With products like the Pebble and the MetaWatch Strata easily blowing past their funding goals on Kickstarter, it seems like we're knee-deep in a smartwatch renaissance. The space is already seeing some strong competitors emerge, and now another player is looking to carve out its own niche in the hype-filled smartwatch market.

Irvine, California-based Martian Watches has just launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring its eponymous smartwatches to the market. The kicker? These are watches you can actually talk to.

Once the Martian watch is connected to an iPhone or Android handset via Bluetooth, users can use the watch's integrated noise-cancelling microphone to issue voice commands to the tethered smartphone. And, yes, you can live out your Dick Tracy fantasies by speaking to callers directly from the watch, thanks to the inclusion of a directional speaker. It's a very nifty feature, and one that hasn't really been touched on by some of the bigger players, but my first question was one of compatibility.

“If the [Android] phone came with an integrated Voice Command app and it works with a Bluetooth headset, it will work with Martian,” said Martian Watches president Stan Kinsey. “If the phone doesn't have integrated Voice Command, most Androids will work with Martian via the "Vlingo InCar" app.” Meanwhile, the Martian watches already seem to play nice with Siri, and the stock voice commands in the iPhone 4 and 3GS.

At first glance, the Martian watches don’t look much like the other smartwatches that have garned so much attention in recent months. They still have analog faces for one, which means call information, text messages and emails are instead displayed on a one-line OLED display nestled in the bottom half of the watch's face.

Meanwhile, a vibration motor and a notification LED help to provide all-important context when different events happen — green flashes mean that someone's calling you, while blue flashes signal the arrival of a text message. Android users can actually squeeze more functionality out of the watch through an as-yet unreleased app that lets them set up notifications from other services. That approach makes for a smartwatch that isn't quite as technologically striking as say, a Pebble, but Martian Watches president Stan Kinsey tells me that's not really the point.

"We didn't want to just miniaturize and replicate the phone's screen and features on your wrist," Kinsey said. "We wanted to complement the phone and make it easier to do a lot of phone-centric tasks."

The Martian Watches team is shooting to score $200,000 in Kickstarter funds, and plans to make the watches in three distinct styles: the Passport, G2G, and Victory (seen in order above).

Would you like to bet on what may be the next big thing in games? Place a wager on real-money gambling, and you could be in for some good returns. Today, when games developer Big Fish launched a new iPhone app called Big Fish Casino, it announced it would raise the stakes in the UK by introducing real-money gambling into it (courtesy of well-backed gambling platform Betable) — making this the first time that a real-money game will be available in the App Store.

This may be a first for the App Store, but it’s part of a growing interest in real-money gambling. The news comes just one week after the introduction of the first real-money gambling app on Facebook (also in the UK) and at the same time that a report has emerged of Zynga lobbying hard to get in-game gambling cleared in the U.S., too.

The gambling back end for Big Fish Casino will come from Betable, the social betting company that has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from a select group of investors including Greylock, CrunchFund, Yuri Milner's Start Fund, Founders Fund, True Ventures, Path co-founder Dave Morin, former Wikia CEO Gil Penchina, Delicious' Josh Schachter, StockTwits' Howard Lindzon and LOLApps former CEO Arjun Sethi.  Up to now, Betable has been operating in private alpha, and this appears to be the first public application of its betting engine in a public service.

Big Fish Casino is the relaunch of Card Ace: Casino, an app made by Self Aware Studios, which was bought recently by Big Fish. Card Ace already had one million active players, all of whom will transition to the newly-rebranded edition of the game. While real-money gambling is only getting turned on in the  UK, users in other markets like the U.S. will be still be able to share chips across different games, chat wth other players, give virtual gifts. The non-gambling version of Casino will be available on Google Play, Amazon’s Appstore, the App Store and Facebook.

But the really hot action is happening over on the other side of the pond, and only on iOS. The UK version of the iPhone app, which Big Fish says will be coming online “within the next few weeks,” will see users able to put hard currency down on blackjack, roulette and video poker games, with the rollout happening “in the coming months.” Other games in the “casino” include Texas Hold ‘Em and slots.

TechCrunch understands that the app is still getting approved by Apple at the moment, and Big Fish has not announced whether it plans to extend the real-money gambling to other platforms, or other markets outside of the UK.

The move to offer real-money gambling in games comes as developers and the platforms that host them look for more ways to keep users engaged, and in the case of developers spending more money. “We have a strong conviction that mobile apps that combine social and real-money gambling are a powerful way to engage more users and increase overall monetization,” said Paul Thelen, Founder and CEO of Big Fish, in a statement.

Facebook has also started to allow real-money gambling into its walled garden as well. Last week, Gamesys launched Bingo & Slots Friendzy as a new Facebook app, also the first time that real-money gambling had appeared on the social network.

"Facebook is a place that allows people to connect and share," a spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time. "Real money gaming is a popular and well-regulated activity in the UK and we are allowing a partner to offer their games to adult users on the Facebook platform in a safe and controlled manner."

Indeed, it looks like for now, with U.S. lawmakers yet to approve real-money gambling on social and mobile games, developers are looking to test the waters in the UK, which has more liberal rules and serves as a good gateway not just to looking at usage patterns in Europe, but also in an English speaking country with demographics similar to those in the U.S.

As for the U.S., Zynga — which has also said that it would like to introduce gambling into its games — appears to be working hard to get legislators to change their mind on their policy. The WSJ reports that the company is investing in lobbying both at the state and federal level to improve the image of gambling services.

In California, it focused its efforts around the Internet Gambling Consumer Protection and Public-Private Partnership Act of 2012, which the WSJ notes would give gambling companies licenses worth $30 million, and the ability to partner with companies like Zynga to offer online gambling services. That bill is still in play.

In the meantime, the opportunity outside of the U.S. is huge. Betable’s chief executive, Chris Griffin, told TechCrunch earlier this year internationally, online gambling is currently a $32 billion market, compared to $3 billion for social gaming, which works out to $300 spent in online gambling for every $1 on social gaming.

Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal (who could, arguably, make more comics instead of being the Internet’s Sarah McLachlan for geek causes) has taken up the ultimate in geek causes: rebuilding Nikola Tesla’s lab in Shoreham, New York. The lab originally held Tesla’s workshop and a giant freaking tower that we was about to send crazy electricity all over the world, powering the universe from a single location in upstate New York. Then they they tore it down.

After his successful campaign to shame FunnyJunk and their terrible lawyer, Inman seems to be on a social funding tear. This time he needs to help $850,000 in 45 days and he’s just hit $350,000 so I doubt he’ll fail.

The museum will celebrate Tesla’s life and times. You can read more about the effort here but the gist is that the land is about to be turned into a mall or some kind of retail establishment. New York State will pay half of the cost of the museum land but picking up the old lab and the acreage is only the first step.

The plans, currently, are pretty free-flowing:

He’s asking major sponsors like GE, Google, and Tesla to pony up some cash, as well, to support a museum dedicated to the work of one of the most important technologists of the past century. Lets all chip in and maybe they can rebuild that big tower thing and we can all get free electricity all day long.

A few weeks ago, I took a look at the new Showyou iPhone app, which founder Mark Hall at that time said was quickly becoming the team’s favorite version of its social discovery engine. Well, Showyou just released a new version of its iPad app to do that one better. Not only does the new iPad app add a lot of the same social features that make the iPhone version so great, but it also adds retina display support and dual-screen mutlitasking.

What’s that last part mean in English? Basically that if you have an Apple TV, you can now use Showyou as your remote control for a wide range of online video.

Showyou uses Apple’s AirPlay to allow you to send videos from the iPad to the Apple TV, which is nothing new — that feature’s been part of the app since day one. But Showyou has incorporated some pretty cool magic that will allow users to queue up videos to be watched on the Apple TV, and watch them even if you leave the app to check your email or browse the web. That’s right — the videos will keep playing.

So this feature has actually been around for awhile in iOS5, but few app makers have actually implemented it to date. Which is a shame, because it’s pretty cool. You can load a video from The Daily Show or Funny Or Die or any of Showyou’s other partners — and there are a bunch — and go about your business, tweeting and not really paying attention to the TV. (It’s just like if you were watching regular TV!) Anyway, Brightcove recently highlighted dual-screen navigation and control as part of the latest update to its App Cloud offering, so maybe others will soon catch on and start using the capability in their own apps.

Anyway, that’s the coolest new feature, but it’s not the only one. After rebuilding its back end to support its updated iPhone app, Showyou is now circling back and adding many of its new features back into the iPad app. For instance, its “Send to Friend” and “Thanks” social features. It’s also adding Retina Display support for all you fancy third-gen iPad owners out there.

Showyou’s in the middle of a big, crowded space full of apps seeking to help you discover cool videos on your iPad. But with dual-screen multitasking support thing, this update can really help set it apart from the rest.

HTML5 gaming is getting another wind this year with a new cohort of startup contenders.

One of the latest is Goko, a Redwood City-based company that’s trying to make it easy for game developers publish, monetize and distribute their HTML5-based work across multiple platforms including iOS, Android, Facebook and Google+.

They’re coming out today with a multiplayer version of a Settlers of Catan massive-multiplayer game called Dominion. They’re also unleashing a software development kit for HTML5 game developers to build on the platform.

“At a higher level, we’re taking HTML5 content and we’re distributing and publishing it out to different channels out on the web,” said chief executive Ted Griggs.

The platform is launching with 150 titles and then there are 15 additional games in production, including 10 that Goko is making in-house. Goko provides bells and whistles like leaderboards, achievements, support for microtransactions, game hosting and analytics — all of which are fairly typical for a gaming platform.

HTML5 gaming has had a rocky history with companies like Moblyng shutting down and Facebook’s initial HTML5 gaming platform launch being a mixed bag. Yet new companies have come to the fore with the hope that HTML5 will one day develop and become commonplace enough that it will offer an alternative to native mobile development. Amid a fragmented marketplace with multiple smartphone platforms, native development can be time-consuming.

A few other HTML5-gaming companies have come out of the woodworks in recent months like Game Closure, which raised $12 million from Highland Capital and others, and Artillery, which is from some ex-Facebook and Google engineers.

Goko’s revenue share with developers is negotiable. “If they’re using our intellectual property versus coming to us with a unique idea, it would be different,” Griggs said.

The company has raised $8 million from Redpoint Ventures and Alsop Louie Partners. Griggs was behind the company that eventually became Microsoft’s MSN Gaming Zone.

You won’t find any new filters in the latest version of Instagram. Instead, the fourteen person team behind the world’s most beloved mobile app (now 80 million registered users strong) has decided to think outside the box, the browser box. “With every dot oh release we’ve tried to shift our focus dramaticallly,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom tells me in one of the longest interviews I’ve ever conducted about a UI change , “Instagram 2.0, with its new filters, etc, was all about the user’s production experience. Instagram 3.0 is about a new kind of browser experience, Photo Maps.”

Almost like Instagram’s mobile-focused answer to Facebook’s Timeline, Photo Maps — available on both iOS and Android — is an attempt to provide narrative around the photos users have up until now uploaded with no real structure.

Location data is used to create custom map of photos (hence the name), allowing users to tell more coherent stories about photos they’ve been uploading willy nilly. The feature will initially pull in photos from the past that you’ve added a location to, which you probably didn’t think twice about.

“We’re constantly knocking these bits of information into social media — It’s too ephemeral,” Systrom says, who believes that location data is the most effective way to organize activity for mobile.

He calls the step a foray into making geo-location a first class citizen inside Instagram., “How many times have you gone to a user profile and scrolled back to the beginning? No one does. This is a way to take a step back and reflect on everything that’s happened over the past two years. ”Photo Maps is such a fun way of re-descovering yourself, but not just yourself, all Instagram users.”

Users who download the new app after the update will see a Photo Map section on their profiles, in addition to the standard Grid and Chronological profile view. When you navigate through that you’ll get an option to see all photos you’ve geo-tagged in the past.

Users can then edit out the photos they don’t want to include on their map, review their final selections and hit ‘Done.’ Once you’re done editing, images in a given location group will should form a pile/stack on your Photo Map. Geolocation data will be removed from the ones you deselect.

You can browse other maps by selecting the Photo Map option on a given user’s profile, and tap into any photo stack in order to drill down into a given location. Double tapping a stack allows you to view the stack in a grid format.

By giving so much weight to geolocation in the browsing experience, Instagram is giving a big vote to the somewhat under-utilized piece of data. “Instagram is definitely still about quick updates on the go,” Systrom says, “But we also want to give you a different lens. We realized that chronological order was not the way we wanted you to browse overall, and we decided that location was more important.”

Systrom tells me that the feature has evoked a sort of nostalgia in user testing. “We’ve had people who moved here from Belgium going back and looking at photos from home and remembering a different time.” “Location is a new dimension, he says, “Viewing photos is not just about the ephemeral nature of snapshots, it’s about going back into your bedroom and opening your shoeboxes.”

Because not everyone yet is comfortable with sharing their whereabouts, past or present, Systrom emphasizes that users will be able to heavily edit what photos they chose to add to Photo Map. “We’re not introducing any new data,” he says, “All this stuff is already public. I’m able to deselect my house and my parents. And the whole goal here is to make it easy for people to show what they want to show.”

In addition to Photo Maps, the new version of Instagram includes many minor UI improvements including multi-line caption editing, more streamlined photo uploading, speed improvements and infinite scroll. Because Instagram has had very noticeable issues with spam as it scales, Systrom has introduced a way to mark any comment, yours or otherwise, as spam. Also notable is that the Twitter “Find Friends” feature is missing, after Twitter shut off its API to the company late last month.

Though Systrom tells me that acquirer Facebook’s overall product strategy had no effect on these UI changes, the feature is definitely an early sign of Instagram’s new direction, “I think we’ve built the best version of the social photo map,” Systrom says, implying that the startup, which still has yet to be integrated into Facebook, is setting the stage for something larger like having photos flow into geodata.

Just as Josh Constine predicted in this post and MG Siegler foreshadowed in this one, Systrom wants you to be able to use Instagram to hone in on specific locations, “I want to tune into the London Olympics, or Burning Man by using location the same way you explore via hashtags or via a profile,” Systrom says. He predicts that in the long run the company will be building on top of the location layer. “We eventually want 100% of photos to be geo-tagged,” he says, hoping the feature will eventually allow Instagram to become “a backstage pass into anywhere in the world.”

You can download the new update once it goes live here.

The heads of Google and Twitter had a fascinating big-think discussion about the impacts of technology on democracy and society ealier this month. In the interview, moderated by Steve Jobs author and Aspen Institute* CEO, Walter Isaacson, Dick Costolo revealed the future direction of Twitter and Eric Schmidt reflected on both the good and evil uses of technology, especially for struggling democracies. Below a video recording of the interview, we’ve included highlights from each speaker.

Twitter

“What is the next phase for Twitter?” asked Isaacson. Costolo responded saying that Twitter isn’t great at dictating how people use Twitter, but rather making it easier to follow discussions and events through streamlined curation, a rare nod at the future direction of Twitter.

One such (hilarious) example that guides their thinking was a tweet and response between Sarah Silverman and Mia Farrow (Woody Allen’s ex-wife):

When ur relatives drive you crazy just close your eyes & pretend it’s dialogue in a woody allen movie

— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) September 20, 2011

@sarahksilverman tried that. Didn’t work RT When ur relatives drive u crazy just close yr eyes & pretend its dialogue in a woody allen movie

— mia farrow (@MiaFarrow) September 20, 2011

Google

In a discussion about how Google responds to government censorship policy, Schmidt offered up a self-critical reflection on their attempt at engaging with China.

“China is a long story, which I’ll summarize as ‘we tried and it didn’t work’,” he admitted. Explaining further,

Basically we, and I in particular, felt that it was better to engage, rather than be estranged. That’s I think a proper philosophy…Our theory was that we would create something which was so incredibly valuable that the citizens of China (because in our arrogant view we provide great value) that the government will be forced to, over time, open this [Internet] up… We did that for 5 years. The censorship got worse, not better. And, then after the Chinese government, or its proxies, attacked us for a month, and stole a bunch of stuff (and we have since corrected that, and we publicized that), and after they engaged in a very long and severe campaign monitoring the gmails of human rights activists and other people around the world, we said is enough is enough.

Interestingly, Schmidt says the Chinese government is often concerned with just covering up trivial missteps, like if a mayor’s son is arrested. “It’s things which are personally embarrassing to the leadership.”

Check out the rest of the video for a discussion on education, immigration, and politics.

*Disclosure: I work with the Aspen Institute on a separate government innovation-related conference

Fleksy is a new keyboard replacement app for iOS, originally designed for use by the blind or partially sighted, which was created by co-founders Ioannis Verdelis and Kostas Eleftheriou of Syntellia. Kostas, you might recall, previously created a proof-of-concept app called BlindType, also targeting the visually impaired market, which he later sold to Google. Fleksy picks up where BlindType left off. It’s no longer just an idea, but a fully formed product and technology.

The app will eventually be built for all the top mobile platforms – Android, iOS and Windows Phone – but the co-founders wanted to start with an iOS release so people could try out what they’ve developed.

Kostas, who also built a popular iOS app called iSteam, had teamed up with cousin Panos Petropoulos on BlindType, which was also a touchscreen app designed to correct errors as you type, helpful when you missed hitting the correct letters. But according to Fleksy founders, the new app is not related to BlindType – either in terms of IP or reused code. It’s a new concept altogether.

“We have developed this in-house from the ground up,” says Ioannis. “The objective of the two (as well as of other keyboard technologies) is the same – to make typing easier. But we do not know any other technology prior to Fleksy that actually delivers this experience and is downloadable.”

Ioannis was friends with Kostas during college, and previously worked as a management consultant in London. Like Kostas, he was interested in making touch typing work better on phones. “We believe this is very important – being able to enter text is an enabling factor to making mobile devices content creation tools” he says. “In fact, in the tablet market, keyboards are probably the only reason why laptops are still needed.”

Initially, Fleksy was created for the visually impaired, but after showing it around, they realized that there may be a market for Fleksy for sighted people as well. However, on Apple’s mobile platform, you can’t replace your keyboard as you can on Android, so the odds are that most iOS users won’t actually use this unless they really are blind or have poor vision. But it’s an interesting idea.

As for the actual user experience…well, it will take some practice. Its learning curve is a bit tougher than something like Swype, I’d say. Your mileage may vary, of course. Below, a video showing Fleksy in action, which makes it look a lot better and faster than it did in my tests just now.

The team is currently bootstrapping, but is raising additional funds this month.

Fleksy is a free download here in iTunes.

There isn’t a CEO in the world who wouldn’t do well to try and emulate the late Steve Jobs in some way, shape or form. He was a visionary, and took Apple from a relatively low point to being one of the most successful companies in the history of the world. But trying to be him, or just like him, would be a vain endeavor.

An hilarious tipster brought to our attention that Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder and Square founder and CEO, may be attempting the latter. In fact, the tipster was gracious enough to bundle up all the evidence in a cute little Tumblr.

Exhibit A: On Getting Fired

In 1987, Jobs was fired from Apple, from which he went on to work with NeXT and Pixar, later returning to be the CEO of Apple. But when he was asked to leave the company he had helped build, he told Playboy the following:

I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach.

Dorsey suffered through a similar situation, wherein he was made chairman of Twitter but no longer an employee. He told Vanity Fair:

It was like being punched in the stomach.

Exhibit B: “This Has Never Been Done Before”

Steve Jobs was a part of many unprecedented changes. The iPod changed the music industry. The iPad changed the computing industry. The iPhone? The iPhone changed everything.

But Jack Dorsey is a pioneer in his own right. He built a massive social network that has changed the way news travels. He is totally disrupting the credit card industry. So it only makes sense that the two would have the same feelings on their accomplishments. But apparently, they also have the same exact wording to describe it.

Jobs in 2010 at the D8 Conference:

Dorsey speaking with Kara Swisher in May 2011:

Exhibit C: “Proud Of What We Haven’t Done”

In 2008, Jobs explained that part of what makes Apple so successful, moreso than other tech companies, is that they’ve managed to turn such a huge profit on so few devices. He said to CNN Money:

I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it. Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size, and it won’t really be sustainable. So we decided not to get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod. We probably wouldn’t have seen it coming.

In February of this year, Dorsey had this to say in celebration of Square’s 3rd anniversary:

Happy 3rd Birthday @square! I’m so proud of all we’ve accomplished, & all we decided not to do. instagr.am/p/G4ioytAQ9x/

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) February 11, 2012

Exhibit D: Surprise And Delight

“Surprise and delight” is an incredibly common phrase in the tech world. Companies are always looking to please customers. In fact, “delight” is a word I hear a lot out of Microsoft executives. But lo and behold, it’s yet another thing that Mr. Jobs and Mr. Dorsey have in common.

Jobs at a 2010 Apple press conference:

Dorsey in 2011:

Exhibit E: The Beatles

Both Steve Jobs and Jack Dorsey have a fondness for The Beatles. Jobs even went so far as to use the iconic four-man band as an example of how to manage and be a part of a team:

Dorsey also makes The Beatles a regular part of his work life:

Exhibit F: “Put It On The Shelf” Philosophy

As has been made perfectly clear, Apple is all about focus. Rather than releasing hundreds of products a year, the company spends months and years developing a single product, perfecting it as much as possible. In any production environment with these standards, timing becomes very important. Sometimes, you must simply “put it on the shelf” and return another day.

Not surprisingly, Dorsey feels the same way:

Our tipster has a whole page full of examples, so I encourage you to head over to the Tumblr Steve Jobs Spirit and check it out. We’ll close with a word from the blog itself.

Stop trying to be me. Stop trying to be the next me. Be the first Jack Dorsey.

Android fans have been clamoring for Google Play (née Android Market) gift cards for years now, and it seems that the wait is nearly over. Less than a day after the folks at AndroidPolice discovered that the Google Play Android app was quietly updated with support for gift cards, AndroidCentral has come across the first images of those cards in the wild.

There’s really not much to say about the cards themselves: they come in $10 and $25 denominations (with larger ones sure to come at some point) and have a big ol’ Google Play logo on them. What’s more of a surprise at this point is why exactly Google took so long to make these gift cards a reality — not everyone wants to keep a credit card on file, after all.

I’d wager that the company’s recent foray into the hardware space with the Nexus 7 has something to do with it. It’s no big secret that Google is selling the Nexus 7 at cost, and pushing Google Play sales is going to be a critical component in making sure the company gets its money’s worth out of the project. The timing seems perfect too. As the holiday season draws ever closer, you’d better believe that a thoughtfully-designed tablet with a solid spec sheet and a low price tag is going to be a hot seller.

People were going to buy Nexus 7s anyway, and oh look, now there’s a nice way to get those tablet users started in the Play Store too. Gift card availability could mean especially big things when it comes to the younger set. Kids and teenagers who wanted to buy hot new apps and books have never really had a mechanism to do so, short of begging their parents for their credit cards. Once these gift cards hit stores, there’s nothing stopping kids from scrimping allowances together so they can download Angry Birds 12: Dead Reckoning, and effectively give Google (and Android developers) revenue they might not have gotten otherwise.

AndroidCentral’s source didn’t mention exactly where the photo was taken, which leaves plenty of possibilities open. A distribution center? The back room of a big-box retailer? There’s also no information on when these things will start trickling out into the public, but the way the cards are stacked and shrink-wrapped makes it look like they’re ready to be cracked open and stuck on peg hooks. Keep your eyes peeled, folks.

Wait, I’ve seen this one before, back when it was called Please Rob Me and based on Foursquare. The folks (folk?) behind the latest “social networking privacy experiment” called We Know Your House have just brought their website back online, following a swift takedown of their Twitter account after media reports disclosed what they were up to. In case you missed it: We Know Your House is an attempt to raise awareness about the information people casually, and unknowingly, reveal when posting to social networks. In this case, We Know Your House shows the tweets from people posting that they’re at home and then links those tweets to an actual street address, as provided by Twitter’s geolocation data.

The site first started making the rounds on Monday, when outlets like Cnet and security blogs like Sophos detailed what was going on. According to the We Know Your House’s FAQ, the site uses the Twitter Search API to collect information (here’s an example query), and then pulls out the tweets which contain geolocation data. This data is provided in latitude and longitude format, which We Know Your House then converts to human readable street addresses.

Despite the uncomfortable nature of what the service is doing – with (partially censored) Twitter usernames, addresses and even Google Street View data – the goal is not to create a database for stalkers. The data is displayed on the homepage for the past hour only, and after the hour is up, it’s deleted from the page and can no longer can be accessed…or, at least, that’s what the website states, if you want to believe its anonymous creators.

In emails with those behind the effort, they (or he or she) told TechCrunch that Twitter suspended their account because “we tried doing people a favour and mentioning them when they were displayed on our site, but their antispam system decided otherwise. We’re currently disputing this with them,” the email read. “We’re dealing with a very serious issue that is not in any way related to anyone whose information was displayed.” (Twitter has no comment.)

Again, the creator(s) stressed that they’re not doing anything beyond trying to raise awareness – they’ve censored the addresses on the website, but there are those who may be doing something similar privately, they warn. And that’s the real problem.

The site’s launch and subsequent relaunch comes at a time when the issues surrounding geolocation and privacy were again thrust into the spotlight as Alexa Dell, the daughter of Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, saw her own Twitter and Instagram accounts shuttered. Apparently, Alexa had been tweeting and posting photos geotagged with her location, while also detailing exactly what she was doing – like arriving in NY, having dinner, heading to an event, etc. Michael Dell, who pays around $2.7 million a year for security for his family, was not likely amused and the accounts disappeared. This happened soon after Alexa’s brother Zachary showed up on the Rich Kids of Instagram tumblr (photo is now down) aboard the family jet.

We Know Your House, with fortuitous timing, is able to now capitalize on the renewed interest in social networking privacy – but it’s an issue that seems to pop up fairly regularly here on the Internet. Besides the above-mentioned Please Rob Me (a similar effort that used Foursquare not Twitter), we’ve seen the Girls Around Me app and a tool plainly named Creepy arrive, generate outrage, and then become forgotten over the months and years that follow.

In a recent thought-provoking post from Amit Runchal for TechCrunch, he argued that there was too much blame placed on the victims in these scenarios. To some extent, I agree. But this isn’t always a “her skirt was too short” situation – as the Alex Dell situation proved, sometimes there’s just a need for increased parental oversight and awareness. Maybe We Know Your House will help.

Parents, are you talking to your children about the dangers of Twitter? Here’s a pamphlet that helps. 

If part of the game in streaming music is to have the biggest catalog of tracks, then today Rdio made a significant move to turn its volume up to Spotify levels, and gain some street cred with indie fans in the process: it announced two key deals with CD Baby and TuneCore, both independent music aggregators, that ramps up its total track number to 18 million songs, and adds some 250,000 new musicians into the catalog.

The deal also will mean a much bigger route to getting music on to Rdio for unsigned artists, which will now be able to offer their tracks via Rdio in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Great Britain, France, Sweden and Finland.

This could actually put Rdio just ahead of Spotify in terms of catalog size. As of June 2012 Spotify had 17 million songs in its catalog, compared to the 18 million now touted by Rdio — although Spotify’s numbers may now be bigger than this. In terms of label agreements, Spotify already had deals with both TuneCore and CD Baby, so this is really more about Rdio stepping up to meet the challenge rather than go beyond what Spotify offers.

While this might bring the two companies’ catalogs up to the same levels of tracks, it still remains to be seen whether Rdio, which launched some two years after Spotify and operates under a different model (no ads, for one thing), will reach the former company’s mindshare in the industry. Spotify currently has some three million users in the U.S. alone, and 18 million worldwide, and is thought to be worth $4 billion. (That size has also been attracting lawsuits.)

Rdio, however, has some compelling pedigree. It was co-founded by Janus Friis, one of the founders of Skype. It’s backed by Friis’ and Niklas Zennstrom’s Atomico ventures, Mangrove Captial and others.

“We are excited to partner with TuneCore and CD Baby, two of the best distribution tools out there for independent artists,” said Drew Larner, CEO of Rdio, in a statement. “Independent music is a vital part of Rdio's catalog. We’re glad to support hundreds of thousands of self-released artists by connecting their work to new music fans from all over the world.”

This expands the avenues where TuneCore and CD Baby distribute music. Before this TuneCore  was available on iTunes, Google Play, eMusic, AmazonMP3, Deezer, Simfy among other download and streaming sites. The company operates on a flat-fee system, taking no percentage on the sale of music. The acts that distribute through TuneCore include Nine Inch Nails, Drake, Civil Wars, Sonic Youth, Beck, Lil’ Wayne, Jay-Z, Aretha Franklin, Keith Richards, Blood On The Dance Floor, Public Enemy, Willie Nelson, They Might Be Giants, Donna Summer, MGM Studios, Bjork, Moby, Girl Talk, Brian Eno and more. It says that in the past two years, it sold more than 600 million songs and generated over $300 million dollars in gross music sales and songwriter revenue.

CD Baby, meanwhile, says that it has to date distributed 4 million tracks to online retailers and streaming services, and paid out $200 million to artists in the last 12 years. It also operates a physical CD business, as well as digital music hosting services (HostBaby) and e-book distribution (BookBaby).

Unlike Spotify, which uses a peer-to-peer network to run its service, Rdio is built on a client/server architecture. Both offer users the ability to stream and share music with friends.

Spotify offers freemium, ad-based services among its pricing tiers, while Rdio’s service is ad-free.

Rdio offers a short-term, free trial but then costs $4.99 monthly for web access and $9.99 for access across unlimited devices, including mobile, Sonos and Roku devices. A higher family tier for multiple users costs $17.99/month. Skip Tunes has a good chart comparing the two services, along with Mog’s.

Nokia’s Chris Weber sure seems to be a feisty mood. The company’s EVP of Sales and Marketing took to his sporadically-used Twitter account presumably in an attempt to build some buzz around Nokia and Microsoft’s upcoming press conference, and this is what he came up with:

“Samsung take note, next generation Lumia coming soon. #nokia”

These are some pretty bold words coming a guy whose company was hit with a class-action lawsuit back in May because its U.S. Windows Phone sales had failed to meet shareholder expectations. That Weber called out Samsung in particular is interesting, not only because that’s usually just not done, but because Nokia is something like a mote in Samsung’s eye at this point.

Then again, it wouldn’t be first time Nokia called out its rivals to drive awareness of its plans — for a company currently navigating some rough seas, Nokia can be pretty mouthy when it comes to its competitors. When the Lumia 800 was unveiled at Nokia World last year, CEO Stephen Elop called it the “first real Windows Phone,” a claim that Microsoft quickly backed them up on (HTC and Samsung must have been thrilled). Then, earlier this year, the ailing company launched a marketing campaign centered around pointing out flaws in rival smartphones all with the intention of pointing out how great its new Lumia 900 is.

Don’t get me wrong here — I like Nokia (apparently other people do too), and I like their products quite a bit. I’m all for some trash talk too (it’s like high school all over again!), but Nokia’s going to look awful foolish if what it plans to unveil on the 5th doesn’t floor everyone in attendance. Quiet rumblings of a Nokia tablet have started to pick up in intensity in recent months, and Weber previously confirmed that Nokia would eventually produce a PureView-toting Lumia device, so there’s plenty of fodder for last minute announcement rumors.

Samsung take note, next generation Lumia coming soon. #nokia

—
Chris Weber (@CWeberatNokia) August 16, 2012

Reddit AKA the front page of the internet for cat gifs and atheist rage comics just earned a Guinness World Record for largest online Secret Santa game. Over the last three years, RedditGifts facilitated anonymous gift exchanges between 30,025 participants (including Stephen Colbert) in 115 countries. Only the Reddit team gets the award and they’re not sharing it with all the users although I’m sure if asked, one of the team members would do a IAMA about how their life changed thanks to a piece of paper.

Just like how RedditGifts was started, it was a random Reddit user named someguyfromcanada (pictured) who got the ball rolling with the stat nerds at Guinness.

In March 2011 (I think) we started getting PMs and emails from the reddit user someguyfromcanada. He was saying that he wanted to make it his personal mission to get reddit and redditgifts into the record books. He started with tweets and emails directed at Guinness, took the campaign to the reddit community and eventually, months later, Guinness decided that they were going to create a new world’s record category for us! So everyone, please, take a moment and thank someguyfromcanada. Without him, this would have never happened.

RedditGifts was started by a Redditor (Dan "kickme444″ McComas ) back in 2009 and Condé Nast purchased the site itself in 2011. As Greg explained at the time, this acquisition gave the little pet project the proper support it needed to grow and better serve its users.

In each gift exchange, participants are paired with another Redditor who is tasked with finding and giving an awesome gift. But this isn’t just for Christmas time. The giving goes on year-round, with categories for teachers, pets, comic books, dorm rooms. So get at it: Join the movement by making someone’s day and earn a little bit of real life karma.

Jumio, a mobile payments and ID-scanning startup backed by $32 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Eduardo Saverin and others, is today releasing a new version of its Netswipe Mobile SDK alongside improvements to its core technology. The updated SDK, which is the software developers use to add Jumio’s mobile payment functionality to their apps, has been improved on a number of fronts, from card-reading and auto focus capabilities to app publishers’ ability to customize the branding in the screens Jumio displays.

But these improvements are not all that Jumio has in store, it seems.

According to new Jumio CMO Marc Barach, who previously served as CEO & CMO of Emotive prior to joining the startup just a couple of weeks ago, the white labeling option is being seen by some of its customers as their secret weapon. “They don’t want their competitors to utilize it as well, until it becomes more common knowledge,” he says. Barach says Jumio has several of these big-name customers who have established volume deals for use of the software, but declined to provide names or hard numbers regarding the size of the developer install base. He did place it in the “hundreds,” however, as opposed to the thousands and admits they saw a bump following competitor Card.io’s exit to PayPal. “We were able to immediately engage with a number of companies who were using that service when it was a standalone company, but have a different view now that it is part of PayPal,” he says.

Now Jumio is trying to incentivize more developers to install their software with the lure of cold, hard cash. The company announced a $5 million Jumio SDK Developer Fund in May which funds 500 free scans per month per developer for smaller-scale startups. Larger companies pay $0.15 per transaction, or negotiate their own volume deal. $1 million of that fund has already been used up, and Barach speculates the rest will be distributed over the next 60 to 90 days.

Other improvements to Jumio’s core technology rolling out today include better security and improved performance and auto-focus. These latter two items allow Jumio’s software to function better in real-world scenarios like low light, or where the user’s hands shake, the card is angled to the side or to the back, the thumb is covering a lot of the card’s surface, and other issues which could have previously slowed the scan time down.

Now, scans are 2 to 2.5 seconds long, with the entire process, including transmission,  taking 4.5-5 seconds in total. Barach compares these numbers to keyed-in entry which takes, on average, 50 seconds to complete. And because Jumio’s other product, the id verification system known as Netverify, also takes advantage of the same core technology, it too benefits from the algorithm enhancements here, as does the desktop version of Netswipe.

In addition, developers who struggled before to implement the mobile SDK will also benefit from other improvements to the SDK itself. Whereas before, the time varied based on the developer’s own proficiency, the entire implementation process has been shaved down to 20 minutes, with improved documentation as well. Before, some developers may have worked for an hour on implementation or even required hands-on help.

As for what’s next, Barach says that Jumio has yet another product in the works that will leverage its core technology in a new way. While he couldn’t discuss what it was exactly, we do know that it’s mobile-facing and it’s arriving in October of this year. Of course, the obvious next step for this company would be to build a mobile wallet application of some sort which would enable customers to quickly digitize all their cards, credit, debit, ID and otherwise. Perhaps something similar to what Lemon is dong, or even Apple’s forthcoming Passbook. So, Jumio, is it a wallet?

“That’s a good idea, I’ll take note of that,” Barach says with a laugh. Aw, c’mon. It’s a wallet, right? “It’s possible,” he says.

While collective consumption has really taken off in the last year thanks to the Airbnbs and Ubers of the world, carpooling and ride-sharing have been around a bit longer. But for the last few years, a number of ride-sharing startups have been making headway in areas where carpooling traditionally has lacked, like safety — the biggest obstacle standing in the way of mass adoption for collective consumption startups. While there isn’t a whole lot of differentiation among the ride-sharing set, Ridejoy is looking to change that.

For those unfamiliar, the YC-backed startup brings people together for long-distance road trips (which they define as those trips over 15 miles), allowing drivers to “sell” their extra seats to riders for cheap. Now that it has 3K active rides listed at any given time and some money in the bank, the startup is looking to expose its ride-sharing experience to a new audience with the launch of a new iPhone app.

Available for free in the App Store, Ridejoy’s new app upgrades the startup’s web experience by making it easier (and quicker) to post rides, search for rides by destination, review driver profiles and coordinate trips.

With hundreds of new rides being posted each day, the startup is looking to expand its footprint in the U.S. and Canada by enabling people to easily find trustworthy drivers with which to share their commute or their trip to Burning Man. To that point, Ridejoy grew out of BurningManRides.com, which the company’s co-founder Kalvin Wang established in 2010 to help people find rides to the infamous art festival in the desert. After launching in August 2011, the company saw 1,600 rides posted over a short period of time (as well as five plane rides) and decided to push forward with Ridejoy.

Wang reminded us that, although it may not appear so at first, ride-sharing is a fairly big market, with 2.3 billion long-distance trips occurring every year, with 76 percent of those in single-occupant vehicles.

So, with a new mobile app and some new tech, Ridejoy is looking for a way to better capture those users. In terms of safety, Ridejoy’s procedures have generally relied on users vetting other drivers and passengers through social networks (Wang tells us that 75 percent of users sign on via Facebook), along with user reviews and references.

While Ridejoy’s model is fairly similar to Zimride, in July it rolled out a feature that allows people to scan their driver’s licenses and passports, which the startup then verifies and allows them to post that to their profile. Another way of ensuring that you’re not catching a ride with a crazed, license-less fugitive — and once that differentiates from Zimride and other ride-sharers.

Ridejoy’s iPhone app also includes another cool distinguishing feature in its ability to serve users with flexible matching, pairing users by route instead of city-to-city. Users can also automatically receive notifications when drivers and passengers are going to be taking the same route you are/will be traveling, along with getting the scoop on other users before the ride, like photos, bios, etc.

Now users can also browse popular destinations on Ridejoy, view itineraries, pay and share costs by scanning their credit cards and activate a new feature called “Autopilot,” which aims to save Ridejoy searchers time and effort by automatically finding and confirming personalized ride matches.

In terms of cost, Ridejoy suggests a price before each trip (which drivers can change if they want), which is on average around $35 or $40. The startup puts a cap on how much drivers can charger per mile ($0.50) to prevent drivers from bleeding their passengers dry. Though all in all, they said — in the spirit of Burning Man — many of its passengers are more interested in meeting people and having company during long trips than using the service to turn a profit.

As for Ridejoy itself (and its monetization), the startup takes a 15 percent cut on credit card transactions processed for each trip.

For more, find Ridejoy at home here, and app here.

Social TV app maker GetGlue is already successful, with 3 million users and more than 500 million interactions with its mobile apps. That includes check-ins, likes, and reviews of TV shows and movies, showing pretty good engagement for its existing user base. But now it’s coming out with an iPad app that it believes will go above and beyond what it’s users have been able to do on the smaller screen.

GetGlue HD focuses on content discovery, providing a more personalized experience for its users, allowing them to get information and personalized recommendations for TV shows. It takes advantage of a user’s previous check-in data, as well as likes and ratings, to determine which shows at any given time a user might like. The whole idea is to re-imagine the electronic program guide — you know, that crappy interface on your cable set-top box you can never find anything on.

Users get recommendations not just for that night or even that week, but also get updates and can receive notifications about upcoming television shows and premieres well in advance. It also gives advanced information about certain types of events — for example, the score of the local baseball game or reviews for new movies coming out over the weekend. Users can also find new shows on streaming services like iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon.

We get a demo of the new app from GetGlue CEO Alex Iskold. Check the video above to see what the new app looks like.

Photobucket is one of the oldest sites dedicated to photo and video sharing — and, at 100 million users, and 3.5 billion images served per day, and 10 billion photos stored — one of the biggest. But with the rise of other photo sharing and storage options from Facebook (955 monthly active users), Twitter (500m registered users), Instagram, Yfrog and so many more, its position as a go-to place for storing and sharing images has eroded. Now the company wants to tacle that head-on with a new redesign that upgrades the user experience with new look, better uploading and a new social feature called Photobucket Stories that creates Timeline-like narratives that friends can use collaboratively to create image-based recollections of an event.

The changes could not come a moment too soon. It was only a week ago that Photobucket landed in the news with a story about how dodgy “fuskers” were using sneaky programs to mine private photos on the site and nude ones to Reddit and other sites. If that wasn’t bad enough, the follow up question that this story raised, “Remember Photobucket?” kind of says it all about how some regard Photobucket’s relevance today.

And with a possibly reinvigorated Flickr coming onto the scene, and a Facebook redoubled with an Instagram acquisition, the time is ripe for Photobucket to update.

Tom Munro, Photobucket’s CEO, points out that there is now a gap in the market that Photobucket wants to fill: the world now has too many ways to take pictures and too many places to store them. People now need a site that can provide some kind of “defragmentation” function.

“Everyone has a phone in their pocket, many also still use cameras, and sometimes more than one,” he points out. “But only half of us back up pictures on a regular basis.” And when we do, it’s often in a mish-mash of places: our hardrives, the cloud-storage services provided by third parties like Facebook and Instagram, and more.

He cites a recent study from InfoTrends that showed that 45% of respondents said they have lost digital pictures, “and that number has been climbing every year. Management is becoming a big challenge.”

The idea behind the new Photobucket is to take away some of that hardship. New desktop uploaders have been created that complement an automated uploading service that is already available on Photobucket’s mobile apps.

While users will still have to make the decision to upload pictures to Photobucket, and then manually select which ones to upload, there is still a lot left to human laziness and disorganization. So where Photobucket’s unification principle might come into play best is in the new Stories feature.

Stories will only get turned on in September, after the launch of the beta, but it’s an interesting idea: users can collaborate together on a communal pinboard — or “canvas”, as Photobucket calls it — contributing their own pictures, video and text, to form part of larger narratives with those of their friends. Again, the aim is to bring good pictures out into the light and bring them together with other people’s relevant pictures.

“Our phones have become the equivalent of a shoebox,” he says, referring to how people have stored printed pictures for years before the move to digital devices, where the vast majority no longer get printed. “We take so many, but we may share one or two and the rest we forget about. This is about trying to bring these out and together,” says Munro.

These pictures can come from any other source — your own phone or camera, or another third-party site — but with the Stories they all get consolidated into one place, and under one theme or event. Munro notes that any pictures from the Stories automatically get copied into a user’s photo database as well.

These Stories will also be another way for Photobucket to extend itself outside of its own walled garden. People will be able to post Stories, for example, on their Facebook Timelines. For now, the idea is that clicking on these will take you to the Photobucket site, but Munro notes that it is currently working with Facebook on ways of either consuming them in-line in the Timeline — and possibly creating a separate Facebook app to improve the experience even further.

Photobucket is different from many other photo-sharing sites in that it has built out its own server infrastructure — it doesn’t rely on Amazon or anyone else. That was one unique selling point when Photobucket won its deal with Twitter — the site powers all of Twitter’s photo and video clips (the traffic that this deal generates is confidential and not calculated as part of Photobucket’s stated traffic numbers). Whether that is the best way forward is another question. “We might have done things differently if we were creating the service from scratch today,” Munro admitted.

But that has possibly also given the company a lot more flexibility in how it’s approached its monetization model. To date, Photobucket has been a primarily free site, and that will not change in the upgrade. In fact, the consumer-facing site makes most of its money from advertising that runs alongside the photo service, so it needs all the traffic it can get. But it is also starting to introduce more paid, tiers now, too.

“Photobucket has been a free site,” Munro says, “and we will continue to have a great free service for users, but when a certain threshold is hit users will have to subscribe.”

The site will have a 2 gigabyte threshold for free images, which Munro says was decided based on historical use of the site — most users store less than this. Photobucket will charge a fee of $29.99 annually for more pictures up to 20 gigabytes. Tiers above that, he says, are “competitively priced.”

Photobucket has also given TechCrunch some codes for the new beta version. The first 50 to click here get in without having to queue.

And as for the fuskers, Photobucket still doesn’t seem to have put any new controls in place to prevent this, but it is trying to make more of an effort to communicate to users how they be more proactive in making sure their images don’t get abused in this way. The problem is more, it seems, about legacy, neglected uploads than active users, although if this redesign works as Photobucket hopes, it will have significantly less dormant users in future than it perhaps has today.

Alcatel-Lucent is releasing a methodology for APIs that it is making available through Creative Commons. It is part of a new consulting practice the telecommunications company has established to help its service partners and enterprise customers develop, deploy and maintain APIs.

Alcatel-Lucent has made APIs a focal aspect of its business by offering them to carriers and other service providers. Through this work, it has provided the company with enough experience to know what issues companies face when they embark on an API strategy. They are packaging that experience into the methodology and its consulting service. Look to the Alcatel-Lucent blog for updates about the methodology.

The new initiative is testament to the widespread adoption of APIs. You see this in the growth from companies such as Apigee and Mashery which have built significant businesses by offering API gateways.

If unfamiliar with the concept, APIs act as interfaces between applications. They’ve become immensely popular through services such as Twitter, which made APIs widely available when the company launched.  Those APIs helped spawn apps such as Tweetdeck, which Twitter later acquired. Programmable Web now has almost 7,000 APIs in its directory, up from 5,000 in February. Programmable Web is owned by Alcatel-Lucent.

Alcatel Lucent is making the methodology available through Creative Commons as a way to create a rising tide of customers who then have the knowledge and confidence to invest in an API strategy.

Even though APIs are more widely accepted, most companies still do not have the knowledge and experience to craft a successful strategy to take advantage of changing business models.

Even the most experienced Web companies have problems:

In the post-war boom, the construction of U.S. highways led to the modern trucking age that delivered good to massive distribution centers. Today, the model is shifting to online commerce and the distribution of data through APIs. It’s these APIs that allow for the most traditional of companies to become service providers. For instance, insurance companies now can be in touch with their customers more than once a year by offering apps that use APIs to surface the best gas deals in any geographic region.

But there are all sorts of pitfalls that businesses face when they develop their own apps. They may turn off an API and launch a new one only to find developers screaming that they still need access to it. Instead, companies need to deprecate APIs over the span of a year as Google has recently begun to do.

The Alcatel-Lucent API Lifecycle Methodology will be designed to help companies develop a repeatable process. It’s also the core to the company’s consulting business:

Laura Merling of Alacatel-Lucent says that companies need to win over developers. The developers will build off the API and by extension increase the distribution of the company’s app. To win them over means knowing API best practices.

“If you want to win over developers, you need to understand the process,” Merling said.

Kin Lane, who writes the blog, API Evangelist, said that up until now, the debate around APIs has been dominated by technical pundits. He added:

Alcatel’s lifecycle methodology moves the conversation forward into solid business, legal and marketing approaches that are critical to successfully deploying APIs and building healthy developer driven ecosystems. This move shows the API industry has matured and is ready for prime time. And the fact that Alcatel released the methodology under a creative commons license shows they get the true essence of the API movement.

I agree with Lane. Alcatel-Lucent has developed something here of real value. It shows how far the market has come. At its core is a more universal belief in openness. It’s that cultural shift that will lead to the continued propagation of APIs. All we need now is for more companies to learn the best way to develop them so their apps get distributed far and wide.

Zalando, the shoe and fashion e-commerce site originally started as a clone of Zappos by the Samwer brothers, is gearing up for another phase of growth. The company today announced that it has closed another round of funding, adding J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Quadrant Capital Advisors as its newest backers.

As with past rounds of financing — and as with many other Samwer investments — exact financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a Zalando spokesperson says that now both J.P. Morgan and Quadrant now each own around 1% of the company. Zalando’s revenues in 2011 were €510 million ($626 million), but it has not disclosed any figures for 2012. We are trying to find out more detail and will update if we do.

Since first opening for business in 2008, Zalando has expanded from shoes to more general fashion — a trend we have seen with other shoe e-commerce startups in the U.S. such as JustFab and ShoeDazzle. The company is also extending its geographic footprint. From its origins in Germany, it is now live in 12 markets and is opening for business in Poland and Norway “soon.” It says it is also in the process of building a major logistics center in Erfurt, Germany — logistics being such a central part of any e-commerce operation.

International is definitely a focus for the Samwer-backed Zalando. “We’re pleased that we were able to secure such internationally established investors as J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Quadrant Capital Advisors. 2012 has been a very successful year for us so far. Together with our shareholders we want to continue along this path,” said Zalando Managing Director Rubin Ritter, in a statement.  ”We will continue to invest in growth as well as building a solid company.”

J.P. Morgan notes that Zalando’s customer base — numbers not disclosed — was also part of the attraction. “The company has quickly established itself as a leading online fashion retailer in Europe. We are impressed with Zalando’s large, growing, and loyal customer base as well as the breadth of products offered on the company’s e-commerce platform,” Robert Cousin, Managing Director, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, said in a statement.

Other investors in Zalando include the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet (owning 44%), Holtzbrinck Ventures (13%), Tengelmann Ventures (8%), Investment AB Kinnevik (16%) and DST Global (9%).