If you run a big website, you have a range of good options for staying protected from malicious hacks: hardware from enterprise-oriented companies like Cisco or McAfee, your own in-house support, or hosted professional blog services like WordPress VIP (which is what TechCrunch uses). If you’re a smaller site out on the open web, you have weaker options — at least if you want to get auto-updated responses to a wide range of security problems. Israeli startup 6Scan is out to change that, launching a WordPress plugin today that automatically scans and updates to protect against the latest issues coming up across the web. By “automatically,” I mean that the company’s security team monitors the web and does its own research to find problems, then pushes an update to all of its users. These go out about every hour, according to co-founder and chief executive Nitzan Miron , as they’re discovered and added to the company’s system. Key problems it fixes include SQL injections, cross-site scripting, directory transversals, remote file inclusion and the other top security risks . The scanning software is offered for free, but it will fix remove risks and provide other features, like zero-day research and additional email and SMS support for $10 a month. Although the Israeli company has only been around since April of last year, Miron and his co-founder Yaron Tal worked in web security in their country’s military over the previous years — they’re not new to the space. Other website guards that serve small to medium-sized sites include Dasient (now part of Twitter ), Armorize , StopTheHacker (also recently funded ) and CodeGuard . They each provide a range of competing services for cheaply and quickly identifying threats, and they all offer various methods for containing or removing problems. Miron says that the ability to fix existing vulnerabilities instead of requiring users to take additional actions helps separate 6Scan’s offering from web-based competitors. (Note: I haven’t tested every web site security system around, but so far I haven’t seen others that do this, exactly. Tell me if otherwise in the comments). More generally, another type of competitor here are companies that offer hosted, supported sites for smaller businesses, that accomplish the marketing goals at stand-alone websites. This can include anything from Facebook pages to Tumblr accounts to hosted site creators like Weebly or Webs.com. On that front, Miron says that they’re also talking to hosting companies to get their software auto-installed, and they’ve been getting some interest — so, they’re not only going straight for consumer-style smaller businesses running their own sites. While WordPress is the first live version, Miron says support for other content management systems are coming soon, with Joomla and Drupal in the next few days. In its private beta, 6Scan has already added up a few thousand customers, he adds, many of whom are already paying. The company has so far raised an undisclosed round from YL Ventures , following on seed funding from Israeli incubator Venturegeeks last year. Miron is coming through town now, and planning to present at the SF New Tech cloud meetup at Might tomorrow.
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6Scan’s Auto-Updating Website Protection Service Is Launching Today, Starting With WordPress
Posted in Software Tools 
Tags: across-the-web, cisco, country, enterprise, facebook, israeli, miron, screen-shot, Security, sms, space, startups 
Comments OffStorify Brings Drag-And-Drop Social Curation To The iPad
Storify has become one of the best ways to create stories from social media — the startup says it has been used by 22 of the top 25 news sites in the United States, and that its users have curated a total of more than 3 million social objects. Now, you can do that curation from your iPad. The company was already mobile, in the sense that stories (which are essentially timelines of content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and more) created with Storify tools could be viewed on smartphones and tablets. But with the new Storify iPad app , you can do more than look at a story — you can create one on an iPad, too. In fact, co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman argues that this may be the first great app for content creation (rather than consumption) on the iPad. That may be selling other apps short, but maybe not — while there are (say) blogging or drawing apps that work adequately on the iPad, those aren’t really the ideal tools for creating content. (Put another way: There’s a reason I’m writing this post on my laptop.) Yet when Damman and his co-founder Burt Herman demonstrated Storify on the iPad earlier this month, I was impressed by how it seemed perfectly suited for the tablet. There’s a responsive, drag-and-drop interface for moving social network updates into the timeline, so it really feels like you’re building something with your fingertips. You can see the interface in action in the video below. Most of Storify’s traffic comes in the form embedded versions of stories on major media sites, and Damman and Herman lay out a plausible scenario where a reporter could use Storify for iPad to file their report. For example, imagine a reporter at a conference who, instead of lugging their laptop around, just breaks out their iPad to curate the social media version of what’s happening, which in turn is embedded on their website. Damman and Herman are hopeful that the app will see serious usage at the upcoming South by Southwest conference — which is, of course, a hub for social media sharing and oversharing. If you’re wandering around eight or 12 hours at a time, it’s easier to share the experience via iPad rather than a laptop with only a few hours of battery life. At the same time, the vision isn’t limited to journalists. The pair says Storify has also gotten a strong response from brands, and they see it as a “social typewriter” that can allow anyone to tell a story. “We always talk about how social media empowered people to create content,” says Herman (a former journalist himself). “It’s getting simpler and simpler, from 300 words to 140 characters. Now we’re overwhelmed by all this media, so this is the next big step — the curation of all that media that’s out there, extracting the meaning in the noise to tell stories.” Damman says his team has been focused for the past seven months on creating a great experience for the iPad, though he isn’t ruling out expanding to other platforms like Android in the future. Storify’s investors include Khosla Ventures .
Posted in Software Tools Tags: experience, facebook, herman, ipad, khosla-ventures, media, Mobile, Platforms, social, startups, storify, timeline, united-states, Video, xavier-damman Comments OffThe Pinterest Effect: Conde Nast Casts ‘Easy Living’ In The Mold Of Hot New Social Network
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result. That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living , a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page. To be clear, the site is not about Easy Living turning into a social network itself — there are no followers in different categories, and users cannot “pin” content on the site (not yet, at least) — but the borrowing of the image-based layout, big on images and shorter on text, is unmistakeable. There are others that have noted how Pinterest has affected the development of web-based content: sites like Quora have topic boards, for example, that also speak to the evolution of content discovery from straight linear timelines to those based on subjects. This could be one of the first examples of a magazine’s website taking that to heart. It’s a fitting one: Easy Living’s subject matter is squarely in the area of lifestyle, home and fashion, three areas where Pinterest has particularly done well, picking up millions of pinners in the process. The drive to make magazines more in the mold of hot web properties is something that we may see a lot more of in future, as publishers take tips in their attempt to keep their readers (and advertisers) loyal in the face of a wave of sophisticated (and free) online content. Let by companies like Pinterest. At Conde Nast, this looks like it is just one part of a big push that Conde Nast is making into digital: today the publisher revealed in London that it is now selling 200,000 digital editions of its UK magazines, and now has 965,000 Facebook fans for its various magazines. Those magazine’s twitter feeds, it said, has nearly has many followers. It now has a total of 13 iPhone apps, but it looks like tablet content might be a major point of investment in the months ahead: it said that Vogue UK will start publishing a monthly iPad edition from September; and that 28 percent of its readers now own a tablet, with that number even higher among some of its titles: in the case of Wired UK, 50 percent of its readers own a tablet. With GQ, it’s 42 percent. Smartphones still blow all that out of the water: 90 percent of Conde Nast’s UK readers use smartphones, with more than half of them iPhones. Still, there is more opportunity to get those mobile types more engaged in Conde Nast content: the company says that only 10 percent of its site traffic is coming from mobile devices.
Posted in Software Tools Tags: conde, conde-nast, Development, facebook, image, ipad, Living, london, magazines, Mobile, pinterest, shorter-on-text, water Comments OffAtlassian’s JIRA 5 Takes Flight With @Mentions, Sharing And Enterprise Version
Atlassian, which makes product management software for software development, is debuting a new version of its collaboration software for product teams, JIRA. As you may know, JIRA is a product and issue management tool that connects people, applications and activity to accelerate the software development process. JIRA 5 is debuting today with a number of new social features such as mentions, sharing and live activity streams. JIRA 5’s new sharing and mention features makes it easier to pull team members or co-workers into the conversation. Live activity streams update team members on all related activities and information, much like Facebook and Twitter activity streams. An expanded plugin API and improved REST APIs allows third-party developers to integrate with JIRA. More than 30 integration partners, including Box, Gliffy, New Relic, Zephyr, Zendesk, Salesforce.com, Tempo and GetSatisfaction are launching JIRA 5 compatible third-party products. And more than 100 commercial and free plugins are also available with today’s launch. Atlassian, which has over 20,000 customers of the product, says that JIRA is currently used by more than 70 percent of Fortune 100 companies. Because of the increasing number of large deployments, Atlassian is introducing a new JIRA Enterprise offering with additional support, training and engagement. Customers with 500 or more JIRA users can now receive 24X7 phone support, end-user training, and administrator certification, among other services. Atlassian has been seeing success as one of the go-to software platforms for the software development world. Revenues for 2011 were $102 million, up 35 percent, and the company tells us it did $10 million in revenue in January alone.
Posted in Software Tools Tags: 100-commercial, api, atlassian, connects-people, conversation, enterprise, expanded-plugin, facebook, Increasing, jira, makes-it-easier, Salesforce.com, success-as-one Comments OffSocial Shopping Site Sneakpeeq Raises $2.7M From Bain Capital Ventures, Keith Rabois And Others
SneakPeeq, a social shopping startup that debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, has raised a new round totaling $2.67 million from Bain Capital Ventures; Metamorphic Ventures; Keith Rabois , Tim Kendall , Mike Murphy , and Vikas Gupta . As we wrote in our initial review of Sneakpeeq, aims to replicate the experience of shopping for items in a retail store. So similar to the way you flip over a price tag to look at the cost of at item at a store, SneakPeeq doesn’t tell you the price instantly when you visit a product’s landing page. You click a “Peeq” button to find the price. The site features daily boutiques that offer discounts on clothes, shoes, home accessories and more from a variety of brands from well-known names like Kate Spade and Puma to smaller designers and purveyors. At launch in May, Sneakpeeq would actually drop the price everytime you took a “Peeq” at the price of an item, with the discount available only until someone else bought the item. The company has pivoted slightly into more of an action-based shopping network. So basically, by Peeqingm buying, sharing items on Facebook, and more, you earn badges on Sneakpeeq, which can then be applied for discounts on an items. All items are generally around 10 to 15 percent off, but in order for the price to drop even more, you need to perform some of the actions mentioned above. Founder Henry Kim explains to be that brands and merchants like this action-based system because pricing isn’t dropping for everyone, and is lowered for the people who are actually interacting with and sharing the product. Each boutique has a leaderboard where fans can compete by peeqing, sharing, and buying at products. Additionally, every member on Sneakpeeq builds a discovery profile through peeqing, sharing and buying things. Users can also see who shares common interests in various product categories including Taste (gourmet foods), Living (home), and Style (fashion and accessories). Another key differentiator for Sneakpeeq is a new Facebook Open Graph integration with the customized ‘peeq’button. Basically, as you opt-in to the integration and ‘peeq’items, this will be show on your Timeline. The integration will also show when a few of your friends are peeqing at a common boutique/product. Kim says that the startup’s key engagement metric is defined as the sum total of peeqs, loves and shares in a month. When Sneakpeeq launched last year, the startup was at 78,745 engagements per month and in January 2012, saw 600,641 engagements. In the future, Kim is working to expand gifting options so members will be able to gift products to and share badges with their friends. Video, and mobile technologies will also be introduced in the next few months. Sneakpeeq is doing something in the social shopping space that could be very important for the next wave e-commerce. The startup is trying to incentivize users to actually engage with products in a social manners, and along the way, express this via Facebook actions.
Posted in Software Tools Tags: bought-the-item, crunch-disrupt, experience, facebook, People, price, sneakpeeq, social, startup, timeline Comments OffSocial, Mobile Gifting Service Wrapp Raises $5M From Greylock And Atomico To Launch In The US And UK
Wrapp , a social gifting service, has raised $5 million series A funding from Greylock Partners and Atomico, the VC firm formed by Niklas Zennström, co-founder of Skype, Kazaa and other companies. The startup had previously raised $5.5 million in funding from Atomico and Creandum. As part of the most recent round, Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman will be joining Zennström, and Creandum partner Johan Brenner on Wrapp’s board of directors. Co-founded by Rebtel and SendIt founder Hjalmar Winbladh, Spotify founding CTO Andreas Ehn and others, Wrapp lets friends give, receive and redeem digital gift cards using mobile devices, and allows friends to contribute to gifts given by mutual friends. With Wrapp, which offers iPhone, Android and web apps, you sign in via your Facebook account, and you can then tap the Celebration tab on the app, browse your friends or major events, and select the person you want to send a gift card to. All available gift card offers for that friend are automatically listed. You can then select the retailer and the gift card offer you want, write your celebration greeting, select a delivery date, enter payment details (if you’re contributing extra funds to a free gift card), and send the gift. Your friend will be notified and celebrated through Facebook and the Wrapp application. Merchants can actually specify the amounts they’d like to offer via the service, and target specific demographics of users with gift card options, which is something other online social gifting options don’t allow. Wrapp is currently growing more than 30 percent week-over-week and is now working with more than 35 large and medium-sized merchants in Sweden including the country’s largest sporting goods retailer Stadium, Dixons Retail’s consumer electronics chain Elgiganten, Amazon’s LOVEFiLM.com, designer underwear brand Björn Borg, street fashion brand WeSC, and home improvement chain Clas Ohlson. In December alone, Wrapp users used the service to buy 250,000 gift cards. And the app has gone viral, with 2 percent of all Facebook users in Sweden downloading the app. AFter three months live in Sweden, one percent of the Swedish population has interacted with Wrapp. While gift cards is a massive, $100 billion industry, the market hasn’t really been disrupting with social and mobile technologies until now, says Hoffman. For Hoffman, who currently sits on six boards (out of a large number of investments), it’s impressive that he chose to take a board seat with Wrapp. He explained to me that in commerce startups, there’s the challenge of how to solve the equation in retail of being good for consumers, merchants, and for the business. “If you solve all three, you have an interesting and transformative play,” he says. Hoffman adds that Wrapp solves all three of these problems. First, the app allows consumers to easily send gifts to friends in groups or individually, for any occasion, and leverages mobile as well Second, on the merchant side, it provides an advertising platform as well as a way to bring people into brick and mortar (and online) stores. And merchants don’t have to spend anything unless consumers come in and purchase an item. The ability to target to specific demographics is also part of the winning formula for Wrapp. While the conventional way to purchase gift cards is at retail stores at the checkout line, this platform allows retailers to access a variety of information about potential customers including gender, age, where they live, and more. “This is inherently a very interesting viral play, with a pair of experienced entrepreneurs and an efficient way of helping both online and offline retailers,” Hoffman added. Winbladh tells us the new funds will be used to launch the social gifting service this quarter in the U.S. and U.K., and to expand throughout Europe and additional major markets around the world later this year. “We’re here to build a global company and do something completely new with the online to offline market opportunity,” Winbladh says. He says that the service is already in talks with a number of large online and big box retailers in the U.S. According to AllThingsD, Wrapp is looking to partner with retailers like Best Buy and Target at launch. Wrapp’s service is certainly appealing from both consumer and merchant standpoint. Now more than ever, retailers need to be looking for compelling technology plays to help draw traffic both online and offline. Similar to the way that ShopKick is innovating on rewards for retailers, Wrapp could be the answer for gift cards.
Siri Sibling Trapit Raises $6.2 Million Series A From Horizons
Exclusive – Personalized web search tool Trapit , often called the sister to Apple’s Siri because both were built on the same artificial intelligence project from DARPA and SRI , has just raised $6.2 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Horizons Ventures , the Hong Kong-based venture fund that manages the investments for Facebook and Spotify investor Li Ka-shing . Horizons also previously invested in Siri’s B round. While both Siri and Trapit arose from the same underlying technology and IP, Trapit moved in a different direction. It focuses on personalized search and web discovery in order to bring your attention to the web content that best matches your interests. To do so, the service’s web crawler indexes hundreds of thousands of sites, then utilizes its intelligent discovery engine to find content that matches your “traps” – aka, your saved search terms. In some ways, it’s like an RSS reader, except that instead of subscribing to websites’ feeds, you’re subscribing to topics. As you continue to use the service, you can improve upon its initial recommendations by providing feedback. In addition, unlike several “topic based” web discovery services, the traps are entirely unique. No two users’ traps are alike, even if their search terms are the same. With the additional funding, Trapit plans to grow its development team, continue its app development and core R&D investments and expand to other platforms, including mobile and tablet. Rob Majteles, Founder and managing partner of Treehouse Capital and a GP at Oak Investment Partners is also joining Trapit as an outside, non-investing Director. Majteles, who has been an informal advisor since Trap.it’s formative stages at SRI, will join the company’s board. The new board will now include himself, plus co-founder and CEO Gary Griffiths, co-founder and chief Product Officer Henry Nothhaft, Jr., SRI’s Steve Ciesinski and Frank Meehan of Horizons Ventures. Trapit was also just selected as one of the eight finalists for the SXSW Accelerator in the Most Innovative Web Startup category, which Siri won in 2010. The company now delivers over 4 million articles per day and has seen over 2.5 million users since launch.
Posted in Software Tools Tags: Additional, apple, facebook, henry-nothhaft, Investments, Platforms, sri, startups Comments OffFacebook’s Free Social Cards From Moo Are Going Like Very Hot Cakes
Some 24 hours after we broke the news that Facebook had engaged Moo to be the sole creator of its new ‘social’ business cards service we have some exclusive numbers on what that deal is translating into. The promotion of 200,000 free packs of 50 cards is on a first come, first served basis. However the offer is capped at 5,000 orders per day (that’s 250,000 cards per day) in order, Moo says, to ensure a “strong ethos of customer service and to make it fair.”
Posted in Software Tools Tags: facebook, first-come, first-served, make-it-fair, News, Offer, per-day, strong-ethos, the-offer Comments OffDijit Remote Control App For iPad Finally Goes Live
Dijit teased us with a preview of their iPad-optimized remote control app back in December, but home theater convergence aficionados will be glad to know that the app is finally available in the App Store. As previously mentioned, the Dijit app has already graced many an Android tablet , but the iPad-friendly version sports a few new tweaks to improve usability. Full screen remote? Check. Larger buttons? You bet. And as always, Dijit allows users to manage their share what they’re watching on Facebook and Twitter, manage their Netflix queues, and engage in some good old-fashioned channel surfing with minimal setup. The app is live (and free) in the iOS App Store , but you’ll need some extra hardware in order to use your iPad for artfully dodging Jersey Shore reruns. Don’t forget to have a Griffin Beacon IR blaster or a compatible Roku device handy, or else you’ll be left checking listings and sharing show recommendations on one device and controlling your home theater setup with another.
Posted in Software Tools Tags: already-graced, apps, channel-surfing, check-larger, facebook, griffin-beacon, ipad, jersey-shore, Mobile, netflix, remote-control, screen-remote, version-sports Comments OffThe Decline And Fall Of The Appian Empires
A couple weeks ago, MG wrote : Android development itself remains a huge pain in the ass. I hear this again, and again, and again . Which took me a bit aback. I’ve developed numerous Android and iOS apps (though not games, so I can’t speak to the differences there) over the last few years, and neither set of developer tools seems to me to be hugely superior: both have their strengths and their really irritating failings. But then I realized–if you’re an iOS developer moving to Android, then yes, Android would initially seem a million times worse, just as the converse would. It’s just that the converse has been far less common. The platform you don’t know always seems unbearably clumsy, whereas the platform you do know generally feels easy and comfortable: you’ve already gone through the setup nightmares, figured out its quirks and idiosyncracies, and learned what not to do or try. This, I think, is a big factor in the reign of apps. Ever since the App Store came out, people have been prophesying that apps are a passing fad, soon to be replaced by HTML5. For years now, PhoneGap and Sencha , Mono , etc., have offered cross-platform app development, ie the ability to write a single app that works on both iOS and Android. If the transition between the two is such a giant pain, then why wouldn’t everyone do that? Well, there are a whole bunch of reasons. Cross-platform apps are still slower and clumsier. They don’t feel as polished as native apps; also, they generally don’t look like native apps. It’s a pain to get them to work with the many hardware and software services provided by the device’s OS, which native apps do very easily. Generated code is almost always much inferior to written code. To get real estate on the phone’s screen, and presence in the app store/market, you have to package your HTML5 in a native-app wrapper, which can quickly begin to feel like the worst of both worlds. Also, cross-platform development in and of itself means learning Yet Another Set Of Tools And Languages. For some time Apple ruled the only app platform that mattered, so writing apps meant Objective-C, XCode, and iOS libraries. Then Android began to boom. App developers who wanted to expand to it as well had a choice: either learn how to develop native Android apps, or expend a comparable amount of time and energy learning how to write cross-platform apps that would be mediocre on the iOS environment where they already excelled. No wonder the latter never took off. But the story is far from over. More and more developers are becoming fluent in HTML5 (which is really very powerful ; in particular, it’s easy to write apps which are fully functional even while offline) for web app development, and more and more “apps” are really becoming “mobile portals to web services”. It would be much easier for such services to have a single HTML5 interface, tweaked slightly depending on whether the client is a phone, tablet, or desktop, than to have to support an Android app written in Java, an iOS app written in Objective-C, and an HTML5 desktop web client. This is doubtless one of the motivations for Facebook’s long-mooted “ Project Spartan “. Unless Apple and Google take the drastic step of crippling HTML5 in Android/iOS, it’s really hard to see this not happening over the medium term. (For the short term, see Ben Savage’s excellent “ 14 HTML5 Predictions For 2012 ” post.) If Windows Phone starts to take any significant bite out of the marketplace, and a third app platform arises, it will happen even faster; developers will throw up their hands and head to HTML5 en masse. But even if the Android/iOS duopoly continues to reign, the HTML5 is on the wall for native apps. They’ll continue to reign through 2012, and maybe even 2013; but make no mistake, their days are numbered. Image credit : Wikipedia
Posted in Software Tools Tags: app-development, apple, client, converse, facebook, html5, hugely-superior, Phone, project-spartan, really-becoming, Tools, Windows Comments Off