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Here Technologies and Argus join our Tel Aviv lineup

Published April 11, 2018

Let’s share a bit more about our agenda for TechCrunch’s Tel Aviv event. This year, the event will focus on mobility and everything around it, from autonomous vehicles, to sensors, drones and security.

That’s why I’m incredibly excited to announce two great speakers. Argus Cyber Security co-founder and CEO Ofer Ben Noon and Here Technologies Head of Mobility Liad Itzhak will join us on stage.

By focusing on mobility, we have the opportunity to spend more time talking about the companies making the magic happen behind the scene.

Here Technologies has been around for more than 30 years. But the company is currently going through a sort of renaissance. After flourishing as an independent company and getting acquired by Nokia, the company is now owned by Audi, BMW and Daimler.

In many ways, mapping technology is the new oil. Car manufacturers need to control mapping data to develop self-driving technologies and services. And Liad Itzhak is well aware of that as he was previously working for Waze and Google.

As for Argus Cyber Security, the company is well-positioned to become one of the companies that matter when it comes to security in the mobility industry. Argus has been working with some of the biggest car manufacturers out there to protect their connected vehicles.

Ofer Ben Noon is a cyber security veteran and the co-founder and CEO of Argus. He’s going to talk about the security risks associated with the cars of the future.

These two speakers will have plenty of interesting things to say on June 7 at the TechCrunch Tel Aviv conference.

Buy tickets here and see you at the Tel Aviv Convention Center!

TravelPerk grabs $21M to make booking business trips suck less

Published April 11, 2018

TravelPerk, a Barcelona-based SaaS startup that’s built an end-to-end business travel platform, has closed a $21 million Series B round, led by Berlin-based Target Global and London’s Felix Capital. Earlier investors Spark Capital and Sunstone also participated in the round, alongside new investor Amplo.

When we last spoke to the startup back in June 2016 — as it was announcing a $7M Series A — it had just 20 customers. It’s now boasting more than 1,000, name-checking “high growth” companies such as Typeform, TransferWise, Outfittery, GetYourGuide, GoCardless, Hotjar, and CityJet among its clients, and touting revenue growth of 1,200% year-on-year.

Co-founder and CEO Avi Meir tells us the startup is “on pace” to generate $100M in GMV this year.

Meir’s founding idea, back in 2015, was to create a rewards program based around dynamic budgeting for business trips. But after conversations with potential customers about their pain-points, the team quickly pivoted to target a broader bundle of business travel booking problems.

The mission now can be summarized as trying to make the entire business travel journey suck less — from booking flights and hotels; to admin tools for managing policies; analytics; customer support; all conducted within what’s billed as a “consumer-like experience” to keep end-users happy. Essentially it’s offering end-to-end travel management for its target business users.

“Travel and finance managers were frustrated by how they currently manage travel and looked for an all in one tool that JUST WORKS without having to compare rates with Skyscanner, be redirected to different websites, write 20 emails back and forth with a travel agent to coordinate a simple trip for someone, and suffer bad user experience,” says Meir.

“We understood that in order to fix business travel there is no way around but diving into it head on and create the world’s best OTA (online travel agency), combined with the best in class admin tools needed in order to manage the travel program and a consumer grade, smart user experience that travelers will love. So we became a full blown platform competing head on with the big TMCs (travel management companies) and the legacy corporate tools (Amex GBT, Concur, Egencia…) .”

He claims TravelPerk’s one-stop business trip shop now has the world’s largest bookable inventory (“all the travel agent inventory but also booking.com, Expedia, Skyscanner, Airbnb… practically any flight/hotel on the internet — only we have that”).

Target users at this stage are SMEs (up to 1,500 employees), with tech and consulting currently its strongest verticals, though Meir says it “really runs the gamut”. While the current focus is Europe, with its leading markets being the UK, Germany and Spain.

TravelPerk’s business model is freemium — and its pitch is it can save customers more than a fifth in annual business travel costs vs legacy corporate tools/travel agents thanks to the lack of commissions, free customer support etc.

But it also offers a premium tier with additional flexibility and perks — such as corporate hotel rates and a travel agent service for group bookings — for those customers who do want to pay to upgrade the experience.

On the competition front the main rivals are “old corporate travel agencies and TMC”, according to Meir, along with larger players such as Egencia (by Expedia) and Concur (SAP company).

“There are a few startups doing what we are doing in the U.S. like TripActions, NexTravel, as well as some smaller ones that are popping up but are in an earlier stage,” he notes.

“Since our first round… TravelPerk has been experiencing some incredible growth compared to any tech benchmark I know,” he adds. “We’ve found a stronger product market fit than we imagined and grew much faster than planned. It seems like everyone is unhappy with the way they are currently booking and managing business travel. Which makes this a $1.25 trillion market, ready for disruption.”

The Series B will be put towards scaling “fast”, with Meir arguing that TravelPerk has landed upon a “rare opportunity” to drive the market.

“Organic growth has been extremely fast and we have an immediate opportunity to scale the business fast, doing what we are doing right now at a bigger scale,” he says.

Commenting in a statement, Antoine Nussenbaum, partner at Felix Capital, also spies a major opportunity. “The corporate travel industry is one of the largest global markets yet to be disrupted online. At Felix Capital we have a high conviction about a new era of consumerization of enterprise software,” he says.

While Target Global general partner Shmuel Chafets describes TravelPerk as “very well positioned to be a market leader in the business travel space with a product that makes business travel as seamless and easy as personal travel”.

“We’re excited to support such an experienced and dedicated team that has a strong track record in the travel space,” he adds in a supporting statement. “TravelPerk is our first investment in Barcelona. We believe in a pan-European startup ecosystem and we look forward to seeing more opportunities in this emerging startup hub.”

Flush with fresh funding, the team’s next task is even more recruitment. “We’ll grow our teams all around with emphasis on engineering, operations and customer support. We’re also planning to expand, opening local offices in 4-5 new countries within the upcoming year and a half,” says Meir.

He notes the company has grown from 20 to 100 employees over the past 12 months already but adds that it will continue “hiring aggressively”.

Zuckerberg’s boring testimony is a big win for Facebook

Published April 11, 2018

Mark Zuckerberg ran his apology scripts, trotted out his lists of policy fixes and generally dulled the Senate into submission. And that constitutes success for Facebook.

Zuckerberg testified before the joint Senate judiciary and commerce committee today, capitalizing on the lack of knowledge of the politicians and their surface-level questions. Half the time, Zuckerberg got to simply paraphrase blog posts and statements he’d already released. Much of the other half, he merely explained how basic Facebook functionality works.

The senators hadn’t done their homework, but he had. All that training with D.C. image consultants paid off.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a joint hearing of the US Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

Sidestepping any gotcha questions or meme-worthy sound bites, Zuckerberg’s repetitive answers gave the impression that there’s little left to uncover, whether or not that’s true. He made a convincing argument that Facebook is atoning for its sins, is cognizant of its responsibility and has a concrete plan in place to improve data privacy.

With just five minutes per senator, and them each with a queue of questions to get through, few focused on the tougher queries, and even fewer had time for follow-ups to dig for real answers.

Did Facebook cover up the Cambridge Analytica scandal or decide against adding privacy protections earlier to protect its developer platform? Is it a breach of trust for Zuckerberg and other executives to have deleted their Facebook messages out of recipients’ inboxes? How has Facebook used a lack of data portability to inhibit the rise of competitors? Why doesn’t Instagram let users export their data the way they can from Facebook?

The public didn’t get answers to any of those questions today. Just Mark’s steady voice regurgitating Facebook’s talking points. Investors rewarded Facebook for its monotony with a 4.5 percent share price boost.

That’s not to say today’s hearing wasn’t effective. It’s just that the impact was felt before Zuckerberg waded through a hundred photographers to take his seat in the Senate office.

Facebook knew this day was coming, and worked to build Zuckerberg a fortress of facts he could point to no matter what he got asked:

Was Facebook asleep at the wheel during the 2016 election? Yesterday it revealed it had deleted the accounts of Russian GRU intelligence operatives in June 2016.
How will Facebook prevent this from happening again? Last week it announced plans to require identity and location verification for any political advertiser or popular Facebook Page, and significantly restricted its developer platform.
Is Facebook taking this seriously? Zuckerberg wrote in his prepared testimony for today that Facebook is doubling its security and content moderation team from 10,000 to 20,000, and that “protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits.”
Is Facebook sorry? “We didn’t take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is and that was a huge mistake. That was my mistake,” Zuckerberg has said, over and over.

Facebook may never have made such sweeping changes and apologies had it not had today and tomorrow’s testimony on the horizon. But this defensive strategy also led to few meaningful disclosures, to the detriment of the understanding of the public and the Senate — and to the benefit of Facebook.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

We did learn that Facebook is working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller on his investigation into election interference. We learned that Zuckerberg thinks it was a mistake not to suspend the advertising account of Cambridge Analytica when Facebook learned it had bought user data from Dr. Aleksandr Kogan. And we learned that the senate will “haul in” Cambridge Analytica for a future hearing about data privacy.

None of those are earth-shaking.

Perhaps the only fireworks during the testimony came when Senator Ted Cruz laid into Zuckerberg over the Gizmodo report citing that Facebook’s trending topics curators suppressed conservative news trends. Cruz badgered Zuckerberg about whether he believes Facebook is politically neutral, whether Facebook has ever taken down Pages from liberal groups like Planned Parenthood or MoveOn.org, if he knows the political leanings of Facebook’s content moderators and whether Facebook fired Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey over his [radical conservative] political views.

Zuckerberg maintained that he and Facebook are neutral, but that last question was the only one of the day that seemed to visibly perturb him. “That is a specific personnel matter than seems like it would be inappropriate…” Zuckerberg said before Cruz interrupted, pushing the CEO to exasperatedly respond, “Well then I can confirm that it was not because of a political view.” It should be noted that Cruz has received numerous campaign donations from Luckey.

Full exchange between Senator @tedcruz and Mark Zuckerberg where Senator Ted Cruz questions the Facebook CEO about the censorship of Conservatives on his platform. pic.twitter.com/c6d7jwDbnJ

— The Columbia Bugle (@ColumbiaBugle) April 10, 2018

This was the only time Zuckerberg seemed flapped, because he knows the stakes of the public perception of Facebook’s political leanings. Zuckerberg, many Facebook employees and Facebook’s home state of California are all known to lean left. But if the company itself is seen that way, conservative users could flee, shattering Facebook’s network effect. Yet again, Zuckerberg nimbly avoided getting cornered here, and was aided by the bell signaling the end of Cruz’s time. He never noticeably raised his voice, lashed back at the senators or got off message.

By the conclusion of the five hours of questioning, the senators themselves were admitting they hadn’t watched the day’s full testimony. Viewers at home had likely returned to their lives. Even the press corps’ eyes were glazing over. But Zuckerberg was prepared for the marathon. He maintained pace through the finish line. And he made it clear why marathons aren’t TV spectator sports.

The question is no longer what revelations would come from Mr. Zuckerberg going to Washington. Tomorrow’s testimony is likely to go similarly. It’s whether Facebook can coherently execute on the data privacy promises it made leading up to today. This will be a “never-ending battle” as Zuckerberg said, dragging out over many years. And again, that’s in Facebook’s interest. Because in the meantime, everyone’s going back to scrolling their feeds.

Zuckerberg tells Congress Facebook is not listening to you through your phone

Published April 10, 2018

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially shot down the conspiracy theory that the social network has some way of keeping tabs on its users by tapping into the mics on people’s smartphones. During Zuckerberg’s testimony before the Senate this afternoon, Senator Gary Peters had asked the CEO if the social network is mining audio from mobile devices — something his constituents have been asking him about, he said.

Zuckerberg denied this sort of audio data collection was taking place.

The fact that so many people believe that Facebook is “listening” to their private conversations is representative of how mistrustful users have grown of the company and its data privacy practices, the Senator noted.

“I think it’s safe to say very simply that Facebook is losing the trust of an awful lot of Americans as a result of this incident,” said Peters, tying his constituents’ questions about mobile data mining to their outrage over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Questions about Facebook’s mobile data collection practices aren’t anything new, however.

In fact, Facebook went on record back in 2016 to state — full stop — that it does not use your phone’s microphone to inform ads or News Feed stories.

Despite this, it’s something that keeps coming up, time and again. The Wall Street Journal even ran an explainer video about the conspiracy last month. And yet none of the reporting seems to quash the rumor.

People simply refuse to believe it’s not happening. They’ll tell you of very specific times when something they swear they only uttered aloud quickly appeared in their Facebook News Feed.

Perhaps their inability to believe Facebook on the matter is more of an indication of how precise — and downright creepy — Facebook’s ad targeting capabilities have become over the years.

Peters took the opportunity today to ask Zuckerberg this question straight on today, during Zuckerberg’s testimony.

“Something that I’ve been hearing a lot from folks who have been coming up to me and talking about a kind of experience they’ve had where they’re having a conversation with friends — not on the phone, just talking. And then they see ads popping up fairly quickly on their Facebook,” Peters explained. “So I’ve heard constituents fear that Facebook is mining audio from their mobile devices for the purposes of ad targeting — which I think speaks to the lack of trust that we’re seeing here.”

He then asked Zuckerberg to state if this is something Facebook did.

“Yes or no: Does Facebook use audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about its users?,” Peters asked.

Zuckerberg responded simply: “No.”

The CEO then added that his answer meant “no” in terms of the conspiracy theory that keeps getting passed around, but noted that the social network does allow users to record videos, which have an audio component. That was a bit of an unnecessary clarification, though, given that the question was about surreptitious recording, not something users were explicitly recording media to share.

“Hopefully that will dispel a lot of what I’ve been hearing,” Peters said, after hearing Zuckerberg’s response.

We wouldn’t be too sure.

There have been a number of lengthy explanations of the technical limitations regarding a project of this scale, which have also pointed out how easy it would be to detect this practice, if it were true. But there are still those people out there who believe things to be true because they feel true.

And at the end of the day, the fact that this conspiracy refuses to die says something about how Facebook users view the company: as a stalker that creeps on their privacy, and then can’t be believed when it tells you, “no, trust me, we don’t do that.”

Mark Zuckerberg: “We do not sell data to advertisers”

Published April 10, 2018

While many of us in the tech world are familiar with Facebook’s business model, there is a common misconception among people that Facebook collects information about you and then sells that information to advertisers.

Zuckerberg wants everyone (especially the U.S. Senate) to know that’s not the case, and has laid forth the most simple example to explain it.

During his testimony, the Facebook CEO clarified to Senator John Cornyn that Facebook does not sell data.

There is a very common misconception that we sell data to advertisers, and we do not sell data to advertisers. What we allow is for advertisers to tell us who they want to reach and then we do the placement. So, if an advertiser comes to us and says, ‘Alright, I’m a ski shop and I want to sell skis to women,’ then we might have some sense because people shared skiing related content or said they were interested in that. They shared whether they’re a woman. And then we can show the ads to the right people without that data ever changing hands and going to the advertiser. That’s a very fundamental part of how our model works and something that is often misunderstood.

While, again, this may seem straightforward to many of us, Zuckerberg found himself having to explain more than once that Facebook does not sell data during his Senate testimony.

The entire Myst series will be re-released for Windows 10

Published April 10, 2018

Myst holds a special place in the hearts of many. Released in 1993, it was unlike any video game most had seen at the time — and yet, its DNA lingers in countless games released today. It was also the game that made tens of thousands of kids beg their parents for a CD drive.

With the game’s 25th anniversary just months away, Myst has found itself in a place no one could have predicted in ’93: Kickstarter.

The game’s original developers, Cyan, have managed to get the rights to all seven games in the Myst universe, and have turned to Kickstarter to re-release it as one big box set. After launching this morning with a target of raising $247,500 dollars, it’s already smashed through its goal and is currently sitting a bit shy of $500,000.

The games included in the set:

Myst: Masterpiece edition
Riven: The sequel to Myst
Myst 3: Exile
Myst 4: Revelation
Myst 5: End of Ages
Uru: Complete Chronicles
realMyst: Masterpiece (the 3D Myst re-make released in 2000)

$49 gets you digital copies of each game, while $99 gets you DVD copies in a box built to look like a Myst book. Tiers above that include a bunch of real-world goodies, from a recreation of Gehn’s in-game pen/inkwell to original, hand-drawn concept art.

Oh, and they built a friggin’ Linking book, complete with a 800×480 LCD screen that plays video fly-throughs of the game’s environments when the book is opened. (For the unfamiliar: in the Myst universe, “Linking books” transport those that touch the book to a far-off destination.)

They’ve updated the games to work on “modern systems,, but there’s a bit of a good news/bad news situation there. The good news: it’ll work on Windows 10. The bad news: most of the games won’t work on MacOS. That’s a bit of a drag, given that the series started its life on the Mac — but Cyan says getting everything running on the Mac would take resources they “just don’t have.” Cyan notes that while they’ll continue to sell the updated games once the Kickstarter is over, the special box set is a Kickstarter-only deal.

As arstechnica points out, much of the Myst series is already available for Windows 10 — only Myst III and IV had never been updated for compatibility, as the rights were held by a different publisher. But this Kickstarter brings it all together for a whole new generation, with some real-world treats thrown in for the longtime fans.

Zuckerberg admits it was a mistake not to ban Cambridge Analytica’s ads

Published April 10, 2018

Facebook didn’t ban Cambridge Analytica when it found out in 2015 that it had received user data from Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, and Zuckerberg called that a mistake during his testimony before the Senate. Cambridge Analytica has since been banned.

Zuckerberg explained that “I want to correct one thing that I said earlier in response to a question from Senator Leahy. He had asked why we didn’t ban Cambridge Analytica at the time when we learned of them in 2015. And I answered that what my understanding was was that they were not on the platform, were not an app developer or advertiser. When I went back and met with my team afterwards, they let me know that Cambridge Analytica actually did start as an advertiser later in 2015, so we could have in theory banned them back then, and made a mistake by not doing so.”

NEW YORK, NY – SEPTEMBER 19: CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix speaks at the 2016 Concordia Summit – Day 1 at Grand Hyatt New York on September 19, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Concordia Summit)

When the Guardian informed Facebook about Kogan sharing user data to Cambridge Analytica, Facebook banned Kogan, and required Cambridge Analytica to formally certify that it had deleted all the improperly attained user data. Cambridge Analytica did so, Zuckerberg confirmed in his prepared testimony for today. But Facebook then stopped short of blocking Cambridge Analytica from buying ads on its platform. The company went on to work with the Trump campaign to help it optimize political messaging and ad targeting.

Had Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica at the time, it wouldn’t have been able to buy ads directly on behalf of political campaigns with which it worked. However, the company might still have been able to help these campaigns to optimize their ads, so a 2015 ban wouldn’t have necessarily prevented second-hand use of improperly attained data.

Zuckerberg testifies at congressional hearings

New research shows successful founders are far older than the Valley stereotype

Published April 10, 2018

There is a classic stereotype of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur: often a computer science nerd, almost certainly male, ambitious and, most importantly, young — very young. Founders who have been covered extensively by the media, like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, started their companies still glimpsing their teenage years, and that reputation has spread widely across the industry.

Now, a group of economics researchers have conducted a comprehensive investigation of the starting age of founders of high-growth startups — and found that that stereotype just doesn’t match the data.

In a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim and Javier Miranda connected a variety of administrative data sets to investigate the age of founders of new businesses, and particularly the age of founders of high-performance startups. Administrative data sets are the “gold standard” of data, because unlike surveys or other statistical sampling methods, they represent the entire population under consideration.

What they found is that the average age of a startup founder is about 41.9 years of age among all startups that hire at least one employee, and among the top 0.1 percent of highest-growth startups, that average age moves up to 45 years old. Those ages are taken from the time of the founding of the company.

The researchers broke down the population of founders along a number of lines, including geography and industry. They found little difference in their results between subcategories, and, in many cases, the subcategory definition actually increased the average age. For instance, industries like oil and gas can have average founder ages as high as 51.4 years old. The researchers wrote that “The only category where the mean ages appear (modestly) below age 40 is when the firm has VC-backing. The youngest category is VC-backed firms in New York, where the mean founder age was 38.7.”

One interesting dynamic in the data is that older entrepreneurs appear correlated with better startup performance. “For example, the 1,700 founders of the fastest growing new ventures (1 in 1,000) in our universe of U.S. firms had an average age of 45.0 (compared to 43.7 for the top 1% and 42.1 for the top 5%),” the researchers wrote.

Indeed, it’s not just that older entrepreneurs are more successful, but that younger founders are less successful. “Overall, we see that younger founders appear strongly disadvantaged in their tendency to produce the highest-growth companies,” the researchers wrote (italics in original). One reason, they argue, is that older founders tend to have more years of experience in their industries.

With those results out of the way, there is a critical question: If indeed the most successful ventures are run on average by founders in their 40s, why is it that VCs seem to focus so intently on younger founders who seem to be wildly statistically unsuccessful?

The authors speculate that the reason could be that younger founders are “more in need of early-stage external finance” because older founders have the connections, networks and personal wealth to fund their ventures. VCs don’t have access to those deals, so they gravitate to the kinds of deals they can potentially fund.

I think there is a more blunt reason for this dynamic: VCs believe they have “pattern recognition” abilities that they simply don’t have. Instead, they rely on suppositions and stereotypes that don’t match the underlying data on startup success. The same reason why older founders are ignored by the ecosystem is the same reason why women and other minorities struggle in the Valley: It’s really not about what you build, but what you look like while building it. Data like those found in this paper should force all of us to reevaluate what kind of founders with whom we should be partnering.

Mark Zuckerberg: ‘There will always be a version of Facebook that is free’

Published April 10, 2018

Today during Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the Senate, the Facebook CEO reiterated that “there will always be a version of Facebook that is free.”

In the midst of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the user data of up to 87 million people was sold by a third-party developer to Trump Campaign-linked firm Cambridge Analytica, there has been talk of Facebook potentially adding a subscription layer.

The scandal has brought to light the heart of a problem that many have been well aware of: if you’re not buying a product, you are the product.

Last week, when asked if there might be a way for users to opt out of being targeted for ads, Sandberg responded saying they’d have to pay for it.

“We have different forms of opt-out,” Sandberg replied. “We don’t have an opt-out at the highest level. That would be a paid product.”

Our own Josh Constine made an argument that ad-free subscriptions could save Facebook. And while there’s no word on an ad-free subscription, Zuckerberg did at least leave room for it in the future, noting that there will always be a version of Facebook that is free.

“How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” Senator Orrin Hatch asked Zuckerberg.

“Senator, we run ads.”

A new app called Garden helps you stay in touch with friends and family without Facebook

Published April 10, 2018

Facebook has become the de facto way people today keep up with their friends and family and, at times, their wider network of professional acquaintances and colleagues. But its inattention to user data protection is leading some people looking for an out. A new app called Garden, officially launching today, wants to offer people a more private and personal way to keep up with those who are important to them.

The app was created by Zander Adell, previously the CEO of the package delivery startup Doorman, which shut down last fall. Doorman had tried to solve the problem with last mile delivery by allowing people to schedule when their online orders were actually delivered. The business had taken a lot of work, as many startups do. And that distracted Adell from maintaining his other relationships.

“I built Garden because I lost a friend,” he says. “I got so busy running my last startup that I neglected some of my closest personal relationships with the assumption that we’d connect when life calmed down. Years went by and life never got any easier,” Adell admits.

He also believes that social media has tricked users into thinking they have stronger relationships with others than they really do – that “liking” a post is some sort of meaningful experience, for example, when it’s actually not.

“Maintaining a real personal or business relationship that adds value and meaning to your life takes regular and substantive effort,” Adell explains. “Just like you can’t expect the plants in a garden to stay healthy without regularly watering them, you shouldn’t expect your relationships to thrive without putting in the time.”

Garden initially grew out of Adell’s own efforts in better tending to his relationships which took the form of a big spreadsheet where he wrote down when he last caught up with someone. He found it helped him better keep up with both his business contacts and his personal relationships.

When he heard from others who had also built their own spreadsheets for a similar purpose, he thought it may make sense to offer the solution as an app instead.

With Garden, you set a reminder frequency on your contacts in your phone, and indicate how often you want to keep up with the person in question – weekly, monthly, quarterly, every six months, etc. When you do catch up with a friend, you can leave notes in the app and write details about your last conversation. In effect, it’s a personal CRM.

Of course, CRM-in-an-app has been done before, but the focus is almost always on business relationships – not personal ones. Garden could effectively manage both.

The app also plays in the same space as all those Address Book replacement apps once did, few of which have lasted. For example, Tinder bought Humin, Brewster’s team joined RBI, and Cobook sold to FullContact.

But perhaps now people will give new apps that help them maintain their relationships another look.

Garden is well-designed if fairly simple – it’s a contact manager with push notifications. The hard work of actually keeping up will have to be done by you – you can’t just like a few posts and call it day. But this may be what some people want right now as they wean themselves off Facebook.

Given that Garden is a database of your personal relationships, Adell says that data privacy is critical. The data itself is hosted with AWS in the cloud, and transferred securely, he says. It will also not spam your friends as many apps in the past have done, Adell promises.

That said, contacts apps have gotten themselves into trouble before – bugs exposed private information, and people have always been a bit uncomfortable in granting apps permission to their private contacts. Garden, like others, asks for access to your Contacts to do its work. And that will give some people pause.

Adell says the project is something he bootstrapped himself, but is his full-time focus for the time being.

The app is currently a free download on iOS, but may become ad-supported at a later date.

Image credit, top: Georgian Style Flower Garden by ricoeurian on Flickr; others: Garden