Uncrunched

A few months ago Daily Booth CEO Brian Pokorny told me that most of his team was working on a second product. “What is it?” I asked, “A mobile photo sharing app?”

I was joking, because everyone and their mother seemed to launch a mobile photo sharing app in the last year or so, to the point that we groaned whenever we saw a new one.

“Yes. And it’s going to liberate the countless photos that everyone has stuck in their phones.”

“Ha ha. Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“No, you’re not serious.”

“Yes.”

“Hah.”

And so the conversation went. I didn’t believe him until he pulled out his iPhone and showed me an early internal version of Batch, his new mobile photo sharing app.

Batch is now in the iPhone app store.

And it is absolutely amazing.

Batch allows people to create albums, called “Batches,” with photos from an event or whatever. Yeah, not so exciting. But it lets you auto upload them as you take them from the app, and you can mass select photos already stuck on your iPhone as well.

That last sentence is the important one. We all have hundreds or thousands of photos on our phones that we’ve never bothered to upload to Facebook or Flickr. Batch makes it exceptionally easy to do that, dozens at a time.

You sign in via Facebook, so it already knows your friends. Tagging them into Batches is really easy as well. They’ve taken a lot of time with the interface and it’s both beautiful, fast and functional.

It’s the perfect app to add to my new iPhone (with Google Voice!). Android users will have to wait a bit to use it.

Photos can be kept private or shared with others. It’s amazing seeing notifications pop up in real time as new photos are added to a Batch while you’re still at an event.

There are some features I’d like to see them add to Batch soon. Multiple people can’t contribute to a single Batch, they have to create their own. So there will be multiple Batches at a single event when all your friends start using this.

I’d also like to have the ability to tag photos, not just batches. And I’d like to be able to download or bookmark individual photos as well. Right now you can only see a list of all Batches you’ve been tagged in. That’s great, but over time that list will become unmanageable.

But the app as it is today is absolutely great, and I’ll be using it constantly. As I tag friends at events they’ll get notifications on Facebook, so they can see the photos. This will spread fast.

As for Daily Booth – Pokorny says it’s still growing nicely (they just passed 1 million users), and the team will continue to develop both products. The company has raised about $7 million to date. It was originally part of Y Combinator.

Try this. You’ll love it.

If you’ve used Uber, there’s a good chance you love it. The company lets users request an immediate black car service from a mobile app. The car usually arrives in a few minutes and takes you wherever you want to go. The fee is automatically charged to your credit card on file.

The service launched in Summer 2010. By February of this year they’d raised $12.5 million, with Benchmark leading the most recent round. That valued the company at $60 million.

Now, Uber says it’s worth $300 million. At least that’s what it’s telling venture capitalists while pitching a new round of financing. Some have passed. But others are still at the table.

Redfin has a classic disruption model. Find a huge inefficient industry (in this case real estate broker fees) and then rip it apart to make consumers happy. The overall size of the market shrinks. But there are huge profits to be made. Investor Josh Kopelman calls it “Shrink a Market!”

Back in 2006 when I first wrote about Redfin this was all just a dream. The company had sold a few homes in the Seattle market, representing buyers instead of traditional brokers and dealers. They then reimbursed 2/3 of the fee back to the buyer, averaging $11,402.

They’ve grown substantially since then. Redfin is now available in twenty or so areas. Since launching in 2006 they’ve represented buyers and sellers in more than $6 billion in home sales, returning a whopping $85 million to consumers. The average reimbursement is now $7,000.

The company is announcing a new round of funding today – around $15 million from Globespan Capital Partners and previous investors Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Greylock Partners. To date, the company has raised nearly $46 million. See TechCrunch for more details.

A good day for the Seattle tech scene, and a great day for Redfin. A bad day for the rest of the real estate industry. Adapt or die, because the real estate broker/dealer scam has gone on long enough.

Here’s the press release:

Redfin Raises $14.85 Million Round Led by Globespan Capital Partners

Oct. 27, 2011 – SEATTLE – Redfin Corporation, the technology-powered real estate brokerage, today announced that Globespan Capital Partners has led a $14.85 million investment in the company. Previous investors, including Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Greylock Partners, also participated in the financing. Prior to this investment, Redfin had raised nearly $31 million, so the new total is almost $46 million.

Redfin, a company of local real estate agents and software engineers working together to give people a smarter way to buy or sell a home, will use the money to launch its service in new cities and to deepen its investment in research and development.

The funding caps another successful year for Redfin. Even as fewer homes have sold nationwide, the company has grown fast. Since launching its service in 2006, Redfin has represented customers in the purchase or sale of more than $6 billion in homes, saving consumers more than $85 million in commissions, an average of more than $7,000 per transaction.

Ninety-seven percent of customers would recommend their Redfin agent to a friend; though Redfin is still most popular among first-time buyers and sellers, the company’s fastest-growth customer segment is now among customers over 45. According to Hitwise, Redfin.com is the U.S.’s fastest-growing brokerage website. Since Redfin tours homes with its own agents, it can publish to its website more than 80,000 notes per year about active listings, which in turn has accelerated traffic growth.

“In Globespan, Redfin has found the perfect partner: an investor committed to customer service as well as technology, who understands from its partners’ Zipcar experience how to grow neighborhood by neighborhood,” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “Not many venture investors appreciate the different ways in which online and retail businesses grow, and even fewer think about the long-term competitive advantage you can create when the two work together.”

“Globespan invested in Redfin for one big reason: service,” said Globespan Managing Director Venky Ganesan. “We had used the site extensively, and talked to customers, so we knew that this was one of the few companies that could deliver consistently higher-quality service than any of its competitors. The more we learned about Redfin’s single-minded service focus, the more we became convinced that Redfin was building the foundation to lead a market that generates $40 – $60 billion in brokerage fees every year.”

As part of the financing, Globespan Managing Director Venky Ganesan is joining Redfin’s Board of Directors. Before Globespan, Mr. Ganesan founded Trigo, a successful product-information company sold to IBM; he also worked as a consultant at McKinsey in Los Angeles and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Alan Smith of Fenwick & West represented Redfin in the financing.

About Redfin
Redfin is a company of local real estate agents and software engineers working together to give people a smarter way to buy or sell a home. Redfin’s agents handle every facet of a transaction, including tours, pricing analyses, negotiations, inspections and closings. The company pays its agents customer-satisfaction bonuses, not commissions, and surveys every client, publishing each survey alongside the agent’s complete deal history.

Redfin’s service is available in the metropolitan areas of Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Portland (Oregon), Seattle, Washington DC, New York’s Long Island and Westchester County as well as most of California, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and Palm Springs. To keep track of our daring exploits, subscribe to blog.redfin.com or our Twitter feed @redfin.

Last week I wrote about how Google Voice junkies can, finally, use the service properly with the iPhone 4S (or any other iPhone Sprint sells). No quirky apps to download that can’t take over the address book or call log anyway. Nope. If you’re willing to live with a Sprint iPhone, you can have it use your Google Voice number natively. It just works perfectly.

Background – Google Voice has never worked properly with the iPhone because Apple didn’t want Google to take over that much control over the phone. But a Sprint deal with Google this year gives every Sprint user the option of either (1) using their Sprint number as a Google Voice number, or (2) replace their Sprint number with their existing Google Voice number.

Then Sprint got the iPhone deal and, BINGO, Google Voice just backdoored their way into the iPhone natively. The only way for Apple to stop this now would be to put a policy in place banning it.

But Apple will not create a policy banning Google Voice on Sprint iPhones.

Here’s what you see when you go through the process on Google Voice. I chose #2 because I want to keep using that Google Voice number. Clicked a button, verified the phone with a code and…bam. I got myself the purest idea of a Google Voice phone to date – one that needs no app whatsoever to work, and work perfectly.

Calls, voicemails and text messages all go through the normal iPhone native apps. And I’ll be using all of those all the time because with Sprint’s horrible data speeds (confirmed by me today, just awful), I won’t be doing much Internet stuff on this very pretty phone.

My next purchase will be a 3 watt cell phone booster, DIY converted to backpack form for portability. It won’t be pretty, but I’ll get a signal everywhere I go, right up until the day I die from brain cancer.