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Coupons.com Acquires Pinterest-Like Recipe & Meal Planning Service KitchMe

Digital coupon giant Coupons.com is today announcing that it has acquired San Francisco-based KitchMe, a startup offering recipe saving, meal planning and shopping lists in a visual interface. The KitchMe application is now available online at www.kitchme.com, and it works on both desktop and mobile browsers. Both of KitchMe’s co-founders, Stella Kleiman and Gene Reddick, formerly of Sequoia-backed FoundValve and Floating Factory, have joined Coupons.com as a part of the deal. Terms of the acquisition were not immediately available.

KitchMe was founded in April 2011, and two previous co-founders have since departed. At the time of its acquisition, the bootstrapped startup was only a two-person team.

In case you’re wondering why you never heard of KitchMe until now, it’s because the company was acquired last year (Q2 2012) before it ever had a chance to publicly debut.

“We were immediately impressed with both the KitchMe product and the company,” Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons.com said. “KitchMe is unlike anything else we’ve seen, combining best-in-class meal planning, recipe discovery, shopping list creation and couponing capabilities in a single application. Not only did we acquire a great product but a talented team as well.”

Kleiman says that the service had no users, and what’s launching today is a new product. However, it has been in closed testing up until now with a few hundred participants.

As a part of Coupons.com, the app will be monetized through – not surprisingly – coupon distribution. These will be seamlessly integrated into the product, showing users the coupons that are available for various items and recipes in KitchMe. Users will also be able to browse a coupon gallery, as on the Coupons.com flagship site. Circular information from 200+ grocery stores across the U.S. is included as well.

In its online interface, KitchMe offers drag-and-drop meal planning, where either recipes or entire meals can be dragged onto a calendar, so you can plan meals for the day, week, month, or longer. The ingredients you need for those meals are then automatically added to your shopping list. The list is now being powered by the same technology that underpins GroceryIQ, a mobile shopping list app for iOS and Android that Coupons.com acquired back in 2009.

KitchMe currently offers thousands of recipes, but focuses only on those that are rated 4.5 stars or higher and can be prepared in 45 minutes or less, the company says. Recipes are sourced from a variety of sites, including Food.com, Food Network, and All Recipes, for example.

To get started with the service, you can sign up or connect via Facebook, then provide the site with your zip code and favorite grocery stores. The site even has a Pinterest-like look and feel to it, given its visual emphasis. You can then browse or search for recipes, plan, save and share meals to Facebook or Pinterest, look for local deals and coupons, print coupons, and more.

The site competes with a number of recipes and meal-planning services, including Evernote’s Food, Condé Nast’s ZipList, Yummly, Kitchenbug, Foodily, Gojee, mor.sl, (though no longer Punchfork), plus the big-name recipes sites themselves, such as Epicurious, AllRecipes, and Food Network, and many, many others.

KitchMe’s founders roles won’t really change following this deal – they will still head up and run the service, now under Coupons.com’s brand. Interested users can sign up here.

Happy 7th Birthday, Twitter

Twitter is celebrating its 7th birthday with a video showing a short history of the service, from its humble beginnings and co-founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet, to the present day, when it boasts 200 million users

Launched on March 21, 2006, Twitter has grown from a promising little service with a lot of server issues to one of the world's largest social networks, with "well over" 200 million active users which send 400 million tweets each day

just setting up my twttr

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 21, 2006

"As we’ve grown, Twitter has become a true global town square — a public place to hear the latest news, exchange ideas and connect with people all in real time. This is where you come to connect with the world at large," wrote Twitter's Editorial Director Karen Wickre in a blog post

YouTube Now Has One Billion Monthly Users

We all know YouTube is the biggest video sharing site around, but how big is it, exactly, when compared to sites such as Facebook or Twitter? Here's a hint: YouTube has just hit one billion monthly unique users

For comparison, Facebook hit that milestone in October 2012. It took the social network eight years to reach one billion active users — almost the exact amount of time as YouTube, which was founded in February 2005. Twitter, which has been around since March 2006, has more than 200 million monthly active users

The YouTube team gives us a few more comparisons for good measure: "Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube. Our monthly viewership is the equivalent of roughly ten Super Bowl audiences. If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India," says YouTube on its official blog

More Twitter Chatter Correlates to Higher TV Ratings, Study Reveals

A new study reveals that more Twitter chatter correlates to higher television ratings.

By analyzing tweets about live TV, Nielsen and SocialGuide found that Twitter is one of three "statistically significant variables" to influence ratings. The other two factors are a show's ratings from the previous year and advertising spending

"While prior-year rating accounts for the lion's share of the variability in TV ratings, Twitter's presence as a top three influencer tells us that tweeting about live TV may affect program engagement," said Andrew Somosi, CEO of SocialGuide, an analytics service that co-led the study with Neilsen. "We expected to see a correlation between Twitter and TV ratings, but this study quantifies the strength of that relationship."

March Madness Gets A Full Court Press From The Tech World, As Pickmoto, IFTTT, & More Cater To Hoop Lovers Online

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, March Madness is upon us, with the NCAA tournament officially kicking off tomorrow. Yes, March Madness brings April gladness, as the saying goes. In fact, difficult as it may be to fathom, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament turns 75 years young this year.

There are many ways to celebrate and commemorate this annual event, which I would argue is one of the best in all of sports. Of course, there’s bracketology, betting and making enemies in your office by stealing the pool; in short, there are a number of tech-related threads floating around the NCAA Tournament this year, and below we’re taking a quick look at some of the more memorable examples.

But first, you’re probably wondering how to watch the madness live, online. The officially sanctioned way to do it is via March Madness Live, a digital offering from the NCAA, which includes iOS and Android apps and gives you audio and streaming video access to every game in the tournament.

Unfortunately, the experience is a little bit different this year. Last year, whether on the web, iOS or Android, users could pay for access to all 67 games, but in 2013, you’ll have to authenticate with your cable login info before you can watch games appearing on TNT, TBS and TruTV. On the bright side, games airing on CBS will be available for free — as these are the later and arguably more important games in the tourney.

You’ll be able to view games via NCAA.com, CBSSports.com or BleacherReport.

Pickmoto

A young Bay Area startup called Pickmoto wants to make it easier for basketball fans to create pools, make picks and goad their friends into making horrible picks. The free-to-play app, which is  available for the iPhone and in a mobile-optimized web app for non-iPhoners, adds a spin on the familiar NCAA Tournament bracket, allowing fans to make picks round-by-round instead of having to pick the winners of every game before the tournament starts.

As I’m usually scrambling to make all of my picks at the last second (Thursday right before the first game starts), I, for one, am a fan of this approach. It levels the playing field by allowing you to adjust after each round — meaning there are no more first-round bracket busters with Pickmoto. Users get to make picks after seeing how teams are playing and form pools mid-tournament just for Sweet 16 games, for example.

Pickmoto initially launched its app in the fall as a way to offer simpler sports betting for the mobile experience, beginning with NFL and the NBA. Rather than designing a more detailed, stat-centric app à la awesome predictive tools for journalists and fantasy sports enthusiasts like numberFire, Pickmoto wanted to avoid replacing the fantasy experience and make a simple sports betting tool for everyday fans.

The new app goes for the same ease-of-use feel, offering an easy way to run your office pool, replacing the old group email and spreadsheet approach. Now the startup offers pools, chat functionality and wager management, prizes, stats, leaderboards and curated news, which have led to 15K downloads in the last two weeks and over one million picks to date.

Pickmoto at home here.

Bracket Management

Other bracket managers include, beyond NCAA March Madness Live, ESPN Bracket Bound 2013 for the bracket-focused gamers (which includes news, video analysis and game stats) and Simple Bracket for those who want simplicity, an experience devoid of ads and no gimmicks. You will need a Twitter account, though.

IFTT Meets ESPN

IFTTT, which stands for “if this, then that,” is an awesome service that allows you to connect all your accounts to its service (like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Dropbox, etc.) and create recipes that make them work together in clever ways. Basically, you can set triggers for specific actions (like, if I post an Instagram, automatically save it to Dropbox) in umpteen different ways.

This week, IFTTT announced that ESPN had created a channel that, once activated, allows you to follow and get automatic updates on breaking news from ESPN’s writers, along with your favorite teams. The channel is your “source for in-game updates and final scores for all your top teams,” the channel’s description reads. Of course, you see where this is going: There are tons of ESPN-related recipes therein, including those focused on the NCAA Tournament, like “Text me Men’s NCAA Basketball breaking news,” for example. Pretty cool. Thanks, IFTTT. Bless you.

Google Embeds Brackets In Search

You’ve probably already noticed this, but just in case you’ve been using Bing or Yahoo, Google is now embedding the NCAA Tournament bracket at the top of results for a number of tournament-related search terms. The bracket pops up first if you search for keywords like “Basketball bracket,” “March Madness,” or “NCAA tournament,” for example. As you would imagine, the embedded bracket instantly “gives you each game’s round, teams, rankings, date, and time, score, and winner.” TC’s Josh Constine has the full story here.

YouTube’s Celebration of 75 Years

YouTube recently launched a new channel called NCAA OnDemand, which is set to become home to scores of clips and highlights from this year’s tournament. What’s more, the channel will also include a bunch of playlists, including upsets, best dunks, buzzer beaters, etc. Ryan has the full story here.

How To Watch From Work Or From Outside The States

While March Madness will be streamed live to viewers in the U.S., international viewers may not be so lucky. And, for the sake of productivity, there’s a chance your friendly local employer may block access to some of those sites. So, the same could go for you if you’re looking to watch the game while on the job. The word is that 30 percent of corporate IT workers have said their company will block streaming this year.

One option for both scenarios is to use AnchorFree’s Hotspot Shield VPN, which sets up a virtual private network to hide your IP address and allow you to access CBSSports.com, etc. The company said that visits to NCAA.com and CBSSports.com through Hotspot Shield increased in average by 710 percent during March Madness 2012, for example. Find more in Chris’ coverage here.

Other Apps Worth Checking Out

Back in November, ex-Googler Nikolai Yakovenko launched Chadwick, an AI-based app that attempts to reduce the noise of our social feeds and deliver immediate coverage of live games to your phone via text and push notifications. Chadwick has been updated for the NCAA tourney, and it shows a whole ton of improvement. Check it out here.

SportStream is another great app if you’re looking for that realtime, second-screen social media experience. The app feeds you a stream of tweets, video, Instagram photos, Facebook posts, play-by-play, and box scores on the games you’re following. A useful tool for March Madness fans. [More here.]

Payroll For Collaborative Consumption Startups Gets Easier With New Braintree-Venmo Service

Braintree’s $26.2 million deal to buy New York’s mobile payments startup Venmo seems to be paying off once more for the Accel-backed company.

The company is launching an easier way for collaborative consumption startups — which could include Braintree’s best-known clients like Uber and Airbnb — to pay their contractors or users.

Basically, the headache is this: these companies work with hundreds or thousands of drivers, TaskRabbits or users on their platforms and paying them with checks can make accounting logistically complicated. They have to mail checks. People have to cash the checks, and that can take between seven to 10 days.

Because Braintree already has a relationship with these bigger companies and then Venmo, the startup it acquired, makes payments easy via e-mail addresses and phone numbers, they now have a way to quickly pay independent contractors sans checks.

“Sending out checks is painful,” said Braintree CEO Bill Ready. “All you need now is the phone number. These companies have many, many providers behind the scenes and paying these people is a severe pain point.”

Called Venmo Payouts, the product includes an API that lets businesses pay their workforce from any bank account to any Venmo user via a Venmo account, e-mail or phone number.

Workers get notified immediately when they’ve been paid and they can cash out from their bank account or through Venmo. It costs $0.25 per payout, without other fees. During the beta, Braintree is giving away the first 1,000 transactions for free. Developers can apply for access here. They’ll be granted access on a first come first serve basis.

Braintree’s already tapped Venmo a couple of times for different products. The company kept the branding because they wanted a better direct-to-consumer relationship, which could prevent them from becoming a commodity payments platform.

They recently launched Venmo Touch, which is a way for consumers to quickly sign up to pay for goods and services without having to re-enter their credit card details.

Braintree is a payments platform that works with Angry Birds’ maker Rovio, Airbnb, Fab.com, OpenTable and Uber. They process at least $1 billion in mobile payments per year.

To Improve Conversations, Facebook Will Launch A Reply Feature And Most Active Threads On Pages And Popular Profiles

Facebook is preparing to roll out a new feature on Pages and popular Profiles that will help increase interactions with fans and readers: Replies. Up to now, visitors could comment on a post but others, including the Page owners themselves, would not be able to respond directly to them in cases of multiple people commenting on a post. Facebook has been running tests of the new feature since November last year; now a source tells us it will be rolling out the feature more formally as an opt-in on Monday, March 25, before turning it on for everyone in July.

Here is a sample screen shot we were sent of how it looks:

Another feature that will be launched at the same time is active-thread sifting, which also had been in beta testing. Here, the most active conversations will be ordered at the top using an algorithm to appear higher in the posts.

Replies and the algorithmic sorting won’t work everywhere. They are being rolled out only to Page posts and Profiles with more than 10,000 followers, not personal accounts. Also, they will not work on mobile, although the intention is to make Replies part of the Graph API and mobile in the future.

Replies are already a part of Facebook’s commenting plug-in, which runs on third-party sites (TechCrunch used it use it; it doesn’t anymore). But this is the first time Replies will be appearing on Facebook itself.

The most important reason for introducing Replies is that it gives Page owners the ability to engage directly with individual commenters, and other Page visitors will then be able to see the most active conversations. This will not only improve the quality of the conversation but will mean more engagement for the Page posts overall. Engagement remains a key metric for Facebook as a way of quantifying how much time users spend on the site, important data for those deciding how to invest marketing budgets.

Facebook will let Page owners opt in to using the new Reply feature from March 25, and it intends to make the change universal by July 10.

In a FAQ that Facebook has been circulating, it gives a little bit of an explanation about how the conversation threads will work, and it’s a little more sophisticated than simply putting the comments with the most replies at the top, and ties in with how Facebook generally prioritizes content for you based on your own social network and likes.

They “may appear differently to each person based on their connections,” Facebook writes. So, for example, if you as a viewer happen to know some of the people in a particular thread, that thread will jump to the top for you, as Facebook assumes you’ll be more likely to want to jump into that conversation.

Apart from this, weight is also given to posts that have a lot of likes and a relatively high number of replies. Conversely, threads or comments flagged as spam will drop down the list, and Facebook says it may also “down-rank” comments made by frequent spammers.

But for a company that has made several proclamations of putting mobile at the center of what it creates today, there will be a little inconsistency with Replies.

Because Replies initially won’t work on mobile, users of the native iOS and Android apps will see Replies as regular comments. The same goes for how the threads will appear via the Graph API. This will also mean that third-party page management apps for now will get the short end of the stick because they will also not be able to write Replies — only comments.

Reddit Is Becoming an Imageboard — Here's Proof

After President Obama’s historic campaign stop on Reddit, the Daily Dot claimed the social news site is “becoming the world’s largest image forum, where famous people occasionally come to promote themselves.”

Now there’s a study that backs up that assertion.

On March 12, Michigan State University graduate research assistant Randy Olson, with help from longtime redditor Chad Birch, revealed a series of graphs that documented the history of the Internet's self-proclaimed front page.

The graphs detailed the rise—and decline—of the site’s many nooks and crannies as proven by user submissions. By 2009, content-specific subreddits, which increased on an annual basis, managed to eclipse the content posted to r/reddit.com, the site's longtime miscellany subreddit. In 2011, r/reddit.com was permanently closed.

Ears-On With Spotify Social, The New “Follow” Feature Now Available To Everyone

Spotify today confirmed to TechCrunch that it has finally completed the rollout of its new social following features that model music discovery after offline behavior — where you find songs through tuned-in friends and influencers. Here’s our hands-on demo and review of Spotify’s move to discovery through actual humans instead of algorithms.

Back in November, I wrote that sources told me Spotify planned to launch a Twitter-esque following feature for music discovery. Then at a flashy event in New York featuring performers like Frank Ocean and an after-party with Vampire Weekend, Spotify officially unveiled its “music graph.” But the rollout has been slow, and the redesigned Discover tab and instant previews features aren’t yet available to everyone. But influencer following is, and it’s a big step up for the on-demand music service.

A Cure For Paralyzed Ears

Discovery is Spotify’s biggest problem. Its search box can be paralyzing. When you can listen to all the world’s music, where do you start? Spotify’s answer is “with what your favorite artists and most music-savvy friends are listening to” through the new Follow tab plus revamped profiles and an activity feed.

By now you should have received a prompt to update to Spotify version 0.8.8. When you fire it up the first time, you’ll get walked through the Spotify Social on-boarding. Congratulations, you’re now automatically following the artists you listen to most and people whose playlists you’ve subscribed to (though you can ditch them if you want).

Next, Spotify recommends you follow some Facebook friends, in contrast to the old version where your feed was clogged with listening activity from all your friends. This update makes a lot of sense, since just because you’re friends with someone doesn’t mean you respect their musical tastes. If you dig pop, don’t follow your hipster friends. If you aspire to be the first on your block who knows about the new buzz band, follow music blogs or buddies who live in London.

Finally, you’ll see suggestions of artists and influencers to get updates from, including bands like Pearl Jam, news outlets like Pitchfork, and celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg or Barack Obama. The process is breezy and doesn’t default you into too many connections. If you’re ever looking for new people to get recommendations from, you can click on the Follow tab in Spotify’s left navigation side.

Intimacy With Influencers

Woo! Alright, now let’s listen to music — socially. These subscriptions populate the redesigned social feed in the Spotify right sidebar. It shows songs listened to, tracks shared, playlists updated, and more from the people you follow. At the top is a recommendation of a featured influencer to follow. The bar is a bit narrow so it cuts off track names but at least it wraps text to show you the full message when people purposefully share.

A single click of the play button in any story instantly plays that song or playlist without changing the page you’re viewing so you can quickly sample what people are bopping their heads to. There’s this oddly intimate feeling when you see that a rock legend like Lou Reed is listening to a song and you can join him. You feel immediately closer to them, like you’re getting a personal tour of their tastes.

If you want to dive deeper into someone’s style, you can visit their redesigned Spotify Social profile. For verified artists, this will show their standard discography and their most popular songs according to the Spotify user base. It’s a bit too subtle (I missed it at first), but you can click the “Spotify Profile” button below their name to switch to see their recent Spotify listening activity and playlists. The latter is all you’ll see for non-musicians.

DJs By Default

In days of old, you’d discover music from professional DJs broadcasting their picks on the radio and at clubs, or through one-to-one interactions. Though modeled after this behavior, Spotify evolves it by turning everyone into DJs without the need to do anything different. You, your friends, journalists, and celebrities simply continue the one-player Spotify experience by listening to songs and building playlists. But similar to the Facebook news feed, Spotify’s new social features create of sense of ambient intimacy around music. It’s like a town square, except filled with your personal music influencers, and they’re all holding boom boxes above their heads.

There’s plenty of room for improvement, though. Spotify used to let you “favorite” non-friends to add them to your feed, but there was no way to find these people. The social on-boarding and Follow tab are a step forward, but they don’t offer much context. I’d be a lot more likely to trust recommendations  if Spotify told me we love the same artists, or their playlist contains the song I have on repeat.

Considering their latest listens are in the feed, its strange and dysfunctional not to have someone’s listening history on their profile. The subscription recommendations atop the feed seem ill-targeted. I rarely listen to pop music, but I get suggested Katy Perry and Bruno Mars. When I was recommended a band I hadn’t heard of called The Script, I gave it a shot. What I heard was FM dial slime I imagine was concocted by removing anything edgy from Coldplay and replacing it with album filler by American Idol semi-finalists.

Social is relegated to the sidebar and feels disconnected from the What’s New homepage. Luckily, Spotify will eventually roll out its redesigned Discover tab, which combines tips from those you follow with hits and new releases from artists you don’t. Until then, discovery still feels a bit marginalized on Spotify. That’s a big contrast to competitor Rdio, which features multiple tabs of charts and personalized recommendations.

Despite these shortcomings, I’m already discovering new music through Spotify’s new social feed. Subscribing to Los Angeles indie radio station KCRW and British music blogger Stuart Dredge has helped me expand my taste. If an algorithm had recommended a sleepy crooner like Escondido’s “Black Roses”, I’d have probably skipped it 15 seconds in. But since the recommendation comes from someone I trust, I gave it an honest chance and fell in love with the lullaby. That’s how social music discovery should work, and it’s making Spotify sound sweeter than ever.

Facebook Retargeting Startup Perfect Audience Launches A Reporting API For Agencies And Developers

When Y Combinator-incubated Perfect Audience launched last year, its stated goal was to make it easy for small advertisers (startups, small agencies, and others) to run retargeted ads on Facebook. Turns out, however, that there’s been much broader interest in the startup’s tools, with customers including enterprise companies and larger agencies. According to CEO and co-founder Brad Flora, it’s part of the broader “consumerization of enterprise” trend, where companies want simple tools that they can “operate themselves” without technical assistance.

However, some of those customers want something more customized than what Perfect Audience already offers. That’s why the company is launching a new reporting API today. Flora said that customers can now get their data out of Perfect Audience into their own apps and campaign reporting tools. That means developers can build their own tools that incorporate Perfect Audience data, and that ad agencies can import the data into their existing dashboards.

This is actually the company’s second API; it quietly launched a JavaScript Tracking API last fall that allowed companies to drop cookies and target ads based on actions rather pages. Flora said that between the APIs, the company has now covered the main use cases: “They can get data out and get data in.”

Overall, Perfect Audience has now signed up 2,500 advertisers and is serving 4 billion ad impressions per month. Flora said the company is cash-flow positive; with its current run rate, it would bring in several millions of dollars in revenue per year. And it’s also expanding into other types of ad retargeting, including web banners and email.

You can read more about the reporting API here and the JavaScript API here.