Microsoft Simplifies Visual Studio Lineup And Pricing For Enterprise Users

Postmates Will Deliver Bastian Lehmann Via Bike To The Disrupt New York StageMicrosoft today announced that it will consolidate its Visual Studio Premium and Ultimate offerings for enterprises into a single product once it launches Visual Studio 2015 later this year. Now called Visual Studio Enterprise With MSDN, this new version will include all of the features developers were getting with Visual Studio Ultimate (IntelliTrace in production, CodeLense support, etc.).
It’s also dropping the price of this new Enterprise version to slightly below the old price of the Premium edition. Enterprise with MSDN will now cost $5,999 for the first year and $2,569 for subsequent years (the old price for Premium was $6,119 for the first year and $2,569 from then on). That’s a 55 percent price drop for current Ultimate subscribers.
The price of Visual Studio Pro, the company’s offering for individuals and smaller teams, will remain at $1,199 for the first year and $799 for renewals.
It’s worth noting that Microsoft will continue to offer a standalone, non-subscription version of Visual Studio Professional, too, for $499.

Now there’s one wrinkle to this story. Enterprises that currently have volume licensing deals are probably getting a better price for Premium right now than for the new Visual Studio Enterprise edition. Microsoft tells me that the typical user there pays $3,573 for the first year and $1,312 for the renewal and that it expects the volume price for Enterprise to be $4,466 (and $1,640 for renewals).
As Microsoft’s general manager for Cloud and Enterprise Developer Platform Marketing and Worldwide Sales Mitra Azizirad told me earlier this month, the company will offer these Premium users the ability to renew their subscription at the old price for the calendar year after the launch of Visual Studio 2015. After this renewal, they will be paying roughly 25 percent more than they are now for the Enterprise version, but the company argues that they are also getting far more features than before.
Azizirad noted that Microsoft’s enterprise customers had been asking for a better way to standardize their Visual Studio deployments across the company, and today’s announcement reflects its attempt to address this.
Last year, Microsoft probably made its boldest Visual Studio move yet when it launched an (almost) fully-featured free Community edition of the application that included support for extensions — something the previous (and very limited) free versions never offered. Microsoft tells me that it has seen over 2 million downloads of the Community edition since it launched.
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As part of the Visual Studio 2015 updates, some of the features that were previously only available in high-priced versions will also move down the ladder. CodeLense, for example, is now available in Visual Studio Professional and the free Community edition is getting support for PowerPoint storyboarding.
“We want to make the right moves to bring the most popular features to the most developers as possible,” Azizirad told me. “This is really a move in terms of accessibility.” She also noted that Microsoft wants to show developers that it is listening and responding to their needs.
So how does all of this work out for existing Visual Studio subscribers? Mitra tells me that all active premium customers will get a free upgrade to the enterprise version, whether they bought Premium or received it through programs like BizSpark or the Microsoft Partner Network.

By: Unknown On 13:36

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Phhhoto Tops 1 Million Users

Gmail For Android Gets A Unified InboxPhhhoto, perhaps the only social network to have first launched as a physical party product aimed at the enterprise, has topped 1 million registered users over the course of the past nine months. Users have posted upwards of 10 million Phhhotos to the platform.
Phhhoto started back at SXSW in 2013 with an iPad-based photobooth, but instead of capturing the usual strip of four photos, the iPad app (hooked up to a stand with special built-in lighting) captures four frames and then strings them into a looping GIF. Users can then text themselves the Phhhoto to save to their phone and share on other social networks.
The product was called Phhhoto Pro.
For a year, the Phhhoto team built out Phhhoto Pro to offer at parties and different events for a negotiable fee, while secretly working on an app that consumers could use whenever they want from their own device.
The app launched in August of 2014 and the company has since grown to one million registered users. Notably, Phhhoto operates much like Snapchat when it comes to populating a user’s social graph, depending solely on the user’s phonebook as opposed to another network like Facebook or Twitter.
For a long time, Phhhoto Pro has been a useful user acquisition tool — the company has around 300 corporate clients and has set up the Phhhoto Pro booth at more than 1,000 different events — but cofounder Champ Bennet explained to TechCrunch that the app has now overtaken the physical product in terms of user acquisition rate.
“The cool thing about Phhhoto Pro is not just that it continues to drive user acquisition, but it offers this level of brand equity for users that makes them high-value users on the app side.”

Moving forward, the company is focusing on the content itself, with the intention to build a platform that fosters media creation from within the app, as opposed to outside content. By comparison, networks like Facebook and Twitter are built to hold and stream content from a number of different networks, while Snapchat (more akin to Phhhoto) is designed to support content created on Snapchat.
“We’re trying to build something pure, and the product has gotten to a point where the Phhhoto media type is something that our users are enthusiastic about, so now it’s about how we can loop that into new ways of communicating, and perhaps even new content types,” said Omar Elsayed.
Phhhoto has raised $225K in seed funding led by Diplo.
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By: Unknown On 06:35

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FiftyThree Lands $30M From NEA To Build Creation Tools For Enterprise And Education Users

Dataminr Confirms $130M Raise To Take Its Social Media Data Analysis To New VerticalsFiftyThree has spent the last several years making products to increase creativity among users. Now the company has an eye on producing new tools not just for the consumer market, but that enterprise and education users could also leverage. To help with that, the company is also announcing it has raised $30 million in new financing from New Enterprise Associates.
FiftyThree started out with an iPad app called Paper that was built to give users new tools to unlock their creativity. It followed that up with Pencil, a stylus designed to interact with Paper and make it easier for creators to use the app. Most recently, the company released Mix, which provides a new way for them to collaborate.
Each of those products has been pretty successful on its own: Paper has had more than 13 million downloads and more than a million users have begun using Mix to work on projects together. And while the company doesn’t break out sales numbers for Pencil, that product has apparently sold well and has retail distribution through channels like Amazon and Apple Stores.
Part of its products’ growing popularity is the recent decision to make the Paper app free and explore other ways to make money. That includes sales of hardware (i.e., Pencil) and plans to sell new in-app creation tools.
Paper ships with what FiftyThree calls its “Essential Kit” — a set of tools that lets users draw, write, color, and outline within the app, among other things. Think Kit will give users new tools, which FiftyThree CEO Georg Petschnigg says will enable them to sketch presentations, diagrams, and flow charts, among other things.
“Our insight is that in companies, in the long run innovation always trumps efficiency,” Petschnigg told me by phone. To increase innovation within organizations, Think Kit will take all of the previous technology that the company has built and add what it calls an “intention engine” into the mix.
The company’s inspiration for the new product comes from analog tools like the whiteboard, sticky notes, and legal pads, which Petschnigg says are still some of the best ways for businesspeople to collaborate with one another. The hope is that by providing them with digital tools that perform similar functions, FiftyThree will be able to make it even easier for them to do so.
FiftyThree sees a big new set of potential users for the product, and as a result has brought on a new investor to help it tackle that market.
With NEA leading its $30 million Series B round and partner Dayna Grayson joining the board, the company believes it gets the best of both worlds — an investment firm that understands enterprise, along with a partner who understands designers. Petschnigg notes that he met Grayson three years ago, and that he was impressed by her focus on design-led companies.
The new investment comes on top of $15 million in Series A funding that FiftyThree raised from Andreessen Horowitz, Highline Ventures, Thrive Capital, SV Angels, and Jack Dorsey two years ago.
The company has grown to more than 50 employees in New York City and Seattle, and it plans to add 20 to 25 more, according to Petschnigg. It will focus on hiring more designers, engineers, and some marketing people, but despite its new focus on enterprise and education, he says the company isn’t planning on adopting a big sales force.
“50 percent of people use Paper for professional use,” Petschnigg told me. He also noted that the app has more users on the iPad than Excel, which is one reason he believes the company is well-positioned to take advantage of its built-in install base. The app has also seen a huge amount of downloads in the education space after it went free.
Could it convert them into paid users? By launching Think Kit as a premium set of tools inside Paper, FiftyThree sure hopes so.

By: Unknown On 13:39

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Uber And Lyft Urge Users To Share Rides With Other Passengers During SXSW

Pitch Your Startup In The TC Radio Pitch-Off On Sirius XMThanks to a city ordinance passed last fall, this will be the first year on-demand ride services like Uber and Lyft will be competing for passengers in Austin during SXSW. As both companies prepare to meet demand that comes from the city’s biggest event of the year, Uber and Lyft will be urging passengers in Austin to share rides with strangers.
On Friday, Uber announced it would be bringing its uberPOOL ride-sharing service to Austin after launching the service in San Francisco last September. Today Lyft follows suit with its launch of competing service Lyft Line during SXSW.
The competition between the companies in Austin is notable in part because this is the first time both services will be operating legally during one of the city’s busiest weeks of the year.
Every year, tens of thousands of SXSW attendees descend upon the city and find few good options for getting around. With few traditional cabs available in Austin, most visitors are served by an ad hoc pedicab system during the conference. Services like Uber and Lyft were unable to legally operate there due to restrictions around non-commercially licensed drivers giving rides in the city.
That hasn’t stopped Uber and Lyft from having a presence in Austin during SXSW in years past, but that presence was mainly promotional. Uber first made its presence felt in Austin by enabling SXSW attendees to hail pedicabs with its app in 2011, and the next expanded its service to include on-demand BBQ.
In 2013 and 2014 Uber offered up rides for free, partly as promotion and partly to skirt the city’s rules around paid rides. Drivers were paid as “brand ambassadors” by the company but couldn’t accept cash from passengers. Lyft, meanwhile, skirted the issue altogether with cutesy promotions like “piggybacks on demand” in 2013 and nostalgic daytime events last year.
This year, however, both services will be offering rides legally at SXSW thanks to a city ordinance passed last October that established a temporary framework for transportation network companies to operate while more permanent regulations were hammered out.
After offering services in Austin since last summer, Uber and Lyft hope to have plenty of drivers at the ready to meet the influx of demand from SXSW attendees. But because that demand will be so much higher than most other weeks of the year, the companies hope to take advantage of the “shared rides” feature they both built and launched in San Francisco last fall.
With both uberPOOL and Lyft Line, customers requesting a ride for one or two passengers will be paired up with others who are heading in the same direction. By doing so, all passengers benefit from lower fares, which can help combat against expected surge pricing that tends to happen in times of high demand.
More importantly, though, by offering shared rides Uber and Lyft can offer service more efficiently and ensure that drivers have less downtime in-between rides. The goal is to have multiple passengers riding together during those times to help reduce demand peaks.
In addition to shared rides, Lyft will have designated pickup and dropoff points at various key spots around Austin as the official rideshare partner for the event. (CEO Logan Green will also be speaking in a keynote.) It will offer promotional rides in a special “Magic Mode” throughout the conference that will feature cars like a Ferrari 458 Italia, 1963 Bentley, Tesla Model S, and others. Finally, it’s rolling out a payment integration with PayPal that will allow passengers to pay with its OneTouch mobile checkout product.
Let’s be honest — even with both Uber and Lyft operating in Austin, and even with both maximizing supply by trying to fill more seats in each car, it’ll still be nearly impossible to get around during SXSW. It’ll just be a little less impossible to do so.

By: Unknown On 07:20

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WhatsApp Says It’s Not “Permanently” Banning Users From Its Service, Just Blocking Third-Party Clients

MWC And The Future Of VRQuite a few reports circling the web this week appear to indicate a tightening of WhatsApp’s policy toward the usage of third-party WhatsApp client applications. That is, word has it that those using an unofficial app will be banned from WhatsApp for life. However, that’s not exactly the case, WhatsApp explains. In fact, there’s been no larger policy shift since we last reported on the now Facebook-owned company’s crackdown on third-party app usage earlier this year.
As you may recall, in January, WhatsApp began banning users from its service when they were found to be using a third-party (unofficial) WhatsApp mobile application. In order to be allowed back into WhatsApp, users were asked to uninstall the offending app from their phone, then download the authorized version of WhatsApp from the app store instead. The company also explained the policy via an FAQ on its website.
At the time, one popular app maker even reported receiving a cease-and-desist from WhatsApp related to his service’s development.
The reason for the crackdown, the company explained, was related to security and privacy. It simply can’t guarantee such apps are safe, given that WhatsApp doesn’t control their source code.
That challenge is one many mobile application makers today face, as failing to restrict third-party app usage can lead to disastrous results – as Snapchat found out last year when its users were hacked. The event, dubbed “The Snappening,” came about due to insecurities in third-party applications.
The confusion this week related to WhatsApp’s policy on third-party clients appears to stem from a Google+ posting from WhatsApp+’s developer where he states that WhatsApp has started a “Permanent Account Disable” recently. That post was picked up by a German blog, and then subsequently began making the rounds as other sites repeated the story, and the details (in some cases) became fuzzy.
The problem is that there’s confusion around this terminology of a “lifetime ban.” That makes it sound like users are being banned from WhatsApp forever, but that’s not the case.
Instead, the same policy as before still stands: if users continue to use WhatsApp+ (or another third-party app), they will not be able to use WhatsApp anymore, as the company explained previously.
What has perhaps shifted is that, before, the company was issuing 24-hour “temporary” bans complete with a countdown timer displayed to affected users, but now those users are simply not able to use WhatsApp’s services at all until the third-party apps are uninstalled.
“If a user doesn’t uninstall WhatsApp+ then they will continue to be banned until they stop using it. But there is no permanent ban,” a WhatsApp spokesperson confirms.
In other words, once a user removes WhatsApp+, WhatsApp Reborn, OgWhatsapp or any other third-party client from their smartphone, they’ll again be able to use the official WhatsApp app – just the same as before. Their account and associated phone number is not “permanently” banned or “banned for life” from WhatsApp itself.

By: Unknown On 22:44

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Chat App Viber Opens Its Games Service To All Users Worldwide

Messaging app Viber has quietly made its games service available for all users worldwide following a two month pilot in five countries.
The company, which was bought by Rakuten for $900 million a year ago, initially launched three games for users in Belarus, Malaysia, Israel, Singapore and Ukraine in December 2014. The titles — Viber Candy Mania, Wild Luck Casino and Viber Pop, links to which popped up in my app today — are standalone apps that link up to Viber to let users share scores, battle and generally interact with friends on the service.
The theory is that they can increase some users’ engagement with the service, and — most importantly for Viber — make money via in-app purchases for power-ups, additional lives, etc.
Viber CEO Talmon Marcos told TechCrunch that he is excited to bring the titles to more of Viber’s international userbase, which currently stands at 236 million active monthly users. Marcos declined to provide specific details about the pilot, but he did say that initial engagement data was “encouraging”.
Marcos added that Viber users can expect to see new games arrive soon, but for now the company isn’t giving away precise details of its plans.

Viber will be hoping that games can become a significant revenue stream in the same way that they have for other messaging app companies. In-app purchases from games account for more than half of Line’s revenue, while Tencent has seen its mobile revenues surge thanks to WeChat’s games catalog. Games have also helped Kakao Talk, which is dominant in Korea but has a weak global footprint, turn in profit since 2013.
Gaming harbors much promise for messaging app services, but there is some caution to be noted. Naver, Line’s parent company, missed its most recent earnings expectations after several key games on the Line platform underperformed. Line has since spread its focus and doubled down on its online-to-offline services with a new investment fund, and a series of initiatives including a Tokyo taxi service, a grocery delivery pilot and a TV service.
Viber currently draws revenue from games, sticker sales and its Skype-like international calling plans. Last year, it introduced a social network-like platform for public figures which could potentially make money further down the line.
One more certain expectation is that it will introduce commerce services, powered by Rakuten’s business, sometime this year. Viber’s userbase has grown steadily — it added 17 million monthly active users over the last quarter — but the service continues to run at a deficit.

By: Unknown On 09:49

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iPhone And iPad Users Can Now Download iOS Apps From Pinterest

Pinterest is making its visual social network a destination for app downloads, after it announced a partnership with Apple that lets its users download iOS apps directly from its mobile app.
The company said that

By: Unknown On 03:47

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