Dropbox Is Testing An Online Note-Taking Service With “Project Composer”

Bill Maris To Talk Longevity At Disrupt NYIt appears that Dropbox is bringing back HackPad, the collaborative documents service the company acquired a year ago. The Y Combinator-backed startup had grown to become a popular tool for taking quick notes at conferences, events, as well as in the classroom, due to its simple design, ease of use, and real-time nature. Now, a service called Composer, which looks remarkably like HackPad, has appeared.
The project was first spotted by a user on Product Hunt, the site that features daily round-ups of the best products based on votes from its online community. Today, SeatGeek product guy Adam Waxman posted a link to Composer on the site, but others were quick to reply that they were unable to access the service for themselves.
The app is hosted on the Dropbox.com domain, and the name refers to an internal project underway at Dropbox, it seems. The project first requests authentication with your Dropbox account, so it can access your files and folders.

Though most could get through the initial steps of authenticating with Composer, you’re then shown an error message that reads: “Sorry, you’re not allowed to use Notes right now.”
Alongside the message, it instructs you to email feedback@dropbox.com if you believe the message was in error.

However, one Product Hunt user, Maggie Bignell of Pocket, who also previously used HackPad prior to its acquisition, was able to log in to Composer.
She says the site offers a clean note-taking experience, much like Evernote on the web, and allows for collaborative note-taking. Composer users can add tasks, Dropbox files, and tables all in line with their notes, Bignell explains, having now tried the product herself.
@rrhoover It’s definitely interesting (+ typography 😍). Integrates hackpad notes I have, prompts for mtgs. pic.twitter.com/o727GWaztJ
— Maggie Bignell (@maggled) April 3, 2015
Overall, it’s a lot like what HackPad had offered in the past, with the obvious addition of Dropbox integration. While the app currently doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as something like Evernote (which frankly has been heading towards overkill with new, “smart” features like “Context,” for example), Composer could definitely play a valuable role for those who already use Dropbox as their preferred cloud storage service. It would make the most sense for those who want a way to more easily add files to Dropbox, without having to first take notes in a word processor then upload that file to the cloud.
The addition also plays into Dropbox’s larger plans to move into the online collaboration space, something that other acquisitions, including that of a workplace chat solution called Zulip, also address.
Dropbox declined to comment on the record about Project Composer, but says it will have more information on the product soon.

By: Unknown On 10:42

Continue Reading

Passion Capital Backs Ravelin’s Hybrid Approach To Tackling Online Fraud

Google Brings Street View To Mount Everest RegionAnother fintech investment to chalk up in London: Passion Capital has invested an undisclosed level of seed funding in Ravelin, an early stage online fraud prevention startup formed by a team of ex-Hailo employees in January this year. The startup is currently working out of Passion’s co-working space, White Bear Yard.
Ravelin’s founders had been involved in fraud prevention at the taxi app, among other roles, where they came up with the original idea to spin out their own business. The seed funding will be used to get their platform to market later this year.
Passion’s average seed round investment — last we crunched the numbers — was around £187,300. TechCrunch understands that in Ravelin’s case the VC is investing above that average. Albeit the sums involved here are clearly modest at this nascent stage. Ravelin is currently working with a small group of beta customers as it develops the platform for a full launch, pegged for Q4.
“We’re starting beta development with our four confirmed beta partners. We have a long list which we’re introducing gradually so as not to swamp our development team. And we expect by the end of summer to have a working product that’s in production with those guys, and then we’re going to go through a hardening process with the actual product and build up our marketing and sales team before we take it to market at the end of the year,” says co-founder and CEO Martin Sweeney.
Ravelin is competing with well-financed online fraud prevention startups, such as U.S.-based Sift Science, which has pulled in some $23 million in VC funding thus far. However it’s not just a less flush U.K. clone. The spin here is it’s not taking a pure-play machine learning route to tackle online card fraud. Rather it’s setting itself up as hybrid platform that blends human agency and machine learning smarts — looping in some algorithmic fraud detection but also not requiring businesses to abandon existing human-oversight and processes. So its a stepping stone sales pitch, for those not ready to fully embrace robotic overlords.
“If you look around in the market you’ve got the established [fraud prevention] players, who’ve been around for 10 or 15 years, who’ve all been bought by big payment processors like AmEx or Visa, and then at the other end of the scale you’ve got new entrants who are doing very much pure-play machine learning. And what we’ve found by talking to people — real world companies — is that neither are particularly serving their needs,” Sweeney tells TechCrunch.
“It’s very hard to go into a company and say ‘look guys, all of that expertise you’ve built up over your lifetime as a company is no longer relevant and your team’s experience is defunct because this new technology replaces it. But also it’s quite hard to go in and say the same tools you’ve been using for the past 10 years are going to be up to date with the changing face of fraud.”
Omnichannel retailing means mobile commerce is proliferating, and more and more browsers and payment methods are being looped into the mix. It’s generally an increasingly complex landscape to monitor when it comes to fraud prevention. So that means human oversight is being strained — but that does not mean it should be replaced entirely, argues Sweeney.
“The old stuff doesn’t work, but the new stuff doesn’t address that fact that these people know what they are doing. So we’re aiming to sit directly in between those two positions,” he adds.
What does that mean in practice? Ravelin will offer access to an aggregated dashboard for fraud analysts that’s pitched as easier to use and more comprehensive than existing offerings, and which also leverages machine learning and social graph information to aid fraud detection — but as a supplementary signal which the humans who oversee fraud prevention in-house can choose how they respond to.
“We’re really trying to increase the efficiency and empower the human beings who are the core of the fraud prevention set up in any established company,” he continues. “What we try to do is to use new technology, including machine learning and social graph and graph network analysis to make their lives easier and make their jobs more efficient.
“These guys already have dashboards that they use, but they tend to be quite hard to use. And they have disparate sources of information. So we’re combining all of that information into once place in the dashboard for the analysts to use. We also provide ways for usually the manager of those analysts, the actual head of fraud, to keep on top of the numbers. To understand exactly what’s happening. To have a lot more control over what you would in the industry call a false positive.”
Sweeney says this approach allows for businesses to set their own risk appetite and continue making their own decisions on whether they want to review all transactions or let them all go through automatically.
“They can still define the rules themselves for what makes fraud, rather than relying on the machine learning — which does the easy stuff but doesn’t take into account all of their expertise. So it’s combining machine learning with some of the more traditional fraud techniques that these people are used to,” he adds.
“People don’t really trust [AI]. It’s not being around long enough to say I trust my job and my responsibility to this computer. They still want some oversight and what we’re doing is we’re aiming to give them all the benefits of these new technologies but without making it seem and feel too risky. We don’t want to make them feel like their jobs are at risk, and they’re putting their teams out of business. We’re just making their jobs more efficient.”
Ravelin will be targeting the platform at SMEs — or “large scale companies who are tech savvy”, as Sweeney puts it. Its business model is software as a service, following the established industry model of charging a per transaction fee, with the exact level based on volumes, albeit aiming to slightly undercut the industry average.
It’s using the new seed financing to fund its beta development process, likely to last six months, shaping the platform in conjunction with its first set of customers to ensure it hits a spectrum of ecommerce businesses’ needs.
“Having come from the taxi industry, we know everything there is about fraud in the taxi industry but not so much about for instance gaming, gambling, retail and all the other different arenas that ecommerce touches these days,” adds Sweeney. “Not just people who sell goods, but people who sell services as well. Because that’s an increasing area that fraud is touching.
“People who sell services are just as exposed there days because of the prevalence of stolen credit card data. And the quality of identity information you can buy on the dark net. Because of all the leaks that have happened, and all the hacking attacks — even the ones you don’t hear about. There’s a huge amount of high quality information out there which is just really hard to track.”

By: Unknown On 07:23

Continue Reading

Funnely Builds Smarter Facebook Ad Campaigns For Online Stores

in fact, the company just announced new ad units for this very purpose. But if you need a little more handholding, there’s a startup called Funnely that might help.
Funnely was created by a team based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and that’s where the startup’s developers are still based

By: Unknown On 23:11

Continue Reading

Medium Founder Ev Williams Wants Better Metrics For Online Companies

Ev Williams thinks Internet companies should be judged on more than just their monthly active user numbers. In an interview this morning at the CODE/Media conference, the founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium said there are other metrics those companies and their investors should be paying attention to.

By: Unknown On 03:30

Continue Reading

Just Eat Acquires Mexican Online Take-Out Ordering Service SinDelantal.Mx

They say lightning doesn’t strike twice, but in the case of Just Eat’s latest acquisition, that is exactly what has just happened: The online take-out ordering behemoth (and recently publicly listed company) has acquired Mexico’s SinDelantal.Mx to add to its Latin American presence and keep up the pressure on Rocket Internet’s Foodpanda.
SinDelantal.Mx’s founders, Diego Ballesteros and Evaristo Babé, also founded and sold Spain’s SinDelantal to Just Eat back in late 2012, for a price we pegged in the range of

By: Unknown On 06:01

Continue Reading

YC-Backed SigOpt Helps Customers Optimize Everything From Online Ads To Shaving Cream

in its name, but Clark said that SigOpt goes beyond A/B testing. Put (relatively) simply, it doesn’t just let you test different variations, but instead examines the data and recommends

By: Unknown On 22:57

Continue Reading

Walmart Expands Online Grocery Shopping Efforts After Strong Repeat Business

Walmart today expanded its online grocery-shopping service, which allows customers to shop online then pick up at their local stores, to a new market: Huntsville, Ala. The move comes only days after Walmart brought the same service to a handful of stores in the Phoenix area, as well. The retailer is still describing the curbside pickup option as something it’s

By: Unknown On 18:29

Continue Reading

Line’s New Fund Invests In Japanese Online Video Startup 3Minute

Got a tip? Let us know.MenuSearchNewsChannelsStartupsMobileGadgetsEnterpriseSocialEuropeAsiaTrendingTinderNSAAndroidGoogleMicrosoftAppleTwitterFacebookAll TopicsAll GalleriesTCTVShowsTCTV NewsBuilt in BrooklynCrunchWeekFly Or DieGadgetsIncubatedInside JobsTC CribsAll ShowsAll VideosEventsTechSupport EventsDisruptCrunchiesMeetupsInternational City EventsHackathonHardware BattlefieldIncludeNews AboutGoogle I/O 2014CESSXSWWWDC 2014

By: Unknown On 03:37

Continue Reading

Capital Float, An Online Lending Platform For Indian Entrepreneurs, Scoops Up $13M From Sequoia and SAIF

Capital Float, a financial tech startup that wants to make it easier for small businesses in India to get loans, has raised a $13 million Series A led by SAIF Partners and Sequoia Capital. Existing investor Aspada also returned for the round.
Founded in 2013 and based in Bangalore with offices in New Delhi and Mumbai, Capital Float has raised a total of $17 million to date, all within the past twelve months. Capital Float will use its Series A to expand into more cities, improve its tech platform, and launch new products.
The company is also using its equity to finance loans, but plans to open up to other sources of capital by partnering with banks and individual investors. It makes money through a combination of interest and fees.
Surfing India’s E-Commerce Boom
So far, Capital Float has loaned more than $6 million to small businesses in 12 Indian cities. Its founders, Gaurav Hinduja and Sashank Rishyasringa, say the number of applications it processes increased by 10 times in 2014, with Capital Float now receiving about 200 loan requests per month.
Capital Float’s growth has been fueled mainly by India’s rapidly growing e-commerce market, which is expected to be worth $43 billion by the end of this decade. Seventy percent of its applicants are vendors who sell goods on marketplaces like Snapdeal, Flipkart, Amazon India, PayTM, or Myntra.
While e-commerce applicants are currently Capital Float’s largest vertical, the company also intends to launch products tailored to offline businesses, such as small manufacturers and business service providers.
About 20 percent to 30 percent of applicants are approved after the platform accesses their suitability based on 2,000 data points. In addition to the usual metrics, like credit bureau scores, Capital Float’s technology scores applications based on online data, including customer feedback and transaction history from online marketplaces. It also does psychometric assessments: in other words, applicants are asked questions to judge things like their ability to scale a business, attitude toward credit, and how they compare to competitors.
Capital Float’s use of data from online sources, including e-commerce marketplaces, is similar to the system developed by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial for its new credit-scoring system, called Sesame Credit. Like Ant Financial, Capital Float is also tackling the problem of financing entrepreneurs in countries with fast-growing industries, such as e-commerce, that are underserved by traditional financial institutions.
Closing The Financing Gap
Hinduja and Rishyasringa said they became interested in financial tech while studying for their MBAs at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. They were intrigued by U.S. companies like Lending Club and On Deck, as well as Brazil’s NuBank (another Sequoia investment), and wanted to build a similar service in India.
Rishyasringa says that formal lending institutions in India provide $140 billion in loans to small businesses each year, but there is still a funding gap of $200 billion dollars. He adds that there are currently about 30 million small-to-medium businesses in India. Together they employ a total 69 million people and many are based in smaller cities, which Capital Float plans to expand into.

By: Unknown On 07:35

Continue Reading

Borro Gets $19M From Rocket Internet, OurCrowd To Expand Its Online Pawnshop For Luxury Goods

Borro, the U.S. and UK-based online platform that people borrow money and put up luxury items as collateral, is today announcing $19 million in new funding led by strategic investments from Israel’s OurCrowd and Berlin’s Rocket Internet.CEO and founder Paul Aitken tells me that the funding will be used for two main areas: moving into new geographical markets and more financial services. Specifically, tapping into Rocket Internet’s expertise, Borro will soon be making its way to entering emerging markets in South America and Asia, and using know-how from OurCrowd it plans to expand the instruments that it uses to finance its loans, with new features including a LendingClub-style crowdfunding platform, and more extended loan times beyond the six-month range Borro offers today.Although Borro is not disclosing its valuation, Aitken tells me it is a

By: Unknown On 10:46

Continue Reading

Amazon’s Newest Tool Lets Anyone Host Giveaways Online

Got a tip? Let us know.MenuSearchNewsChannelsStartupsMobileGadgetsEnterpriseSocialEuropeAsiaTrendingTinderNSAAndroidGoogleMicrosoftAppleTwitterFacebookAll TopicsAll GalleriesTCTVShowsTCTV NewsBuilt in BrooklynCrunchWeekFly Or DieGadgetsIncubatedInside JobsTC CribsAll ShowsAll VideosEventsTechSupport EventsDisruptCrunchiesMeetupsInternational City EventsHackathonHardware BattlefieldIncludeNews AboutGoogle I/O 2014CESSXSWWWDC 2014

By: Unknown On 09:31

Continue Reading