChat Creator Launches His Mobile Ad Startup Namo Media, Raises $1.9M Round Led By Google Ventures:

http://tcrn.ch/XREpek

Fancy Hands Now Has An iPhone App, So You Can Book A Personal Assistant Anytime:

http://tcrn.ch/10uMbsT

NYC Big Apps compeition was powered by Collabfinder:

http://on.nyc.gov/XrzktR

We also had two great brown bag lunch guest speakers, Keoki Flagg and Chris Soghoian. See their talks at http://betaworks.com/events.php

Announcing Openbeta

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:03:00 -0400

Inside the betaworks studio, we build lots of new things each year. We’re firm believers in the open web and we’re firm believers in betas, so today we’ve decided to extend our community to anyone who wants to test our new products before they’re officially released. This expansion is part of a broader initiative here that we’re calling Openbeta.

Historically, we’ve tested new products within the betaworks studio, as well as among a small community of portfolio companies, advisors, investors, and friends. Often we host Openbeta sessions between our young companies and larger corporate partners such as the New York Times, among others. Having a small community of early beta testers allows us to iterate quickly and build products that solve real needs for people. Sometimes we succeed…others times we don’t. That’s a core part of our process: taking risks and trying to solve difficult problems.

What we’d like to do with the Openbeta community is allow this small community of early adopters to grow (a bit). We will view the Openbeta community as a true design partner. In return for your input, we will give you early access to products that we hope will change your lives (and make them more fun and easier). We’re still not 100% sure what the Openbeta community will look like or how it will evolve, but we think you’ll be happy to be a part of it. Like everything else we do, Openbeta is an experiment.

You can join the Openbeta community here. We can’t wait to show you what we’re working on.

-Nick

This is Giphy.

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 09:30:33 -0400

A few months ago, two hackers in residence, Alex Chung and Jace Cooke, built something called Giphy. Animated GIFs have existed for decades, but there was still no good way to browse and discover the best the web had to offer. And the vision for Giphy isn’t really just about finding GIFs. It’s a search engine today but soon you’ll see it grow into a community, a platform with a host of features targeted at gif artists, enthusiasts, bloggers, and anyone generally looking to discover or create that next big meme.

When the team launched Giphy, it truly was a “hack”, a fun experiment to try and remedy something we felt had been broken for far too long. It spread quickly, serving millions of results in the first few weeks. The response has been overwhelming and we’ve learned so much more than we could have anticipated.

We have lots more fun planned, but for now it’s back to work…

- Paul

The Future of the Feed, the Read, and the Reader

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:17:14 -0400

This week brought Google’s long-feared announcement that it will euthanize Google Reader, which will cease July 1. Some are interpreting the move as a death knell for RSS. And indeed, where RSS (and Atom) used to be the only widely-used, machine-readable feed infrastructure for Internet content, we now live in a world marked by new ways to discover new articles, posts, and updates to read, most notably social feeds powered by networks like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

But Google Reader, both the API and the user-facing web site, are just tools for using the underlying technology of RSS. And we at betaworks do not agree — one bit — that RSS as a technology is dead, or even dying. Rather, we think RSS is evolving, nudged by the explosion of social networks and social feeds. We think there are lots of useful products and valuable companies yet to be built in this space.

More generally, we believe that reading as an activity still matters: the display and delivery may change (from paper to big screens to small screens and tablets, from human carriers to wires to wireless), but reading remains one of the most wonderful parts of civilization. We’ve bet on reading in the past and we’re going to keep making those bets.

In the area of RSS, in particular, we’re doubling down, but in ways that we think are different from traditional “RSS Readers.” Our biggest commitment is Bloglovin’, one of our studio companies. Bloglovin’ is a beautiful and simple web-based blog (RSS) reader — that helps you follow the blogs you read by letting you know when they update. Their audience is broad, with over 2 million accounts and a particular strength in women’s lifestyle and fashion. In response to the Google announcement, bloglovin’ released a single-click importer to give users a seamless way to move all of their feeds and favorite blogs to bloglovin’.

We are also investors in Superfeedr, a real-time publish-and-subscribe service. Superfeedr aggregates and publishes RSS feeds, saving publishers money and allowing users to get information even faster. We’re also investors in IFTTT, which connects services — including RSS feeds — through “recipes” that users can create and share.

Last, we already have a wonderful reading experience at Digg. Over the next few months, Digg will build and launch a reading experience that takes the best parts of Google Reader — its simplicity, speed, ease of use, and embedded social and sharing functions — and moves them forward with new features and options that help users organize and distill the often vast and overwhelming social network feeds that they wrestle with daily. Digg is actively seeking input as it builds its reader, so head over and let your voice be heard.

Google Reader may be going away. But readers — people like you — are here to stay.

- Josh

February Update

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:26:33 -0500

We at betaworks are proud to share some of our milestones for the beginning of 2013:

Digg’s Users Doubled Since August, Now Has Over 10 Million User Emails On File:

http://tcrn.ch/YdieeD

Seesaw launches:

http://tnw.co/WyZuIX

Editorially Launches:

http://bit.ly/WmbImv

Etsy Acquires MIXEL:

http://etsy.me/YdinP3

Everyone Stop DM-ing On Twitter And Start Using The Moped App Now, It’s Way Better:

http://tcrn.ch/V9Ir1t

AOL adds GDGT to it’s HAVE list:

http://bit.ly/YdiRF4

Announcing: Done Not Done

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 13:09:00 -0500

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Done Not Done today - the iPhone and web app that helps you find and do things you’ll love. With this product, our goal is to help you see more great movies, read better books, and listen to more interesting music — with your friends.

The easiest way to get started is to download the iPhone app or visit the site — and find your friends. Once you add a few people, you’ll start getting ideas of things to do and you can either add them to your Not Done list or mark them as Done along with a rating, to help guide your friends. The more you use it, the better the product gets for you and your friends.

Over time, we’ll add new verbs (play, eat, visit) and look for smarter ways to bring in existing data from services to make things a whole lot easier for you. Our promise is once you’ve told us the things you want to do, we’ll do everything in our power to make it easier to do those things.

Done Not Done was built in partnership with our friends at Fictive Kin, and is one of several exciting products we plan to announce in the coming months.

Done.

- Paul

Happy New Year!

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 10:26:00 -0500

Here’s some news to kick off the year from the betaworks network.

Keen On… John Borthwick-Why The Facebook-Instagram Deal Is The Most Important Tech Event Of 2012:

http://tcrn.ch/1008rhy

With Funding For Svbtle, Dustin Curtis Wants To Build A Business In Long-Form Online Content:

http://tcrn.ch/SiF8Ue

http://blog.svbtle.com/svbtle-funding

Just.me helps your phone become truly social:

http://tnw.co/Vnp8g4

Bitly Launches Social Data APIs For Real-Time Search, Attention Spikes, And Deeper Looks At URLs:

http://tcrn.ch/Skek67

December news

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:55:00 -0500

As we reach the end of the year here at betaworks, some great things have been coming out of the studio and the network. Here are some of our end of year successes:

Tapestry is rethinking the way we publish online. Here is a collection of notable tweets about how people are using Tapestry.

12 weeks later it feels like Digg is coming back:

http://bit.ly/SR1EjE

Jon Steinberg discussed Digg on Bloomberg:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzu3SJ_V5xU

Branch has announced their groups page, forums-for today’s internet:

http://branch.com/groups

Layervault announces Dropbox and GitHub integration:

http://tnw.co/UTMcFp

Teleported raises $1M to continue work on Instagram analytics platform:

http://tnw.co/YZOnLG

Collabfinder, a platform to find someone to work with you on your next big project, has launched:

http://bit.ly/UiQIK7

Bloglovin’ launches its iPhone app. In less than one month they have 150k daily users:

http://bit.ly/ZfIFnP

Livestar 2.0 has been released, check it out:

http://bit.ly/Z0rW9j

Given the holidays are coming up, nice to see The Pope is using Tweetdeck. Looking forward to him using Bitly:

https://twitter.com/iaindodsworth/status/278823846398808065

betaworks is thankful for...

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 16:42:56 -0500

The holiday season has begun. Turkeys are being stuffed, potatoes are being mashed, and the team at betaworks is thankful for the great month we’ve had. Here are some of our standout fall successes:

betaworks has launched Swirl, a new iPhone app that automatically creates albums from your Instagram & Twitter networks.

http://bit.ly/TMqf6b

betaworks has launched Tapestry, a collection of tappable stories for your iPhone or iPad.

http://bit.ly/WpnRJB

Pickie raises $1M.

http://bit.ly/TTF6On

RebelMouse Raises $2.5M.

http://bit.ly/TTF6On

betaworks invests in Seesaw.

http://tcrn.ch/10gBw4G

17 year old founder creates Summly, one of our new seed investments.

http://tcrn.ch/Sa4TlC

We hope everyone has a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

-team betaworks

seed investments update

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 14:57:00 -0500

We spend our time at betaworks in three areas. Structured as a company, rather than a fund, we’re afforded the flexibility to build, to invest, and to buy. Most of our time is spent building new products at the studio and scaling our existing core companies. This is why we identify first and foremost as makers, builders, and operators. So far, 2012 has been an insanely active year for us at betaworks. We have launched new products like Tapestry and Swirl, acquired and re-launched Digg, acquired a significant stake in bloglovin’, and closed more seed investments than any year in our history.

As John outlined in a blog post over two years ago, we do seed investments in order to create an ecosystem of founders and companies that share our vision for the future of the real-time social internet. In betaworking for almost five years now, we’ve made almost 100 investments in the category and have seen a tremendous amount of value emerge in the network that we’ve built.

We believe that the real-time social web represents a massive change in the way companies will be built and operate, and the way in which people interact and communicate with one another. We continue to be fascinated by products that are social, data-driven and design oriented, as well as extraordinary entrepreneurs that have the guts and commitment to build something big and different and often times terrifying.

In 2012, we’re on pace to be our most active yet, having already made 20 new investments (several not yet public) in early-stage companies. We pride ourselves on being “first money in,” making investments in entrepreneurs with very early betas (or alphas) because it’s at this stage where we think we have the most to add. We understand this awkward period in a company’s lifecycle because we do it ourselves all the time, building and breaking products that are every bit as experimental as the companies and entrepreneurs we invest in.

The year is not over yet. In the next few months, we’ll have a few new things to announce that we think you’ll love. So stay tuned, more soon.

betaworks launches swirl

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 12:43:48 -0500

Today we are excited to announce the official launch of swirl, the new iPhone app from betaworks that automatically creates albums from your Instagram & Twitter networks.

Several apps are trying to solve the problem of group photo sharing. Some require one person to create a set and invite friends to join, while others attempt to guess which photos are related and auto-create sets for you. swirl simply creates a photo set from a shared hashtag among your friends.

When you log in with your Instagram and Twitter accounts, swirl will index everyone you follow on those networks, and place all hashtagged photos into sets called ‘swirls.’

Between the hurricane and the election, we’ve seen some pretty interesting sets from our friends in the past few weeks.

We also love the everyday events we see tagged. The designer swissmiss tags her 2-year-old’s tantrums with #itshardbeingtwo, while Dennis Crowley tracks his most caloric meals with #fatdenny. Tech Ethnographer Tricia Wang tags an ongoing set of her dog’s balancing acts with #stuffonelleshead.

You can try swirl’s public web view, which is a great way to browse photo sets. Far more fun though is seeing the personal sets swirl creates for you and your friends on the mobile app. Download the swirl app to check them out.

betaworks launches tapestry

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 13:20:13 -0500

Today, betaworks launches tapestry: a collection of tappable stories for your iPhone or iPad.

With tapestry, we’ve created a way to write and publish essays designed for the iPhone or iPad — tappable stories. These are short-form stories that you tap through to read. After downloading the app, you’ll gain access to the library of short stories designed specifically for tapestry from New York Times best-selling author Robin Sloan and many others, with new stories released regularly.

The tapestry site allows anyone to create and share their own tappable stories. If you go to tapestry.is you can create an account and write a story. Once your story is ready to be published, you get a URL which you can send or tweet to others that will insert your essay right into their version of the tapestry app. Periodically, we’ll look for interesting tapestry stories to feature in the app.

Download the app and tap a story today.

October update from Betaworks

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:07:58 -0400

The season has changed and the weather is cooler but the world of betaworks has never been busier. Check out what’s been happening:

How Digg was saved in 6 weeks:

http://bit.ly/SzVFk4

Digg Ipad app has been released:

http://bit.ly/Vqm8mg

Layervault aspires to become a designer’s best friend:

http://bit.ly/QJFC2l

Rap Genius closes a $15M funding round:

http://tcrn.ch/PZ9c2l

Livestar launches at Disrupt:

http://tcrn.ch/R0yagG

Branch is embedded for the first time on NYtimes.com:

http://nyti.ms/T62paM

Betaworks also had Eli Pariser, chief executive of Upworthy, discusses the “filter bubble” and the work they are doing at Upworthy. Check out his brown bag video:

http://betaworks.com/events.php

Digg is hiring. Check out their job postings here:

http://www.digg.com/jobs