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Managing Talent In A Networked Age, Part I | Reid Hoffman | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | Success in Silicon Valley is all about people — about how companies build lasting alliances with teams of entrepreneurial employees. Outsiders sometimes think that recruiting and keeping great people in the Valley requires offering Google-like perks or eye-popping compensation packages. In fact, it’s far more powerful to treat an employee like an “ally,” be realistic about how long they’ll likely stay at your company, and then offer a promise of career transformation if they work for you. That’s something every startup can do — even those still in the bootstrapping stage. When we are advising our portfolio companies on how to do this, my colleague at Greylock Jeff Markowitz and I employ some of the principles from my new book “ ” In the , the old employment model, in which employers offered lifelong employment in exchange for loyal service, is no longer affordable or desirable. Instead, companies need to foster a new kind of long-term dynamic loyalty — an alliance: a mutually beneficial deal, with explicit terms, between independent players (company and employee). To create this alliance we must perceive an employee’s career not as a monolithic entity owned by one employer, but as a dynamic entity that consists of successive “tours of duty.” These tours should give employees the opportunity to transform their careers and the company they’re working for. They should encompass both the employer’s goals and the employee’s aspirations. Based on this alignment, employers can construct a mission that leads to a fulfilling tour of duty for the employee and significant advances for the company. For example, many people who work at startups want to start their own company someday. Rather than avoid the topic or try to convince the person to stay at your company forever, craft a tour with a mission and a time horizon that, if completed, will help your employee be a better entrepreneur in the future. Talk openly and honestly about this promise. Recognizing that top may someday want to leave — and allowing employees to and consult at other companies while they work for you — leads to more honest conversations at work that can even help with long-term retention. In Part 2 next week, Jeff will go into more detail about fostering the relationships between your employees and other people in the industry. |
Uber Hits Out At India’s ‘Unnecessary And Burdensome’ New Payment Regulations | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 30 | at new regulations governing payments in India, after it called the mandating of two-factor authentication for all online transactions “an antiquated solution that is cumbersome for consumers and stifling for businesses.” a new wallet-based payment solution last month in response to . Today it fully switched over all payments to the wallet, but it said that adoption of the system has been “slow” among its customers. At the time of launching its wallet, Uber made no mention of the RBI’s regulations, but today it came out swinging, arguing that user reluctance to switch from its credit card-based system “indicates their trust in Uber’s payment system and a preference for more convenient yet secure online/mobile payments.” Uber is not the only company to be affected by the RBI rules, which require any online payment involving an Indian bank card to include a two-factor authentication process. The RBI said that the rules are designed to increase security. There are some upshots. Wallet-based payments mean people in India can now indirectly pay for their Uber rides using a debit card, internet banking account, or even cash to top up their balance. That removes the hurdle of having to own a credit card. Uber only accepts credit card-based payments in all other countries, but few in India own them. Despite opening up to a new audience, the U.S. company claimed that loading a wallet with pre-pay credit is “less convenient”. Uber said it has had “constructive discussions” with Indian authorities, but it is asking for a 45-day extension period to continue to allow payments from credit cards since it said so few customers have switched over to the new payments. That, it argued, effectively means they will be unable to use the service, and that will affect its drivers too. The U.S. company has been trying to hard to raise attention of the change. Last month, it to spark their interest, but based on today’s blog post it seems that adoption rates have not been as high as it hoped. |
Rules For Drones | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 11 | 30 | People are idiots and when you put high-powered flying machines into their hands, things can get ugly fast. This Christmas, more people than ever will get quadcopters and that means will think it’s a good idea to fly them on a field right next to their local (or ) airport or over a stadium full of people. Thanks to people like this and general public unease about all things “drones” in the U.S., we will soon get a first set of regulations that will govern what we can do with our quadcopters — and that’s okay. There has been a lot of insecurity surrounding the FAA’s plans for drones and the sooner we get some clarity, the better. For years, hobbyists were able to fly their remote-controlled planes (and for all intends and purposes, that’s what most of the “drones” you hear about these days are) without any hassle. There weren’t all that many of them, the planes and helicopters were expensive and hard to fly, and most people followed the common-sense rules of the . Today, you can buy a powerful quadcopter with a built-in camera and gimbal for less than a thousand dollars. It doesn’t take any special skills to operate them. That’s awesome. I’ve played around with my fair share of them (and crashed a few, too) and they allow you to take great images and videos. But there is a growing segment of the population (especially in the U.S.), that freaks out every time the word “drone” is uttered somewhere. The — that beacon of journalistic integrity — happily features a drone-related horror story as , for example. The FAA is about to release a first proposal for regulations that would mostly affect . While nobody wants more rules and regulations, I actually think it’s about time we get some clarity as to what commercial drone operators can and can’t do. Let’s not forget, even if you are doing real estate photography with a small DJI Phantom drone today, you are working a legal gray zone. The specific regulations that have leaked so far seem rather onerous (operators must have pilot certificates, for example), but a) these are only rumors for now and b) those rules will be up for discussion once the FAA publishes them. Still, right now we have a bunch of drone startups that can’t really do anything because the rules around commercial drone flights are so unclear. Even if this first batch of regulations is annoying, at least it will provide some clarity. It’s the irresponsible hobbyist who could ruin the fun for everybody, though. It’ll only take one real accident and that’s it. So when you get that quadcopter in four weeks, don’t just and start it up without having any idea of what you’re doing. Read the Academy of Model Aeronautics’ . That’ll give you a general idea for what’s acceptable (no flights over 400 feet within a 3-mile distance from airports (or even better: just stay really far away from airports anyway), stay 100 feet away from other people, etc.). Then take a look . If you’re inside one of those shaded areas, don’t fly your drone there. Don’t fly in national parks either. Just apply some common sense — because you don’t want to be . |
Vox Media Raises $46.5M At A Reported $380M Valuation | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 30 | , which owns sites like , , and , has raised $46.5 million from General Atlantic at a valuation of $380 million. The new funding, which is supposed to be announced on Monday, was that has been . We’re taking that as confirmation of the funding amount, but have reached out to Vox to see if the valuation is accurate. General Atlantic’s investment in Vox follows major investment news from several other media outlets. In August, . More recently, Reddit from Sam Altman, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. And last year, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million. Each time a media platform scores a big raise, it leads to a lot of headscratching from people wondering how online content can still be a profitable venture. But, seriously, what are you doing right now? All this shock at media being actually valuable. Guys, guys, what are you staring at all day? — Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) Furthermore, an investment in online media isn’t just about pouring money into articles and gifs. When Andreessen Horowitz made its investment in BuzzFeed, general partner Chris Dixon that the venture capital firm sees the company “as a prime example of what we call a ’full stack startup.’” In other words, BuzzFeed isn’t just dishing up clickbait. It is also building technology that has (and will continue to) change how people consume online content and how companies monetize it. A similar argument can be made for Reddit, which now has more than five billion monthly page views and 115 million unique visits each month, making it one of the biggest content-sharing sites in the world. What about Vox then? In an , Ezra Klein, who left the Washington Post’s Wonkblog to join Vox, detailed the startup’s tech innovations, which includes a that makes it easier for writers to edit and illustrate their posts, and word-recognition software that allow for quicker comment moderation on sites like , where reader engagement is key. Its focus on software development has helped Vox Media’s properties grow rapidly. For example, , the news site helmed by Klein, grew to 10.9 million visitors in October, according to comScore, just half a year after launching in April. |
Audience Entertainment Shows Off New Ways To Play Games With Everyone At The Movie Theater | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 30 | Startup aims to get movie watchers twisting and turning as they play games together in the theater. I wrote about the company a few of months ago, when it was for outside developers to create content on the platform. The demos I saw then were pretty simple — for example a game where I jumped around to tap falling cubes, which was fun, but not a particularly deep experience. The content is advancing quickly, at least judging from what I saw during a visit to the Audience Entertainment office earlier this week. As you can see in the video above, the team has created demos that go beyond simple games and feature environments for users to explore — first, panoramic nature footage, and then a -ish city for players to walk around. Chief Marketing Officer Adam Cassels described these demos as “a teaser” for the kinds of applications that the company is trying to support. And as you watch the video, keep in mind that these experiences aren’t really designed for three dudes in an office, but for larger groups of people playing together. Cassels said the technology is currently available in 100 theaters in the United States, and the aim is to bring it “anywhere where there’s a big group of people and a large screen.” “It’s like any new technology — you walk abefore you run,” added CEO Barry Grieff. “You know, when home video came out, they had stuff on it that they probably didn’t want on later, right? Then they got more sophisticated. The same thing is happening here.” |
Five Sony Pictures Movie Screeners Leaked After Hacking | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 30 | Five movie screeners from Sony Pictures have made their way onto torrent sites after the studio’s computer system was hacked earlier this week. These include unreleased titles “Annie,” “Mr. Turner,” “Still Alice,” and “To Write Love On Her Arms,” as well as World War II drama “Fury.” The latter has been in theaters for over six weeks, but is now the second most popular pirated film with more than 1.2 million downloads as of 11AM on Sunday, . The leak is most likely related to the , which caused all computers used by the studio to go down. An image with the words “Hacked by #GOP” (which stands for Guardians of Peace, not the Republican Party) appeared on employees’ computer screens, along with a demand for access to financial documents. The studio is also , as retaliation for “The Interview,” a comedy film about a CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jong-Un. In an email to The Verge, a person . The alleged hacker also told The Verge that IT security at Sony Pictures is lax: “Sony doesn’t lock their doors, physically, so we worked with other staff with similar interests to get in.” Indeed, this isn’t the first time Sony Pictures has suffered a massive security breach. Back , email addresses, and other sensitive information on SonyPictures.com with a SQL injection. We’ve contacted Sony Pictures for comment and will update this post if they respond. |
Lyft Sheds Some Of Its Quirks As It Seeks New Users | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 11 | 30 | The pink mustache. The fist bump. Riding up front and chatting with the driver. Those are all things that had come to define Lyft as a service over the earliest part of its journey, as it sought to win over users and position itself as an alternative to Uber and the existing taxi industry. As time has gone on, however, Lyft has become more lax with some of the traditions it was founded on, and is rethinking what users can expect when they use its app to catch a ride with one of its drivers. To understand the subtle shift in positioning, it’s probably best to look back and see how some of its defining characteristics came to be in the first place. Before launching Lyft, co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer put a lot of thought into what they wanted the service to ride-sharing service to be like. Zimmer was a graduate of Cornell’s hospitality school, and he hoped to model the user experience on what you might expect from a boutique hotel: it could be quirky, sure, but it would also be friendly and inviting. Each ride would have its own uniqueness about it, just as no two rooms at a Joie de Vivre hotel would be decorated in the same way. However, even though the Lyft team knew each driver (and car) would have its own unique personality, it hoped to instill some common threads throughout the experience. Stemming from that ethos came the ritual fist-bump upon entering and leaving a car. Lyft co-founder Logan Green suggested the fist bump because it was friendlier than a wave but not as formal as a handshake, and as he told others at the time, “No one wants to worry about having sweaty palms.” The other big quirk was the giant pink carstache, which drivers attached to the front of their cars, and would overwhelmingly become the symbol of the service. Tying it all together was the motto that Lyft adopted for its service: “Your friend with a car.” Following through on this motto, however, carried with it a certain set of expectations for Lyft passengers — mainly that they would sit up front and chat with the driver throughout the ride, just as they would with one of their friends. In its earliest days the Lyft team spent a lot of time selecting and training its drivers with all of this in mind. From the time the service initially launched in San Francisco and even up until it entered its second market, Los Angeles, drivers were individually screened before being added to the platform. For a while, co-founders Zimmer and Green even interviewed potential drivers themselves. At launch, Lyft did all this partly out of necessity. After all, unlike the taxi industry, there was no standardization around the make or model that one of its peer-to-peer drivers would drive up in. Having a big pink mustache on the grill was an easy way to help passengers identify the car that was picking them up. The Disco Lyft is one of the more iconic Lyft rides (It also had the side benefit of creating a fair amount of buzz and word of mouth from pedestrian passersby who would walk up to cars wanting to know what the whole mustache thing was all about.) Moreover, as the first peer-to-peer ride-sharing service, Lyft had to get users comfortable with the idea of riding with a stranger, and one who wasn’t commercially licensed to drive people around town. Lyft did a lot of work early on to ensure it did all the necessary driver and criminal background checks required, and as above, screened applicants for friendliness and personality before signing them up for its service. Still, it had to win over customer trust to get them comfortable with the ride-share model. While a certain amount of trust and safety was already expected and built in to the taxi industry and to the licensed black car drivers that Uber partnered with at the time, Lyft was using regular people and their cars to power its local transportation service. Positioning a driver as “Your friend with a car” was one way to help instill trust on the customer side of things, and to differentiate itself as an alternative to the silent or sometimes surly taxi drivers passengers had been used to. Things change over time, however. As the service matures, the same features that helped Lyft win over its earliest customers two years ago aren’t as useful in the current competitive environment. Again, some of the shift was born of necessity. After all, it’s difficult to scale community when your supply of drivers is constrained. Lyft first saw this about six months into its journey, as demand outstripped supply in San Francisco and it needed to rethink how it was onboarding drivers. The company could no longer afford to have its founders individually interview each to ensure they fit its personality. Over time, as it’s sought to keep up with demand, the individuality of its drivers is no longer quite as much of a focus. While the “Disco Lyft” and “Karaoke Lyft” vehicles are great when you see them, fewer and fewer drivers are putting in that much effort to provide a differentiated service. Moreover, it’s becoming clear that drivers themselves are a commodity, particularly as arch-rival Uber has aggressively sought to recruit away those who drive for Lyft across multiple markets. At the same time, there’s a bigger shift underway in passenger expectations. Increasingly passengers around the country are becoming comfortable with the idea of hailing a ride via mobile app, and the designation between a commercially licensed driver and one who isn’t licensed doesn’t matter quite so much to most. That is to say, the same education Lyft needed to provide to users two years ago isn’t quite as necessary in today’s environment. In the same way, it no longer needs a big pink mustache on the grill of its cars to make users aware of its service. And, finally, more education and awareness among consumers about available ride-sharing services means there’s less actual differentiation between them. Increasingly, users aren’t choosing a Lyft or an Uber based on friendliness of feature set, but based on price and availability. He who isn’t surge pricing and he who has the nearest car available frequently wins. As a result of all of the above trends, it’s becoming more and more difficult for Lyft to differentiate based on the same founding principles and “user experience” its co-founders dreamed up before launching the service two years ago. Even if Lyft could scale culture and extend it to thousands of drivers across hundreds of cities, it’s unlikely that consumers would care very much. All of which is why you’re probably seeing a subtle shift away from the Lyft features which used to define it. Lyft has stopped distributing the iconic giant pink carstache to all new drivers as it seeks to find more sustainable and effective methods of branding. That’s probably a good thing, since it seems most drivers had stopped attaching the ‘stache to the front of their cars years ago. (In my experience, most used to place the ‘stache on their dash, which could be precarious.) The company first began transitioning away from the large mustaches in July — as it launched service in New York City — and now provides an emblem for drivers to put in their windshield to identify their cars as Lyft vehicles. They also provide a smaller version of the ‘stache, which Lyft calls the “cuddlestache” and is less cumbersome to place on the dashboard. A source within Lyft tells me the company is working on new visual branding to reflect its identity and that the “cuddlestache” is merely a short-term placeholder. It’s not clear when the replacement for the mustache will appear, but it’s likely sometime early next year. At the same time Lyft is moving away from the mustache, it’s also signaling a shift in passenger expectations. Last week, the company sent an email entitled “ ” which sought to explain some “Family Secrets” to users. Those “secrets” were essentially around how users should greet their drivers and where to sit, and the email basically told users that fistbumping their driver and sitting up front were no longer necessary. While the email said users could continue on with Lyft traditions, it also seemed to make the service more open for users who just want to get from Point A to Point B: “How you ride with Lyft is up to you. At the end of the day, Lyft is about helping each other get to where we want to go.” While Lyft’s focus on community and friendliness was a key differentiator early on, there’s evidence that as it seeks new users, those same values might not be helping it. Anecdotally speaking, I know multiple people who refused to use the service because they didn’t want to sit up front or have a conversation with their driver — they merely wanted a quiet ride and to respond to email in silence while going to or from work, for instance. As Lyft seeks to grow and compete with Uber, the company realizes it’s going to need those passengers, too. The “Insider’s Guide To Lyft” seems a tacit acknowledgement of that fact. There’s no doubt Lyft will continue to try to appeal to a certain type of user as a competitive differentiator. After all, some people will want a “friend with a car” rather than a “private driver.” But for many users, the differences between the two are becoming increasingly blurred. And as Lyft seeks to go mainstream, it seems the company is increasingly aware of that fact. |
Facebook, Google, And Twitter’s War For App Install Ads | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 11 | 30 | of our love of apps is that now there’s just too damn many of them. The app stores are overcrowded, leaving developers desperate for a way to get their games and utilities discovered. That is why the app install ad has become the lifeblood of the mobile platform business. Big brands aren’t the only ones to suck up to anymore. No one buys a car or Coca-Cola on their phone, at least not yet, so proving the return on investment of mobile ads to these businesses is tough. There is one thing people instantly plop down a few bucks for on the small screen, though: Apps. Lured by billions in app install ad spend per quarter and hoping to grow that pie, Facebook, Twitter, and Google have stepped up. But to win those dollars, they have to buddy up to developers. Facebook and Twitter really have Apple and Google to thank. The critical need for app install ads stems from their negligence around app discovery. The App Store and Google Play provide search engines and Top 10 charts, but little in the way of personalized, social-proofed browsing or discovery. Basically the only way to get a hit app is to score enough downloads to break into the charts, and let the added visibility keep you there. That’s a struggle unless your app is inherently viral, kooky, or great enough to inspire word of mouth, or you win the favor of the app store editors who choose who to feature. But then there were app install ads. Ad network app install banner ad on Songza begs people to download a mobile game Before the big platforms redefined their roadmaps to pry open developers’ wallets, a slew of independent ad networks ruled the space. AdMob, InMobi, Jumptap and Millennial Media flourished in the early mobile era. These let developers buy ads to promote their apps on mobile websites and other apps, or host them to earn money. The little pop-up banners and interstitials hawking games and shopping portals were inarguably annoying, but they worked to a degree even if they lacked advanced targeting data. Without a sales force or much know-how, developers could monetize their apps by selling ad space or buy growth for their products. Google saw the potential of mobile advertising and in 2009 fro $750 million, while and launched its own ad network iAd in 2010. Both ran app install ads, but those weren’t their sole focus. It wasn’t until 2012 when the real landslide shift from desktop usage to mobile happened that Facebook wised up. Mark Zuckerberg’s company was in a bad place. Freshly IPO’d with no revenue on mobile as its users moved there, Facebook’s share price was getting crushed. While it had owned a popular web platform for gaming where it earned a 30% tax on in-app purchases, it didn’t own one on mobile after its HTML5 mobile web platform fizzled out. All the taxes were flowing to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android stores, even though apps were relying on Facebook’s free social login, friend finding, and sharing features. What Facebook did have was relationships with developers, deep ad targeting data, and a steady influx of tons of mobile eyeballs. Facebook’s mobile monetization platform strategy had been a bit far-fetched: Hook developers up with social sharing APIs, and hope users pushed their content from Facebook-connected apps back to the web or mobile News Feed to where Facebook shows ads. Facebook’s first app install ads were ugly and vague, but proved developers would pay it for downloads The social network’s relationship with developers had become strained, though, after years of whiplash product and API changes. Even its garishly-named “Operation Developer Love” program to warn app makers of impending changes couldn’t shake the stigma. Viral channels opened and closed, functionality appeared and disappeared, and developers became weary of investing in developing on an unstable platform. But app install ads let Facebook use its consistent mobile app traffic to turn things around. In August 2012, its first ad unit not triggered by an action of a friend. By October they were rolling out, and I described Facebook’s strategy as “ …to be the top source of discovery outside of the app stores.” The ad units looked downright ugly compared to later versions, but early reports from advertisers were positive. Twitter had already seen developers experimenting with since at least 2012. With the formal launch of its app install Cards that could be amplified with Promoted Tweet ads in April 2013, it let developers turn a download of their app into the buzz at the global water cooler. The battlelines were drawn. Facebook with its in-feed app install ads, Twitter’s promotable app install cards, and Google’s AdMob. Each has its own strength. Facebook knows a lot about who you are, Twitter knows what you talk about and are interested in, and Google deeply understands what you do on the Internet plus had a head start in the market. The next few years would see them turn app install ads from an ATM bolted onto the outside of their business to a full-fledged bank built on the ground-floor of their platform strategies. The web’s decline is . On mobile, there’s no room for a shotgun approach of riddling the small screen with tiny, low-quality, poorly targeted marketing messages. Instead, mobile ads are often shown one at a time. That means better targeting goes a long way. This has allowed platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to the independent ad networks like Millenial Media by combining powerful personal data with native app install ad formats that blend into their content While many would like to a painful death, app install ads are some of the only banners that can succeed on mobile. That’s because app install ads have two big advantages on mobile compared to traditional brand ads: With the app stores just getting more cluttered, developers began pouring cash into the ad format. By the end of April 2013, I suggested app and wrote that “While brand advertising was the rock of Facebook’s desktop ads business, app install ads could form the base of the mobile ad business its future depends on.” When Facebook revealed its earnings for that quarter, it noted that developers, including 40% of the top 100 on iOS and Android, had already bought 25 million installs. The ads to its bottom line said Mark Zuckerberg, and helped total ad revenue from mobile jumped from 23% to 30%. Meanwhile, app install ads had helped Twitter file to IPO with . By late 2013, the world had proof that app install ads were poised to become a giant business. Simply selling ads would have been a missed opportunity, though. Driving installs is so important to developers that, lacking operating systems, Facebook and Twitter built their mobile platform strategies around app ads. The goal: provide high-quality services and tools to developers in order to form relationships that lead to ad buys. That’s why , a mobile-backend-as-a-service that takes some of the development work out of building and hosting apps. It would form the base of . Essentially, Facebook offers solid, affordable development tools and SDKs for managing and testing apps through Parse, or adding social login and sharing to News Feed. These also aids ad targeting by letting Facebook know who has installed an app with its SDK. Once it has its hooks in, Facebook can then coax these developers to grow by buying its app install ads. The last part, “monetize,” was a little hazy until recently. The expectation was that thanks to Facebook’s development and growth assistance, apps could make money on their own by hosting ads, virtual goods, or ecommerce. But Facebook wasn’t getting a cut of that until April 2014 when it launched the that lets advertisers target ads they buy in third-party apps be targeted using Facebook’s extensive personal data treasure trove. Suddenly, by getting them to host its ads…which very well might be app install ads from other developers. It’s a feedback loop where Facebook helps apps get built until they pay it to grow until they’re big enough that it pays them to help others grow. And it’s a lucrative one. Facebook earned , and is suspected that a sizable chunk of that comes from app installs. It knew it was the little guy in the fight, with less traffic to its own ad-serving properties than Facebook’s feed or Google’s search pages plus AdMob. It also watched But it wasn’t until October 2014 that Twitter’s strategy came into focus at its It’s a of developer tools that includes Crashlytics for squashing bugs, enhanced login and tweet composer options for upping an app’s organic virality, a quick way to build login via phone number called Digits, and MoPub for making money by hosting ads. What Twitter cunningly leaves out is the with each Fabric tool a dev uses, they get closer to Twitter and are probably more likely to buy its app install ads. And just this week, Twitter announced it would start tracking all the apps on a user’s phone to improve the targeting of its ads, and its app install ads that will get the most benefit. First off, you won’t see ads for apps you already have, and it could know to show you travel or sports app ads because those are the kinds of apps you already have. Along with more traditional brand ads, app install ads helped Twitter bring in 75% of its ad revenue from mobile for a whopping . Now that its plot to endear developers is revving up, expect app install ads to be an even bigger part of its revenues next quarter. All the while, it appeared Google was resting on its laurels, satisfied to enjoy the gains from its prescient acquisition of AdMob. But it finally saw how hard others were chasing the market, and invested more resources. It had less reason to rush than Facebook and Twitter, as its ownership of Android gives it a steady income from taxes on in-app purchases. While they scrambled, Google calmly kept improving AdMob’s targeting and conversion tracking. By April 2014, Google was ready to wrestle for the limelight, that leverage the giant’s data on what apps people download, use, and spend money in. Beyond installs, it would join and in offering app re-engagement ads built on deeplinks that get users back into apps they’ve already downloaded, and straight to relevant purchase pages like HotelTonight listings for a city they just arrived in. After a messy year for Google+ spent working on its login platform for third-party apps, Google finally . That’s a full two years after Facebook put them in its mobile feed. Though Google’s mobile search traffic keeps it far in first place for total mobile ad share, its piece of the pie is while Facebook’s grows. believes to 44.6% of mobile ad market share by the end of 2014 from above 50% two years ago, while it projects Facebook will grow to 20.4% from a mere 5.4% in 2012, and Twitter is expected to grow from 2.25% in 2013 to 2.64% in 2014. That’s why Google’s CFO that “Our focus [is] on helping developers generate app downloads.” Beyond its iAd ad network, Apple’s largely been silent regarding the app install ad business even though it’s a huge reason it exists. Mainstream iPhone users rely on Apple’s top charts and editors’ picks to discover apps. Despite in 2012, the experience of digging great apps out the million in the store hasn’t gotten much better. If developers don’t have the clout or virality to get on the charts, they have to buy their way there. That’s led some to like with app install ads on the App Store itself or elsewhere on iPhones and iPads. iOS 8 can offer other people nearby frequently download, such as the Starbucks app when you’re in one the cafes. It’s sensible to assume it could sell these recommendation slots. For now, though, it seems dead-focused on its high-margin hardware business, ceding the opportunity to the other platforms. With the app store overpopulation problem getting worse at an accelerating pace, app install ads will only grow in importance. They could take on new forms, though. As apps evolve to be more vivid, so might their ads. Facebook is deeply investing in video advertising with its . It could combine LiveRail’s video ad inventory across the web with its targeting and developer connections to sell video app install ads that really show how fun or useful an app can be. Developers are also experimenting with Twitter’s Vine video sharing social network. They get Vine creators with huge followings to make sketches about their apps or name-drop them by commissioning the stars through content monetization networks like Niche [Disclosure: Niche was founded by my cousin Darren Lachtman]. Some devs then pay again to promote tweets containing the Vines that shill their apps. Contextual home screens that replace Android’s default launcher app navigation and folders with dynamic suggestions of apps you might need at the moment could also host app install ads. already sells its app recommendation slots. There are also pre-install deals with carriers and manufacturers where devs might pay upfront or a cut of future earnings to have their app come with a phone. [Update: After app install ads, it will be the rise of the app engagement ads. Overtly promotional push notifications are banned on iOS, and they risk getting an app’s lifeline muted if annoyed users turn off push. Ads can be the only way to get someone to open an app buried in a back screen folder. Sophisticated retargeting by adtech startups like and will help developers pull dormant existing users back into apps, or trigger whales to make purchases. These ads could remind people to check out the new clothing line in a fashion app, buy access to extra game levels, or check out must-see content that could rope them back into a social network. As more brands and businesses make the shift to mobile and start building userbases for their apps, partly through install ads, they’ll look to squeeze more lifetime value out of their initial investments with reengagement ads.] Ultimately, it is the balance sheet that will decide the winner of the app ad war, though is likely to be more of an ongoing turf war than one with an uncontested conqueror. Which platform has the best targeting and ad formats that can deliver the best conversion rates at scale and can prove the highest lifetime value per user for the lowest ad prices? If either Facebook, Twitter, or Google can supply the highest return for app ad spend, developers will come running. And not only will the victor get the spoils as developers thrust open their wallets, they’ll become the gate-keeper to success in the new app economy. |
Banks As Commodity Utilities In A New Payment World | Christoffer O. Hernæs | 2,014 | 11 | 30 | With the recent launch of Apple Pay and of Facebook integrating payments with Facebook Messenger fintech companies, there is a lot of speculation regarding the future of banking. Backed up by the way-too-often quoted , and a range of similar reports tech evangelists predict that Apple, and will become the banks of the future. This is highly unlikely, not because of lack of abilities, but rather because the challengers don’t want to be banks. The cost and complexity of running a bank is with the fundamental business model of tech companies, and meeting the capital requirements, compliance and overhead associated with running a bank is perhaps best left to the banks. This creates another scenario that should be even more frightening for incumbents where traditional banks are reduced to infrastructure providers. The fact that most fintech startups and challengers from the tech world are combined with extensive regulations supports this scenario, but also creates a false sense of security for incumbents, where giants like Bank of America and Capital One say not to worry since challengers are not targeting the . This attitude is what makes the financial sector ripe for disruption. After all, disruptive innovation is based on the idea of introducing new ways of doing things, often to an underserved market. I have previously argued that payment processing is in , but the threats to incumbents span much wider than payments. P2P lending is no longer limited to payday loans and consumer finance. has already entered the student loan segment with over $1.3 billion in refinanced student loans and is targeting the first-time home buyers and the is , and has currently issued £369 million in loans to 5,000 companies. But P2P landing does not only disrupt traditional loans, but creates new investment opportunities for institutional investors. The law firm Richards Kibbe & Orbe estimates of the investments in the U.S. P2P market originate from private equity and hedge funds, where the latter uses P2P loans as a way to without commercial banks as intermediaries. At the same time crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter are providing new funding options for capital-seeking businesses, as well as giving retail investors and high net worth individuals through large commercial banks. With the emergence of the term “ ” many firms saw the way banks targeted the wealth management segment was up for renewal. With automated services based on intelligent algorithms to secure further growth after reaching $1 billion in assets under management since its launch in 2011. Looking to the financial sector for new opportunities is not limited to lean Internet companies and startups, but technology behemoths to streamline transactions with an automated supply chain platform. Where yesterday’s customers went to the bank as a one-stop shop for all financial services, the customers of the future can choose from a wide range of financial services delivered from third-party solutions like for personal finance, P2P-loaned providers for both consumer finance, mortgages and more, for merchant services, and without ever needing to contact or log on to your bank. For all these services to function someone has to manage ledgers and settlements, maintain checking and savings accounts, as well as meet capital requirements, manage risk and comply with governmental directives and regulations. With traditional banks as that someone the development is eerily similar to similar to how telcos is stuck with managing and building information super-highways in order to provide sufficient bandwidth for YouTube Netflix, Hulu, Spotify and a wide range of OTT service providers which benefits from high speed internet connections in order to profit. To cope with the development telcos like in order to secure some of the revenue generated on top of their infrastructure as a last attempt to turn the tides on a battle lost a long time ago. Ultimately President Obama stated and commissioned the FCC to protect the net neutrality and a free Internet. With the rise of a new fintech ecosystem on top of the existing infrastructure, is the development in the telecom sector a foreshadowing of the future fate for traditional banks? To stay relevant, banks must embrace the technology-driven changes and look for new opportunities rather than protecting and preserving antiquated business models. |
The Star Wars Episode VII Trailer If It Were Made By George Lucas | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 30 | What would that glorious trailer look like if George Lucas went back and fiddled with it, as he so loves to do? Probably something like this… The number of references and jabs crammed in here is off the charts. I won’t spoil them all, but my favorite? The unnecessary rocks at 0:20. (If you don’t get that one, don’t worry — that’s probably a good thing. ) (Joking aside, George Lucas have a pretty big role in the development of . While he’s neither directing nor writing the movie, the story concept is his and he was on set as a creative consultant.) On a side note, I can not comprehend how someone managed to blast this out in just about 36 hours after the trailer’s release. Helluva job, . |
The Algorithm Economy Heads To Amazon | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 11 | 30 | Holidays are a time for families to come together, catch up over great food and drinks, and determine all the technical problems that need solving throughout the house. Indeed, for children growing up in the digital age, the holidays ultimately boil down to free (or more accurately, meal-subsidized) technical support for our most cherished loved ones. Kids: Amazon has you covered. Well, almost. This past week, , which a few months ago. Amazon is developing a marketplace that offers after-sale services such as car alarm installation, iPhone repair, and computer hardware setup to consumers buying relevant products. Today, the marketplace is available in 15 early rollout cities, including New York City and Lexington, Kentucky. After-sale services are among the highest profit margin revenue streams for retailers, so it is little surprise that Amazon is jumping into the fray. Geek Squad, which was founded by Robert Stephens in 1994 and sold to Best Buy in 2002, is perhaps the most prominent example. , “Over the past decade, Geek Squad has been a cash cow for Best Buy. […A]nalysts estimate Geek Squad generates a gross profit margin of 40 to 50 percent based on a minimum annual revenue of $2 billion, or about 4 percent of Best Buy’s total revenue of $50 billion.” That profitability of after-sale services has also attracted the attention of startups. One particularly notable example is Geekatoo, which is building a marketplace for technical support and . And in a certain kind of disruption irony, Stephens, the founder of GeekSquad who moved to Silicon Valley after leaving Best Buy in 2012, recently recommended the service. But Geek Squad still has one critical advantage that many of these startups lack: point-of-sale access. After customers have purchased a new flat-panel television set or computer, there is a precise window of time to offer them installation services where the rate of acceptance is significantly higher than it otherwise would be. Few customers later decide to search for a service specialist, hence the need for children to head home for the holidays to install and fix technology. This is why Amazon’s announcement is so important. Given its dominant position in online commerce, the company’s decision to offer a services marketplace could literally create thousands of jobs across the United States, or at the very least, improve the prospects for specialists already working in the field. For each product, Amazon will list the available services next to the listing, guaranteeing visibility and even potentially increasing sales among customers who are unsure if they can install or use a product. Perhaps even more importantly, the prices of these point-of-sale services can be much higher than they would otherwise cost, thanks to framing effects. After someone has just spent thousands of dollars on a new device, adding a few hundred more for installation service doesn’t sound like such a bad deal. That’s what made Geek Squad such a profitable division for Best Buy. That’s also why Amazon’s decision to run Selling Services as an open marketplace is so surprising. In my research, I split labor marketplaces into two groups: versions 1 and 2. Version 1 marketplaces, which include the newly combined Elance-oDesk, Craigslist, and the original TaskRabbit, are open marketplaces where people can request services or sell their services at any price, and consumers wade through pages of relevant listings to find exactly the level of service quality and price they want. These marketplaces have many challenges, not least of which is that consumers are terrible about judging quality from online postings. In many marketplace verticals, there can be a race to the bottom as customers rank services by price and then select the cheapest options. Ironically, this behavior is bad for the marketplace as well, since many consumers would be willing to pay more if they had fewer options. These models compare to version 2 marketplaces like Uber, Rev, Scripted, and the new TaskRabbit, where prices are set flat or with a formula, and the quality of service is guaranteed by the marketplace itself. There is no haggling over price or being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of options, but often only a single option or a small handful to choose from. On the whole, these version 2 marketplaces tend to have better customer satisfaction and arguably higher profits. Interestingly, Amazon’s marketplace doesn’t seem to follow these more recent version 2 marketplaces, but is instead more in line with the version 1 model. Amazon is not prescribing prices for its different services, instead offering an open marketplace where service providers can charge what they want and compete. The choice is no doubt familiar to the company given its other marketplaces. That’s unfortunate, given that Amazon already has a tendency to cause buyer fatigue due to their massive product catalog. Given the number of customers using Amazon, I imagine many service providers will join the platform, meaning that there will be a surfeit of options for every service in each geography. Now, buyers will be expected to make another purchasing decision as part of their checkout process. I have little doubt that many potential consumers of these services will be left on the table. The good news is that this is a beta product, and Amazon has a lot of time to get the mechanics of the process right. Unlike startups in this space who have to seek both sides of this market, Amazon has a guaranteed demand-side in its marketplace, so it has plenty of time to figure out how to best develop the supply. That won’t just make after-sale services easier, but save the holidays for millions of children across the country. Update: We got it working. |
Uber’s Next Billion-Dollar Financing Could Be A Convertible Debt Round | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 11 | 8 | On-demand transportation company could put more money under its already overstuffed mattress*, as the company is seeking to raise an addition $1 billion in funding. Instead of offering equity to investors that participate, however, the company might structure the offering as a convertible debt round. Uber’s efforts to seek new financing was yesterday, while Re/code . Our sources have confirmed Uber is in preliminary talks with potential investors about raising an additional round of financing. However, we’ve heard the company is shopping the deal as a convertible debt offering, as opposed to a typical late-stage equity deal, with a valuation cap of $25 billion. Uber’s existing investors include Benchmark, Menlo Ventures, Google Ventures, TPG Growth, Kleiner Perkins, Fidelity, Wellington Management, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Jeff Bezos, Lowercase Capital, and First Round Capital, among others. With the financing Uber is seeking to add to that list and is pitching new investors on the deal. For Uber, structuring its financing as convertible debt would reduce its risk of dilution, particularly as the company seeks to raise so soon after its last round. Less than six months ago, the company that valued it at $18.2 billion. Investors participating in the current financing would likely get a discount on the next round of financing. They would also benefit from a better liquidation preference in the case of an exit before Uber raised more money. The company is already extremely well-capitalized, having raised approximately $1.6 billion to date. That’s five times the amount raised by its nearest competitor Lyft. But the new financing would only add to its * as Uber seeks to enter new markets and experiment with services beyond urban ground transportation. Uber is available in over one hundred cities in 45 countries around the world, and it’s seeking to make its mobile app for finding a ride ubiquitous in metropolitan areas. But beyond just entering new cities, the company is also trying out different categories of services. Based on its logistics network, Uber believes that it can move more than just people, and has experimented with everything from courier services to food delivery. Uber was even tested as a delivery partner for Amazon, and there’s a real possibility it could provide the framework for on-demand delivery of goods from other third-party providers in the future. All that is very capital-intensive, and Uber will need money to make money. Like Palantir, it’s likely Uber will try to remain private for as long as humanly possible. Having billions saved up could help with that. We’ve also heard there’s the possibility of Uber using the financing to provide some liquidity to early investors. To date Uber has been as its valuation has reached news heights. Even if it does that, the company will have plenty of money left over to go after a really big transportation and delivery segment. Uber cash, even. ==
* Because Alexia thinks “war chest” is a cliché. |
It’s Time For An Open Standard For Cards | Nova Spivack | 2,014 | 11 | 8 | Cards are fast becoming the for mobile apps, but their importance goes far beyond mobile. Cards are modular, bite-sized content containers designed for easy consumption and interaction on small screens, but they are also a new metaphor for user-interaction that is spreading across all manner of other apps and content. The concept of cards emerged from — the short content notifications layer of the Internet — which has been evolving since the early days of RSS, Atom and social media. Today cards are evolving the nature of the stream before our eyes. For example, Twitter is transforming itself into a network for sharing rich, interactive, media, commerce, advertising and analytics-enabled cards, and if is widely adopted, we may soon see an ecosystem here. But Twitter isn’t the only company with designs on building a walled garden for cards. Facebook isn’t that far off with Open Graph . Cards are also starting to pop up in user interfaces for a wide range of mobile apps and even a new generation of enterprise SaaS apps such as and to name a few. There are several more competing formats for cards today in apps ranging from search engines and intelligent virtual assistants like , , and . There are even new content and media card authoring and distribution platforms like , and that illustrate the power of cards for content publishers and brands. We’re witnessing the early days of a mini-Cambrian explosion of competing apps and formats for cards. And just like similar Cambrian explosions around other formats in recent times, it will likely be followed by a consolidation and standardization phase. It’s happened with every major new media type that has emerged. Formats for email, calendars, contacts, images, videos, audio files, documents and even structured data records all started out with their own Cambrian explosions of interoperable competing formats, followed by consolidation on open standards. The standards of the web — particularly HTML — also went through this same process as Netscape, Microsoft and the W3C fought it out. Cards have all the makings of a new emerging medium. But cards don’t interoperate, yet. There is no standard for what a card is, how it renders, or what you can do with it. Each different breed of card only works in a specific proprietary app. This non-interoperability is a pain point that will create the need and opportunity for an open standard for cards to emerge. The notion that any one company can or will succeed at controlling a new medium that is an idea that has been proved wrong time and again. Publishers, retailers, advertisers, consumers and app developers will increasingly need a common open format. The headache of supporting multiple different competing card formats will become painful enough that someone will solve it with a standard. Whoever does this first will have valuable first-mover advantages. Any standard would need to find a common design language for layout and rendering card content. It would also need to provide conventions for how to address and route cards across different apps and platforms; find a way to connect cards into graphs and collections; create common APIs so that apps and cards can interact with each other; and finally provide a metadata syntax for describing cards, which formalizes their semantics (defining their type, relationships, authors, purpose, content, history, workflow state and commercial licenses and agreements). It’s going to take work, and some sacrifice and business model evolution, for an open standard to emerge. But if and when it does, a range of next-generation uses and benefits of cards will be possible. Standardized cards will function like a cross between a MIME attachment, a page of HTML and JavaScript and applet. They will be portable, interactive, programmatic content experiences. They will work across apps, which will open a new era of cross-app interoperability, enabling powerful new forms of sharing and productivity. Publishers will be able to put cards on their websites or embed them in app UIs, as well as encourage consumer to interact with collect and share them. If you see a product you like, you will be able to just grab its card to buy it later. If you see a link or video you like, you will be able to collect its card into your personal card library so you can find it later. It’s not a bookmark; it’s a live, interactive data record. Brand marketers will be able to use social media dashboards like Hootsuite to compose cards that work consistently across multiple outlets (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other apps). Marketers might even be able to distribute cards directly to consumers who opt in to receive them via their intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs). For example, a marketer or brand could promote a card to a targeted set of relevant prospects by sending it to their Google Now, Cortana or Siri assistants, which in the future, might be able to function almost like butlers or admins. Their IVAs would pre-screen incoming cards for their users, deciding which to show when, how much priority they should have, and which to ignore. Cards are small, portable and semantically rich. They contain information and self-describing meta-data. This is much better than the document web which is basically just UI code mixed in with some content. Semantic metadata attached to cards, perhaps from and , or maybe even using the standards of the , will enable apps to be really smart about understanding, filtering, targeting, displaying, sorting and suggesting cards to users. Semantic cards will enable every app and search engine to search uniformly across cards, no matter where they were created. Whether messages flowing through social networks like Twitter, or notifications in apps like Google Now, standardized cards will help consumers get more signal and less noise, with less effort. One might even imagine an open publish-and-subscribe ecosystem for exchanging, matching and sharing cards between apps and people. Anyone could publish cards to those with matching interests and subscribe to get cards that match their own. Consumers could also benefit by having a single way to save and find the cards they care about for later. Jane could collect cards from different apps and networks into Evernote and annotate them, or she could store them in her own personal card file — a database of the things she wants to remember. An open standard for cards should and probably will happen sooner or later. And whoever leads it will be in an advantaged position. Companies like Twitter, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all have the ability to create an open standard for this new data structure. Twitter has Twitter Cards, the most mature format for cards that behave like messages and ads; Google’s got Schema.org, Google.org and the Knowledge Graph, which are leading the charge of creating new cards, and Android gives the company an obvious mobile platform. Meanwhile Facebook — despite its open Graph — Microsoft, with cards for Cortana and Bing, and Apple have all lagged behind. Planting a flag through the creation of an open standard could give any of these giants a leg up. Whoever defines the standard, the is where it should live, just like HTML, logically belongs. History has shown that consolidation and standardization around open formats is likely and ultimately better for all concerned. So why wait? Instead of wasting a decade or more of time and money and causing everyone in the ecosystem unnecessary friction as they figure this out for themselves, the large incumbents could save everyone a lot of trouble and move the future closer by launching an open standard for cards. The first company to launch an open standard for cards could do an end-run around all their closed-minded competitors. Not only would they benefit from defining and leading the standard, they would garner massive goodwill and branding, and they would be positioned right at the center of a new cards ecosystem where they could cherry-pick the best opportunities and reach scale first. The next evolution of the Internet is just over the horizon: We need an open standard for cards. |
Little’s Law Is Big For Startups | Matt Oguz | 2,014 | 11 | 8 | Traffic, traction, growth. We all know that these terms are prerequisites to success. As we launch our startups we hope for initial customer acceptance, which would lead to traffic, traction and growth (TTG). In some cases, we’re willing to pay for traffic. In most other cases, we work around the clock to ignite organic TTG. When we read about the successful co-founders of a Yelp, Pinterest, or WhatsApp, we find ourselves inspired by their drive and intellect, but we often leave wondering what it really was that gave these startups the astronomical TTG that we all want. There’s certainly no shortage of ideas and opinions about how one startup achieved success, but as analytical founders, the prescribed path from “good to great” often does not satisfy us. We crave more mathematical guidance. One discipline to turn to in order to understand the underlying mechanics of business is operations research (OR). OR principles not only guide us to optimize and run our businesses smoothly but also provide us with statistical analysis of underlying business concepts via modeling and simulation. One of the most interesting studies in OR which provides relevant guidance to today’s applications is . And inside queuing theory, Little’s law is a hidden gem that gives us profound hints on where to focus to achieve superior traffic, traction and growth. Queuing theory in its simplest terms tackles problems within the context of the following flow in a store: In a queuing system, there are items that arrive at some rate to the system. Then they depart. An item can be a customer or inventory. When we think about it, this is exactly what we have on a website or app. Visitors arrive, they stick around for a while, then they leave. The most valuable company is the one with the most visitors that stay the longest. says that, under steady state conditions, the average number of items in a queuing system equals the average rate at which items arrive multiplied by the average time that an item spends in the system. L =average number of items in the queuing system, W = average waiting time in the system for an item, and λ =average number of items arriving per unit time, the law states the following: “The long-term average number of customers in a stable system is equal to the long-term effective arrival rate multiplied by the average time a customer spends in the store.” This statement sounds trivial. Its magic, however, lies in the simplicity that the relationship is not influenced by the service distribution, service order or anything else. It’s not influenced by the color of the site, the distribution of the content or the price of the product. The only thing that matters is how fast the visitors are coming and how long they’re staying. Everything else is secondary. Little’s law doesn’t only apply to queues in physical stores; it applies to networks and to any system where there’s a flow of items. To examine a real-life situation, it’s safe to claim that Google, as a search engine, has the highest arrival rate of visitors, namely λ. But the visitors don’t stick around much. They quickly click through to another site via organic or paid links. Then they come back later for another search only to leave quickly. Google has done a phenomenal job at building up that arrival rate that made the company what it is today. But take a look at the acquisitions, research or any other top initiative at Google, and you’ll easily see that all of them target the second part of Little’s law: W, the average time a customer spends at a Google property, whether that’s email, phone, calendar or web browser. According to Comscore, . This translates to 433.3 million queries per day, 18 million per hour, 300 thousand per minute and only 5,000 per second. A quick comparison to Bing looks like this: One wonders if Bing at any point exceeded Google’s 5,000 per second search rate. If yes, that’s good for Bing and bad for Google and it’s crucial to figure out why that jolt happened at that particular second. Investigating short bursts of higher-than-usual traffic leads to significant hints versus observing daily or monthly numbers. Now consider Facebook. Facebook has both great arrival rate and time spent in “store.” But its customer arrival rate (λ) is not as high as Google’s. This is why all the top acquisitions and projects at Facebook target increasing the arrival rate. We visit Facebook a few times a day and stick around a little bit but then we quickly jump to a Google search. Operation managers and entrepreneurs are more concerned with the throughput rate rather than the arrival rate. But the throughput rate is important only if there is arrival. Arrival is certainly a binary function without which there’s no usefulness. Once visitors arrive, the key metric to monitor is how fast they arrive, not how many. Here are three implications of Little’s law as it applies to startups: Little’s law provides hints for social or viral growth, too, because in both cases, influence is spread out in short bursts as people visit the site/page/app almost all at the same time. Viral influx is the dream of a startup and after that, some level of stickiness is required to keep people around. But early traction trumps great content. Normalizing your metrics over time and looking at meaningful windows of time are a lot more useful than just looking at long-term averages. If you’re hungry for analytical insights on traffic, traction and growth, look no further than queuing theory and particularly Little’s law. For those of you interested in the mathematical proof of Little’s law, to Professor Little’s 2011 paper celebrating the 50th anniversary of his theory. |
Using Big Data To Fight Pandemics | Nuria Oliver | 2,014 | 11 | 8 | Last year, on how anonymous and aggregated mobile phone data can be used to understand and combat the spread of infectious diseases. I described a study that we carried out in my research team a few years ago, where we analyzed aggregated and anonymized mobile data from Mexico during the H1N1 flu outbreak in the spring of 2009. Thanks to the massive adoption of mobile phones and the power of anonymized and aggregated data, we were able to quantify the impact that the measures taken by the Mexican government had on the mobility of the population and hence on the spread of the disease. We, and similarly researchers at the Karolinska Institute and Harvard University among others, have demonstrated how the analysis of large-scale mobile data can be used to deliver significant benefits to society. Little did I know that today we would be fighting the worst Ebola outbreak in our history, with already almost 5,000 deaths and over 13,000 infections. Unfortunately, a few months after the outbreak of the pandemic we are only now starting to put into place coordinated efforts towards the analysis of mobile phone network data and what this tells about the spread of Ebola. People’s efforts have understandably been focused elsewhere. This week at the in Busan, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the GSMA and the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that they are joining forces in the fight against Ebola. This unity is an essential step forward, but along with the GSMA, United Nations Global Pulse, and a number of other data scientists, I really want to make sure we, and most importantly the African mobile operators, address this opportunity and truly harness the potential of the data available. Of course mobile data analytics cannot directly assist the heroic work of doctors and nurses who are on the ground, but it could prove extremely helpful when it comes to planning resource allocation or understanding the effectiveness of different mobility containment measures. Mobility is one of the key factors that contributes to the spread of a human-transmitted infectious disease, such as Ebola. Therefore, understanding and quantifying human mobility in the areas affected by the Ebola virus could make a crucial difference to contain it. And population mobility is precisely one of the characteristics that can be analyzed and predicted using large-scale anonymized mobile data. In addition, levels of activity of the cell towers over a specific time period could be seen as a proxy of the amount of people in the geographical area served by that tower. Modeling the changes in the levels of activity in the towers of areas affected by Ebola would provide insights into population changes due to the outbreak. While this data is far from perfect, it provides valuable information that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive and time consuming to collect. Understandably, there might be concerns, particularly in West Africa, about the impact on privacy. The good news is that extensive research conducted by a range of academic teams demonstrates that it is possible to both analyze human mobility patterns and preserve privacy. All data is typically anonymized using state-of-the-art encryption algorithms. In addition, data is usually analyzed in a highly secure and protected environment (e.g. the mobile operator premises) by authorized personnel. No analysis is undertaken that would ever identify individuals. In addition, only the resulting aggregated, non-sensitive analyses (e.g. population mobility estimates, aggregate statistics…) would be made available to relevant aid agencies or government agencies. Technical difficulties should not be a barrier either, as there is a body of work illustrating how to carry out this type of analysis. Moreover, there is a group of highly skilled data scientists — including ourselves — and strong support from organisations, such as the ITU, ISOC, GSMA and United Nations Global Pulse — who are ready and willing to assist African operators in the process, particularly to ensure that all data handling is carried out in an ethical and anonymous manner, always respecting local data privacy laws. The potential to have positive impact and help save lives is immense. I truly hope that we can quickly find a way to realize this the full potential of big data for social good. It’s an opportunity that we cannot afford to miss. |
Xbox One November Update Brings Custom Backgrounds And Twitter Integration | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 8 | Another month, another pack of shiny new features heading for the Xbox One. It’s not the most exciting update the One has received to date, and it sounds like this one will be the last big update for the year… both of those facts likely because Microsoft doesn’t want to risk introducing any big bugs right before the oh-so-important Christmas season. A 3-minute video below runs through a bulk of the new stuff, but in case you prefer good old fashioned words — |
Everykey Wants To Put Your Passwords On Your Wrist | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 8 |
The password as a digital authenticator is under more strain than ever. But is the answer to memorizing multiple complex secure passwords to rely on proximity and a physical wristband for logging in to devices and websites? The U.S.-based makers of a device called believe so. They’re currently , looking to raise $100,000 to turn a prototype Bluetooth-powered authentication wristband into shipping product by March next year. They’re not the only ones eyeing up the security potential of wearables either, with Apple’s forthcoming apparently relying on a biometric heart rate for authentication when using its NFC-powered Apple Pay function. And Toronto-based startup also working on a heart-wave sensing authentication wearable. (We saw a back in April.) Everykey is following a similar wearable route to Nymi, with a basic wristband that has a single security-focused purpose, but is not bothering with any biometrics, which does mean you’re putting your passwords in a single unsecured physical basket (i.e. a form that can be stolen and used by someone else to log into your stuff). Why is it avoiding any biometric component? Everykey CEO Chris Wentz expresses scepticism about acquiring accurate electrocardiogram data — as Nymi aims to do — via a single wearable point, i.e. rather than having multiple electrodes on the body. Hence Everykey staying away from biometrics. It’s also aiming to undercut Nymi on price — given that there’s less sensor kit required inside its wristband it can offer the wearable at a lower price point. The Everykey is up for pre-order via Kickstarter for $50, vs Nymi costing $79. It also offers better battery life, of up to a month. Wentz says it is expending effort on making it’s wristband look a bit more #FASHION than the average generic plastic bangle. Although, to my eye, there’s not a huge amount in it… What about the inherent insecurity of putting physical passwords in an easily stealable form? “You can disable your Everykey at any time just like a credit card by calling us or deactivating it through our website,” was Wentz’s response. So this is absolutely a trade off between convenience and security. But, given how troublesome passwords are becoming, it may be a trade-off some people are willing to make. The problem of too simplistic passwords is huge and growing, with hackers data-mining leaked repositories of passwords to get better at guessing the words humans use to try to secure their digital stuff. If a password is simple enough to be memorable, chances are it’s hackable. But more complex passwords are also starting to be cracked as hackers train their systems on leaked password data to get better at brute forcing our 0p3n s3s4m3s. Password manager software, such as or , is one answer to this growing password-generated security gap. Everykey’s wearable device, which uses proximity and Bluetooth to work with a range of devices as well as websites, is another — although the wearable won’t support authenticating mobile apps unless developers integrate Everykey’s SDK. So it’s not a case of one ‘wrist-ring’ to unlock them all. The Everykey wearable does not store any passwords itself, acting purely as an authenticator, via an encrypted signal sent over Bluetooth 4.0 when the wristband is within a customisable range to the Bluetooth device you are using. Device passwords are stored on the devices themselves in keychains, while website passwords are encrypted and stored on Everykey’s servers. The use of Bluetooth 4.0 limits which devices it can unlock, unless you add a Bluetooth dongle to older hardware. While iOS unlocking will only work for jailbroken devices. For PC users, Everykey is also only compatible with Windows 8.1+; older versions of Windows aren’t supported, so again that’s a limit to its usefulness. What about website compatibility? “Every website I’ve tried Everykey on has worked with Everykey. Our algorithm for identifying a login field is pretty well refined and while we can’t guarantee that it will work with all websites, it’s very reliable and works on all the top websites (Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, etc) as well as every other website we’ve tried it on,” says Wentz. “In terms of the devices themselves, Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS, and Linux are all supported — keeping in mind that iOS requires a jailbreak for the device unlock itself,” he adds. There is apparently no limit on the number of close-by devices that can be authenticated via the wristband — a tech it has filed a patent on. However it’s still working on ways to support logins to websites where a user has multiple accounts, so might want to specify which account to log in to. Managing multiple Everykeys owned and used in close proximity to each other also sounds like it will require some additional thought to avoid the wrong user being logged in. To set up Everykey for unlocking supported devices entails downloading an Everykey app, then pairing it with the wristband (pushing a button on the device to activate pairing mode) — and then typing in a unique code printed on the back. When logging into a website for the first time automatically encrypts and store your username and password for that website, via a browser extension (once you’ve installed its software). The companion software can also be used to generate a complex password, as other password manager software offerings do, if you don’t want to come up with a tough enough string yourself. Everykey looks to be — at best — a partial fix to a messy problem, and one that evidently prioritizes fashionable convenience over security. Adding a two-factor authentication feature that loops in the proximity of the mobile user’s phone to bolster security would be a welcome addition but isn’t currently offered. “Two factor authentication is something we’re interested in, it’s not yet a feature but may become one if there’s enough demand,” says Everykey, responding to on its Kickstarter campaign. With caveats like these it’s clear Everykey won’t be for everyone. But it’s managed to pull in close to half its $100,000 funding goal thus far, still with almost two weeks left on the clock, so this wearable password manager may yet fly. If its makers get their prototype to market, how smoothly it flies and how far it travels remains to be seen. |
The Rise And Fall Of The Full Stack Developer | Peter Yared | 2,014 | 11 | 8 | It seems as though everyone in tech today is infatuated with the full-stack developer. Full stack may have been possible in the Web 2.0 era, but a new generation of startups is emerging, pushing the limits of virtually all areas of software. From machine intelligence to predictive push computing to data analytics to mobile/wearable and more, it’s becoming virtually impossible for a single developer to program across the modern full stack. When I first started programming computers as a kid in the pre-mobile, pre-web late 1970s/early 1980s, a single person typically wrote a complete software program from start to finish, and there weren’t many other layers of software between the programmer and the hardware. Using assembly language was the norm for programmers trying to squeeze more performance and space out of machines with 8-bit processors and very limited memory. Programming applications quickly evolved into a team sport with the advent of client/server computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the wave of Internet computing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Each facet of new technology was so complex that a specialist was often required, sometimes one for different tiers (e.g. front-ends, databases, application servers, etc.) Managing a business website became a specialty that included operating networking equipment, such as routers and load balancers, tweaking Java virtual machines, and using various database indexing mechanisms. By the mid-2000s, creating virtually anything — from simple websites to next-generation SaaS services — became prohibitively expensive. The rising expense was directly correlated to the overhead of numerous individuals from the various tiers communicating (and often miscommunicating) with each other, and changes in one tier cascading into other tiers and into deployment parameters. As Marc Andreessen pointed out in a recent tweet storm about burn rates, “More people multiplies communication overhead exponentially, slows everything down.” Conversely, the technology to create the new generation of Web 2.0 sites became increasingly streamlined and simplified. Programmers switched from using the more complicated enterprise Java stack and databases such as Oracle to the more straightforward LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl). New languages and frameworks such as Django and Ruby on Rails automated the layer between the website and the database. Front-end frameworks such as jQuery helped abstract all of the intricacies between different browsers. Cloud services such as Amazon Web Services simplified deployment and provided turnkey networking. By the late 2000s, it became possible for many programmers to deliver a complete consumer or SaaS site, including a dynamic web client, server-side business logic, a scalable database, deployment, and operational support. This new breed of full-stack developer could run circles around teams of programmers attempting the same task. When projects scaled up, adding more full-stack programmers allowed a single person to add a single feature across all the tiers of an application, which accelerated feature delivery over the communication overhead of having different people own the feature in each tier. If you’re building a website on the full stack illustrated above, find full-stack developers who can effectively wear these hats. But these days — and call me crazy — I’d consider this a less-than-full-stack. Here’s a fuller full stack: I’d wager that there are zero individuals with advanced-level knowledge in each of these areas that would be capable of single-handedly delivering this next generation kind of application. Just keeping up with the advancements and new programming interfaces in each category is almost a full-time job. We are in the midst of a rapid shift to more complicated technologies that, as in days gone by, require experts at each tier. Developing excellent iOS and Android applications requires experts in those platforms that understand the intricacies. Operationally, tending to new object databases such as MongoDB requires constant attention and tweaking. Running an application on cloud services such as Amazon requires knowing the ins-and-outs of its various services and expertise on how to failover across regions. Even the venerable web front-end has evolved into CSS4, JSON and JavaScript MVC frameworks, such as Angular.js and Backbone.js. In this brave new world, it is critical to have at least one person with at least a functional understanding of each of the composite parts who is also capable of connecting various tiers and working with each expert so that a feature can actually be delivered. In a way, these tier-connecting, bridge-building software architects — who are likely experts in only one or a couple of tiers — are less full stack developer and much more full stack integrator. Rest in peace, full stack developers. Welcome, full stack integrators, in addition to engineers with deep technical skills in particular areas. It’s a fascinating world of software out there and we need you more than ever. |
The Larger Implications Of Electronic Payments Adoption | Alberto Jimenez | 2,014 | 11 | 8 | While global efforts to increase financial inclusion (expanding access to savings, credit and insurance products) can have profound implications for individuals given the emergence of the digital economy, the ability to send and receive money in electronic form is potentially more transformative. The societal benefits of financial inclusion are obvious. Safely accumulating money for financial goals like education or home ownership; or getting access to credit to start a business, can be life-changing tools for the unbanked and those with lower incomes both in developed and emerging markets. However, the simple ability of sending or receiving money electronically can be as (if not more) transformational. That ability can open the door to the benefits of the digital economy beyond just granting access to bank accounts, while also spurring new opportunities for entrepreneurs to create entirely new markets. To begin with, electronic payments can enable financial services providers to lower the high costs of originating and distributing banking or insurance products by not having to maintain a branch network or pay agents to disburse and collect loans. By decreasing their overhead, these organizations can offer more affordable credit. For example, in East Africa there is a thriving segment of alternative financial institutions with little to no physical presence. These institutions run their businesses almost exclusively on top of mobile money networks, allowing them to reach more customers at a significantly lower cost. Electronic payments and basic banking products do intersect. At both ends of an electronic payments network, repositories of value are needed (also known as bank accounts in the developed markets) to hold the balance being sent and received. These repositories have different manifestations depending on the customer segment and geography: prepaid accounts in unbanked segments in developed markets, mobile money accounts provided by telcos in emerging ones, etc. But potentially more important than access to financial services is the access to the digital economy that has developed on top of mobile app ecosystems over the last few years. I am referring to services like non-hotel travel accommodations, car sharing services and digital content delivered directly to devices. Digital economy goods and services are usually provided by businesses with no “retail presence”; therefore, the ability to pay and collect remotely is an absolute requirement to access the service (from the consumer’s point of view) and to develop a business (from the provider’s). While some of these services are delivered in-person, the business still needs to collect remotely. A case in point, Uber drivers don’t collect payments. When we think of the digital economy in developed markets, businesses like Netflix and iTunes come to mind. But the reality is that trends like the sharing economy, which also requires an electronic payments foundation, can potentially be larger in low-income and unbanked segments where idle assets have better chances of being monetized. In these segments, usually more prone to unemployment and financial shocks, assets like personal time and extra space at home can create massive business opportunities for buyers and sellers in services like TaskRabbit and Airbnb, respectively. From a commercial perspective, access to electronic payments mechanisms opens the possibility of businesses to reach a truly global scale – extending across geographies and all socioeconomic segments. More generally, it can be said that the supply and demand that mobile platforms match in banked, smartphone-owner segments is basically disconnected in cash economies. Specifically, sellers of excess capacity of assets, such as personal time, real estate and transportation, and buyers who need assets on a non-permanent basis require the ability to complete transactions by exchanging electronic value. Even if the matching of supply and demand can be achieved, physical cash would generate too much friction for these ecosystems of buyers and sellers to thrive and scale. It is not a coincidence that mobile money ecosystems in emerging markets have become a foundation for large-scale financial inclusion initiatives, and have also started to attract entrepreneur communities like the ones behind successful digital-only businesses that are so common in developed economies. These communities in emerging markets are less focused on renting movies or selling games and more focused on remote services that can also be consumed digitally, like monitoring of medical conditions or receiving healthcare services over the phone. In summary, electronic payments can both accelerate traditional financial inclusion but also open access to relevant services that meet real needs and, more importantly in low-income segments, create new opportunities to generate income. |
Disrupting Democracy | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 11 | 8 | You have to grudgingly admire the black-hat political hackers who have the American electoral system. First, entrench a two-party dichotomy; second, gerrymander districts into tortuous shapes; third, cultivate an electorate that no matter how much voters dislike their incumbent, they hate the alternative worse; fourth, It’s elegant, horrifying brilliance. The whole point of democracy is to make it easy to throw bad governments out. (Putting good governments in would be a nice bonus, but tends to be a crap shoot.) I think it’s safe to say that American democracy has gotten stunningly bad at that. On Tuesday, despite an appalling approval rating, across 435 Congressional districts, only saw incumbents lose. . Because “ .” (To those of you in the rest of the world; I sympathize. I’m not even American myself. Bear with me.) Technology may be to blame for this, to some extent. The age of social media has probably by aggravating filter-bubble confirmation bias. And as I’ve been , tech-driven social changes has made polling a , which doesn’t affect the results, but can make them much more shocking. https://twitter.com/pkedrosky/status/492816327497617410 On the other hand, tech has a role to play in making democracy more robust. In particular, I give you like and , which use cryptography to allow voters to confirm that their vote was in fact counted, without anyone being able to track individual votes back to voters. These don’t directly defend against ballot-box stuffing, but they’re a start, and in the age of , really should be rolled out forthwith. (But we should move to online voting–the applause sounded very nearly unanimous, which tells you a lot–and we should always have a physical paper trail for ballots. That makes it much harder to hack a recount.) In a sane world, technology would fight gerrymanding, too. Instead of districts being drawn by hand, their boundaries should be set algorithmically, using only geographic contiguity and population counts as factors, not . Of course the political hackers who have seized control of the system will never allow that to happen. It will have to be forced on them. But vulnerable systems have to be patched somehow if you want them to keep running. Algorithmically defined districts would have another huge advantage: they would make it easy to create new “virtual” districts not tied to the tyranny of geography. Back when modern democracies were invented, that was the only viable option, but in our hyperconnected today, wouldn’t it make as much sense–if not more–to allow voters to register for constituencies, instead of the one in which they happen to physically live? Imagine a world in which able to muster enough people could send its own post-geographical representative to their Parliament or Congress. That body would become enormously more representative…and less defined by two or three dominant parties. Technology could obviously make direct democracy easier, too. But it wouldn’t make it any better. Direct democracy, ie rule by referendums and popular ballots, is actually pretty awful. I realize that’s an unpopular statement, at least in San Francisco, in an era when direct democracy recently legalized marijuana and helped bring in same-sex marriage (both of which I strongly support.) But even the American president is elected indirectly. There’s a reason for that. Direct democracy is not a scalable, sustainable solution, and it . As a Canadian who used to live in the UK and is now Californian, the notion of pages and pages of ballot initiatives and judges up for (re-)election — — seems, and I choose these words with great care, . In Canada and the UK, referendums tend to be once-in-a-generation events. No electorate is well-informed on the merits and demerits of individual judges. Nor do they have an expert grasp on the ins, outs, and unintended consequences of well-meaning ballot initiatives. But of course you also need to emphasize a strong education system. An uneducated democracy is one ripe for takeover by parasitical political hackers. Technology can, and does, help a there; political information and fact-checking has never been so easily available. Though you also need to meta-educate people to actually avail themselves of this knowledge: Florida Man Doesn't Know How Voting Works | via — Florida Man (@_FloridaMan) work, direct democracies don’t, and technology won’t fix or change that. Relying on direct democracy because your republic isn’t working is tantamount to pushing your car to your destination because the engine is shot. I occasionally encounter techno-utopians who suggest that all major American political decisions should be put to direct online votes, a la John Brunner’s : the idea makes me cringe and plot my escape route back to Canada. That said, though, American democracy is broken, and I’m about the British or Canadian political systems either. But the system can be fixed–and technologically improved–if we can overcome the that has been carefully cultivated in us all by the powers that be. Call me crazy, but I’m still optimistic. |
European Startups, Get Your Pitches Together | Andrew J Scott | 2,014 | 11 | 8 | I’ve pitched at least 250 investors over the years, mentored hundreds of startups and have plenty of behind me. So I feel I know a thing or two about pitching, and European startups are so often really rather bad at it. Austria, and specifically Vienna, is famous for classical music and more than tech startups, but I’d heard good things about and so wearing my early-stage investor hat, I found myself consuming 50 startup pitches at the . To give yourselves a better chance of securing funding – and customers – here are 10 suggestions to get right. Define what you do; this is the most basic aspect of a pitch. To my ongoing astonishment, this so often gets overlooked or poorly communicated. According to the interactive event app (which allowed investors to submit questions and vote) at least half of the startup pitches didn’t communicate clearly what they do. Top of the feedback was “I don’t get it.” Often the judges didn’t get it either and had to ask in the Q&A. The size of the problem you solve and how well you solve it creates the value in your business. There is simply no excuse for not being able to pitch coherently the problem you solve and how you solve it in one minute let alone three minutes. A good test is to pitch your Mum (use your team’s family, too). This is a serious suggestion. If your mother understands it then you’ll guarantee tech investors (and your customers) understand what, why and how, too. As a born English speaker whose only second language is French in the form of a , I feel a tinge of guilt criticising others who don’t get to pitch in their native tongue, but the harsh truth is that unless you can speak English as a CEO pitching an international market, you’re going to struggle. I’ve even heard that a Y Combinator representative said that CEOs with “thick unintelligible foreign accents” quite simply fail. Record yourself and ask a native speaker their honest opinion. Better, record yourself and ask other people for whom English is their second language. Invest in lessons/speech therapy if necessary. And in addition to that… As an occasional MC/speaker I certainly still sometimes fall foul of this. Speaking more slowly does come naturally. It feels odd. But it sounds good. Slower speech will not only help with clarity if you have a strong accent, it will give you more gravitas. There are lots of great resources to help you improve your speaking; this is of many. If you feel that you’re talking way too slowly, you’re probably speaking about the right speed. Too many decks continue to be confused, bloated, overly complex or all three. I’d recommend you take as a starting point, though some cash / revenue projections may not apply if you’re very early stage. They’ve made a lot of money in this business. If it’s good enough for them, it should be good enough for most investors. Bear in mind obviously the content will change depending on whether this is a deck to be read, studied closely pre-investment or something you’re presenting in three minutes. Equally, if your presentation is just three minutes you obviously wouldn’t include all these slides; apply common sense. If I’m reading a slide, I’m not listening to you. When I’ve finished reading, I’ll look at you again and start listening again. You have precious seconds to make an impression and you want people to engage with you, the human being on stage, and listen to what you’re saying. Complicated slides compete for audience attention. Why set yourself up with a competitor? Steve Jobs was possibly the king of scarce slides, using imagery and allegedly never more than three bullet points and usually only a word (or three) each. You may not be launching the new iPhone but you can steal Steve’s tricks to help keep people focused on the important things: What you’re saying. Humans are emotional animals; yes even investors. With a three minute pitch (as it was at Pioneers) you might think it’s a distraction to tell a story. But don’t forget story telling is the most ancient of modern human’s ways to communicate information, be it cave gossip or religion. Half your challenge is to engage the audience within the first 5-10 seconds before their heads tip back down to phones and laptops. A snappy authentic story which positions your problem / solution fit can engage and differentiate you. Don’t include fluff (this isn’t bedtime story telling) but providing context and stimulating curiosity in the first 30 seconds, may mean people leave the wifi alone for the remainder of your pitch. If you believe then 10,000 hours is the time it takes to become supremely accomplished at anything. That’s not feasible for your pitch obviously, but practicing 10, 20 or 50 times is. With all the cost and time to attend a conference, not to mention the subsequent impact your 1, 3, 5 or 10 minute pitch will have on an audience, practice really will help make perfect. So many founders I know don’t properly practice their pitches for specific events which often have specific pitch lengths. So practice; rinse, wash, repeat. It will really pay off. Before you begin, take a few seconds to pause. There’s more about this in the . Gaining composure and asserting yourself on the stage is vital and you can afford five seconds to avoid the impression of a manic hyena, before you launch into your winning pitch. The Q&A session is a great time to show your mettle. Perhaps surprisingly, this is closely linked to practice. If you’ve not pitched “friendly” investors, your team, your family or others, you won’t be used to answering the tough questions. Get to the point when answering the question and if cornered (e.g. because an investor asks your valuation or you don’t know the answer) know in advance what you’re going to say, even if it’s “I’m happy to discuss that afterwards off stage.” Even if you’re a seasoned pitch artist for your startup, sit down and write the 10 questions you’d hate to be asked. They’re probably exactly the ones you’ll get. You can hire a coach or get a mentor or another entrepreneur to help you shape your deck, but you can also hire a coach to help you with your presentation skills. Given how important a snappy delivery with absolute clarity in a startup world of elevator pitches is, paying for a day or two of presentation coaching (assuming you hire someone good) could make all the difference the next time you’re onstage, and it’s something startup founders rarely seem to see value in doing. Don’t forget, even the most populous leaders in our world do this – from Presidents to Prime Ministers – they all have coaches or have been coached. There are many more tips and tricks you can employ (and far better speakers or teachers than I out there who can give them) but reviewing the performance of the 50 startups Pioneers, these thoughts were the elephants in the room, which, as startup founders, you need to take outside the zoo and aggressively cull from your startup pitches. It’s worth adding that conference teams themselves can sometimes be guilty of compounding problems. If you’re a conference organizer, these are my top three gripes as an attendee watching pitches or having been a founder having to pitch: It continues to amaze me how poor so many hosts are at tech conferences and I find myself wondering why they were chosen. Despite “only” introducing each startup, the MC sets the whole tone of an event – they define the energy in the room. They should be able to connect with an audience, gain the audience respect and carry the audience with them if there are problems and keep things on time gracefully. Being an MC is hard. I know, I’ve done it and I can always improve. So pick your MC carefully, ask them how they will prepare, ask them what’s important about being an MC, get recommendations and don’t consider it an afterthought – they will make or break the perception of your event. You have plenty of time to test and practice rapidly changing pitch decks and to confirm that your sound system works. Don’t make a founder’s job even harder when they’re already wracked with nerves by fiddling around with PowerPoint/Keynote problems. You’re presumably paying an AV company to run your sound system. If you’re in the pitch room and speech isn’t clear, it’s their job to fix it. Or, don’t pick a room with naturally awful acoustics for voice. Somewhere which is good for chamber music, may not necessarily be good for startup pitches. I’d like to end on a note to the audience at these events. We Europeans are a hard crowd to please and there’s nothing worse than being an MC or a founder speaking to an audience of unengaged stones. So next time you’re asked to welcome someone on stage, give them a energized round of applause or hey, laugh at the MC’s joke even if it’s not going to win him an Emmy Award… Just a little bit of enthusiasm, even if feigned, goes a long way. |
Steve Jobs Still Casts Long Shadow At Web Summit | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 11 | 8 | I spent this past week in Dublin at , and I couldn’t help but notice, we are still fascinated, dare I say obsessed with the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs more than three years after his death. If you knew the man or even had a meeting with him back in the day, interviewers wanted to hear about it. Heck, even TechCrunch got into it this week . It seems if you had any connection to Jobs, you’re in demand. Take former Apple CEO John Sculley as an example. He was famously lured to Apple by Jobs in 1983, but the honeymoon was short-lived and Jobs left under a cloud of animosity in 1985 to start NeXT Computers. Sculley was a successful executive before he joined Apple. He left Apple profitable 11 years later, and he’s done quite a bit in the 20 years since he left the company, but you would never know it. All anyone wants to hear about is what Steve was like, and his involvement in forcing Jobs out of the company (although he disputed just how that went down). Almost 30 years after the fact though, we’re still talking about it and dissecting the politics of the situation, and asking Sculley about what happened. He is famous by association and it’s a strange dynamic. But it wasn’t just Sculley who got asked about Jobs, so did Drobox CEO Drew Houston who was asked about a single meeting he had with Jobs in 2009. This wasn’t the first time he talked about this. In fact, he gets asked about it all the time. Why? Because we want to hear stories about the man. For Houston, it was by all accounts a surreal experience where he met a hero who wanted to buy his company. But he wasn’t there to sell and it never went much further than that because as Houston pointed on stage at Web Summit this week, if you don’t want to sell your company, don’t take meetings about selling your company. It ended there, but five years later just because Houston had a conversation with the guy, we still want to hear about it. In the closing session of Web Summit, U2 lead singer, Bono appeared on a panel with House of Cards producer Dana Brunetti and Eric Wahlforss, co-founder of SoundCloud. There was lots of industry talk of course, but moderator David Carr of the New York Times had to ask Bono about a meeting with Steve Jobs five years ago in France (millionaire’s talk) when he infamously told him iTunes looked like a spreadsheet. Bono was surprised that for a guy who was so concerned about design, that Jobs didn’t make iTunes prettier. To be honest, the look of iTunes in my view is the least of its problems, but once again he had a face-to-face with Jobs and the world wanted to hear about it. Jobs died over three years ago, but his influence on the technology industry will very likely go on for a long time to come, and if Web Summit was any indication, our desire to hear stories about a man who had so much impact on the industry will likely continue too. |
Salesforce’s Service Cloud 1 Is A Wearable Technology Trojan Horse | Justin Foster | 2,014 | 11 | 1 | Imagine a scenario in which an oil rig worker suddenly hears an alarm sound from somewhere on the rig. The adrenaline rush begins and the worker knows he has to move fast. The sound of the siren is not a clear signal as to where the trouble is, but the smartwatch on his wrist indicates exactly where to go and what needs to be done to fix the problem. As he works to fix it, each step is photographed with his heads-up display for documentation and organizational learning. If you’re thinking this scenario is far off in the future, think again. It’s actually a lot closer than you might think. At the Dreamforce conference earlier this month, Salesforce — its wearables “Trojan Horse” — which I believe is about to take over as the industry leader in wearable technologies. In the demonstrations of the new ServiceCloud 1, Honeywell showed off its ; the company is banking that homeowners will move from paying for “security monitoring” to paying for a broader set of “home monitoring.” Are these advances in Service Cloud 1 and the mobile development platforms a Trojan Horse for mobile, and in customer and field service? While wearables represent a quickly growing category of devices from a variety of vendors – and across a variety of industries – they’re still looking for a long-term home. In case you’re keeping score, wearables today are struggling a bit in the consumer world. There are a growing number of smartwatches like the Moto 360 and the upcoming – and much anticipated – Apple Watch, and even new hybrid, all-in-one wearables like . Then there are the fashionably awkward heads-up display (HUDs) devices to choose from, including Google Glass and Oculus Rift. And just this month, we started talking about “hearables.” I suspect this is just the beginning. Certainly, these devices are designed to attract consumers, particularly early adopters like myself. Depending on the situation, these wearables can come in handy. For example, smartwatches have notification features that help me avoid getting distracted by my smartphone. On the other end of the spectrum, wearable HUD technology remains largely unused because there are no “killer apps” that make them must-have tools. These devices look silly, and people ultimately know they are providing the wearer no real value. Why invest in a wearable that can’t leave the house? Not to mention, vendors have not yet married the fashion and technology elements; in order to be worn by the mainstream consumer audience, wearables have to look good. I believe the breakthrough and mass adoption opportunity for HUDs and other wearables lies in the customer and field-service world. There are hundreds of examples of where this emerging technology of wearables could quickly come into play across many industries and applications: The use of real productivity tools for field-service workers is the next logical step, and by introducing tools around wearables and mobile enablement, Salesforce will soon be infiltrating the world of customer service with wearable technologies. After all, hundreds of thousands of Salesforce customers across each of these verticals and many others are already using their ServiceCloud 1 technology. So it seems no small coincidence that the company is pushing hard on wearables through marketing, innovation and new development tool sets. This Trojan Horse is about to burst open, and it will change the entire industry in a very positive way. |
The Internet Archive Now Lets You Play 900+ Classic Arcade Games In Your Browser | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 1 | Looking for a nice little burst of nostalgia on this fine Saturday evening? Don’t feel like going through the process of installing MAME and lurking for ROMs, but still want to get your classic arcade on? Back in December of last year, the Internet Archive (in their effort to backup the entire digital world, one bit at a time) launched a “ ” that offers up browser-friendly emulators for a pretty shocking number of consoles from the 70s/80s. Want to play some Atari 2600? Sega Genesis? ) This weekend, they’ve introduced a whole new category: . 900+ classic arcade games, no quarters required. It’s all a part of the , an effort to emulate as many systems as possible… in Javascript, of all languages. As they put it, they want to make “computer history and experiences” as embeddable as “movies, documents, and audio”. Do they all work seemlessly? Nah — you’ll almost certainly spot a bug or two. Many are missing sound. But it’ll get better in time — and for now, just the fact that they got MAME in a browser, sans any hefty plugins/runtime environments, is damned impressive. One of JSMESS’ developers, Jason Scott, outlined the work he put into the Arcade-centric leg of the project in a . ( it can be a bit weird to figure out a game’s controls in MAME some times. The 5 key lets you insert a coin; the 1 key is usually the Player 1 start button. Arrows are usually used for directional stuff, with CTRL/ALT/SPACE used for the three primary buttons. Beyond that, you’ll have to mash buttons a bit to figure it out [or hit TAB to dive into the key configurations]) |
Two Worlds Colliding: How LinkedIn Could Take On Salesforce | Vik Singh | 2,014 | 11 | 1 | Today’s B2B sales and marketing folks struggle with the overwhelming number of channels for finding and reaching new leads. The customer “funnel” continues to expand as buyers do more of their own research before raising their hand to connect with a sales rep. But imagine if you could make the funnel wider by identifying leads when they’re just browsing your site and haven’t yet filled out your “contact me” form, or leads who haven’t yet visited but are likely to be a good fit for your product? That’s hard to do with the primitive tools that are available for sales and marketers today, unless you bring together some very rare assets — which just so happen to all exist at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the only company with fairly clean and accurate details on pretty much every contact that matters in the business world. Unfortunately, most other data providers’ contact info contains 80 percent garbage, and they can’t really improve it without violating CAN-SPAM laws. LinkedIn also reflects the direction sales is heading with strong channels for thought leadership. Via LinkedIn, you can educate and advocate for your customers versus just selling to them. Here’s a hypothetical scenario: What if you included some JavaScript from LinkedIn on your company’s website so that whenever a signed-in LinkedIn user visited your site, you could see who they were in LinkedIn Sales Navigator? Since the overwhelming majority of potential leads just browse and don’t fill in your forms, this would give you insight into a whole new population of potential customers that your Marketo and Salesforce systems can’t track. If LinkedIn offered a more sales or marketing automation-style interface, you could select, group or filter those web visitors and send them educational LinkedIn InMails or purchase targeted advertising on LinkedIn or in their LinkedIn email digests. If we take this scenario a step further, marketers and salespeople could eventually use LinkedIn to reach new prospects who haven’t yet visited their sites. LinkedIn would know which types of users find your company interesting – especially if the company worked itself down the funnel towards Salesforce’s territory to offer CRM functions. By knowing the history of your leads (i.e. which ones end up converting to customers), LinkedIn could help you pinpoint your hottest prospects even before they hit one of your landing pages or contact forms. While LinkedIn claims that isn’t a competitor, it sure is running a course that brings it closer and closer to Salesforce’s bread-and-butter. LinkedIn’s recent acquisition of the Bizo marketing platform is a clear indication that the company is serious about taking on B2B marketing. A related to the acquisition details LinkedIn’s strategy to do this with an approach that builds upon its incredibly valuable social graph, online presence and other unique assets. And LinkedIn’s revamp of its Sales Navigator product is another sign that the company’s focusing more and more on . LinkedIn has an opportunity that none of today’s automation vendors can match. Even if Marketo and Salesforce joined forces, they’d be unable to give companies the true full-circle understanding of customers that LinkedIn could provide. That’s because LinkedIn has four unique assets that position it well to make a considerable run into this space (if it chooses to). First of all, LinkedIn holds a treasure trove of data about companies and individuals. Whereas and you have to fill them up with contacts to campaign and prospect into, LinkedIn already has a pre-populated database. That’s why many sales teams leverage its Team Link tool to share networks across reps. This makes it easy to determine the right contacts, retrieve lead recommendations, and see updates on key people or companies. LinkedIn could add even more value for salespeople by automatically lighting up all the right prospects tailored for their business, and offering one-click actions so they could easily reach out to them with the best personalized offers. LinkedIn also has its hooks in every part of the customer loop. As described in the scenario above, LinkedIn could help you generate net new revenue via insight into anonymous web visitors. It could eventually provide end-to-end sales and marketing analytics — from anonymous web visitors to converted customers — which would far outdo today’s marketing or sales automation reporting on just the sliver of people already in your funnel. That comprehensive insight could be used to score incoming leads and rank them within the LinkedIn experience. In addition, LinkedIn is a hub for thought leadership. LinkedIn provides a social network for promoting educational content in an organic, viral way that’s way more enticing than the blast emails we get from today’s marketing and sales automation systems. For example, LinkedIn’s Influencers feature has already attracted numerous successful business leaders like Richard Branson, Jack Welsh and Bill Gates. This kind of approach has tons of potential, especially for under-tapped sales and marketing opportunities around emerging trends or topics. Finally, LinkedIn has a data-driven DNA and a great culture for smart products. LinkedIn CEO knows first-hand how important data science is, and he hired one of the best data scientists I know – . They understand that these techniques will also be crucial for redefining sales and marketing. In fact, the company has built an advanced lead scoring system that its sales team uses internally. It leverages data science, LinkedIn’s network graph, and numerous interesting company and profile signals to predict the best prospects for LinkedIn to sell its hiring solutions into. Although this system is heavily customized for LinkedIn’s internal corporate needs, it’s clear that the company has seen the future. With such assets, it’s a no-brainer to make a run into a $30 billion market, right? Well, not quite, because for LinkedIn to make this move, it must overcome significant challenges, including . The company already has a cash cow in its recruiting solutions and is loved by the public markets. But if you’re going to take on an existing market like CRM, you have to be very, very focused. That’s hard to do when you’re already making a lot of money from a totally different buyer. LinkedIn is a focused company, so it’s hard to see its leadership taking on the risk of spreading their focus too thin. Another issue is the company’s consumer roots. Protecting users’ privacy is paramount for a company like LinkedIn, and this would get more challenging if it moved into the enterprise space. Salespeople and marketers would demand more data about LinkedIn users, and want more aggressive and effective methods for eliciting responses from them, but that would very likely run afoul with consumers’ expectations. Crossing over into the enterprise would mean longer sales cycles, more support, less profit, more engagement with partners and consulting firms, and a lot of pressure to do deeper reporting and analytics. And while LinkedIn would probably prefer that we do all our work end-to-end in their experience, enterprise software is just messy. It has to interoperate with back-office applications for things like contracts, bookings, website analytics, customer support and ticketing, lead routing, territories, CRM triggers, etc. Even if LinkedIn had all these workflows and integrations (and the implementation partners and consultants to support them), it would be an uphill battle to take over existing sales and marketing workflows from within Salesforce and transfer those to the LinkedIn island. Although the risks of moving into the sales and marketing space are high given the safeties LinkedIn enjoys today, the market is just too lucrative to ignore. I predict LinkedIn will incrementally chip away at pieces of marketing and sales automation over time rather than going all-in and calling out Salesforce. That said, I would love to see LinkedIn go on the offensive like Salesforce did against Siebel. It has the goods and is the most well positioned to pull off such a game-changing feat. |
Talk Isn’t Cheap As Investors Pour Cash Into Collaboration And Intelligence Tools | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 11 | 1 | Investors and innovators have been trying to develop better tools for groups to communicate, collaborate, and make decisions for decades. Since businesses have become increasingly global and engage more remote workers, the need for collaboration tools is even more pronounced. And while hundreds of millions have been spent on technology, investors still think that there’s more work to be done. Friday saw the in the collaboration software developer Slack. That investment values Slack at over $1 billion, making it the latest enterprise facing software startup to become a unicorn. Slack’s metrics are as impressive as its valuation, with 30,000 active teams that send more than 200 million messages each month, and more than 73,000 of the daily active users registered as paid seats, according to the company. Slack also says that it’s now pulling in $1 million each month in recurring revenues. But behind Slack and its other large competitors, such as and are a host of smaller companies waiting in the wings to tackle the problem of collaboration and decision-making in businesses large and small. One recent entrant hoping to make headway against the industry’s giants is , which has raised $700,000 in financing and has developed a new software as a service collaboration tool for businesses. SpeakUp isn’t alone. Since 2010, venture capitalists have made 239 investments in companies that are trying to develop these new collaboration, communication and decision-making tools, according to CrunchBase. And despite a slackening in the pace of investments and some big rounds for incumbent players in recent months, new startups keep launching to try their hand at building a better mousetrap.
SpeakUp began developing its technology about 11 months ago, but the inspiration came from chief executive Ray Gillenwater’s experience as a managing director for BlackBerry in Australia. “As the new MD, I was pushing for culture change,” Gillenwater wrote in an email. “I wanted a team that participated in problem solving and idea generation, from top to bottom. I successfully got the team to open up and share their thinking with me. And when they did it was information overload.” Thinking that businesses needed a better way to capture and curate input from their team, Gillenwater developed the SpeakUp tool, which lets anyone post to a private space in the company to share ideas and suggest solutions to problems. The team reaches consensus through voting and the decision maker approves, amends or denies posts transparently. Gillenwater estimates that it’s a massive market, with about $1.5 billion spent on internal tools to manage decision-making and communications among teams. “We are much more than just an engagement tool; we are also a communication and innovation platform, so the market is… Big,” Gillenwater wrote. Anyone can sign up for free to use the service, but it’s utility really begins when at least 12 people sign on to share information and collaborate, according to Gillenwater. For enterprises or small to medium-sized groups the cost is $89 per-month, while groups of up to 100 users pay $249 per month. His service has really taken off with companies like Box, PayPal, Lyft, Adobe and Dropbox, along with bigger corporate divisions like John Deere, and Lexus. Another company that launched earlier this year with similar aspirations of combining communications with enterprise decision-making is . Backed with $1.1 million, the company developed a mobile application for communicating and polling around specific questions posted to its forums. If SpeakUp and Waggl are taking a hands-on approach to collaboration and problem solving, then companies like , which raised $6.5 million in July, and the massive Sequoia-backed, Chicago-based company are looking to automate much of the process. Believing that there’s no better tool to help managers make strategic decisions than the raw data that they have but can’t always process, Decision Lens and Mu Sigma both tackle decision-making with software. From deciding on capital planning projects and budgets to determining which research and development initiatives to prioritize, Decision Lens makes collaboration easier by obviating the need for it. Founded by two brothers who developed the technology from research their father had conducted as a professor, Decision Lens began by selling its software a service toolkit to government agencies. Since then, it’s been picked up by some of the largest Fortune 500 companies including AstraZeneca, Boeing, and Johnson & Johnson. “During 2014, Decision Lens has experienced its greatest revenue growth ever, and that can be attributed to our technology platform finally hitting its stride among large enterprises. They are witnessing first-hand how invaluable the solution can be for the future of their business,” said John Kealey, Decision Lens chief executive, in a statement at the time of the company’s financing. Decision Lens currently has 71 employees and more than 80 enterprise-level customers. But the company’s beginnings are more humble. Its initial business intelligence and decision-making tools were developed in 2004, tapping into databases and providing visualizations of data that could indicate to managers what paths to take, according to company co-founder John Saaty. “What it does is structure objectives through a hierarchic format,” said Saaty in an interview. “That’s different from a survey system that’s taking votes.” Surveys are imprecise, according to Saaty, because people are not consistent — or pragmatic — when it comes to evaluating competing objectives. Unlike surveys, Decision Lens takes the raw business data and allows decision makers to evaluate the impact of certain courses of action given a set of mapped decision blueprints. The executives at Mu Sigma agree. “In the age of big data, companies often lack the tools they need to appreciate and understand the complexity of problems they face. A new art of problem solving is needed to address this,” said Dhiraj Rajaram, the chief executive and founder of Mu Sigma, in a statement. “The big goal of our new platform is to automate dynamic thinking that is often baked into the DNA of innovators like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, but now make this available to any major corporation.” Unlike Decision Lens, Mu Sigma has raised quite a bit of cash to pursue its goals. Some of venture capital and private equity’s biggest names — Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic — have poured over $200 million into the company. Earlier this month, Mu Sigma rolled out muUniverse, a new product that the company said serves as a Google Maps for decisions. Whatever the path, it’s clear that venture investors still think there’s a lot of work to be done to ensure that companies work more intelligently and efficiently as they become more distributed.
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The Future Of French Robotics | Laetitia Vitaud | 2,014 | 11 | 1 | The French still dream of humanoid robots and . Swedish TV series , broadcast on French-German TV channel Arte, seduced a surprisingly large audience in France. And flagship robotics projects are proudly . is one of those flagship robots, an autonomous programmable humanoid robot developed by French company . The same company also created , which it . Romeo is supported by Paris business cluster and is destined, like Real Humans’ fictitious “hubots” to help the elderly and the sick regain some form of autonomy. These are the types of robots used to showcase France’s engineering prowess. Yet a few extra decades will still be necessary to produce robots that can perform half as much as a human maid. What’s been known as “ ’s paradox” is the fact that high-level reasoning and calculation require little computation, whereas low-level sensorimotor skills require huge computational resources. NAO Robot (Source: Aldebaran Robotics, NAO Robot creator, under a ) “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.” Or as famously put it: “The main lesson of 35 years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.” This is why no robot can yet perform all of our domestic chores. can only vacuum the floor and will never empty the dishwasher. Humanoid robots are a showcase, not a business. Robots shouldn’t be expected to look human, but to do the “hard” things their own way. The dedicated specialised machinery used in our modern factories (particularly in high-wage countries), fascinating though they may be, are not so new nor are they very French (one immediately has Germany in mind), but French robotics has been conquering warehouses with an increased mastery of “hard” sensorimotor skills. ‘s Co-founder Raul Bravo had this in 2005: “Logistics is a sector that really needs robotics.” Little did he know that in 2012 Amazon would spend $775 million to buy , a U.S. company that produces mobile robotics fulfillment systems for Amazon to . Balyo’s doesn’t look impressive nor does it look human, but it is replacing human workers in warehouses. It is designed to make any fork-lift truck into a fully autonomous vehicle. The potential market hasn’t yet been fully explored: In Europe alone, more than a million fork-lift trucks are used to move pallets in warehouses, all of which could become automated! The really promising element is that no ground infrastructure is required to use these tools. Like warehouses, parking lots are cleared areas dedicated to one purpose. These areas can be made more efficient with robots. German company developed an automated parking system: “279 automated parking spaces at Düsseldorf Airport can now be used via patented robots.” In France, two researchers, Clément Boussard and Aurélien Cord, have been working on their own version of that system: is developing a solution that would be lighter and more flexible (and cheaper) than Serva’s sophisticated system, something that reminds more of Balyo’s MoveBox. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICdxiQXqWGo Stanley Robotics “Optipark” doesn’t require any modification of existing infrastructure and the solution can be deployed in any parking lot. The potential market in crowded urban Europe seems limitless. And parking solutions could be an entry point to the larger market of driverless vehicles. But can these robotics firms really boost the French industry and economy? has proved particularly dramatic in the past decade. Robotics doesn’t seem to have changed anything, and the number of factories has dwindled drastically in France. The share of the industrial sector in the country’s added value dropped from 18 percent in 2000 to 12.5 percent only in 2011 and lags far behind that of Germany (26.2 percent) or Sweden (21.2 percent). In the 2000s, France’s export market share plummeted while Germany’s grew. The French industry has seen no other option but to crop its margins, which fell from 30 percent to 21 percent (meanwhile Germany’s margins went up). There seems to be a stark contrast between the dynamism of France’s high-tech and robotics entrepreneurs and the catastrophic results of the French industry and its under-equipped factories. There are clearly ; there are five times as many industrial robots in German factories as in France. German companies have invested an extra $12 billion each year while the French cut their investment by $5 billion. No integration has happened between French startups and the industrial giants that could make good use of their output. It’s as if the industry was worlds apart from the tech scene. Former Arnaud Montebourg did try to create fruitful interactions between the world of innovation and the industry. In September of last year his were designed by the government to boost France’s industrial sector by bolstering the country’s most competitive and innovative industries. and robotics were identified as a source of future wealth for the nation and regularly promoted by the Ministry with special events called “ “ Montebourg’s “New Industrial France” aimed to combine the actions of public actors and private companies to help the emergence of future French innovation. Even if these plans had not been abandoned with the change in minister, one can doubt the efficacy such measures could have had. French ministers often only pay lip service to the idea of disruptive innovation, but in effect only protect the incumbents and business as usual. The construction of bridges between France’s innovative startups and its fast-declining industry is but rather mostly from private initiatives and improved financing fluidity. Investment Fund aims to do just that. Bruno Bonnell and his partners at Capital this year to invest in French (and European companies) and boost the industry in the process. “Robotics will emerge as an industry unto itself that will impact all sectors of the economy,” they say. French economist Robin Rivaton in a widely discussed note titled “ ” (how robots can help reboot the French industry) argues that factories reflect a country’s economic wealth and that mastering one’s production is a matter of economic strategy. He is convinced that industrial robots offer a path to re-industrializing France. Robots can help the French “insource” its industrial activities and restore its margins. There’s no knowing whether France’s industrial decline can still be reversed. But promoting cool French robots can’t do any harm, can it? |
How To Reinvent A $38 Billion Company | Andrew Keen | 2,014 | 11 | 1 | With its illustrious 138-year history, its 114,000 global workforce and its $38 billion dollar market cap, you’d think that the Swedish tech giant Ericsson would be secure as the . But no. As Ericsson CEO confesses, every morning while brushing his teeth, he thinks to himself: “Today I need to make more changes in order to be relevant.” But, of course, “relevancy” is a tricky word amid the creative destruction of today’s tech world. And nobody knows this better than Vestberg – whose four and a half year tenure at Ericsson has been so impressive that he was to have been on Microsoft’s radar as a potential CEO. In what Ericsson describes as , everything changes. And so, as Vestberg acknowledges, Ericsson needs to change, too. Thus Ericsson is reinventing itself not only as a mobile infrastructure and services provider, but also as a company prospering in the new intersection of telecom, IT and media. Vestberg admits his own paranoia about perpetually reinventing Ericsson: “We need to challenge ourselves.” Only , of course. And as Ericsson begins to move downstream and directly compete with tech companies like IBM and HP, the next few years are going to be bloody interesting in that trillion-dollar intersection of telecom, IT and media. |
Gillmor Gang: Eating the World | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 11 | 1 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Thursday, October 30, 2014. A good news week, disguised as mobile, Facebook, and notifications eating the world. Just beneath the surface, the power of micro-communities lurking. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
The Potential Of Beacon Technology | Navneet Loiwal | 2,014 | 11 | 1 | After indoor positioning with Wi-Fi, beacon technology is a massive step forward in ambient context identification, which is why this technology is all the buzz of late. Beacons allow for background positioning and detection, giving new power to a phone that can make it truly “smart.” Because they offer the potential to target a consumer at the most opportune moment, beacons are especially hot on the retail sales front because shelves and store displays can suddenly become interactive and personalized. Brands are no longer limited by shelf displays and point-of-sale campaigns to communicate their messages, and brand marketers can extend past the store floor or shelf to deliver a personalized, digital form of outreach to identified shoppers. Beacons are a unique and sophisticated tool in the world of merchandising and advertising. However, if we take a step back and think about exactly how beacons are reaching retail locations, there is reason for concern rather than excitement. Currently, beacon networks are fragmented and closed. At quick glance, this may not be a concern, but thinking ahead, this fragmentation will likely result in long-term negative implications for consumers, retailers and developers alike. An analogy for beacon technology is GPS. Since its inception, GPS technology has always been an “open system” onto which developers could innovate and extend new product applications. Imagine if GPS had been deployed in a similar manner to beacons and, for example, if Google seized control of California, Apple secured rights to Nevada, and TomTom gained exclusive access to The Netherlands. In this situation, the end-user would be forced to rely on multiple applications and hardware selections to complete a single journey. Fortunately, GPS was not deployed in this fashion. But this is exactly how beacons are currently being deployed, and it’s the primary reason why they will limit the same innovation and depth of user experience that everyone is getting excited about. To unlock the massive potential of beacons, we need an open network much like GPS: ubiquitous, widely accessible, and easy to use and implement through built-in platform support. Beacons must form a new ubiquitous layer that powers context in order to most effectively serve the end-user. Instead, individual companies are currently creating the equivalent of small, private networks that will have limited value and use. In the retail space, beacons have garnered considerable attention in recent weeks and months. It is our view that if we advocate and build an open, inclusive beacon network, then all constituents — retailers, developers and end users — will collectively benefit. As with any new space, “immediate gain” usually does not translate to “ultimate reward.” It is likely that the retailers currently teaming up with closed networks may find themselves rethinking this decision a few years down the line. We’ve all read about retailers aligning with various app developers to install beacons for their apps. But today’s hot app may not be the most popular tomorrow. If a retailer ties itself to a platform backed by a single app and that app slips from hot to “not,” then that retailer is faced with having to uninstall and reinstall beacons. This reconfiguring process requires a massive undertaking in order to take advantage of new technological advancements. And the consequences are not without impact to the merchant’s bottom line. By forgoing closed networks and advocating for an open platform, retailers stand to significantly gain from future developments by retaining the ability to employ newer innovative services as they emerge and gain mass acceptance. Imagine that GPS was closed and that only one developer could access this data. If this had been the case, innovation would have been extremely limited. As it currently stands, beacon developers have to pay-to-play by teaming up with retailers to install beacons at retail locations or small proprietary networks. This is cost-prohibitive for small companies and startups. Additionally, without an open network, a developer is forced to spend unnecessary time attempting to access the network instead of building an incredible service and pushing the envelope on potentially more progressive offerings. If Waze had to do that for location data, it probably never would have been built. The fact that we don’t have an open system for beacons will most likely stifle innovation, which ultimately will hurt all constituents involved. In the early stages of any technology, developers need to be cognizant of long-term repercussions. Under the current paradigm, for a shopper to realize the full benefits of beacon technology, that user would have to download a multitude of apps that each take advantage of only a small network of beacons. This is highly unrealistic. Users don’t want to download apps for every retailer because it’s cumbersome, time-consuming and ineffective. An open, accessible and ubiquitous network would benefit all constituents, propel innovation and foster a collaborative environment for decades to come. |
The Challenge Of Connecting The Unconnected | Hassan Baig | 2,014 | 11 | 1 | Every time we return to or sign up for an Internet service (e.g. Facebook, Google, Gmail, YouTube, etc.), we rely on what UX experts call a “mental model” for navigating through the choices. A mental model is essentially a person’s intuition of how something works based on past knowledge, similar experiences and common sense. So even when something is new, mental models help to make sense of it, utilizing the human brain’s ability to transcode knowledge and recognize patterns. For instance, most of our grandparents can hit the ground running with changing the channel or increasing the volume when handed the remote control for the latest television available in the market today, squarely because of a well-developed mental model for TV remote control units. But our grandparents may not have the same level of success when using Internet services, smartphones or tablets. Under-developed mental models in these domains are their primary obstacles. In fact, according to Pew Research, do not use the Internet at all. So can teaching them how to use basic Internet services create the right mental models and alleviate the problem? It’s a step in the right direction, but there are other barriers at play. For instance, the same Pew Research study indicates only 1 in 2 older American adults actually know the benefits of the Internet (e.g. online shopping and entertainment, video conferencing with and emailing loved ones, reconnecting with old friends on social networks, medical advice etc.) — the rest, by implication, feeling that there’s no incentive to go online. In other words, onboarding someone to the Internet is a question of both teaching them how digital interfaces and basic Internet services work, and why they should consider using the Internet in the first place. Both go hand in hand. In addition to the aforementioned, Internet accessibility and affordability are significant hurdles that need to be overcome, as well, but they’re essentially engineering problems with a finite scope. In contrast, developing desire and mental capacities to make use of the Internet’s many conveniences is an abstract, psychological challenge (with a potentially infinite scope). This gamut of issues needs to be tackled for the unconnected to connect. Of course, by no means is anyone advocating forcing the offline to get online. The point is purely to remove the hurdles so the unconnected can make an informed decision about going online and not under duress of the fear of the unknown. How many unconnected are there anyway? According to most sources, approximately 20 percent of Americans are unconnected. That’s a big number. But this balloons if the whole world is taken into account. So how many are unconnected across the entire world? 4.3 billion. That is, for every Internet user, there are two people who don’t use the Internet at all; this skews predominantly rural, low-income and female. All these unconnected are missing out on the myriad ways the Internet facilitates its users: efficient communication, education, better career opportunities, free information regarding the personal and the professional, cross-pollination of world views, cheaply available entertainment, social networking, digital storage, etc. Likewise, given how the majority of the 4.3 billion unconnected belong to underdeveloped economies, some “third-world specific” benefits could also result. For instance, imagine how contagions like Ebola and Polio would become accurately trackable; or how moderate voices would digitally seep into extremist-controlled localities and seed pluralistic world views; or how smallholder farmers would get access to modern farming methodologies and finally look beyond their forefathers’ archaic agri-practices; or how each of the UN’s would never again suffer from the difficulty of data gathering, paving the way to much faster course correction and much bigger impact. We could end up making a dent in history’s biggest, most stubborn challenges — this second Internet revolution being as pivotal in human history as the second industrial revolution. Viewed across time, the opportunity cost of what the unconnected are missing out on is at least growing as fast as the aggregate progress in Internet-based technological advancements. How big a cost would that be five years from now? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Or by contrast, how big an opportunity is that? An opportunity to change the very fabric of the world, for the maximum number of people in the world, forever? With the of low-cost smartphones across the globe, getting everyone in the world online is not as farfetched as it could otherwise be. So to speak, the unconnected are getting their hands on their first ever computing device thanks to this smartphone boom. It is thus no wonder that some of the leading innovators of our time have begun to ponder various solutions for connecting the 4.3 billion unconnected. It can realistically happen. For example, Google’s , the and the recently announced are some crucial steps taken by the search giant to tackle the problem. Likewise, — a global initiative led by Facebook, Samsung, MediaTek, Nokia, Ericsson, Qualcomm and Opera Software — has been working quite seriously toward making the Internet affordable for the unconnected. The first summit recently kicked off in Delhi. During this summit, Mark Zuckerberg Internet.org’s commitment to the cause. And though originally the internet.org initiative focused almost exclusively on making the internet (via zero-rating and infrastructural improvement), Mark’s summit speech referenced the mental barriers for communities with no prior Internet experience. In essence, this is a “demand side” problem, i.e. getting the unconnected to start demanding the Internet through building incentives (i.e. the how) and mental models (i.e. the why). Improving Internet access and affordability, on the other hand, are “supply side” initiatives. Both demand and supply sides need to be tackled in tandem so that — in simple Econ 100 terms — the demand and supply curves intersect at a non-trivial price, leading to the generation of a non-trivial economy around connecting the unconnected. A recent carried out by McKinsey & Co and sponsored by Internet.org identifies the aforementioned issues, as well, but mentions them individually instead of further refining them into demand- or supply-side problems. Regardless, a sophisticated model including the complex psychological reasons behind being unconnected is finally emerging now, for the first time ever, so there’s a lot we can do from here. |
Why Is It Bad For Tech To Eat Jobs? | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 11 | 1 | Most jobs suck. Yours probably doesn’t–after all, you’re a member of the highly educated, cutting-edge TechCrunch demographic–but most jobs, almost by definition, are done by people coerced by the fear of not having enough money into doing work they mostly don’t want to do. We should be about the prospect of robots doing that work for us. Shouldn’t we? And yet everyone accepts that such a notion is terrifying. : Are robots coming for our jobs? In fact, they began stealing our jobs a long time ago […] robots are already displacing, and will continue to displace, jobs that humans would like to keep […] robots or other machines with human-like skills have appeared in service industries, too. (They apparently also MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson, which is a pretty shitty thing for any publication to do, let alone .) That central thesis–that technology eating jobs is a bad thing–is . Brad DeLong : “the average human will be highly productive in the robot world of the future but that does not mean that the typical human will be well-paid.” : “Stop ROBOT exploitation, cry striking Foxconn workers.” Yes, that’s right: even outsourced jobs are being automated! Meanwhile, the is “the great wage slowdown of the 21st century,” citing “(at least for many workers) technological change.” Yes, people voiced similar concerns fifty years ago, and a hundred years ago, and they were wrong. Why is this time different? Because of the profound, colossal distinction between then and now, which can be summed up in two words: . We’re fifty years into a period of . The world has never changed so fast before. And even if Moore’s Law ends tomorrow, much of its effects are only beginning to ripple out from the tech sector into the rest of the economy. But, again, why do we these concerns about tech eating jobs to be wrong? If technology destroys a large number of bad jobs, by being more productive than people, and also creates a smaller number of good jobs, shouldn’t that still be an unadulterated win that increases both economic productivity and human happiness? Why is it such a disaster if the old bad jobs outnumber the new good ones? The answer, of course, is that our economies and societies are not built for an world in which economic production is only very weakly linked to employment numbers. Think of WhatsApp’s 55 employees and $19 billion valuation, as an illustrative extreme. , in a on the prospect of technology destroying jobs faster than it creates them, this as: “Wealth without workers, workers without wealth.” Meanwhile, “the share of employment in middle-wage jobs has declined, while employment in high- and low-wage jobs has increased,” the Centre for Economic Policy Research. One potential future is apparent: first the job market is polarized into the high end and the low end, and then robots eat much of the low end. Consider, for instance, the effect of self-driving vehicles replacing the in America–but consider it , after taking a step back from all of your usual socioeconomic assumptions. Consider that the tedious, drudgery of truck driving is a job that few actively enjoy. Suppose self-driving trucks let us do all that work with 3 million fewer people, while creating 2 million better jobs with twice the salary elsewhere. How have we painted ourselves into a corner where that is somehow viewed as a thing? Why are we so scared of a future that boasts both greater economic production, and more people with the freedom to spend their time and effort however they desire? Shouldn’t a world with more output from fewer jobs (defined as “paying people to do things they don’t really want to do”) actually be extremely desirable? Put another way: why would it still be important to maintain full employment in a world overflowing with machine-generated wealth available to everyone? The answer, of course, is that it wouldn’t. But how do we imagine we’ll get to that world, if not via tech eating jobs? Maybe the real problem isn’t that robots might replace truck drivers; it’s that virtually none of the resulting economic benefits will go to the newly unemployed drivers. Maybe the real question we should be asking is: “ ” A couple of weeks ago I went for a sobering walk along the edge of The Jungle, a huge homeless camp (pictured above) barely a mile from San Jose’s City Hall, in the heart of Silicon Valley, arguably the wealthiest region of the richest nation on Earth, as cited in , which goes on to say: The anger in Northern California and elsewhere in the United States springs from an increasingly obvious reality: the rich are getting richer while many other people are struggling. It’s hard not to wonder whether Silicon Valley, rather than just exemplifying this growing inequality, is actually contributing to it […] Simply put, as we getter better at automating routine tasks, the people who benefit most are those with the expertise and creativity to use these advances. And that drives income inequality: demand for highly skilled workers rises, while workers with less education and expertise fall behind […] Of course, a diagnosis is far from a cure, and a call to improve educational opportunities is far too facile—who could argue with that? Indeed. If I’m right about the future, technology will destroy bad old jobs faster than it creates good new ones — and this should be a good thing, a cause for celebration. Unfortunately it won’t be, because our governments move too slowly to keep up with technology. But upheaval and poverty caused by will be a , not a problem, and it will be futile to try to address it with either Luddite idiocy or rote calls for more education. The real problem is far more fundamental. Our economy, as currently structured, insists that every household must have at least one member with either a job or independent wealth, and will continue to do so even as and when technology renders that demand inherently senseless. It’s a problem that will require . Don’t blame tech for the symptoms; blame governments for their failure to address the cause. |
San Francisco’s Short-Term Rental Solution | David Chiu | 2,014 | 11 | 1 | After two-and-a-half years of intense policy discussion and countless hours of public testimony, this week Mayor Ed Lee signed into law that will for the first time regulate short-term rentals in San Francisco. This legislative process was a test of whether or not we could find a reasonable solution to a policy issue posed by the new tech economy — and I strongly believe we succeeded. Unfortunately, critics of our approach — some of whom have genuine concerns, but many of whom are politically motivated given my campaign for California State Assembly — have continued to spread misinformation about the policy. It is time to set the record straight and be clear about what the new law means and to dispel the most persistent fabrications about it. These regulations are the direct result of discussions with a variety of people, including tenants, landlords, the hotel industry, the tourism community, neighborhood associations, home sharers, the city planners, the mayor’s office, my fellow supervisors, and many others. Like all legislative processes, we all had different ideas for what the perfect solution should look like. But everyone agreed on one thing: the status quo is not working. Every night hundreds of San Franciscans share their space with visitors from around the world. This activity is happening, and I am proud that rather than continue to ignore it, we chose to update outdated laws and put a balanced solution in place. The heart of this legislation is about addressing housing affordability. How can we all afford to live in the San Francisco we love as it becomes increasingly expensive? We know there are bad actors using illegal short-term rentals to push San Franciscans out of the city. Previous efforts to stop them had fallen short. There were no coherent enforcement structures in place. That’s why we consolidated enforcement in one city department and imposed tough fines and potential criminal penalties on anyone taking housing off the market and turning any unit into a year-round vacation rental. We placed a limit on the number of days residents can rent their space if they’re not present. But we also knew that many San Francisco residents were sharing the homes they lived in and not taking much-needed housing off the market. Throughout this process, we have heard hours of testimony from seniors, students, families and artists who rely on this income to make ends meet and pay their rent or mortgage. These are our friends and neighbors. We have seen that home sharing, when regulated properly, could actually be a tool to make the city more affordable for more families. The new law says that San Francisco residents who play by the rules, register their residence, pay their taxes, obtain liability insurance, abide by building safety and rent control rules, and do not profit wildly from sharing their space, can participate to a limited degree in short-term rentals. This is the truth about the new short-term rental legislation. Ideally we could start to implement it and monitor our progress, and future supervisors could tweak it as necessary. Instead, opponents are saying that they will try to push a ballot measure on the issue in 2015. And you can be sure that whatever the they propose, it won’t be the result of a thoughtful, inclusive legislative process. It will be a profoundly political effort based on a fictitious narrative about back taxes. Contrary to claims by David Campos — my opponent in the upcoming election — claims echoed repeatedly without any fact checking, the new law does not let Airbnb or any hosting platform off the hook for $25 million in back taxes. In fact, I was the first elected office to publicly support the city’s treasurer when he issued a ruling that the “transient occupancy tax” or TOT applies to short-term rentals. My legislation affirms the treasurer’s existing powers to apply this tax and goes a giant step further by explicitly stating that hosts and hosting platforms must collect and deliver taxes to our city. I also pushed Airbnb to work with the treasurer to for short-term rentals. Before the final board vote on my legislation, the treasurer that said unequivocally that he has all the legal authority he needs to pursue back and future taxes. For two-plus years, I have stated publicly that the city should collect all taxes owed before any of the opponents focused on this issue. But the idea that we should not address the broken status quo until a full completion of a lengthy tax collection is a great political sound bite, not a real policy argument. There’s one more falsehood to call out regarding taxes. The ubiquitous $25 million figure is not a real estimate; it’s a math error. We do not know the amount that past short-term renters and platforms owe. We do have a very rough estimate from San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carolyn Said that we could see $11 million or so annually in new taxes moving forward — funds we will be able to spend to build affordable housing, clean our streets and support the social safety net. But extrapolating back from the $11 million estimate and concluding that the back taxes owed are $25 million simply because the treasurer issued a ruling two-and-a-half years ago is absurd. It assumes the same level of activity over that time period, when in fact we know that short-term rentals have been growing exponentially. Finally, I want to respond directly to one other aspect of the anti-Airbnb rhetoric that’s swirling around: the offensive suggestion that I would pursue legislation based on campaign spending by technology leaders on my behalf. Nothing could be farther from reality. I began to craft short-term rental regulations two years ago because I saw a housing policy challenge in San Francisco that needed to be solved — well before I even began to consider running for the State Assembly. I believe that new technology is creating the need for new policies, and I was elected to pass laws to solve problems. The Board of Supervisors I’ve presided over has worked tirelessly to address San Francisco’s housing crisis by fighting evictions and approving the construction of new housing, with a focus on maximizing the number of affordable units. The work we’ve done to regulate short-term rentals is in that same spirit. San Francisco has always prided itself on innovation and openness. With this step, we continue to show the world that we are a leader not just in technology, but in government’s response to technology. At our best, we do not run from tough challenges or grandstand from the sidelines; we work together to hammer out new and fair solutions. |
Twitter Will Open Hong Kong Office To Target Advertisers | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | In Asia, Twitter is up against rivals like Sina Weibo and the ubiquity of messaging apps like Line, WhatsApp, and WeChat. But the region is still an important one for the microblogging platform, a point it underscored today by announcing plans to establish an office in Hong Kong. Twitter’s vice president for Asia Pacific, the Americas, and emerging markets, Shailesh Rao, , which will open in early 2015, will focus on selling advertising to companies based in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. A Twitter representative told TechCrunch, “With half of all Internet, mobile and social media users worldwide in Asia today, we see many opportunities across the region. APAC is the growth engine for the company and we are expanding into more markets to reach new users, partners & advertisers.” Though Twitter has been blocked in mainland China since 2009, that doesn’t mean that the greater China region can’t be a potentially lucrative source of advertising revenue. Facebook is also blocked there, but Mark Zuckerberg at Tsinghua University last week that “Facebook is already in China” because Chinese businesses use the site to market items like mobile phones, connecting them to potential customers in other countries. Twitter can, of course, play a similar role for those companies. Rao identified Huawei, Xiaomi, Lenovo Group, Alibaba, Acer, and Asus as potential advertisers. Though 77 percent of Twitter’s 284 million users are located outside the U.S., only 34 percent of its revenue comes from international sources. In Q3 2014, Twitter’s total revenue was $361 million, up 114 percent from $169 million a year ago. Ad revenue totaled $320 million, an increase of 109 percent year-over-year. Mobile advertising was 85 percent of that amount, and international revenue was $121 million. The company has been like expanding its ad program to developing markets in Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. According to the WSJ, Twitter’s Hong Kong office will be led by Peter Greenberger, its Singapore-based director of sales for emerging markets. In addition to its existing office in Singapore, Twitter also has offices in Seoul, Tokyo, and Sydney, and to work with Indonesian advertisers and marketers. |
Spotify Now Lets You Use A Phone Or Tablet As A Remote For Your Desktop Music | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | , , were wondering when Spotify would use its Connect feature — which — to connect their phone and desktop devices. Well, I’m pleased to say that , and you can now use your phone or tablet as a remote control for the tunes playing on your desktop. The only stipulation is that you are a paying Spotify customer, but that’s always been the case for Spotify Connect — which lets you play music on WiFi-enabled devices in your vicinity, like speakers, using a mobile device. (Spotify has confirmed that just its iOS and Android apps are supported for now.) Spotify Connect for computers uses the same setup as other hardware, and is easy to configure. Ensuring that the Spotify app is open on your desktop, simply open up the app on your mobile and start playing a song. Then click through to the ‘now playing’ menu and open the connect icon in the bottom right corner of your screen. The Spotify mobile app will take a few seconds to locate your desktop (and any other connected devices), after which you simply click on the device (us162188, in my case) and — hey presto — the music will play on your desktop. You can then skip, change track, etc, right from the mobile app itself. I’ve been playing with this a little this morning and, while it doesn’t solve any earth shattering problems, it makes the experience of using Spotify more convenient. And, frankly, that’s the aim of the game. For example, I like my music and appreciate that when I finish work I can power down my laptop and pick up where I left off on my phone. I could also connect my laptop to ‘dumb’ speakers and get the Spotify Connect effect that WiFi-enabled hardware enjoy. Spotify, of course, shows off more sophisticated situations for how it could work with the right speakers and other hardware. The integration itself is unlikely to persuade anyone to fork out the $10 or so per month that Spotify Premium costs — — but it’s a neat addition that I think many existing customers will appreciate. |
SparkLabs To Launch Its Internet Of Things Accelerator In South Korean “Smart City” Songdo | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | , one of the leading incubators in Seoul’s rapidly growing startup ecosystems, announced today that it will launch its Internet of Things Accelerator in Songdo International Business District in early 2015. A $35 billion private real estate development that will contain 80,000 apartments, 50 million square feet of office space, and 10 million square feet of retail space when it is completed next year, Songdo is This means that the city was developed with a technological infrastructure that supports connected Internet services and products in public spaces and residences. For example, the city is filled with sensors that can monitor temperature, energy use, and traffic flow, as well as amenities like charging stations for electric cars. SparkLabs intends to use Songdo, which currently has more than 35,000 residents, as a “test bed” for its companies. Its Internet of Things program will be based in Seoul and Songdo and is open to startups from anywhere in the world. It will focus on enterprise and consumer connected devices, sensors, data analytics related to the Internet of Things space, platform plays, and wearables, says SparkLabs co-founder and general partner HanJoo Lee. Alumni from SparkLabs’ incubator program include KnowRe, , and Memebox, . “Songdo’s importance is to the overall tech ecosystem,” Lee tells TechCrunch. “Global leaders, such as Cisco and LG, and potential others are integrating cutting edge technologies into this smart city built from the ground up. It really provides a unique opportunity for companies to see how ubiquitous technology can be integrated into our lives without creating interference of distractions. Songdo is a giant petri dish for companies such as Google to new startups.” “Songdo provides our Internet of Things participants a very unique opportunity to plug them into a community of 35,000 people. This opportunity is unparalleled in the world,” he adds. “Working with such a wired city open to innovation allows our startups to test out their products at scale, not a field test with four or five friends. We picture a whole range of devices that will eventually be launched at Songdo, from new security systems for recreational parks to new healthcare devices to pet trackers to smart appliances.” Located near Incheon International Airport, Songdo is already being used as a testing ground by Korea and U.S. tech companies such as Cisco Systems, LG CNS (an LG Group subsidiary that provides information technology services), and security monitoring provider ADT Caps. In a statement, New Songdo International City Development chairman Stan Gale said “With the IoT accelerator pioneering cutting-edge technologies in Songdo IBD, we are confident that our population of early adopters will embrace the new technologies that are developed by SparkLabs.” |
Home Depot Hackers Also Snagged 53 Million Customer Email Addresses | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | Remember that Home Depot hack? The one ? Of course you do. Hell — if you’re anything like me, you’re probably still in the middle of updating your various accounts to point to the replacement credit card. Alas, things are a bit worse than previously believed. In addition to the 56 million credit/debit cards that were initially known to be lost, Home Depot has just disclosed that the hackers grabbed roughly 53 million customer email addresses. “Who cares!” you say. “They already have my credit card number, what’s the big deal with them having my email address?” One word: phishing. Everyone gets phishing emails. If you spend any time on the Internet at all, it’s pretty much unavoidable. But it’s not every day where the phishers have access to a once-valid credit card number to help them in their trickery. “Hey! It’s … uh, your cable company! To prove it, here’s the last four digits of your old credit card number. How about giving us a new one?” may not fall for it. But when they’ve got 53 million emails to flood, you can be certain that many would. |
Zuckerberg Answers Big Questions About Facebook, Forced Downloads Of Messenger, And Page Reach | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | Today at his , Mark Zuckerberg boldly responded to some of the top gripes and questions about his company. Here’s a look at the top questions and a summary of the Facebook CEO’s answers. because Zuckerberg thinks it’s a “better experience” and to get you faster responses from friends. Before, messaging was buried in the main app behind several taps, which made it harder to use. People send 10 billion messages a day, so Facebook thought it deserved its own full-fledged experience. Messenger delivered this better experience, but only if all your friends use it, too, and respond to your messages quicker, so it forced people to download. In the end, though, Zuck admitted “Maybe we didn’t handle that as smoothly as we could, in terms of the transition.” The percentage of their fans that Pages reach with each of their News Feed posts is decreasing because of two facts. One, people are sharing more content per day, adding more friends who share more content, and subscribing to more Pages that…share more content. There’s on average around 1,500 posts eligible to be shown in each person’s News Feed each day. Two, people only spend a limited time looking at News Feed per day. Facebook only shows around 100 posts per day. Zuckerberg says “No person will look at everything.” With more content to be shown but roughly the same amount of time spent consuming it, there’s more competition for each slot. That means each source of the content naturally reaches a smaller percentage of the people it could be shown to. Zuckerberg empathized with businesses trying to reach their customers, but explained that people would probably rather see a post about their friend’s baby being born and it being healthy than some post from a Page. He says when there’s a conflict between the interest of Facebook’s News Feed-reading end users and business, “we optimize for the readers.” His advice to Pages is to “focus on sharing great content,” which Facebook will recognize more people will want to see and it will show it to them. Read our deep-dive into for more info. Zuckerberg says that support for women entering science, technology, engineering and math needs to start earlier in the funnel so girls don’t self select out. He also noted that there’s a cyclical problem where there’s not a lot of women in tech because there aren’t a lot of women in tech. Essentially, there’s a lack of role models. He said to break this cycle, there needs to be an overwhelming effort. Zuckerberg noted this is everyone’s responsibility. Zuck says with a laugh that yes, he has multiple copies of the same shirt. He explained the reason he wears the same gray t-shirt everyday, “speaks to how we think about our duty to the community here.” He said his goal is to clear his life so he can make as few decisions as possible so he can focus on making Facebook the best experience possible. “I don’t feel like I’m doing my job if I spend any of my time on anything silly or frivolous in my life.” |
Ex-Pixar And Twitter Exec Ali Rowghani Joins Y Combinator As A Part-Time Partner | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | After parting ways , Ali Rowghani has found a new (part-time) home: Y Combinator. YC has just announced that Rowghani will join their ranks as a part-time partner, with his time mostly to be spent on helping later-stage YC alumni scale things up. Writes YC President Sam Altman announcing the addition: I’m delighted to announce that Ali Rowghani is joining YC as a part-time partner. He will mostly focus on helping our alumni that are a few years out of YC scale their companies, but I’m sure the current batch will enjoy getting to know him as well. Though we’ve traditionally focused on helping very early-stage companies, our successful companies have asked for help on topics like scaling operations, managing hypergrowth, building out management teams, etc. Rowghani was the CFO at Pixar from 2002 to 2008. He moved to Twitter as its CFO from 2008 to 2012, at which point he served as the company’s COO until his departure . With that, I believe that brings YC to a total of 25 partners, counting both full and part-timers. The full-time list: Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Dalton Caldwell, Paul Graham, Kevin Hale, Aaron Harris, Justin Kan, Carolynn Levy, Jessica Livingston, Kat Manalac, Robert Morris, Kirsty Nathoo, Alexis Ohanian, Geoff Ralston, Garry Tan and Qasar Younis. The part-time list: Adora Cheung, Patrick Collison, Elizabeth Iorns, Andrew Mason, Ali Rowghani, Yuri Sagalov, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel and Harj Taggar. ( ) |
Trends That Will Revolutionize The Retail Industry | Babs Ryan | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | In retail, innovation is the name of the game. Increasingly, retailers are staying ahead through unique in-store experiences that inspire shoppers through social lifestyles. Take a look at STORY, a Manhattan retailer that continually changes everything in store, from products to fittings to events based upon different themes like “Love” or “Made in America.” They are described as a monthly magazine, meets art gallery, meets retailer concept. Taking the in-store experience to a whole new level, IKEA recently hosted a “one-night-only” sleepover for shoppers at its store near Sydney. Rooms that were advertised on Airbnb described in detail themes for individual suites, such as “reminiscent of a Swedish summer cottage.” And Burberry is bringing fun and engaging in-store experiences to the luxury retail scene with digital rainstorms and a digital runway nail bar. These and many other forward-thinking retailers are changing the way we think about how we tie digital to physical in-store, by morphing product and channel focused “customer experience” to “experiential,” blazing trails using community and entertainment as their primary differentiators. This is where retail is heading – toward a beautiful fusion of exciting invention and customer-focused retail concepts: The assumption that digital and mobile self-service will drive sales will shatter starting with Millennials, who are twice as likely as their predecessors to shop with others and avoid isolation. Human interface and interaction across channels will be considered table stakes in the next 10 years. Hated interactive voice response (IVR) menus will disappear when customer service operators, following Zappos’ lead, realize IVR increases attrition and is less profitable than live customer service representatives. Clunky online chats will move over to Skype-type conversations, where the reps assigned to take shoppers’ calls will be matched by personality, health, life, and career goals and aspirations. To magnify the in-store experience, retailers, airlines, banks, gyms and laundromats will see a surge of even more cafés, bars, living rooms, dance clubs, gaming centers, wellness classes and organic klatches. In the next 10 years, the real retail winners will be those who move to fit in with those existing social hotspots to enhance the experience, rather than try to become a new hangout. Pop-up shops will continue to pop up and pop down, parking lots will be full of self-drive electric cars, and the concept of “retailtainment” will again be front and center. As Generation Z’s inclination toward shared experiences over possessions endures, the retail industry should be prepared to adjust for these elevated perspectives on value. What’s more, we will see a stream of urban migration to smaller city apartments by Generation Z, resulting in a rise of “customer closets in the cloud,” inspired by e-retailers like Rent the Runway. H&M and Zara fast fashion will still be a “go-to” retail concept, but “wear-it-once” fashion for single events and occasions will soar in popularity. The rental subscription model will explode and provide consumers with options that go beyond clothing — from event organizers renting wedding gowns and party dresses to furniture retailers renting seasonal furnishings and one-time home entertaining decor. In the next 10 years, in-home 3-D printers will be a staple in most U.S. households, and early 3-D aggregators will siphon market share by providing instant product delivery through direct downloads. From kitchen gadgets to delicious food, 3-D printers will threaten Alibaba to Autozone with instant, custom home delivery of millions of SKUs from anywhere in the world. If a customer loves Joan’s vintage earrings on a rerun of Mad Men, all they will need to do is click a mobile remote control app and quickly purchase the earrings via Apple Pay, PayPal, or another mobile wallet while the 3-D printer starts to buzz. We are currently seeing early interest in virtual shopping experiences, but by 2025, this technology will become mainstream as Google Glass, Facebook’s Occulus Rift and others that will join the battle to lay claim on the virtual mall. Shoppers will one day have the option to enter a retailer’s interactive brick-and-mortar, or enjoy the convenience of shopping from home by entering immersive virtual stores, attending virtual fashion runway shows, or selecting from their own virtual closets. In retail today, retailers’ battle cries include “customer-focused,” “customer-engagement” and “omni-channel,” but their hyphenated focus is primarily on operations, channels, delivery, discounts and products — not people. The retailers who will make it big in the next 10 years will be those who innovate and differentiate around people rather than channels. The best of the best, however, will make it a point to entertain, not just “engage,” their customers — after all, share of time equals share of wallet. The face of retail is constantly changing, and over the next decade retailers will continue to dazzle us with the latest product innovations and in-store experiences. However, our bet is that it will still be all about the customer. |
Let’s Call The Amazon Echo What It Is | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | This morning, Amazon announced a . With a built-in, cloud connected, “always on” microphone, the Echo can listen for your voice “from across the room.” You can ask it about the weather. You can tell it to set an alarm. You can ask it for information about Abraham Lincoln. It’s a personal assistant in a tube! But let’s be clear here on what this thing is beyond that — or what it will be. Amazon is not in the business of telling you whether or not it will rain tomorrow. Nor is it in the business of waking you up in the morning. Nor is it in the business of teaching you about dead presidents. Amazon is in the business of selling you things — and is why Echo exists. For now, Echo’s shopping-centric functionality is limited to helping you add things to your shopping list. Need some pickles? Cool. Just say “Alexa, add pickles to my shopping list.” (Note: Echo listens for the word “Alexa” by default. You can pick a different name, it seems.) It won’t order them for you yet. It’ll just add them to a list for you to look at later. But if Echo sees any sort of success, just watch how fast that will change. You’ll be able to say “Alexa, order me a copy of Kung Fu Panda 2,” and it’ll be done. “Alexa, order me some dope-ass high thread count egyptian cotton sheets.” Bam. Done. Sheets are on the way. One-click purchase becomes no-click purchase. Your entire house (or at least, anything within earshot of Alexa) becomes the impulse-buy candy shelf from the grocery store’s checkout lane. There’s a reason Prime members get the thing for 50 percent off: Prime members order more. Make it easier for Prime members to order even , and they will. Is that a bad thing? Nah. Amazon isn’t forcing these things into your home. And as someone who uses Prime , I actually like the idea of being able to shout my stupid desires to my house and have things magically appear on my doorstep. But just be clear on why Amazon would want to build something like this. Amazon doesn’t want to be a destination anymore; they don’t want to be something you have to go to; they want to be ubiquitous. They want their store “front end” to be floating in the ether all around you, just waiting for you to open your mouth. The Echo is a bit like the Fire Phone in that regard; it may do some interesting stuff, but its driving force, the beat in its heart, will be to accept your money as efficiently as possible. Amazon clearly learned its lesson with the way it marketed the Fire Phone (and the $83 million worth of phones they have sitting around). People don’t like to they’re spending money just to make it easier to spend even more money. But the motivation here hasn’t changed. |
Motorola Starts Selling Moto 360s with Metal Bands For $50-$80 More | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | If the only thing keeping you from picking up a Moto 360 was that your only choice for the watch-band material was leather (and not that Android Wear is still a bit wonky) — good news! After quite a few leaks suggesting as much, Motorola is now the Moto 360 with metal bands. One thing to note: the metal bands hike the price up a bit, up to $300 from the $250 price that the leather-banded model goes for. For now, you’ve got two metal options: one light and one dark. Coming “in time for the holidays,” however, are two bands. These “slim” bands (coming in at 18mm wide vs. 23mm) will come in the aforementioned light finish, as well as a gold-colored finish that bumps the price up another $30 to $330. Motorola also announced “Moto Body,” an app that allows Moto 360 users to track their steps taken, distance walked, heart rate and calories burned. This is an interesting decision, given that the Moto 360 is already compatible with Android Wear’s built-in fitness features, which… can already show much of the same information. |
Odysee Automatically Saves Your Mobile Photos And Videos To Your Home PC | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | A new application launching today called offers a different way for consumers to back up photos and videos from their smartphones. Instead of backing up to the cloud, which can be both and sometimes even , with Odysee, content is backed up to your home computer. For free! Well, it’s free until next year when the $5/year pricing plan kicks in. It’s like iCloud without , in a way. (iCloud, of course, handles photos and videos – but it’s this content that tends to eat up a lot of your iCloud storage space, as you probably know.) The startup was founded by Raghavan Menon and Shiva Javalagi, both of whom have a background in networking, algorithms, caching and embedded software. Menon previously co-founded Ingot Systems, which was acquired by Virage Logic (later acquired bySynopsys). While Odysee is a bit different from that business which was focused on implementing software algorithms in silicon IP to improve performance, the idea for the app came from his own personal experience. He had kids. “After they were born a few years ago, I found that walking around with a smartphone meant 100x more videos and photos captured,” he says. “People used to just capture the big moments; with an HD camera with us all the time, we capture everything, all the time.” Menon says he understands there are plenty of good solutions for handling photo libraries out there already. iOS’s Photostream has made it easier for he and his wife to see each others’ photos, while Flickr is a great place to store them online. Videos, however, were the game-changer, he said. “I rarely saw the videos that my wife took unless she grabbed me and showed them to me on her phone. That’s how we started: solve the video archiving, access and distribution problem for me — and photos would be handled as a subset,” he explains. With Odysee, full-resolution photos and videos alike are synced from your device and on your home computer. That means that a family of five could each store their phone or tablet’s photo library on the family computer for safe keeping. However, Odysee isn’t only a backup solution, Menon explains. It also offers users a personal social network where they can both manually and automatically share photos with others, including those who use the app and those who don’t. The automatic sharing, which happens on a timed delay and only with those specified, allows you to share every photo or video you take with another user. For example, a husband and wife who each take numerous photos of their kids would be able to immediately see each other’s photos in the photo stream in the app, while the originals are archived to the family PC. “19 out of 20 people archive their videos on drives or computers at home,” says Menon. But they can’t automatically share videos across all their devices and between family members, and they don’t have access to their full photo and video archive at all times, he says. The app is immediately available for iOS and works in conjunction with a desktop app for either Mac (soon – before year-end) or . An Android client is being tested now ( ) and other platforms will follow. For the first year, the service is free. It will then be $5 per year afterwards. The company says it needs about 3 million users for it to be self-sustainable at this price point. (Remember they don’t have to store your photos and videos, just sync them). Longer-term, the team plans to offer an API for first-person cameras and support for any storage destination you choose, including Amazon Glacier, home storage that is often offline or other third-party cloud storage sites. “Our vision is to be a thin layer in the cloud that ties together all of your storage devices, capture devices and viewer devices. We are storage agnostic,” the co-founder says. San Jose-based Odysee is a small team of four with $750,000 in angel funding. The company is in discussions with potential partners on the storage and capture side now. |
Former Lyft Exec Denies Taking Confidential Data With Him To Uber | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | Uber executive Travis VanderZanden says allegations that he stole confidential documents from former employer Lyft are “ridiculous.” In a series of , the ex-COO of Lyft denied taking any confidential data with him to rival Uber and claims to have deleted all files he was accused of having in his possession. Yesterday, Lyft for breach of his confidentiality agreement and breach of fiduciary duty. In the suit, Lyft alleges the former executive had copied numerous files to his personal Dropbox account and backing up his Lyft emails and attachments to his personal computer before resigning. According to the complaint, Lyft claims this information came to light after conducting a forensics analysis of VanderZanden’s company-issued laptop. But VanderZanden tells a different tale. He claims via Twitter that he used his personal Dropbox account only to collaborate on documents with other Lyft employees while he was there, and says he “was invited to view many of the documents listed in the complaint by the co-founders directly.” After leaving Lyft, he claims that he realized Lyft hadn’t revoked invites to those documents and “deleted all remaining files myself.” In summary, VanderZanden wrote, “All the facts will come out, but I wanted to clear up the mis-information and protect against this audacious attack on my reputation.” Without having a third party look into the matter, it’s difficult to say whether or not VanderZanden has deleted the files or if he still has access to them. But in his Twitter defense, VanderZanden only responded to some of the charges levied by Lyft. For instance, the the former exec had backed up company email — including contacts and attachments — to his personal computer the day before resigning, even creating a to-do item in Evernote reminding himself to do so. The company also claims VanderZanden solicited Lyft employees away from the company in breach of his confidentiality agreement. As we noted yesterday… With legal cases like this, it’s anyone’s guess how this will pan out. In the meantime, check out VanderZanden’s full response below: Lyft’s PR has lost it, the allegations in their complaint are ridiculous. — Travis VanderZanden (@travisv) Just to be crystal clear, I did not take any confidential data to Uber. — Travis VanderZanden (@travisv) Like many other early employees at Lyft, I used my personal dropbox to collaborate on files. — Travis VanderZanden (@travisv) In fact, I was invited to view many of the documents listed in the complaint by the co-founders directly. — Travis VanderZanden (@travisv) After leaving Lyft and before joining Uber, I realized they hadn’t revoked my invites, so I deleted all remaining files myself. — Travis VanderZanden (@travisv) All the facts will come out, but I wanted to clear up the mis-information and protect against this audacious attack on my reputation. — Travis VanderZanden (@travisv) |
Former Space X Employee Arrested For Alleged Silk Road 2.0 Involvement | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | The alleged operator of the Silk Road 2.0, Blake Benthall, has been arrested by the FBI in San Francisco after federal agents shut down the site on Wednesday. The site was a copy of the original Silk Road, a secure black market site allegedly run by . The FBI announced the arrest on its New York Twitter feed. Operator of Silk Road 2.0, Blake Benthall, arrested yesterday by FBI agents in San Francisco, CA — FBI New York (@NewYorkFBI) “As alleged, Blake Benthall attempted to resurrect Silk Road, a secret website that law enforcement seized last year, by running Silk Road 2.0, a nearly identical criminal enterprise. Let’s be clear – this Silk Road, in whatever form, is the road to prison. Those looking to follow in the footsteps of alleged cybercriminals should understand that we will return as many times as necessary to shut down noxious online criminal bazaars. We don’t get tired,” said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in a release. Benthall, who went by the handle Defcon, allegedly processed $8 million in monthly sales. The FBI closed in after it bought 1 kilogram of heroin, 5 kilograms of cocaine, and 10 grams of LSD from Silk Road 2.0, apparently from Benthall himself. The FBI “infiltrated the support staff” for the Silk Road 2.0. The FBI alleges that the new site was launched in November 2013 after the seizure of the original Silk Road. You can read the entire complaint below.
Benthall worked at Elon Musk’s Space X from December 9, 2013 to February 21, 2014 according to . Below is the full press release from the Manhattan Federal Court. Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, George Venizelos, the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), and Peter Edge, Executive Associate Director of Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”), announced today the arrest of BLAKE BENTHALL, a/k/a “Defcon,” in connection with his operation and ownership of the Silk Road 2.0 website, a hidden website designed to enable its users to buy and sell illegal drugs and other unlawful goods and services anonymously and beyond the reach of law enforcement. BENTHALL was arrested yesterday in San Francisco, California. He will be presented later today in federal court in San Francisco before Magistrate Judge Jaqueline Scott Corley. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: “As alleged, Blake Benthall attempted to resurrect Silk Road, a secret website that law enforcement seized last year, by running Silk Road 2.0, a nearly identical criminal enterprise. Let’s be clear – this Silk Road, in whatever form, is the road to prison. Those looking to follow in the footsteps of alleged cybercriminals should understand that we will return as many times as necessary to shut down noxious online criminal bazaars. We don’t get tired.” FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge George Venizelos said: “It’s been more than a year since the FBI made an arrest of the administrator of the black-market bazaar, Silk Road, and here we stand again, announcing the arrest of the creator and operator of Silk Road 2.0. Following a very close business model to the first, as alleged, Blake Benthall ran a website on the Tor network facilitating supposedly anonymous deals of drugs and illegal services generating millions of dollars in monthly sales. Benthall should have known that those who hide behind the keyboard will ultimately be found. The FBI worked with law enforcement partners here and abroad on this case and will continue to investigate and bring to prosecution those who seek to run similar black markets online.” HSI Executive Associate Director Peter Edge said: “Blake Benthall’s arrest ends his status as the alleged administrator of a website that allows illicit black-market activities to evolve and expand, and provides a safe haven for illegal vices. HSI will continue to work in partnership with its federal and international law enforcement partners around the world to hold criminals who use anonymous internet software for illegal activities who seek to hide behind the anonymity of the Internet to carry out illegal activities accountable for their actions.” According to the Complaint unsealed today in Manhattan federal court: Since about December 2013, BENTHALL, a/k/a “Defcon,” has secretly owned and operated an underground website known as “Silk Road 2.0” – one of the most extensive, sophisticated, and widely used criminal marketplaces on the Internet today. The website has operated on the “Tor” network, a special network of computers on the Internet, distributed around the world, designed to conceal the true IP addresses of the computers on the network and thereby the identities of the network’s users. Since its launch in November 2013, Silk Road 2.0 has been used by thousands of drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services to buyers throughout the world, as well as to launder millions of dollars generated by these unlawful transactions. As of September 2014, Silk Road 2.0 was generating sales of at least approximately $8 million per month and had approximately 150,000 active users. Silk Road 2.0 was created in the wake of the Government’s October 2013 seizure of the website known as “Silk Road” and the arrest of its alleged owner and operator, Ross William Ulbricht, a/k/a “Dread Pirate Roberts.” The original Silk Road website had been designed to enable people anywhere in the world to buy and sell illegal drugs and other illegal goods and services anonymously and beyond the reach of law enforcement. Before its seizure in October 2013, Silk Road was used extensively to facilitate such transactions. In November 2013, approximately five weeks after the Government shut down Silk Road and arrested Ulbricht, Silk Road 2.0 was launched. Designed to fill the void left by the Government’s seizure of Silk Road, Silk Road 2.0 was virtually identical to the original Silk Road website in the way it appeared and functioned. In particular, like its predecessor, Silk Road 2.0 operated exclusively on the “Tor” network and required all transactions to be paid for in Bitcoins in order to preserve its users’ anonymity and evade detection by law enforcement. Likewise, the offerings on Silk Road 2.0 consisted overwhelmingly of illegal drugs, which were openly advertised as such on the site. As of October 17, 2014, Silk Road 2.0 had over 13,000 listings for controlled substances, including, among others, 1,783 listings for “Psychedelics,” 1,697 listings for “Ecstasy,” 1,707 listings for “Cannabis,” and 379 listings for “Opioids.” Besides illegal narcotics, other illicit goods and services were openly advertised for sale on Silk Road 2.0 as well, including fraudulent identification documents and computer-hacking tools and services. When Silk Road 2.0 was launched, it was controlled for a short time by a co-conspirator using the same online moniker as that allegedly used by Ross Ulbricht in operating the original Silk Road website – “Dread Pirate Roberts.” In late December 2013, however, BENTHALL, using the moniker “Defcon,” took over administration of the site and has owned and operated it continuously since that time. In that role, BENTHALL has controlled and overseen all aspects of Silk Road 2.0, including, among other things: the computer infrastructure and programming code underlying the website; the terms of service and commission rates imposed on vendors and customers of the website; the small staff of online administrators and forum moderators who have assisted with the day-to-day operation of the website; and the massive profits generated from the operation of the illegal business. During the Government’s investigation, which was conducted jointly by the FBI and HSI, an HSI agent acting in an undercover capacity (the “HSI-UC”) successfully infiltrated the support staff involved in the administration of the Silk Road 2.0 website, and was given access to private, restricted areas of the site reserved for BENTHALL and his administrative staff. By doing so, the HSI-UC was able to interact directly with BENTHALL throughout his operation of the website. *** BENTHALL, 26, of San Francisco, California, is charged with one count of conspiring to commit narcotics trafficking, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison; one count of conspiring to commit computer hacking, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison; one count of conspiring to traffic in fraudulent identification documents, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison; and one count of money laundering conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The maximum potential sentences are prescribed by Congress and are provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the judge. Mr. Bharara praised the outstanding joint efforts of the FBI and its New York Cyber Branch and HSI and its Cyber Crimes Center and Chicago-O’Hare Field Office. He also thanked the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Strike Force, which comprises agents and officers of the DEA, the Internal Revenue Service, the New York City Police Department, HSI, the New York State Police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, Office of Foreign Assets Control, and New York Department of Taxation. Mr. Bharara also thanked the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section for its assistance and support, the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division Office of International Affairs, and the law enforcement authorities of France, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Mr. Bharara also noted that the investigation remains ongoing. The prosecution of this case is being handled by the Office’s Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit and Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture Unit. Assistant United States Attorneys Serrin Turner, Timothy Howard, and Daniel Noble are in charge of the prosecution. Assistant United States Attorney Margaret Graham is in charge of the forfeiture aspect of the case. The charges contained in the Complaint are merely accusations, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. |
Why Are My Facebook Page’s Posts Getting Bundled Together? | Travis Bernard | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | It’s your fault. You’ve “liked” too many pages, and now Facebook has to do something about it. Sure you might be following 50+ pages on Facebook, but do you really interact with all of them? You don’t. And Facebook knows it. That’s why Facebook has rolled out a site-wide experiment that causes some users to see posts by pages “bundled” or “collapsed” together. Here’s the logic: [ A spokesperson from Facebook has reached out to us to explain the logic, and it’s slightly different than we originally reported. The new design let’s users know when there are multiple posts from the same friend, Page, or Group in the News Feed. In this test, when there are multiple posts from the same person, Page, or Group in a short space of time, Facebook will show the top 2-3 stories with a note at the top that there are more posts from this source. Users will have the option to click “see more” to see additional posts. This is to help people find more content they are interested in. Whether or not posts collapse or bundle is actually dependent on there being multiple posts from the Page, person, or Group. It has nothing to do with being a passive versus die-hard fan. I originally reported that the bundling was determined by how engaged of a fan you were, but this is not correct. The rest of the original post was accurate, but I apologize for the mistake on the logic.] Here’s what the bundling looks like on desktop. Notice the “posted 3 updates” at the top of the screenshot and the “see all” at the bottom. Please note, there is no “see all” in the Facebook mobile app. [gallery ids="1079775,1079776,1079777"] This is another one of Facebook’s attempts at surfacing the most relevant and valuable content to you in your feed. When Page posts get bundled together they may be less visible and therefore get fewer real impressions and clicks, which can be hard on businesses that depend on their Pages for sales or traffic. But if Facebook is showing the posts bundled rather than not at all, the update could actually help some Pages with lower engagement. [ Facebook has clarified that they only show bundled posts that would not otherwise have been in the feed for that person. Any Page post you would have seen in the News Feed will still be shown.] Only time will tell how this impacts the reach of brand Pages, but if you’re a social media manager you should probably keep a close eye on your Page’s reach. If Facebook stays true to it’s “surfacing the best content” modo, my guess is that the better posts will get even more reach. |
CloudScreener Helps You Decide Which Cloud To Use, Raises 600,000 Euros | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | What cloud should you host your applications on? That question is getting harder and harder to answer as more players join the fray and as existing companies continually add new features and . wants to help you by asking you a couple of basic questions about your needs. It then combines that with the performance data it gathers from all of the different services in its library and gives you a sorted list of possible solutions. The service breaks its tools down into three different wizards for finding clouds for hosting websites, business applications and your data. Say you are looking for a place to host a business application. You tell CloudScreener how many users you need to support, what operating system you’ll use, where your users are located and a few other data points and it’ll come back with a couple of options ranked from 1 to 100 based on your estimated cost, the performance level you can expect and the kind of features the service supports. For pricing data, the company scrapes each provider daily and for performance data, it spins up its proprietary benchmarking software on a number of instances on each service every six hours. With that, it can gather data about write and read speeds, network performance and latency, as well as CPU and memory performance. For network data, CloudScreener is partnering with . As CloudScreener co-founder Anthony Sollinger, who started the company with Nicolas Drouet, told me at the OpenStack Summit today, the Paris-based company now has 15 clouds in its index. The idea is to add more services in the long run, but the idea is to mostly focus on the major global players for now. Looking ahead, CloudScreener expects to launch a paid service for companies that need more flexibility and granularity from a tool like this. With that, users will be able to exactly specify what they are looking for in their infrastructure (number of cores, RAM, etc.). As Sollinger also told me, the company has now raised 600,000 euros from three undisclosed, France-based angels. The company plans to use these funds to expand its team, both to work on its product and to increase its marketing team, especially in the U.S. |
Vainglory Launches On iPhone And iPad Later This Month | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | , the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) shown off onstage at this year’s iPhone announcement, just got solid release dates in every region but China, Japan and Korea. Starting a week from today, Vainglory will arrive on the iPhone and iPad in Europe. The game will run on the iPad 2 or newer or the iPhone 5s, 6 or 6 Plus. On November 18, the game will roll out in North America, South America, Middle East and Africa. Developer only says that it will arrive in the last remaining regions “later.” Last week at its developer’s offices. I think it’s a great MOBA, but didn’t get to play on servers filled with people playing from North America or on older iPads or the iPhone. Check TechCrunch on the North American launch day for my thoughts on how it performs on the iPhone 6 Plus. |
Feet-On With Boosted Boards’ New Faster And Cheaper Electric Skateboards | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | If you want to ride a magic carpet, the is the closest you’ll get until they make that hoverboard run on asphalt. And now there’s an even more powerful model for climbing epic hills or hitting 22mph, and a stripped down model for casual boarders on a budget. Y Combinator and StartX-backed Boosted Boards launched it Kickstarter back in November 2012 and finally shipped its one in Spring 2014. Since then the company’s CEO Sanjay Dastoor tells me Boosted’s sold “thousands of boards”, even at its previous $2000 price point. Now it’s offering a few different models, all for much cheaper. I went down the startup’s headquarters and factory in Mountain View to try out the new boards. You can check out the “feet-on” video above. I’ve ridden longboards for 10 years and have been Boosting since March, so here’s my take on the three models: – The most similar to the original board’s specs, the 15lb Dual Drive is solid for most riders. It has 1500 watts to go 20 mph, climb 15% grade hills, and go up to six miles on a charge. . The ride is comfortable for most riders, especially if you don’t have super-steep hills in your town or feel the need to hit a death-defying top speed. If you haven’t skateboarded a ton, this model will get the job done nicely. – The pro-level board takes the and supes it up with new software that makes it more powerful and responsive. It’s a dream to ride if you’re up for exhilaration, and you can . The 15lb Dual Drive+ has 2000 watts of power that let it do a brisk 22mph, climb 20% grades that include even some of San Francisco’s steepest hills, and extra torque for super quick acceleration from a dead stop and powerful braking for those sudden stops when someone cuts you off. It’s speed and maneuverability means it will satisfy even hardcore skateboarders. Thankfully, if you have an old original Boosted, in early 2015 you’ll be able to get a free software upgrade if you mail it in or come by the upgrade station the startup plans to bring to meet-ups and board sports events.
– With just one motor on one of the back wheels, this board is cheaper and lighter though it sacrifices some power and stability. At 13.5lbs, it’s more comfortable to carry, making it useful as a commute vehicle to get you that last mile between the train or bus and your office. The price will make it more affordable for the masses too . Unfortunately its 1000 watts will only get you up to 18mph, it can’t climb steep hills, and both acceleration and braking are a bit sluggish. Worst of all, if you try to brake or accelerate while turning the direction opposite of the wheel with the motor, it can lose traction so you won’t speed up or slow down. Unless you live in a mostly flat area and just want to go in a straight line rather than making swooping carves like on snowboard, the Single Drive may feel a bit skittish. Personally, I think Boosted Boards went a bit too low-quality with this, and the added braking seems well worth the extra $300 for the Dual Drive. You’re flying above the hard concrete with nothing to strap you in, so safety is big concern. Together, the new set of boards diversifies the potential Boosted ridership. Slow-goers in suits and serious skateboard kooks alike can now find a board for them. For now Boosted Boards is focused on building the core technologies around propulsion, regenerative braking, and remote control. The real question, though, is whether Boosted will stick just to the skateboard market. No matter how stable the deck or smooth the acceleration, some people just aren’t comfortable riding something standing sideways with no straps and nothing to hold on to. When I asked Boosted Boards’ CEO if the company will branch out to other vehicles like scooters, Dastoor told me it’ll only do it if the the style and portability found in its original project can be maintained. He did admit that his startup could build a badass electric bicycle, and the team has been thinking a lot about that. But it will be tough to beat the Boosted Board’s zen-like breathing motion of carving back and forth across cement like it was snow…while going uphill. |
Benchmark Backs Real-Time Data-Processing Startup Confluent | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | Companies nowadays are creating huge amounts of data, but harnessing it and making it useful still remains a problem for many businesses. A startup called , which was founded by members of LinkedIn’s data infrastructure team, hopes to solve that problem by building commercial tools around some open-source software they developed. To go after the market, Confluent has raised $6.9 million in funding led by Benchmark, with joining the company’s board. Along with Benchmark, LinkedIn and Data Collective also invested in the round. Confluent was founded by LinkedIn alums Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede and Jun Rao, who built and maintained the open-source project Apache Kafka, which LinkedIn used internally to collect and manage data from different sources within its network. The software was built to unify data from multiple different silos in a low-latency, highly scalable way, giving organizations access to it in real time. At LinkedIn, Apache Kafka was used to populate its Hadoop cluster with data that was used to power its activity stream, along with providing the company with operational metrics. Since its introduction, however, a number of other companies have adopted the tool to manage and analyze data across their own organizations. The for various projects reads like a “Who’s Who” of the tech ecosystem: Twitter, Netflix, Pinterest, Uber, Spotify, Tumblr and Mozilla. The organizations are using the software for everything from real-time analytics to fraud prevention. So obviously other companies found Apache Kafka useful, but not every organization has the engineering resources or tech savvy to work with open-source tools. Kreps said that over time the team behind Kafka ended up fielding calls from organizations that wanted to implement it, but weren’t used to working with open-source software and needed help getting up and running. After doing free training for some of those businesses, the team decided to follow the lead of other open-source organizations by productizing and commercializing a series of tools that would make it easier for a wider range of companies to use Kafka. “If you want to make something real, you can’t do that entirely through open source,” Kreps told me. “You need to make something that companies can use in an out-of-the-box way.” Apache Kafka will remain open source, but Confluent is hoping to build products that will help organizations quickly get up and running with its tools. “There’s a set of companies that prefer to do everything in-house, and then there are companies that are willing to pay for software,” Kreps said. Obviously Confluent hopes to cater to that latter set, while continuing to improve the capabilities of what they built in Kafka. It’s a huge problem and a huge market, and one that the founders are intimately acquainted with. All of that is why Vishria wanted Confluent to be his first investment, despite being brand new to venture capital. “When you first become a VC everyone tells you, ‘Go slow, and don’t make any investments right away,'” Vishria said. But he was impressed by the founding team and the product, as well as the momentum around use of Apache Kafka. That was enough for him to decide to make the investment, just a few days after meeting them. With $6.9 million in backing, Confluent is well-capitalized to go after the market. More importantly, though, Vishria believes the team has the domain expertise to help solve the big data problem for organizations. “So often you see founding teams that aren’t meant to do the mission of the company,” Vishria said. “But these guys came in and they built and their whole careers around solving this problem.” |
Droid Turbo Review: Motorola’s Amped-Up Moto X Excels Where It Counts | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | the 2014 Moto X sink in before announcing essentially a beefed-up version of the same. The Verizon-exclusive Droid Turbo is a Moto X with a better battery and a better camera, but in a package that’s hard to describe as an “improvement” on the original. Where the Verizon phone excels, however, it really excels, which makes it a tempting proposition for those on or interested in Big Red’s network and services. The Droid Turbo is basically anathema to my taste in smartphone design. It’s like the Ed Hardy T-shirt of smartphones. And some people will actually like that, as hard a time as I have understanding why. The materials that cover the device, including Kevlar finer and plastic, do seem to actually make it more durable as Motorola claims, but they also make it look like a misguided teenager’s Pinterest-fail budget version of a Fast and Furious street racer. [gallery ids="1079702,1079694,1079696,1079697,1079699,1079700,1079701,1079703"] This version, which sports a backing material that feels like a backpack strap, is also fairly heavy in the hand, but there’s a very good reason for that – it’s packing a massive 3,900 mAH battery inside, which helps the Turbo claim battery life almost unheard of among today’s smartphones. The weight isn’t altogether unpleasant, either; after years of devices that compete with each other on drastic weight loss, having something a bit more substantial in the hand is actually nice. Motorola has also opted for capacitive hardware buttons on the Droid Turbo, as opposed to the software keys now preferred by modern Android devices, including the Moto X. It’s a small thing, and on the one hand it means apps have more real estate in general. But it also means full screening won’t provide an entirely clean face, and it means that even when this phone gets its Android 5.0 update, it won’t change to the new button iconography Google has gone with. Motorola offers some of the best software features in the business after recently shifting to a strategy of taking a mostly minimalistic approach to skinning Android. Its active notification screen is here, with battery-saving visual notifications of activity on your device when the phone is asleep, as is the ability to silence alerts or view notifications with gesture controls. Also here is the always-on voice assistant, which listens for a custom command of your choosing and stands ready for a litany of possible requests, including weather, traffic and just a general overview of the current state of your phone’s affairs. All of Moto’s existing software features work as expected on the Droid Turbo, and they’re great. Without a doubt, Motorola is among the only companies to have actually done anything additive with its own spin on Android, whereas competitors like Samsung have generally thrown a lot of features ranging from useless to laughable into the mix. That said, this is a Verizon special, so the carrier couldn’t help but load up the device with some of its bloatware, including VZ Navigator. Droid Zap is genuinely cool, acting as a type of AirDrop service for quickly sending photos between devices, but the rest can go, since they really just do a subpar job of mimicking existing Android services. The new features specific to the Droid Turbo are also great, insofar as they address the issues most people have with most devices. The Turbo has a huge battery that can sustain the device through 48 hours of normal use (and longer if you’re being conservative), plus it can load up eight hours of talk time in just 15 minutes, which is amazing for grab-and-go use during those busy days. Droid Assist is also back, and is also a smart feature for remembering to do things like silence notifications when you forget. Also, the Gorilla Glass 3 screen, which Motorola advertises as “chemically strengthened,” is automatically insured for the first two years of ownership, meaning if you get the all-too-common spider shatter syndrome during the term of your wireless agreement, it’ll be replaced without pesky questions about your lifestyle choices. The Droid Turbo packs a 2.7GHz Qualcomm quad-core processor and 3GB of RAM, meaning it’s no slouch in the CPU department. Its computing ability makes it more than able to handle the strains and stresses of running Android, and powering the animations that requires. It can also easily handle HD games and movies, and frankly at this point if I were to run into a flagship smartphone that encountered any kind of processing performance stutters, I would be very, very surprised. It’s the performance of device-specific features that I’m much more interested in, and this is where the Droid Turbo can be better differentiated from the rest of the crop. The feature that lets it wake the screen when a hand approaches it, for instance, is too easy to set off accidentally, which means your screen will catch your eye, waking itself seemingly at random times while you’re working away at the computer or watching TV. Luckily, that doesn’t seem to impact the device’s battery life, thanks to its AMOLED display, which doesn’t activate areas displaying black, but it does manage to irk. Motorola’s gesture-based camera activation is also a tough thing to actually activate in practice, requiring a very deliberate double-twist motion that feels ridiculous in real life and just isn’t something most users are going to take advantage of. A dedicated camera button would be awesome, especially given how crazy good the Droid Turbo’s shooter is, but this also isn’t a deal-breaking problem since it’s an optional feature that doesn’t really impact normal use of the device. The Droid Turbo’s display isn’t one of my favourite aspects of the device. Motorola favors screens with high saturation and warmer colors, which aren’t my favourite. The displays tend to exaggerate, which results in unnatural images, which, while they definitely pop, don’t represent accurate color rendering. This probably helps the photos from the camera look as good as they do, but for general use of apps and web browsing it’s not ideal. Advantages of the screen include the pure blacks of AMOLED, and the battery-saving features of said tech, which help the Droid Turbo last as long as it does. The display also claims a lot of durability, though I haven’t yet had any frightening drops to test Motorola’s claims. Lighting is evenly distributed, but you’ll probably have to crank brightness up and turn off the auto setting to get the most out of the screen in most indoor lighting situations. Motorola’s Droid Turbo shines especially bright in two areas, and this is one of them. The rear camera on the smartphone packs a 21-megapixel sensor and is capable of recording 4K video. It has a wide f/2.0 aperture and dual-led flash, and while it doesn’t have optical image stabilization, it’s very fast to lock in and shoot, and like a good photographer, it seldom seeks the crutch of flash firing, even in indoor lighting conditions. The camera on the Droid Turbo is, quite simply, the best smartphone camera I’ve used outside of the iPhone 6 Plus. The 6 Plus probably has a slight edge over the Droid Turbo, but it’s a very slight one indeed, and the Droid Turbo might be better in some situations, like when it comes to achieving background blur effects on close-up shots like most of those in the gallery below. [gallery ids="1079708,1079709,1079711,1079712,1079713,1079714"] Video captured on the Droid Turbo is likewise good, and 4K resolution will be a boon to some, but ultimately the lack of the kind of advanced cinematic stabilization that Apple has on their iPhones means it isn’t quite as good in this department. Still, as a still camera, the Droid Turbo is tops among currently available Android devices. The other shining moment for the Droid Turbo comes with its amazing battery life performance. Motorola has indeed packed a huge powerhouse in this device, which in my experience has been good for two days of standard use, and more than that when used conservatively. I eked three days out of it with the kind of interaction you might expect from a user for whom a phone is just a phone, mostly good for occasional web browsing and checking maps, plus a few brief conversations. The charge delivered to the phone in just 15 minutes of being plugged in also provides a lot of use time, and in general even when you’re in the red you can rest assured it won’t just give up the ghost right away. If battery life is a priority for you, this is the Android device you should get right now. Both with the Droid Turbo and the iPhone 6 Plus, this year I’ve felt like we’re reaching new standards of what constitutes long-lived, advanced mobile devices (and I do mean advanced, in case you were going to raise the spectre of BlackBerry devices of old). The Droid Turbo is Motorola’s functional flagship, even if the Moto X gets that crown as a device available more generally, and with a design that’s much more palatable for general users. Luckily, it’s going to be available more widely under the name ‘Moto Maxx,’ which is good news for anyone not on Verizon. Those happy with, or willing to switch over to, Big Red should probably do so for the Droid Turbo — it’s that good of an Android device. If there’s a caveat, it’s that the Droid Turbo is sort of fugly, heavy and big, which is not what everyone wants in their smartphone. Kudos to Motorola for focusing on packing as much functional excellence into this hardware as possible, however, even when that required sacrifices in terms of device bulk. As for the amateur street racer-inspired aesthetics – I guess you can’t have everything. |
Just In Time For The Car-Less Generation, Bus And Train Ticket Aggregator Wanderu Raises $5.6M Series A | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | Boston-based travel startup , which aims to become something of a Kayak.com for booking bus and train tickets — a market that doesn’t yet have a leading aggregation site — has now raised $5.6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Metamorphic Ventures, and was said to be over-subscribed. Also participating were Alta Ventures, Craig Lentzsch (former Greyhound CEO), 500 Startups, Barbara Corcoran Venture Partners (yep, of “Shark Tank”), John Balen, Brad Feld and other angels. The service in August 2013, following the close of an earlier seed round totaling $2.45 million led by Alta Ventures. At the time, the company had 12 partners, including BoltBus, Go Buses, Concord Coach Lines, and New York Trailways, which allowed it to cover 80 percent of the Northeast U.S. Today, the company has grown to 40 partners, and covers 70 percent of the U.S. It now includes access to the largest ground travel providers, and has since added Greyhound, Megabus, Peter Pan Bus, Grupo Senda and others. Wanderu users come to the site, enter their starting and end destinations, and the service offers you options on how to get there, taking a cut of the ticket sales booked via its portal. While CEO Polina Raygorodskaya declined to say what that percentage is, she did note that Wanderu passed a million in monthly sales this summer, and has continued to grow. The company is growing at 200 percent quarter-over-quarter in users and 400% quarter-over-quarter in sales since its public debut, she tells TechCrunch. Today a team of 17, the company plans to use the new capital to expand into Mexico, launch native mobile apps, and expand its coverage and services targeted toward millennials. Wanderu is especially tapping this younger market, which now accounts for the majority of bus travelers. Around 74 percent of bus travelers are 18-35, the CEO told TechCrunch. “It’s becoming much cooler to travel by bus.” Unlike pricey, cramped airplanes, buses have rolled out things that appeal to millennial travelers. For example, they started offering plugs and Wi-Fi before planes and trains did. “More than 80 percent of our users are under the age of 45 and we have seen incredible return rates,”Raygorodskaya says. “What’s most exciting is that we’ve seen our conversion rate double over the past 4 months, driven by strong return and repeat user rates, and our push to rapidly roll out new coverage and features that users are asking for.” In addition to bus tickets, Wanderu offers bus, train and city travel guides on its site, plus details of routes and more. The company, which competes with and , plans to build its own brand going forward, rather than license its data to others. That data, however, is valuable. Because many in the bus industry didn’t have their own APIs, Wanderu had to partner with companies in order to gain access to their data and then build their system from scratch. The timing of the service feels right, as the millennial generation establishes its footing and spends its income. This demographic group is fleeing suburbia and leading the return to the cities and urban centers, where they’re and are parenthood, giving them more time to travel. |
Nest And Asian Insurance Giant AIA Launch Startup Accelerator In Hong Kong | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | Hong Kong’s close proximity to manufacturing hubs like Shenzhen, China, and its small but growing startup ecosystem will make it a fertile growing ground for wearable tech startups. At least that’s what Nest, an early-stage venture capital firm, and AIA, one of Asia’s largest insurance providers, are hedging their bets on. The two have teamed up to launch , which will focus on health and wearable tech startups. Nest already holds several programs meant to help fledgling Hong Kong startups grow. These include an and an . AIA is Hong Kong’s largest insurance provider by market cap and has offices in sixteen Asia-Pacific markets. The accelerator program started accepting applications today and will select eight companies, which will receive mentoring and potential long-term equity investments. The startups will present their products during a demo day next June. In a statement, Steve Monaghan, head of AIA Innovations, said “AIA meets the ever-changing and increasing financial and protection needs of the people across the region by offering a wide range of products and services. We will continue to innovate across multiple disciplines to drive sustainable growth and to provide our customers with the right solutions. The AIA Accelerator program is one of our endeavors to promote innovation.” Despite access to manufacturing centers in China, programs like Nest’s incubator, and government-sponsored resources, and government initiatives like the information and technology office hub, Hong Kong’s startups still face significant challenges. These include few funding opportunities because investors prefer sticking to financial and banking sectors, and lack of mentorship. While it remains to be seen which of AIA Accelerator’s portfolio companies will successfully receive follow-up funding, Nest founder Simon Squibb believes that the program can at least address the mentoring gap by connecting participants with executives from AIA, as well as entrepreneurs like Richard Kelly, formerly managing director of IDEO Asia Pacific, and David Zhu, co-founder of Divide, an . “Entrepreneurs often try to develop solutions to problems that are most relevant to their daily lives,” said Squibb. “Since healthcare and lifestyle are big on the priority list for people in Asia, we believe start-ups in this region are particularly well-placed to disrupt the future of industries like healthcare and insurance.” |
SF Engineer Dan Ha Has Been Missing Since Halloween Night | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | Dan Ha, an iOS developer at a San Francisco startup called , has been . According to the CEO of the company, Dan Preston, who reached out to TechCrunch to help find his employee, Ha went home sick on Thursday afternoon and no one has seen or heard from him since Friday night, October 31, at 8pm. Ha reportedly left work at 2 p.m. on Thursday and then emailed in sick at 10 a.m. Friday morning. The last anyone has seen or heard from him was the night of Halloween, when his roommate saw him rushing out of the house with a wallet and no bags, wearing a red hoodie. Ha lives in the SOMA district, near Brannan and 8th St. His family and friends are searching for him, calling hospitals, jails, etc. and filing a missing persons report with the San Francisco Police Department. His friends have created a Facebook group to coordinate efforts in finding him. In addition to calling hospitals and jails, they’re trying to tap into some of his social media, email, Spotify and Uber accounts to figure out where he might be. Any information that you can provide that might help Dan’s friends, family and coworkers find him would be invaluable. If you have any information whatsoever about Dan’s whereabouts, please contact the SFPD at 415-553-1373, and use this case number: 140937521. And, particularly if you live in the San Francisco area, please share on Facebook, Twitter, etc. |
Universal Studios Buys Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs Movie From Sony For A Reported $30M | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | Aaron Sorkin’s much-anticipated Steve Jobs movie is now a Universal Pictures project, after the studio stepped in take over from Sony Pictures which ended its two-year development of the title this month. of the change from a Universal spokesperson on Monday. The publication reports that Universal paid more than $30 million for the title, but that figure has not been confirmed. The film, which is based on Walter Isaacson’s much-respect biography of Jobs, will be directed by Danny Boyle and scripted by Sorkin, who was behind unofficial Facebook film The Social Network. Inglourious Basterds and X-Men star Michael Fassbender is confirmed on the cast for the flick, which will be produced by Scott Rudin — the first director to scoop an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Award — and Mark Gordon, whose past credits include The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair. that the film would not adopt a ‘cradle to the grave’ approach to documenting the late Apple CEO’s life. The Academy Award winner admitted feeling the pressure; initially he hesitated before taking on the project because the prospect of covering a universally respected figure like Jobs is “a little like writing about the Beatles.” that the film would consist of three 30-minute sets depicting backstage events at key Apple launches. Now that the future of the project looks to be sorted, we won’t have quite so long to wait to find out. |
Affordable Hearing Aid Maker iHear Raises $5M Series C | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | , which makes affordable hearing aids that users can customize at home, has raised $5 million in a Series C round led by Lighthouse Capital, a Shanghai-based venture capital firm that focuses on medical devices. Japanese electronics maker Brother Industries and Ameritas Holding Company also participated. This brings the total iHear Medical, which was founded in 2009, has raised so far to $7.8 million. TechCrunch , when the company was running an Indiegogo campaign to fund its latest hearing aid, which starts at $199 and comes with access to iHear’s online diagnostics software that can be used to calibrate each device. iHear founder Adnan Shennib says iHear is getting ready to ship Indiegogo pre-orders when the device gets FDA registration, which is expected next month, and the Series C funding will allow his startup to increase production and find new online distribution channels in Q2 2015. These will include iHear’s own online store, as well as insurance customers through Ameritas, which will serve as a distribution partner. Then in 2016, iHear plans to expand into Asian markets. iHear’s goal is to reach the 40 million Americans who suffer from some from of hearing loss, especially the who don’t own a hearing device because of lack of insurance. |
Why Virtual Reality Is Happening Now | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | Since the Oculus Rift first made waves with its successful Kickstarter, there’s been a consistent line of criticism based in the notion, “why would it work this time?” It’s a fair question — you can go back decades and see to build virtual reality gear for the masses. “Many very smart people have attempted to do this! What didn’t they see that Oculus and its compatriots see today? People didn’t want a in 1995, why would they buy a Rift in 2015?” That perspective misses one of the most important (and, almost always, obvious in hindsight) factors in tech: the actual technology that makes up a product. This is what consumer-grade virtual reality looked like two decades ago. Take a look at the actual pieces that, when put together in the right way, result in an Oculus headset. You’ve got a high pixel density LCD screen, a gyroscope and camera for positional tracking, and a 3D environment processed in real-time by a desktop computer or (in the case of the Oculus-compatible , a phone!). All of these things are only available at affordable prices to consumers thanks to advancements in other areas that have taken place over decades — specifically, smartphones and video games. Was it possible for a hardware maker to build a display with a resolution greater than 1080p for a VR headset even ten years ago? Nope — it would have been prohibitively expensive for consumers and would use way too much power for portable devices to be a possibility without obnoxiously large external battery packs. For instance, let’s say that to get the best experience in VR, your ~5.5-inch screen has to be 4K and refresh 120 times per second. In 2003, a screen with , and would only refresh 12 times per second. Oh yeah, and it used as much power as a small desktop computer. The current Oculus dev kit uses a 1080p and can refresh 75 times per second. The Gear VR uses the Galaxy Note 4’s 1440p screen. Progress! The Samsung Gear VR uses your phone to power the entire virtual reality experience… and hints at a future where VR can leap forward every time we get a new phone. Advances in real-time computer graphics are also key to providing a VR experience that’s compelling to consumers. While studies have shown that graphics , they do have to be Even a moment of graphics lagging behind input — in this case, moving your head to look around — can lead to serious motion sickness and ruin a user’s sense of immersion. The only thing you can do to about that is throw beefier hardware and smarter optimizations in code at the problem — things enthusiast hardware manufacturers and game developers have been working on for decades. Those improvements happened outside of the context of virtual reality, but Oculus has packaged them in a way that has legitimized the field in the eyes of many investors and early adopters. There’s a new ecosystem emerging around building the interfaces and accessories that will make virtual reality truly mainstream, and it’s not just happening within Oculus HQ — or, as in previous decades, the confines of university research labs. A Google search for “virtual reality Kickstarter” will turn up project after project building what could be the killer control mechanism for VR applications. If you go to a VR meetup or Oculus’s conference, you’ll meet an absurd number of developers working on what they think is the right way to do things, with ideas ranging from cameras mounted around the room to omni-directional treadmills and glorified Wii controllers. Six months from now, those developers will know a lot more about what works and what doesn’t than they do now. The same can also be said for the past six months, and the year-plus before that since the Oculus hit Kickstarter. Things are in motion in the virtual reality space in a way that they simply haven’t been before. |
CloudFlare Will Offer A Local Version Of Its Web Security Service In China In 2015 | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | is tackling a long-standing goal and bringing its internet security and performance service to Mainland China next year. The U.S. company will open 12 data centers on Chinese soil over the next six months in a move that gives overseas websites and services improved performance on the ground, not to mention will increase its business in China. “One of the biggest requests from our customers is to be fast in China,” Matthew Prince, CloudFlare CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch in an interview. “We’ve been working on this problem for three years. It has a number of regulatory and technology challenges, but we finally cracked that problem.” Prince said China is already CloudFlare’s second largest market based on traffic and customers, behind only the U.S.. That’s despite the fact that it has done no local marketing or sales, and it offers no local customer support. The CloudFlare website and services aren’t even translated in Mandarin at this point, but Prince sees vast demand in the country, from both local and international companies. China is obviously a sensitive market when it comes to the internet. Prince explained that CloudFlare and its customers will adhere to domestic regulations and rules, all of which will be managed by its local partner — a company which he cannot reveal at this point. If a customer on the CloudFlare network has content that is censored by the Chinese government, for example, it will be blocked in China but will remain visible to anyone outside of the country. But Prince — — is focused on the argument that doing something in China is better than nothing. “We don’t have the hubris to think we can change Chinese internet policy, nor do we think we can put illegal content in China,” he said, going on to explain that content being censored in the country “won’t make the problem any worse” since that is already the status quo. Beyond helping websites load and run faster inside China, CloudFlare’s presence can mitigate the risk of cyber attacks on customer sites and also offset threats to CloudFlare’s own global network. “Many of the very bad attacks [on our network] originate from inside China. Right now, they can affect parts of our network that are not inside China. Now we can start to absorb those attacks inside China, so it doesn’t hit our global network,” Prince explained. CloudFlare’s new China service is expected to go live in January, during which time a first batch of beta customers — including TechCrunch and Crunchbase — will have their sites put on the service. Regulations require customers to hold various state approvals before they can be on the CloudFlare China network, though CloudFlare and its partner handle that and have found a way to streamline the process it can still be time-consuming. So if you want in, time is of the essence. “We’ve been identifying existing customers that care about the Chinese market [as launch partners]. Any others interested in being part of this beta should contact us sooner rather than later,” Prince said. CloudFlare has sales offices in Japan and Sydney but its next phase in Asia will be the opening of a regional office. Prince said the initial plan was to base that in Singapore, but the company’s recent experiences supporting a pro-democracy site in Hong Kong have caused it to rethink that assumption and consider an office in Hong Kong instead. — which offers support to “public interest websites that cover political or artistic content” and may be vulnerable to cyber attacks — CloudFlare worked with , an unofficial referendum voting site in Hong Kong, this summer. In the lead up to and during its vote, . “The voting started at 9pm, but by 6pm we were seeing some of the largest attacks we’ve ever witnessed. It was very sophisticated — it felt like a team of very smart hackers was on the other side. Our team worked around the clock to ensure the site would stay online. All one million votes were handled by the system which was behind CloudFlare’s infrastructure,” he explained. https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/479812898315706368 This is new: Layer 7 HTTPS flood that prioritizes TLSv1/DES-CBC3-SHA, which is CPU intensive. — Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) after the referendum, with many citizens occupying parts of the city in protest at their belief that China reversed a promise to grant them universal suffrage. CloudFlare continues to work with PopVote, and it has other customers in the pro-democracy space in Hong Kong, but Prince admitted that going into the project he had no idea that it would be so demanding. In addition, CloudFlare’s efforts during the vote — which were reported with negativity by pro-Beijing media in Hong Kong — came at a tricky time when it was dealing with prospective Chinese partners and regulations to bring its service to the mainland. Yet, Prince said the experience was an “awe-inspiring” one that created a special bond between CloudFlare and Hong Kong — to the point that Prince himself gets stopped and thanked by citizens when walking the city-state’s streets wearing a CloudFlare t-shirt. Prince also recalled that CloudFlare received more than 1,000 inbound applications for jobs from people based in Hong Kong and, beyond the emotion of the experience, he believes that helming the company’s Asia presence in Hong Kong could provide excellent access to talent. The decision on location is still to be finalized, but CloudFlare plans to open its Asia office in the first half of 2015. As for the longer term future of the company, Prince is candid about potential exits. “We’re not in the camp of no [IPO], but we’re also not in camp of building for such an exit. There’s no pressure to be public, and I can’t imagine that we’d do it in 2015 — 2016 is earliest we’d consider, but my hunch is that it will be longer than that,” he revealed. He claimed that CloudFlare is already profitable on a GAAP basis, and that it still has from 2013 in the bank. “We’re in a pretty good place to choose our own destiny, it would be awfully expensive for someone to buy us,” he remarked, helpfully suggesting that one signal to watch for is new hires. “We have a four person board, so when you see us build out our board that means we’re on that path — but there’s no rush.” |
Regin Spying Software Has Been Attacking Governments And Corporations Since 2008 | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | Symantec has found an unusual new threat called Regin aka Backdoor.Regin. The software, which is essentially a very powerful Trojan Horse, appears to have been circulating in the wild since 2008 and has been hitting governmental, industrial, and individual systems with impunity, using sophisticated encryption and targeting systems to spy on targets. The anti-virus company has released a on the new threat, noting its similarity to the specially targeted Stuxnet virus that attacked Iranian nuclear reactors. Is the tool still a threat? As far as Symantec can tell the original Regin virus disappeared in 2011 only to reappear in 2013. The virus was able to hide itself completely on host computers and it wasn’t until Symantec reverse-engineered its packets that they were able to tell the scope and danger associated with the virus. It seems that it is completely modular, allowing the controllers to use the product to steal information and spy on network traffic.
From : reported that the software has special payloads targeting airline and energy industries. It seems to have first spread in infected payloads hidden in legitimate software. |
Built In Brooklyn: FlyCleaners Saves You A Trip To The Laundromat | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | For this episode of , producer Steve Long and I visited the Bushwick garage of , an on-demand laundry service — and Steve even went for a ride in one of those blue FlyCleaners vans (they’ve become a common sight in Williamsburg, my neighborhood of Brooklyn). With FlyCleaners, instead of having to bring your laundry to the laundromat or dry cleaner, you can just use a smartphone app to summon a “FlyGuy” to pick up your laundry. Once your laundry is ready (FlyCleaners partners with local businesses to do the actual cleaning), you then use the app to request a delivery of your clean clothes. Co-founder and CEO David Salama compared the idea to , the bakery chain created by his co-founder Seth Berkowitz. It’s not the most obvious comparison, but Salama said Berkowitz was able to build a “national empire” simply “by giving it to people the way they want it, how they want it, when they want it.” “Seth came to me with the idea of doing something very similar within dry cleaning and laundry, because to him it was another industry where the focus wasn’t necessarily on what the customer wanted,” Salama said. While this isn’t a review, I should probably mention that I’ve used the service a couple of times and I’ve been pretty happy with the results. I’d use it more if I didn’t a washer and dryer in my apartment — but . The company is actually based in both Brooklyn (that’s the garage we visited) and Manhattan (where it has a more traditional startup office), and the service is now available across both boroughs. However, the service . Noting that he’s been “a lifelong resident of Brooklyn,” Salama said there are “a lot of parallels between what I’ve seen happen in Williamsburg over the last few years and what we were trying to do here with laundry and dry cleaning.” “We thought that it would be a natural fit for us to bring a new concept to an area that was so open to change and to new ideas,” he added. |
TechCrunch Radio On Sirius XM 102 Indie Is Back | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | is back in full force and that means we need YOU! What is TechCrunch Radio, you ask? Well, it’s an hour of weekly bliss brought to you by myself, John Biggs, and the kind folks at Sirius XM each Tuesday at 6pm ET/3pm PT. We discuss this week’s news, chat with interesting guests, and then get into our weekly startup pitch-off. If you want to listen in, just head over to for the full deets. Companies get approximately sixty seconds to pitch their wares, which will then be judged by a guest VC judge, John, and me. At the end of the show, we pick a lucky winner and they forevermore get all the glory they deserve. We need startups to apply, so if this sounds like something you’re into, keep on reading.
1. You must have a product that is available to general users. No sign-up pages or pre-orders with a TBD ship date. There must be a link we can give to listeners/readers where they can access your product, service, what have you.
2. You must be an early stage company. If you have raised a Series A or later, you are disqualified. Bootstrapped or seed stage startups are welcome.
3. You must be able to pitch your product with your words only.
4. You must be able to operate a telephone.
It’s going to be a hoot! |
Pathgather Raises Looks To Bring Social Networking To Learning Management | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | Companies feeling they aren’t getting enough out of their learning management systems now have a new tool that may help with the recent financing and launch of . In the learning management space roughly 61% of companies that use services are looking to change them, according to Eric Duffy, Pathgather’s chief executive officer. “I got started on this on the consumer business side,” says Duffy. “When i started i didn’t know what an LMS was.” The idea was to find the best learning on the web. like a Kayak of learning, and keep track of what you’re learning a la LinkedIn, and do it in a social context like Facebook.” The company’s aim, according to Duffy, is to allow people to get more out of what they learn online. Initially the company put up a demo of how its software would work to enhance learning in a social context, but as soon as a Qualcomm executive saw the software, they wanted to bring it in-house. Duffy, the company’s 26-year-old chief executive actually met the 28-year-old chief technology officer Jamie Davidson through a mutual friend of Duffy’s from his alma mater of Washington University. Duffy, who was at Carnegie Mellon at the time, was working on developing this tool to highlight the best online curriculum and establish a collaborative framework for students to learn together. It’s this vision that’s become the core of Pathgather and managed to attract $1.5 million in early stage funding from investors like , , and to the company’s capital table. The company allows students enrolled in professional development programs o create learning paths, so that they can follow a specific route for their personal and professional advancement. “After graduating Wash U I spent some time doing a fellowship in China in Guangzhou,” Duffy says. “And then I did an entrepreneurial program in South Africa — in a village with 2,000 to 3,000 people. — called ” During his time at the village one of the things that struck Duffy was that the village had gotten electricity six years before he arrived, but had come out a month before his travels. All the village could talk about was that the community finally had the opportunity to take classes, Duffy says. “That’s when I got the idea to find the best learning on the web. And make an app like a Kayak of learning, that would keep track of what you’re learning a la LinkedIn, and do it in a social context like Facebook,” Duffy says. |
Fluc Raises $2.3 Million To Improve The Logistics Of Food Delivery In More Markets | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | When it comes to food delivery, people want things fast and fresh and most of all, and increasingly they want to know when that food will get to them. Thanks to the Uber-ification of everything, being able to place an order and see when it will arrive (and even see a delivery in process) is becoming table stakes in the on-demand economy. Then again, setting expectations for on-demand logistics is not easy. Which is why a whole bunch of math geeks created , which is a food-delivery service that tries to provide better customer service using complex routing algorithms to get food to its customers faster. With that goal in mind, Fluc raised $2.3 million in seed funding to expand its business and keep moving into new markets. The new financing came from investors that include Sherpa Ventures, WI Harper, Charlie Cheever, Blake Ross, Zhou Hongyi, and other angels. Fluc to date has mostly been , working to figure out how to most efficiently make deliveries in what is essentially a suburban market. Its key differentiator isn’t in the restaurants it signs up or the food it delivers, necessarily, but in the routing that it’s built on the back end, which makes more efficient use of its drivers. In the same way that Uber or Lyft has a good idea of where demand will be based on factors like time of day or even weather, Fluc uses a huge amount of data to provide precise estimates of when food will be delivered to customers. But setting expectations around arrival is one thing — behind the scenes Fluc is optimizing routes and pickups for its drivers in real-time. That means not only knowing where orders will be coming from, but also generally how long food will take to prepare based on venue and location, how long it takes to get from one place to another, and where items need to be delivered. Based on all the info provided, Fluc seeks to optimize driver routes to enable them to “stack” multiple orders in a more efficient manner, while also getting food to the customer in a short period of time. Fluc calls its logistics technology “The Oracle,” based on the Matrix, and co-founder Tim Davis says the backend platform can typically predict a driver’s moves up to 3-5 deliveries ahead of where they currently are at any given time. Fluc’s cost of delivery is at $6 per order now, but users can now split the bill when ordering multiple items, which reduces the individual price for each person. As a result, the company could draw more orders from office workers for lunch or for those hanging out and watching a Football game in Sunday. Now that it’s received seed funding, the outfit is ready to expand its offering into new places. While Davis wouldn’t say which markets the company would be focusing on, showing that the service works in suburban areas, as opposed to highly dense cities, means it has huge potential in places where delivering $10 meals in 10 minutes wouldn’t make sense. |
Black Friday Starts Early This Year, With Pre-Thanksgiving Sales Up 19% Over 2013 | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | Holiday shopping got an earlier start this year with a number of retailers including , , , , , and several others launching “pre-Black Friday” deals, or kicking off a week of Black Friday-like sales where select items are deeply discounted. The overall effect has been an early lift in online sales ahead of Thanksgiving. This past weekend, sales were up by 18.7% over the same time last year, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark data. Mobile traffic and sales also increased over the same period last year, with mobile traffic up 24.4% to account for 48.8% of all online traffic, while mobile sales accounted for 26.6% of all online sales – an increase of 23.9% year-over-year. Smartphones drove nearly double the traffic of tablets here, with 31.8% of total online traffic versus tablets’ 16.5%. But tablet shoppers spent more, accounting for 17.3% of online sales, which was nearly twice that of smartphones (9.2%). As per usual, iOS shoppers sent more traffic, drove more sales, and spent more money, when compared with Android shoppers. Says IBM: Desktop PCs still played a big role, too, driving 51.2% of all online traffic, and 73.4% of all online sales. And consumers spent more money on their desktops at $123.29, than on their mobile devices ($105.37) – a difference of 17%, says IBM. However, though consumers were shopping more online, so far they’ve been spending slightly less. The average order value during the pre-Thanksgiving weekend was $112.86, or down 5.4% from 2013. IBM attributes this decrease to consumers being more digitally savvy, and better capable of using coupons and rebates to secure the lowest online prices. On the social marketing front, IBM found that Facebook referrals drove an average of $101.83 per order while Pinterest referrals averaged $103.87 per order. But Facebook referrals converted sales at twice the rate of Pinterest, the study says. Asked what was driving shoppers to start spending more, earlier, this year, Jay Henderson, Director at IBM Smarter Commerce, told us that it’s more than just a general shift to e-commerce that’s at play here. “This year, we are predicting in-store growth of four percent, so in our opinion, both in-store and e-commerce are growing this year, but we are of course seeing more growth online,” he says. “We are seeing incremental consumer spending shifting toward e-commerce. Combine this with the elongation of the holiday shopping weekend, holiday promotions beginning earlier and lasting longer, we see tremendous growth.” “Ultimately, these trends lead to an overall lift in sales, rather than cannibalizing of other days,” Henderson adds. Retailers are always working to extend the holiday shopping season, as it’s the biggest sales driver for their businesses, so it’s not surprising to see them figure out how to turn Black Friday into a week-long event. In fact, given the number of week-long sales rolling out ahead of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, it no longer even seems appropriate to call these “Black Friday” sales. They’re just holiday sales. One has to wonder, too, what this extension of sales means for the day branded by retailers as “Cyber Monday” – the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday where everyone returns to work and shops from their desk for all the things they forgot to buy while in-store. Will it still see as big a boost, given that consumers have had a week or more to shop deals ahead of the usual Black Friday events? While several of the “early” sales started over the weekend, many more kicked off today, . Websites like and help shoppers keep track of the growing number of sales, while mobile apps like can help you when you’re away from the PC. Tellingly, that app is already #1 in the “Lifestyle” section on iTunes – a week before the day in question. |
Let’s Pivot Again — Handmake Me Is An Ethical Marketplace For Handmade Gifts | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | Call it a pivot. Or failing and starting over. But, either way, . After all, the entrepreneurial road can be a long and winding one. The latest example to cross my in-box is , an “ethical marketplace” born out of multiple pivots by the team behind Hobzy. Specifically, the U.K. startup has re-launched to offer a gift-buying experience where every product is handmade by a “skilled individual” — which Handmake Me verifies — and is customisable/made-to-order. “We require every product to have at least one custom option so that buyers can have an input into the gift they’re buying,” explains co-founder Dan Rice. Meanwhile, for sellers, the idea is to enable any individual to make a living — or at least supplement their income — by producing unique handmade gifts, “crafted using the skills they’ve taken the time to learn.” Handmake Me counts its main competitors as Etsy, and, more locally, Not On The High Street, although Rice sees some key differences. “Etsy have moved far from their authentic roots, and don’t employ quality control over their sellers and product,” he says, noting that it also doesn’t have the same focus on made-to-order/custom items. Not On The High Street does put greater emphasis on quality and personalisation. However, the service is “high risk” for sellers, argues Rice, as the company charges a £199 joining fee on top of commission. “They’re also not available to U.S. sellers like we are,” he says. In contrast, Handmake Me takes a flat 20 per cent commission on each sale only. It’s also recently partnered with to power a branded store for the social enterprise — a move Rice says tallies perfectly with the startup’s mission to promote “social and ethical commerce”. That’s particularly encouraging for a startup that — if I’ve counted correctly — is on at least its pivot. The company started out as Host My Portfolio, a portfolio service for professional creatives, before entering the U.K.’s Oxygen Accelerator in 2011, where it pivoted to focus on hobbyists instead, and changed its name to . However, despite initially having decent traction, the new venture resulted in “poor retention and zero revenue.” “We thought we could improve retention by building social features and allowing people to connect with each other around their shared hobbies,” explains Rice. “[We also] tried generating revenue with a theme system (like Tumblr) and adverts. This didn’t work.” Spotting that 95 per cent of the hobbies on Hobzy were craft-related, the startup thought it could monetise the service by enabling users to sell the things they were showcasing. But this produced a lot of poor quality products that nobody was buying, and a “diluted” value proposition. “Were we a social network or a marketplace?” Rice asks rhetorically. Next up, Hobzy took the e-commerce tech it had built and created a “reverse marketplace for handmade gifts” called Handmake Me — letting anybody who wanted to buy an authentic handmade gift to request what they wanted and how much they would pay, after which the site’s community of craft-makers would then bid for the job. “Nobody was requesting anything,” concedes Rice, so the team decided to pivot once again by switching the model to a more conventional marketplace, while still keeping the focus on buyer input via various customisation options for each product and ensuring strict quality control procedures are in place. “It worked!” he says. “People are buying, people are selling and we are revenue generating at last.” Or, as I like to say, you gotta love it when a pivot comes together. |
Vainglory Review: A Solid MOBA On Your iPhone | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | Last week, came out for the iPhone and iPad. We’ve (on the iPad Air at the developer’s office) and found that it’s a great MOBA for tablets. For those unaware, Vainglory is the multiplayer online battle arena Apple showed off on-stage at the iPhone announcement in September to demonstrate the real-world power of the and the A8 system on a chip. That was great for demo purposes: Vainglory is a very pretty game from a technical standpoint. But seeing the game on-screen and playing on a tablet doesn’t let you know how it actually felt to play on a device the size of a phone. Now we’ve had a chance to actually try out Vainglory in real-world settings: on my apartment’s decent Wi-Fi setup and on an actual iPhone 6 Plus. As it turns out, the game is almost entirely successful at transferring to the the smaller form factor, with only a few minor gripes that can be addressed in future updates. In terms of performance, the move down to the phone doesn’t seem to have caused any major issues. Super Evil Megacorp may have turned down the texture and shader quality a tad, but because everything is smaller on the screen it’s not glaring in the slightest. Frame rates held up well in my testing except when I received notifications, which led to a second of stuttering as well as reduced the amount of screen space available unless you quickly swipe them away. I actually got incredibly annoyed with these and ended up turning off notifications for texts, email, and Facebook messages while recording game footage. Vainglory will look familiar to those who have played MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota 2, but the overall match mechanics have been simplified to reduce the length of each match. For instance, instead of giving players three “lanes” by which to attack the enemy, there’s one main route and a “jungle” where you can attack non-player characters for gold (to buy items) and to gain bonuses like stronger NPC allies. While these simplifications definitely reduce match length from the 45 minutes to an hour you see on PC MOBAs, I’ve found that actual online games can still last longer than 30 minutes. That’s about twice as long as we spent playing each round at Super Evil Megacorp, so perhaps the issue is that new players don’t yet know when or how to be aggressive enough to make game-making plays. Another area where Vainglory is reminiscent of its bigger cousins is the onboarding experience. MOBAs are notoriously difficult to pick up for beginners, and each major title in the space has made strides to help newbies pick up the bare essentials. Vainglory’s tutorials keeps things to-the-point, quickly walking you through everything in the game’s arena before dropping you in a level that challenges you to acquire as much gold as you can in a short amount of time. There are a few features that go under-explained (I bet a lot of beginners just buy all of the recommended items rather than coming up with their own gear strategy), but for the most part gamers with some experience playing action-RPGs won’t have much trouble jumping in with only one run through the single-player tutorials and practice. Unlike League of Legends or Dota 2, Vainglory does not sport dozens of characters to choose from when going into a battle. There are a dozen characters at launch, all of which feel fun if not wholly original. Characters aren’t perfectly balanced against one another, but that’s part of the fun: if you rush the enemy’s side of the arena without your allies backing you up, you’re making a gamble that you’ll be able to take on the enemies that are almost certainly waiting just beyond your character’s line of sight. Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose from all of these characters at the beginning of each round. Instead, there’s a rotating selection of characters available for free, with the rest available for those willing to pony up some cash. This will be frustrating to some, but I think it’s fair to say that if you’re playing enough that you feel compelled to pay a few bucks to pick from your preferred characters, you’re probably getting your money’s worth. One of the most noticeable things missing from Vainglory is the toxic culture you quickly discover playing League of Legends. There, players committing an hour of their time to a match feel it appropriate to harass teammates they feel aren’t pulling their weight, spilling all kinds of insults across their keys. That’s not an option on an iPhone, so Super Evil Megacorp reduced communication to issuing strategic messages via a shortcut at the top of the screen. Most frequently, this means telling your teammates to all attack the enemy at once in order to take advantage of a fleeting advantage. Thus far, I don’t miss messaging teammates one bit — there’s only a handful of targets worth attacking as a group, and the shortcuts are more than sufficient for making split-second group decisions. As with most mobile games today, there’s little reason not to try Vainglory if it seems like it might be up your alley. You can try all of the core gameplay for free, right now, and the content you do pay for is the kind that only increases your enjoyment. There’s none of the “spend $5 to unlock levels that would normally take you 20 hours of repetitive gameplay to access” BS you see from some studios on the App Store, and enough depth to keep you interested while Super Evil Megacorp adds more characters (and therefore play styles) to the mix. |
Comcast, Stop Scamming Me So I Can Stop Scamming You | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | Have you ever heard anyone excited to get Comcast service? Of course not. That’s like being excited for a hernia operation. Here’s my hernia operation: every year or so I have to do a dance with Comcast. You know, feigning the intention to quit their service. The so-called trial period on my TV and Internet package ended, causing my bill to nearly double from $90 a month to $160 a month. So I have to quit. Or at least say I’m going to quit. Both the lowly customer retention associate and I know I’m not going to quit. I hate doing it but it works and it’s the most frustrating thing in the world. The call goes something like this. Let’s call the Comcast rep Ted. I’m talking in a soft and sad voice. Me: “Hi there, my bill is too high so I need to cancel my service.” Ted: “Oh I’m sorry to hear that. Let me take a look at your bill.” Me: “Okay, but I doubt there is anything you can do.” Ted: “I see you’re on the digital extended plus basic package with Xfinity Internet with speedboost and extra bloatware. That’s a good package. But you don’t have the home phone service.” Me: “I don’t need the phone service.” Ted: “Yes you do.” Me: “I really don’t.” Ted: “Okay, I hear you. They make me ask.” Me: “Sure.” Ted: “Matt, I’m sorry to hear you want to leave and I’ll do anything to keep you as a customer. What will it take?” Me: “Well, I don’t know, maybe if you drop the price back down to under $100. I don’t need HBO or anything past the basic Internet.” Ted: “Okay, let me go ask my manager. We have a special I might be able to work you into.” Me: “Thanks.” Ted: “Good news, Matt. My manager snuck you into the super digital enhanced package with 25 Mbps [note – he says megabytes, though] Xfinity Internet with speedboost and extra bloatware. It’s just like your other package but we’re throwing in even more digital channels. How is that, Matt?” Me: “Sounds good. Thanks, pal.” Ted: “We would like to sign you up for the digital home phone service too.” Me: “No thanks.” See, this is the problem, Comcast. This is why no one likes you. It’s because you force people to scam you to get out of being scammed. Comcast is the only option outside of satellite in my area. Around me, each neighborhood has a different cable provider. Some have Comcast, some have Charter and some have municipal cable companies. I long to live in an area where competition is allowed and fiber is available. I’m not alone. This is a common complaint and a common practice. Essentially if I didn’t do this dance – which always works – I’d suddenly pay double. It’s like going to the gas station and suddenly prices are $6 a gallon just for you – but you can get a discount if you whine to the guy behind the bulletproof glass. Why does this have to happen? Of course the company does this for profit and the simple fact they’re allowed to price their service as they see fit. And that’s great! Go capitalism! That’s not the issue. Comcast simply does not care enough about its subscribers to institute fair pricing. Wireless carriers cannot get away with this scam. Insurance companies cannot either. Both of their markets are competitive enough to force the companies to compete on pricing and features. But when areas sign over their souls to a single cable provider, the residences suffer and the companies win. , the rep he spoke with was clearly just doing his job in doing whatever it takes to keep a Comcast customer. None of the laugh line he delivered suggested that Comcast wanted Ryan as a customer, they just wanted Ryan’s money. Treat your customers with respect from beginning to end, and the profits will follow. Look at T-Mobile. The company is billing itself as the “uncarrier” and is aggressively advertising its new policies. No contracts. Great selection of phones. Amazing pricing. And it’s working. The company is recovering. Sadly, Comcast doesn’t need to reinvent itself like T-Mobile. The company is already the top cable provider in the country is attempting to buy its closest competitor. Comcast is swimming in coin like Scrooge McDuck. From an investor’s point of view, the company should expand its practices. They’re clearly working great. But here I am. Here you are. We don’t have any other options. It’s either give Comcast a fortune or… give Comcast a fortune. |
null | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 11 | 6 | null |
Chrome Will Start Blocking All Remaining NPAPI Plugins In January | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | , Google’s Chrome browser will block all old-school (NPAPI) plugins. This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, given that Google started its efforts to remove NPAPI plugins . Over the last year, Google went from recommending that developers move away from this old architecture to actively blocking almost all NPAPI plugins. There was, however, always a whitelist that allowed some of the most popular NPAPI plugins like Microsoft’s Silverlight, Unity and Google’s own Google Earth plugin to continue to run in the browser. Starting in January, even that’s going away and all of these plugins will be blocked by default. Other plugins that will be affected by this move include the Google Talk and Facebook plugins. Most of the whitelisted plugins saw their usage decline since Chrome started the deprecation program, but according to Google’s own data, still remains popular with 11% of Chrome users launching it at least once per month. Most of that usage is probably from Netflix users, but now that Netflix is moving away from Silverlight, too, the impact will likely be less than those numbers suggest. Enterprises, which may still run some mission-critical NPAPI plugins, will be able to bypass these restrictions for the time being. Come September 2015, however, Google will completely remove support for these plugins from Chrome. |
Tesla Has Discussed Sharing Electric Car Tech With BMW | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | A future where the electric car is ubiquitous cannot be built by one company alone, regardless of the hype around Tesla and its progress in consumer automotive space. That’s why it’s exciting to hear from Elon Musk himself about talks between BMW and Tesla, even if they’re only informal, around potential collaboration on battery and charger technology. Musk’s comments are from an interview in , the German weekly news publication. In the interview, Musk says that the talks entered around potential collaboration in developing future battery tech, and charger stations, which could allow for greater interoperability between electric vehicles from both brands, as well as faster advances in improvements to EV power tech. The discussions have also touched on the technologies that BMW employees in the manufacture of its and i8 sports car, which use electric power. BMW employs carbon fibres in the chassis construction for these vehicles, which makes for more lightweight vehicles overall, which in turn means batteries can drive the cars for longer without requiring a recharge. While it’s early days yet to say for certain that these two will work together in any kind of formal partnership, it’s a good sign for those hopeful about the future of EVs. A fragmented, proprietary market where manufacturers focus on their own tech to the exclusion of others doesn’t really help anyone in the long term, beside the entrenched fossil fuel interests. Musk also commented on the company’s partnership with Mercedes, and said a working collaboration will continue despite Mercedes’ recent sell-off of its Tesla stake. He also expressed confusion at Toyota’s recent decision to pursue fuel cell vehicle technology, noting that a fuel cell-powered car consumers three times as much energy overall when compared to an equivalent, battery-powered vehicle. |
In Recession’s Wake RelianceCM Rebuilds A Tech Brand | Fara Warner | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | Corvallis, Oregon seems an unlikely high-tech town. Once a center for logging, small produce farms that now grow mint and fescue grass surround the university town of about 55,000 people. But in the 1970s, Hewlett-Packard built a massive plant on the outskirts of Corvallis, bringing with it a wave of technology talent. In those early years, the factory assembled handheld calculators, HP’s first personal computers and eventually became known for perfecting ink jet printing. As HP’s business shifted over the decades, some of its scientists and engineers left to start their own businesses in Corvallis, creating a base of manufacturing and technical businesses. In addition, Oregon State University helped to supply an educated workforce that allowed Corvallis to compete against the larger metropolitan areas of Portland to the north and Eugene to the south. One of those companies was RelianceCM, a contract manufacturing company that for the better part of two decades operated under the name MegaTech. During the 1990s, the company ran three shifts as a “board stuffer,” cranking out thousands of circuit boards mostly for the telecommunications industry. Circuit boards, now a multi-billion dollar global industry, are both the brains and brawn of virtually all the technology products we use. They are most often made from copper boards upon which wire circuits are soldered, connecting the dots to resistors and capacitors that make technology work. The computer, phone or handheld device you’re reading this on works because of circuit boards. By 2013, RelianceCM’s biggest telecomm customer shifted its circuit board manufacturing to China. But instead of closing up shop, the company saw an opportunity in the now-booming hardware start-up world where entrepreneurs needed small batches of circuit boards to test their ideas and start small-scale manufacturing. That’s when David Schroeder, the now 28-year-old son of the company’s third owner Scott Schroeder, decided to do what most companies consider unthinkable: throw away 25 years of history and get rid of the MegaTech brand name. Scott wasn’t in love with the old name, “but I thought he was crazy,” the elder Schroeder remembers thinking when David told him they needed to change it. Still he took the leap of faith and said yes to a new name. The name, RelianceCM, focuses attention on the company’s ability to provide hardware startups with hands-on help, reliable circuit boards and a sustainable supply chain. Still it wasn’t easy giving up on the name, even one like MegaTech. “It was a scary process,” David says. “We didn’t just shorten the name. It was gone. Flushed outside of the system. We don’t use it anymore.” The company’s new visionaries: Patty Baker and David Schroeder David never expected to join his father’s business, let alone overhaul its image for hardware startups. He graduated with a marketing degree from Oregon State with every intention of doing something that probably didn’t involve MegaTech. But it was 2008 and the country was sliding precipitously into the Great Recession. “I never pictured myself here,” David says of the company’s non-descript office and manufacturing space in a small industrial park a few minutes’ drive from the city’s picturesque downtown. “But it’s what I knew.” Unlike past generations of children who joined the family business and stayed the course, David didn’t want to just fill his father’s shoes. He wanted to create his own path. But first, his dad put him to work on the factory floor, learning the process of creating circuit boards with people who have worked on the small and often delicate products for more than a decade. That gave him hands-on experience, so that when he stepped into the role of business development manager a couple of years later, “he knew what he is talking about,” Scott says of courting prospective clients. Around the same time David joined the company, Patty Baker came on as the company’s office manager. She too was looking for a way through the recession and, like David, she wasn’t content with how the company was selling itself to the outside world. Nor did she want to be an office manager for the rest of her career. The recession, however, made it tough to risk much at the small company. But when Monaco, a client who made recreational vehicles went bankrupt, Patty and David saw a business that might help them get through the tough economic climate. They decided to continue sourcing those parts from other suppliers, essentially acting as a parts supplier, and help get those products directly to consumers. The risk paid off. “It got us through the deepest part of the recession,” Scott says. Because of this success, Scott says it was obvious that Patty was the perfect candidate to replace the company’s sales manager when he retired. Patty chose the title of relationship manager when the company shifted its focus as it rebranded itself RelianceCM. Patty, 48, jokes that when they walk in to sell the company’s abilities to new customers she knows they are thinking who are “the middle-aged lady and the kid?” But the odd couple combination has worked. David often starts out taking the technical questions and Patty connects with people over topics outside of even contract manufacturing. But the conversations don’t always end that way. “A person I would expect D (her nickname for David) to get on with ends up talking to me and vice versa.” Patty says traveling and meeting clients together helped her and David come to the decision that RelianceCM needed to be a company that entrepreneurs would have confidence in. They wanted their company to be able to meet the start-up mentality—a business model that requires fast and flexible manufacturing. “Who do we want to talk to as customers and at that point we were talking to a lot more startups—which we had always called them ‘new customers’—but these people had a new mindset,” she says. “They weren’t just the engineers that we had been trying to present to. They were entrepreneurs with a broader vision.” For many people, even those hardware entrepreneurs, contract manufacturing is a bit of a mystery. But as David puts it simply, “we are building other people’s products. When it comes down to putting whatever widget it is together, we are the people who screw it together, place the parts on the board and ship a product out of here.” Over the decades, that type of manufacturing has been shipped overseas because building circuit boards can be extremely labor intensive. But for start-ups who only need a few boards to test, or a few thousand to put in their products to sell, going to Asia can be daunting. Even at scale, navigating the world of contract manufacturing overseas isn’t easy. Those two factors have collided as hardware has become cool again. There are companies that need to test their ideas in the real world, but few places domestically can build the circuit boards. David says when he tells people in the San Francisco area that he is in contract manufacturing they think he has a factory in China. It takes them a while to understand that RelianceCM actually make boards in America. Companies like Dragon Innovation have helped hardware startups Pebble and Sifteo manufacture overseas. But not every company needs hundreds of thousands of parts. Some never will and not everyone wants to head to China. That’s where RelianceCM hopes to fill a vacuum, especially the domestic one. “We can compete if the labor component remains small compared to the parts cost,” Scott says. “We can work with early stage companies that need high touch and grow with them.” Part of Scott’s strategy also has been to invest in some early-stage companies as well. David, for his part, spends a good amount of time in Portland, where he organizes and helps run the monthly PDX Hardware Startup meetup. Contract manufacturing—no matter how hot hardware startups are right now—remains one of the less sexy sides of what is now called “the Internet of things,” which seeks to combine hardware with software and sensors to link all kinds of machines together via the Internet. But without RelianceCM, companies like VendScreen probably wouldn’t be upending industries like the vending machine business. VendScreen may not seem all that cool against flashy hardware products like smart watches or drones. But the company is a great example of why a company like RelianceCM is an important link in the Internet-connected hardware space. Most vending machines are still deeply embedded in the analog machine world. Many still only take coins or cash and are restocked on routes that may have little to do with whether a machine is out of chips and soda. VendScreen wants to change that. Its technology essentially is an Android retrofit that turns a vending machine into a big data machine—and it takes credit cards. The small plastic device RelianceCM makes is literally crammed with seven circuit boards. That stack gives the vending machine the capability of sending data on what’s selling and what’s not, nutritional data and pretty much anything else those seven boards can deliver. All that is put together in a small manufacturing space across a parking lot from RelianceCM’s main building. Some devices are half built, the circuitry exposed, others are “talking” to VendScreen’s servers and still others are packed and ready to ship out. “They have taken this industry that has operated in one way for twenty, thirty years — probably more — and kind of turned it upside down,” David says. He could say the same for his own company that is proving contract manufacturing for start-ups can happen in a small town in Central Oregon. |
Homescreen Is Betaworks’ Latest Experiment-Turned-Product | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | When someone picks up their phone to take a peek, I can’t help but take a peek, too. Whether it’s a perfect stranger on the train or the girl I’ve had a crush on for months, I can’t help but look. With the latest product out of , you can take that curiosity to a whole new level. It’s a simple app called Homescreen that asks you to take a screenshot of your home screen and share the generated link on Twitter. The link will lead back to your homescreen.is/username page where other people can see the apps that are nearest and dearest to your heart. Plus, the service uses image recognition technology to let you get in-depth information about the app by hovering over any app, whether it’s in a drawer or not. [gallery ids="1087237,1087238,1087240,1087231"] Obviously this is super simple, but the trend is already there. People are already finding to share their home screen on their own, and the best marketing scheme for an app is word of mouth anyway. By pairing those two things together, betaworks is creating its own user-generated app recommendation engine. There’s also a to see the most popular apps across the platform. Of course, there’s something in it for betaworks, too. The company is pretty obsessed with data. As a startup studio (for lack of a better word), it kind of to be. Betaworks manages around a dozen different brands, each with own subsidiary company, across a variety of verticals, from weather to media to analytics to gaming. Understanding the value of their products is paramount. And so, for about a year, betaworks has been working internally to understand which apps are most important to you. And there’s no better place to start than your very own home screen. Catching on to the yearly tradition of posting a screenshot of your home screen to Twitter during the holidays (which I had never heard of before this), betaworks culled data from 1,000 different home screens by searching on Twitter. After stripping away data that would be too anecdotal (all of it is somewhat anecdotal, given it all comes from Twitter users, but the methodology is explained well in ), the research showed that iPhone users are starting to replace a lot of Apple’s default applications, such as mail, weather, task-related apps, calendaring, and podcasting. In fact, for each of those categories, between 45 percent and 65 percent of the home screens examined had replaced Apple’s default apps with third-party options. Betaworks also found that messaging apps were creeping their way onto the home screen, but not necessarily replacing Apple’s Messages app but joining it. You can get a full scope of what betaworks found in , and if you want to try out Homescreen, you can get the app . |
The ‘Brief History Of Graphics’ Video Series Is Your Monday Morning Pong Pick-Me-Up | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzN2pgL0zeg&list=PLOQZmjD6P2HlOoEVKOPaCFvLnjP865X1f] A video series by of XboxAhoy has created one of the nicest mini-documentaries I’ve watched in a while. The that looks at computer graphics from to to and beyond. The whole series – complete with Brown’s soothing brogue – is a great look at the history of game graphics and the tools that programmers used to build some amazing classics. The series starts with the difference between vector and raster graphics – essentially -like line graphics vs. blocky pixel sprites – and how the advent of color pushed the arguably superior vector graphics into the dustbin of history. The second episode details the rise of the sprite and describes how things went from Super Mario to Out Run in a few short years. It’s a great series for anyone suffering from coin-op nostalgia or a programmer who wonders just where all that lens flare and those persistent dirt effects came from. Good stuff. |
Goldbely Debuts An App That Lets You Order Gourmet, Regional Cuisine From Anywhere In The U.S. | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | , the that lets you order gourmet foods from around the U.S. is now on mobile. The company just launched its first app with , which also includes a newly added next-day shipping feature for getting its tasty treats more quickly than before – whether that’s a real Philly cheesesteak, deep dish pizza from Chicago, Maryland crab cakes or anything else. The app lets you browse collections like “Eats from NYC” or “The Best from the Midwest,” add items to a cart and indicate a preferred delivery date. Note that the luxury of gourmet food shipped on demand does not come cheap. A Chicago pizza is shown for $59, a Key Lime pie is $69, a pastrami sandwich for two is $60, and so on. Founded in 2013, the idea with Goldbely is to allow anyone to experience the best of an area’s local cuisine, while restaurants get to increase their distribution. They may charge extra for their items to include the special shipping preparations they have to make, like flash-freezing or using dry ice, for example. Goldbely then takes a cut of the sales for itself. Last fall, the startup and others to expand its operations, and further carve out its niche. While today, there are a number of services that deliver meals on-demand, they are mainly focused around serving a local market’s immediate needs for breakfast, lunch, dinner or snacks. Goldbely, meanwhile, is focused around bringing you speciality foods from other cities, while also not necessarily in the “gifts” market where it would otherwise compete with online flower shops who deliver chocolates or fruits, or gift basket purveyors like Harry & David, for example. The company likes to partner with restaurants which have already been shipping foods, though not necessarily at scale, because they already have some infrastructure set up around packaging and shipping. Still, it’s a challenging space to enter as it’s difficult to deliver gourmet food at a fast pace while scaling a business quickly and maintaining quality, all the while trying to capture the market before a competitor. But Goldbely co-founder Joe Ariel at least brings a lot of food industry experience to the startup, having previously served as CEO at Delivery.com and CEO and founder of Eats.com ( by Delivery.com in 2009). That makes this his third run at leading a food-focused company. On average, orders are around $70+, and 80% of users are outside the top 10 U.S. markets, the company tells us. Goldbely revenue is also growing at 500% year-over-year, and it expects to reach profitability by December. |
Snapchat’s Newest Money Maker Is A Sponsored Our Story For Samsung And The AMAs | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | Snapchat took its first shot at monetizing its Our Stories collaborative livestream feature tonight with a Samsung-branded look at The American Music Awards. We were to the AMA Our Story, and confirms to me that it was paid by Samsung for the promotion. The AMA Our Story intersplices “Sponsored”-tagged Samsung photos and videos from behind the scenes at the AMAs with user-generated shots from the crowd and red carpet. The sponsored Our Story demonstrates how Snapchat could make money off branded content that feels more natural in its app than the pure ads it recently begun showing. in June to give people around the world a , starting with the Electric Daisy Carnival dance music festival. Anyone within the geofence of the festival in Las Vegas could submit Snaps of photos or videos to the EDC Our Story. Snapchat then curated the submissions, choosing the best to show on the EDC Our Story that’s visible to all users globally if they added “EDC Live” to their list of Stories updates from friends. I attended the festival and was astounded by how accurate Our Story’s potrayal was. a “genius, collaborative reinvention of the livestream”, and suggested that “Events might also be willing to pay for the promotion and cool-factor Snapchat could provide by setting them up with an Our Story.” After successful Our Stories for the World Cup and Super Bowl, Snapchat started regularly showing cool festivals and holidays from around the globe. Now we’re seeing the first Our Story that a brand paid to be featured and automatically added to Snapchat users’ friend lists. In this case, it’s Samsung paying for the AMAs to appear as an Our Story with its ads mixed in. Unfortunately, the Samsung Snaps in the Story feel much less natural or compelling than the user generated content. A bland video of a woman’s feet on the red carpet emblazoned with “AMAs…Powered By Samsung Galaxy” serves as the title screen and first slide. Following some fun shots of celebrities entering the awards show and performing outside, we get a drab “Backstage – American Music Awards. Powered By Samsung Galaxy” video of the production studio editing the taping for live TV. After clips of Taylor Swift performing on stage and One Direction winning an award we get…a stagehand pushing an equipment case through the backstage? I’m not sure who thought Snapchat users would want to see these boring clips of how the AMAs get made. They stick out like sore thumbs, but at least they only last a few seconds and can be skipped with a tap. Not being forced to watch these ads is an important point. Just like its , starting with a video promoting new horror film Ouija, Snapchat’s not making them interruptive. Don’t want to watch? Don’t tap. That minimizes the backlash from its fickle youth-centered audience its spent years stealing from competing social apps like Instagram. Snapchat has done a remarkable job of making Our Story supremely watchable, even for off-kilter events like a hot air balloon festival with no name-brand. That’s because it’s taken great care in curating which events it picks as well as the snaps it shows. For Sponsored Our Stories to succeed, Snapchat has to maintain that high bar of curation. It can’t allow lame events to get the Our Story treatment, and it has to teach businesses how to make their branded-clips fun. It needs Twitter Samsung Ellen Selfie-quality branded content. Otherwise, the audience that returns to Our Story will disappear faster than…Facebook’s latest standalone app. |
Crowdfunding Ain’t The Bank | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | There should be a name for the cognitive disconnect that everyone experiences with the Internet that says “I support the worldwide disruption of everything to get to a more democratic or egalitarian way of doing things except as it affects me.” From wine to window cleaning it’s the same everywhere: We expect everyone else in the world to adapt to the new froodier more exotic way of doing things until it comes knocking at our door. Then we’re shocked that our industry is no longer business as usual. SHOCKED. This even happens in such forward-facing industries as gaming. For example this week in crowdfunding two pieces of news underscored (for me at least) how badly many game developers handle change. They are the news that Frontier Developments to stop developing a key promised feature for , and the news that Valve had to to tell developers to stop messing Early Access customers around. The games industry has of course long been on the forefront of crowdfunding. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Steam’s Early Access and even use of Paypal are all examples of this sort of thing, and some of the biggest stories around crowfunding have emanated from games (OUYA, and so on). And yet despite all that game developers often don’t seem to understand what crowdfunding means. It means letting people in. More than anything else the key lesson of crowdfunding is that by going to the crowd you are asking for community as well as cash, asking people to join you, to support you, and essentially promising them an ear. Whether it’s a card game or a whole gaming console, the crowdfunding transaction is more than just finance. It’s tribal. It’s a movement. The problem that I perceive is that many games people don’t seem to understand that . They understand the first part well enough, that with the the right campaign a Kickstarter might raise millions of dollars and set a studio on the path to success. But when it comes to fulfilling the other half of what that implies, they balk. Some are fearful that community involvement in design corrupts their vision for example. That is a legitimate fear because design by committee is rarely anything but terrible and it comes at the cost of your soul. However I think it’s not that common for communities that form around crowdfunded games to actually want that. The crowd chose to support the game maker because the game they’re making seems to be cool. That means they trust the game maker to make a great game, but at the same time they’d appreciate being listened to. Nobody supporting the campaign for wants its developers to change their story, they just want to feel involved (disclosure: I worked a little with the developers making TDC, and I absolutely biasedly think you should support them). However the greater problem, I think, is how many developers haven’t updated their sense of how to deal with the public. Game development is generally a very sheltered industry. There is what goes on the industry and there is what goes on the fan community, and those two worlds only interface under select – and often very managed – circumstances. The game maker is generally used to talking at the audience through an interpreter such as journalist, podcaster, YouTuber or other intermediary. He’s actually used to that PR layer of insulation that keeps real people at about three steps remove and works to present a best-foot-forward image to the press, the fans and the community. And in that world the developer/studio is used to thinking of the money that comes at them as investment from the bank. All professional investment tends to carry a sense of risk with it, a sense of “hey guys we’re all taking a bet here”. Any game project funded by a publisher or investor is understood to likely only meet half of its wild promises, to evetually have to cut, compromise, revise and pivot along the way. We professionals generally understand that is just how life is. We regard the contract between us and the money as a promise to build something roughly like what the vision promised, but not quite. The problem is that crowfunders are not professional investors. They’re amateurs, people who invest for love and meaning and not at all to do with the business side. They’re ardent fans, supporters, eventually a marketing channel. But when we treat them like the bank, when we high-hand them with declarations of changes and say “It’s just a PR problem”, the fault is ours. When we solicit their money and then disappear for a year only to surface with some weak-ass version of the thing that we promised, the fault is again ours. There’s no ther way to say it. We’re basically ripping them off. There has always been a dimension of the games industry that has questionable morals. In all sectors there are plenty of journeyman projects whose developers take whatever coin they can because they’re just trying to make ends meet, That kind of work is just part of the business and we’ve all done it at least some of the time. I fear however that in dealing with crowdfunding many of us are basically take the same stance: All that matters is getting the check in the door, and what follows is just business as usual. Is it really so hard to understand that the way to deal with a crowdfund community (or anything social network based) is to talk to its participants as human beings rather than hiding behind PR bullshit or disappearing altogether? I don’t mean that as an insult against PR folks either – the best ones I’ve worked with all talk about the importance of voice and authenticity and actively dissuade clients from treating the public like they used to treat the press. Yet said clients do so anyway. There might be an element of age to this. I notice that many younger indie developers seem more at ease with the idea that they should just talk to people (one of my favorite is my friend Mike Bithell) and avoid the instinct to massage. They have no problem admitting their failings, of realizing that a chink in the armor does not equate to the press corps jumping up and down on them with glee and fans caterwauling at your graveside (well maybe Gamergate might, but I mean regular folks). They just want to be treated like supporters rather than spoonfed children. As the industry continues to evolve, and crowfunding with it, my earnest hope is that the games industry stops trying to hold its audience at quite such a remove. Nobody’s asking developers and publishers to change ther plans on the basis of fan polls (or whatever), nor even for a seat at the table. They’re asking that if there are problems, if things aren’t working out, or promises need to be broken, that they be included in that process. Some may feel hurt or betrayed anyway, but in the long run I think that the developer who talks is the one to whom fans will return again and again. Whereas the one who plays shenanigans will get tagged, perhaps irreparably. |
Jumpy Is An Open-Platform Smartwatch Just For Kids | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | Smartwatches for children hold a lot of allure and at least they will help drive the smartwatch market to 373 million devices shipped in 2020, up from 15 million this year. Kids get a shiny new gadget, while anxious parents get location trackers and activity monitors to keep tabs on their offspring. Children’s smartwatches, however, suffer from the same problem that other toys do: the very short attention spans of their target market. A Taipei-based hardware startup called wants to create a smartwatch for kids that won’t end up abandoned like the Velveteen Rabbit. Founder and CEO Jerry Chang, who was division head of Foxconn’s smartphone business before leaving last December, believes the key to creating a kids’ smartwatch with enduring appeal is to provide an open SDK and release new apps by JoyRay and third-party developers every month. Called , JoyRay’s smartwatch is designed for kids aged five to eight and Android and iOS compatible. It has a host of features software developers can play with, including a detachable watch head, gyroscope, gesture and voice recognition, and Bluetooth connectivity. , where it has raised about half of the $100,000 it wants to reach by December 18. The smartwatch’s Kickstarter price is $99 and it is scheduled to ship in March, a goal Chang is confident it can reach because Jumpy has a working prototype (which I saw demoed at JoyRay’s office) and a manufacturing partnership with Foxconn. One of the reasons I like Jumpy is because its creators are eager to make sure children use the smartwatch to interact with their parents and the world around them, instead of just staring at its screen. For example, JoyRay is currently working on an app that will allow kids to control , a Bluetooth-connected ball, by waving their hands around. The smartwatch will be shipped with an activity monitor app that features a cartoon dog named Chubby who reminds kids to move around and drink enough water.
While at Foxconn, Chang, who has two young children, brought home one of the original equipment manufacturing giant’s smartwatch prototypes. His son was enthralled and wanted to bring it to school to show off to his classmates. “I had to tell him, sorry, this is just for adults, not kids, but it made me realize how much smartwatches resonate with children,” says Chang. JoyRay’s team includes co-founder and developer David Liu, who is in charge of overseeing the apps Jumpy will come preloaded with, as well as its future releases. Liu’s own startup, LND Games, created , a nifty motion-sensor based iOS app that teaches children about color and music theory. Color Band was last year and later featured by the App Store. Jumpy features a larger screen (1.6-inches square) than most of its competitors and the watch head can detach from its silicon band. This allows it to be used as a controller in other games or attached to other devices. In the works is an educational app for tablets that is like an updated version of . The app features a drawing of a human body that reveals organs and bones when Jumpy’s watch head is passed over it like an X-ray. Jumpy’s watch head can also be incorporated into other devices. As a stretch goal for its Kickstarter campaign, JoyRay is currently working on a charger that is shaped like a robot or dog. When inserted, Jumpy’s watch head becomes the toy’s face, giving kids yet another way to interact with it. Chang says he learned from the relatively limited functionality of competing products like , an activity monitor for children. “It’s supposed to encourage them to be more active, but if you read reviews on Amazon and other sites, you see parents saying that while their kids were really excited at first, they were bored by it within a couple of weeks. So when we started developing Jumpy, we wanted it to be open platform. We have our own team of app developers and are also partnering with third-party developers to focus on educational, exercise, and entertainment apps.” When Jumpy ships, it will come with about eight to 10 apps, including games, an exercise reminder and monitor, a location tracker, and a messaging app that sends emojis or voice messages to smartphones and other Jumpys. Data is uploaded through wifi to the cloud so parents can monitor their kids’ activities on an iPad app. After that, JoyRay plans to release new apps on a monthly basis, including gesture-based games, storytelling apps, and language-learning tools. It also plans to integrate Jumpy with connected toys, like Sphero, that have open SDKs. “As we talk to consumers, we will keep adding new functions and games. We believe that Jumpy has a lot more possibilities beyond other kids’ smartwatches,” says Chang. While Jumpy’s competitors already include , , the aforementioned Leapband, as well as a host of GPS and activity trackers, Chang believes Jumpy’s open platform, larger screen, and detachable watch head will allow it to stand out in what is sure to be an increasingly crowded market. For more information about Jumpy, check out . |
Digital Privacy Is “The New Frontier Of Human Rights” | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | The impact of mass, digitally-enabled state surveillance upon individuals’ privacy has been described as “the new frontier of human rights” by Member of the European Parliament, Claude Moraes, who was giving an annual lecture on behalf of the at the London School of Economics on Friday. Moraes is chair of the European Parliament’s (LIBE), which conducted an into electronic mass surveillance of European Union citizens last year, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s digital dragnets. Moraes said there is a growing understanding among members of the European Parliament of the need to balance state surveillance practices with individual privacy rights, although he noted there is variation at the level of individual MEPs and Member States, with some (such as the U.K.) taking a far more . He described the notion that there is an either/or dichotomy between security and privacy as a falsehood — arguing that targeted surveillance and proportionate data capture processes are more effective counter-terrorism measures, and reiterating Snowden’s argument that gathering “haystacks” of information hinders rather than helps the cause of tracking down a few interesting “needles”. “Fighting terrorism is actually fought better by understanding that targeted information is a far better thing, rather than this mass surveillance approach,” argued Moraes. “People in Germany who understand what happens when you have , where information is then out there being used for negative purposes, understand where that can lead. But if you have targeted information… then we are in a society where that privacy balance is preserved,” he continued, adding: “It’s the terrorists who want to deprive us of the freedoms that we all fight for. They’re not interested in these freedoms.
By way of an example of a more nuanced mindset in the European Parliament when it comes to surveillance and privacy, Moraes gave the example of the Passenger Name Record agreement between the EU and the US which he said the Parliament will shortly be referring to the European Court of Justice — to judge whether it is “proportionate and necessary”. He also referred back to the ECJ’s decision, back in April, to that was made in the wake of 7/7 terror attacks — with the Court determining it to be disproportionately broad and contra to individual privacy rights. Moraes noted that such “untargeted data grabs” are the typical political trigger response to terror attacks, and make the business of creating the sought for balance between surveillance and privacy more difficult to achieve — given that security services will always ask for more surveillance powers at times of heightened terror fears, while politicians will want to be seen doing something to shore up national security. But — at a European Union level, at least — he said those knee-jerk security reactions are being more critically examined now, in a post-Snowden data retention “enlightenment” (as opposed to what he dubbed the pre-Snowden “data retention dark ages”). “Today as a result of having our inquiry even those people who started to call [Snowden] a traitor must now realize we have a whole group of people who must now at least understand that mass surveillance is something that is at least troubling and that we must do something about it,” he said. “The privacy agenda from the European Union now is very strong.” Moraes said the LIBE committee is focusing the next stage of its electronic surveillance inquiry on exploring the notion of a digital bill of rights as a way to create structure to support more proportionate surveillance practices that do take individual privacy rights into consideration. However, despite more support for a “privacy agenda” at the European Parliament level he cautioned there are still huge vested interests pushing in the other direction — so continuing to bang the drum for mass digital surveillance as a security panacea. It’s therefore imperative that the EU throughly interrogates the technical and moral complexities underpinning this new human rights frontier, he said. “The next phase of this enquiry into mass surveillance has to be about our security, a digital bill of rights, about where encryption is going, what the cloud means, where our privacy is going. Privacy is critical. And the idea that there is going to be no privacy unelect, or no idea of where we place privacy has got to be wrong,” said Moraes. “The next phase of our enquiry has to be on where we take this concept of privacy, where we take the concept of regulation. It is an extremely challenging time… I don’t have huge faith in many Member States to do this, there’s so many vested interests, vested security interests to not do this — but we have to try and do this.” He added that the big challenge for privacy rights activists now is articulating a strong moral case for privacy, so spreading “more powerful narratives about surveillance” and educating people on why privacy matters — at a time when security concerns and commercial technology services are pushing against it like never before. “Ultimately the Member States will have to step up to the plate, because they ultimately control the agenda. If people in this room don’t convince the individual Member States and governments of the big countries to make shifts on privacy, and to change the moral and political climate around security and privacy then of course we won’t make real progress. And every time we get the shocks and changes in atmosphere around terrorism then we’ll take a step back. And of course we see that today — with ISIS and ISIL,” he said. “We need a more powerful moral narrative, more powerful technical narrative… Here’s where this issue is different from many other issues, the knowledge level is very low, amongst people more widely, because it is very technical, because it’s very complex, so although it’s the new frontier of human rights it’s a very complicated frontier of human rights… It’s very different from other human rights issues — it’s one where we have to educate others because they will not always see the importance of it.” |
Whitney Wolfe, Other Former Tinder Employees To Launch Direct Competitor Called Bumble | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | Whitney Wolfe, an , has joined up with two other early Tinder employees, and his parnter (cofounders of YayNext), to launch a direct competitor to Tinder called Bumble, sources tell TechCrunch. According to the app’s , Bumble is a social discovery app that “promotes a safe and respectful community” where “you’ll never get unwanted messages” and your suggestions will be more relevant than the “dead-end matches” you find on “other, more shallow apps.” You can check out the full description . Yesterday, Bumbleapp had a that showed a preview video of the app, which seems to look a lot like Tinder. It shows a user making a match and chatting. The account has since gone private, which might have to do with us looking into the company pre-launch. The app website also shows photos of the app, which seems to use more detailed information than Tinder, including job position, company, college, and the year you graduated. The Facebook page for the app shows of the making of the app’s launch video, showing a helicopter and a boat being used during production. “Boats n’ bees,” read the caption. There are also on the founders’ Instagram accounts of video shoots to promote the app at Ham Yard Hotel in London. The app is slated to launch on December 1, according to social media, and thus far that’s all we know about the actual product. While Gulzcynski and Mick are on their social media, Wolfe has seemingly kept a low profile, not posting anything about the stealthy startup. However, sources tell us that Wolfe is at the helm alongside Mick and Gulzcynski. You can see in from a month ago, posted by Mick, that Wolfe is sitting at what appears to be a startup office in front of a computer. The caption reads “working late.” The photo links to many of these images no longer work, so I’m including screenshots. The company, which is officially called Moxco Limited, lists its place of business in London, according to the . But you can see from the Instagram accounts of Gulczynski and Mick that the team has been traveling quite a bit. There was a trip to , where they stayed , and then to Paris. Not to mention multiple trips to and from London and Los Angeles. It’s unclear just how much the company has raised, but one source told TechCrunch that it’s in the millions. We’ve also heard about a number of different sources for the funding, including social dating service Badoo and Michael Herd, the multi-millionaire heir to an oil fortune. This summer, during the time of , sources told TechCrunch that Wolfe and Herd had been in a relationship. It’s unclear if the romantic relationship continues. However, we’re told that the private jet ferrying the team to and from London belongs to Herd. In from three months ago, you can see both Herd and Wolfe on the plane, and you can see all four of them (Herd, Wolfe, Gulzcynski, and Mick) in London a couple of months ago. The fact that Wolfe, Gulczynski and Mick are launching a direct competitor to Tinder brings up a number of interesting points. Of course, the most obvious one is that they’ll have inside knowledge of their biggest competitor, quite a bit of experience building an app like this, and they have enough public visibility to spread awareness quickly. Beyond that, the app seems squarely countered against a ‘shallow’ Tinder experience where you receive ‘unwanted messages’, all with the subtext that the founder of Bumble actually received unwanted messages from the co-founders of Tinder. Whether or not Bumble will make a dent in Tinder’s near ubiquitous adoption is yet to be determined, but we’re bound to find out soon enough. We’ve reached out to the Bumble team but have yet to hear back. Same goes for Tinder. We’ll be sure to update you if we do. |
Dislike That Computer Engineer Barbie Book? This Tool Lets You Rewrite It | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | Unless you unplugged your Internet and shut off your phone this week, you’ve probably heard the tale of Computer Engineer Barbie. I won’t spend much time recapping it, but we cover it . The short version: Mattel publishes a “ ” Barbie book. Seemingly intended to encourage young girls to pursue a career in computer sciences, the book instead frames Barbie as something of a damsel-in-digital-distress who turns to her male friends every time something breaks. A few years later, blogger Pamela Ribon reads the book, and rightly slams it for being lame, full of cringe, and not the book that it should be. Anger spreads, Mattel apologizes, and the . But the idea of the book itself isn’t a bad one — it’s the execution that was botched. An “I Can Be A Computer Engineer” Barbie book absolutely exist — just… not this one. While I’d wager that Mattel is already cracking away at a re-write, it might take a while — you can be damned sure that any replacement book will be vetted a bit more thoroughly than the first one was. Want something sooner? Want to re-write the book yourself, perhaps? You could bust open Photoshop and start paint-bucketing the words away… Better yet, you could . Built by coder , the web app lets you remix individual pages from the book to your heart’s content. We’ve shared some of our favorite (if totally 100% inappropriate for an actual book) remixes below: Little Barbie Tables, we call her. — Jarkko Laine (@jarkko) Crying over — Sophie Webb (@abeautride) I know I'm late to the party on , but honestly this is my favourite thing ever now — Shiro Sirius (@ShiroSirius) [Topmost remix ] |
Requiem For A Unicorn | Micah Rosenbloom | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | Marc Andreessen has said that there are that generate 90% of the returns for VCs. Startups jockey for position in the “ .” In the world of startups we don’t have the S&P 500, we have the “ .” Fab was once a member of this unicorn club. Founders Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shellhammer appeared on . The company was a fixture on “ ” lists. Fab raised in total funding, including a recent $150 million dollar round which valued the company $1.5 billion dollars. Now, in what can only be called the largest flash sale in history, Fab is reportedly being , or just 1% of its former value. Stories of outsized success are inspiring, but the disproportionate attention paid to these mythical beasts is detrimental to the broader startup ecosystem. This obsession with founding and funding unicorns has driven VC funds to become billion dollar behemoths, and as a result, ignore smaller, though still very promising, companies. I call this kind of startup a “thoroughbred.” They’re impressive organizations that have the potential to change the lives of their customers and employees, but differ from unicorns in that they are “only” likely to exit for $100-500 million dollars. Some VCs see these companies as too small to concern themselves with, but there is something fundamentally broken in the startup ecosystem when funding a company that sells for a quarter billion dollars is an unattractive prospect. Personally, founding and selling a thoroughbred company proved to be life-changing. In 2003, Eric Paley and I raised $8.5 million dollars for our company, . Our goal was to digitize a part of dentistry that hadn’t changed since Egyptian times. We developed a that allowed dentists to create 3-D models of their patient’s mouths and 3-D print crowns and fillings. We didn’t get our faces on the cover of Forbes, instead we spent most of our time on the (un)glamorous dental trade show circuit. In 2006 we sold the company to 3M for $95M, generating an excellent return for our investors, and for us. The proceeds of the sale and our entrepreneurial learnings served as a springboard to start Founder Collective. In the five years since we started the fund we’ve seen a dramatic growth in the number of venture capital funds and the amount of funds they have under management. This surplus of dollars means that any attractive category of companies—think of subscription ecommerce in the wake of BirchBox or daily deals after Groupon—will quickly have 3-5 venture-funded startups competing for investor dollars, customer attention, and resumes for key hires. Each company will raise more money than the previous one and an arms race for everything from Adwords to office space will ensue. The problem with trying to attain mythical status is that there can only be one. Raising huge amounts of funding locks you into a binary outcome—you’re either worth billions or you go bankrupt. First wave web companies were built on the strength of network effects that rewarded companies like Amazon and Ebay with near monopolies. This has led many to believe that there’s bound to be a single winner in any tech category, but not every market has a winner takes all dynamic. Apple and Android co-exist. In adtech, dozens of very successful companies deliver solutions to brands and publishers. Even in the slow moving dental industry we had a venture-funded competitor that also enjoyed a sizable (~$200M), but non-unicorn exit shortly after ours. Not everyone has to be running a unicorn to build a great company, recruit a great team, or to raise capital. It’s hard to ignore the pundits, but just like in politics or sports, sometimes it’s the best thing one can do for their sanity. Focus on your customers, co-workers, and your venture capital strategy and there’s a good chance you can build a life-altering business that’s rewarding personally and financially. Fred Wilson’s post about says it well – one shouldn’t correlate fundraising to likelihood of success. Nor should you focus on whether or not you’re a founder/investor/entrepreneur at a “Unicorn.” Remember even unicorns can be a mirage as , and now Fab demonstrate. |
eBooks Could Finally Inch Past Print In 2018 | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | PricewaterhouseCoopers analysts are predicting (again) that ebooks could soon edge out print as publishers’ most lucrative products. What does this mean? Essentially that a ebook popularity and pricing stabilizes, users will spend more on bits than they will on pulp. The resulting switch could be the final nail in the print coffin. The of rising revenue from books, leading to slightly over 50% US penetration in 2018:
Will this happen? I’m not betting on the 2018 number. First, points out that PwC has been making this same prediction over and over again, year after year. Why? Because at some point they will be correct. I honestly expected ebooks to overtake print in the US far sooner. The with alarming regularity and print is still wildly popular in Europe. But this will change as cheaper ereaders become available but there is also a generational issue. Kids and older adults – audiences that bookend the book market – are still reading print books as the plethora of , , and titles at second-hand bookshops can attest. But as parents become more comfortable with leaving a tablet with the kids as they doze off I feel even the first of these hold-fasts can soon crumble. As for older adults this number is chipped away as grandparents and parents become familiar with their kids’ Kindles. Print books are still commonplace. In order for ebooks to “win” print books have to become cult objects. I, a book lover who understands the amazing tools afforded writers by epublishing, recently purchased a copy of in hardcover. I can’t remember why I bought it in paper form – perhaps I wasn’t paying attention on Amazon – but there is something about holding a nicely printed book in my hand, dust cover slipping slightly off the cardboard cover, and the minutes ticking away into hours as I flipped crisp pages. But, as an indie author, sooner I can romanticize the experience of ebooks the better. We are caught in two worlds and the new one isn’t quite ready yet. |
Fitmob Gets More Funding As It Partners With Gyms And Looks To New Markets | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | Fitness marketplace is growing fast and looking to grow even faster, and to do so it’s raised new strategic funding from . The funding will be used as Fitmob adds more options to its fitness marketplace through partnerships with gyms, and as it seeks to expand into new markets. Fitmob has refined its business model quite a bit recently, moving from a pure peer-to-peer model to one in which the company partners with existing players in the industry. The company also launched $99 monthly subscriptions several weeks ago and has seen demand explode since then. It turns out people like paying one fixed fee for access to a whole bunch of different activities rather than pay a la carte for each class they take. Over the past several months, the company started partnering with different yoga and other fitness studios to offer up a wider variety of classes to its users. And now, in a , the San Francisco-based company has begin working with gyms. That marks a shift from Fitmob’s original plan to build a peer-to-peer marketplace of activities that sought to connect users with trainers and classes that didn’t have to be — and often weren’t — connected with a gym or training studio. By doing so, the company had sought to lower the cost of overhead associated with the current fitness model, while also giving trainers more freedom to make money from classes that they taught. Fitmob is still looking to build the largest marketplace of fitness activities, but now it will also include gyms and their classes in its app, according to founder and CEO Raj Kapoor. “Our initial positioning was that we were an alternative to the gym,” Kapoor told me by phone. But since, he says the company has evolved its business model. “We decided we were better off partnering with the industry than trying to go around it… It makes more sense to leverage [gyms’] excess capacity than to create all new capacity in the system.” Gyms that will become available in San Francisco, Marin, and Seattle include Studiomix, World Gym, LiveFit, Kentfield Fitness, Fitness SF, Body Kinetics in Marin, and The Seattle Gym. Altogether, there are 17 participating at launch, but the company expects to add more each week. By including gyms in its list of activities, Fitmob users can either sign up for their classes or just drop in and use their equipment. Like its existing partners, Fitmob will pay also gyms on a per-use or per-visit basis, but it will be doing so at a heavy discount over their usual a la carte prices. The goal is to fill up unused capacity at those gyms, according to Kapoor. And the model works because about 70 percent of spots in any given class are usually open, which means that any Fitmob user who signs up is taking a spot that probably would have remained empty. In addition to adding gyms to its list of fitness options, Fitmob has also just launched an Android app, which should grow its addressable user base. That’s important, especially as it looks to become available in places besides San Francisco, Seattle, and Marin. Today it has about 80 different trainers, studios and gyms on the platform in San Francisco and about 40 in Seattle, with more being added over time. But expansion into even more cities is coming soon, with Fitmob looking to launch in the top 50 cities in the U.S. over the next year. Now that the company has locked down how it works in its home market and nearby, it plans to enter new cities over the coming months. To do so, it hires brand ambassadors in each new market to help it find the best trainers, studios, and gyms and then works to sign them up. And of course, the funding will help with that. Fitmob isn’t disclosing the size of the investment by Recruit Strategic Partners, but Kapoor notes Recruit is the home of some of the largest marketplace in Japan. Leveraging its expertise, Fitmob hopes to continue growing its own marketplace right here in the U.S. |
Uber Über Alles | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | Oh, Uber. Such a great service…run by such short-sighted, thin-skinned executives. Clue: when people criticize you and/or your company, suck it up, take the criticism on board and apologize/adjust if warranted, then . Do not muse aloud, even at a quasi-off-the-record party, about forming million-dollar funds to attack and silence your critics. Quite aside from the ethics of it all, how did the notion of repairing Uber’s tarnished public image by declaring war on journalists ever seem remotely like a good idea to anyone? That’s like pouring napalm onto a firestorm, or the Streisand Effect squared. And then to casually mention this bright idea to a Buzzfeed editor at a party? The mind boggles. And so a classic Valley soap-opera scandal erupted. Won’t someone think of the journalists? Pass the popcorn, please! Ashton Kutcher . Pando’s Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr, who seem to live for this kind of slugfest , did their thing. Dave Winer, of long-ago RSS fame, unleashed a in which he attacked the tech press for “name-calling,” and…complained at length about Chrome. flew about what actually happened at the infamous dinner. And Uber CEO Travis Kalanick apologized, but– . 's tweetstorm reads like its author is vaguely aware that "values" are theoretically important, but doesn't actually have any. — Jon Evans (@rezendi) (Not saying he's actually like that. Twitter is very low personality bandwidth. But I am saying it's a clumsy and weird faux pas.) — Jon Evans (@rezendi) But let’s not dwell overmuch on Uber and journalists. They can take care of themselves, and besides, there’s so much else to talk about: Uber’s competitive , disregard for customers’ , alleged of its , sponsorship of (!), and its creepy and/or corporate culture, to name a few. (They their infamous “Rides of Glory” blog post, but fear not, the Wayback Machine .) Today, though, let’s talk a little about Uber and wheelchairs. Because this really seems to epitomize Uber’s whole corporate culture: https://twitter.com/othiym23/status/535511591362772995 Beyond you’ll find: “Uber is lobbying to change proposed legislation designed to increase the paltry number of wheelchair-accessible taxicabs in Washington … Uber wants to avoid any requirement to report the numbers of wheelchair-accessible trips requested and provided to passengers.” I mean, wow. We’re not talking about wasteful bureaucratic pork here; we are literally just talking about providing data to help disabled people. That’s something you’d think a company that will soon have raised of dollars would be willing, if not eager, to provide. But not Uber. Uber is a deeply libertarian company that guards its precious data jealously…even to the point of refusing to provide the government with information that could help the disabled. They really seem to be trying hard to prove Peter Thiel correct–something which I grudgingly admit happens with irritating frequency–when he called it “ ” onstage at Disrupt this year. Uber responds– Uber has been, and will continue to be, within the District […] We have agreed to share data to further accessible transportation options in multiple cities – including Seattle, Chicago and Houston, among others […] We have had productive and active discussions with the DC Council and community advocates and are committed to being a part of the solution on this very important issue. I hate the taxi cartels too. But the choice between them and Uber-at-its-worst is very much a false dichotomy. Don’t get me wrong, Uber is not always at its worst; but when it is, it really seems like all the worst aspects of today’s tech industry, amplified beyond the point of parody– What are the odds upper management there mutters "Hail Hydra" to one another every morning? — Safety Dansky (@RDansky) Valley culture probably needs to take some of the blame here. On one hand, we stress “growth at all costs,” and then we’re shocked, shocked! when founders actually take that to heart, even when those costs include things like “values” and “ethics.” And Uber’s astonishing hypergrowth is apparently blinding them to the fact that they are developing a fantastically unpleasant corporate reputation — in an industry where trust actually matters quite a lot. On the other, we’ve become such a cheerleading echo chamber that successful tech people now expect not just respect but actual adulation, no matter the source of their success, and any hint of criticism seems completely unacceptable. Winer actually seems to be suggesting that because the tech industry is So Very Important its titans should be immune to any kind of critical scrutiny. In fact that’s exactly why such scrutiny is so necessary. I don’t really care what Emil Michael may have carelessly said at a dinner party, except inasmuch as it reinforces the spreading notion that Uber is a company run by narcissistic sociopaths. But I don’t believe it actually , and I don’t believe in Internet pile-ons, and I do believe in second chances, so I’m not uninstalling them–yet. But I do hope Uber realize that they don’t just have an image problem. They seem to have a fundamental problem with their corporate culture, one that will require real and significant changes, not just empty PR fig leaves. I hope those are in the pipeline. In the interim, I reckon I’ll be riding with Lyft. Non-disclaimer: while their tenure writing for TechCrunch overlapped mine by a year or so, I’ve never met or corresponded with either. |
Crowdsourced War | Jillian Kay Melchior | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | At least 4,000 people have died in Eastern Ukraine, according to United Nations estimates, spilling roughly 5,000 gallons of blood on the nation’s soil. As with much of the needless waste of war, this bloodbath was avoidable and this death toll could have been much lower. In 90% of potentially survivable battlefield mortalities, uncontrollable bleeding was the top cause of death, the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research found in 2012. These statistics caught the attention of Ilya Tymtchenko, a young Ukrainian man who recently moved back to Kiev after studying in the United States. Using the crowd-funding website , he raised more than $2,000 in 10 days to provide bandages and , a blood coagulant, for Ukrainian soldiers. Using he found an American friend headed to Kiev who could make the medical purchases in the United States and bring them abroad in a suitcase, avoiding the pricey and unreliable Ukrainian mail system. Also through social media, he found contacts in Kiev who would soon be headed east, who could transport the trauma kits to the front line. “I would say that I am a very minor example in the greater picture, because there are people who are much more involved with raising funds,” Tymtchenko tells me by Skype. “For myself and my friends, we look at what can be the most effective way of saving a life.” As Ukraine’s fight against Russian invaders and pro-Russian separatists continues, the country has embarked on an unintentional innovation: crowd-sourced war. Though patriotic civilians have long supported war efforts — think Rosie the Riveter, volunteer nurses and the dutiful stocking-knitters of yore — Ukraine’s crowd-sourced war effort is different. For starters, it’s born of stark necessity; around the time Russia annexed Crimea, Ukraine had only 150,000 troops, down from 700,000 in 1991. Ukraine’s defense spending in 2013 was only U.S. $1.9 billion—35 times smaller than Russia’s military budget. And even that doesn’t tell the whole story. Ukraine’s former president Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin puppet who fled to Russia in the wake of the Maidan protests last February, spent his time in office weakening the military, diverting funding from foreign-focused troops to his own internal police, who helped suppress the Ukrainian people. Second, Ukraine’s crowd-sourced war effort is decidedly techy. A primarily grassroots effort, volunteers and fund-raisers publicize and coordinate their efforts on social media. To collect money, fund-raising campaigns rely on everything from Western crowd-funding websites to text-message campaigns to electronic terminals created by Ukrainian banks. Tymtchenko tells me most contributions to his campaign ranged between U.S. $20 and $50. A $100 donation is considered big, he adds. That’s not surprising, given that Ukraine remains a relatively poor country, with the per capita gross domestic product still only $3,867. But small donations make a big difference, as one fund-raising campaign launched by the Ukrainian military demonstrated earlier this year. By texting 565, Ukrainians could send in a 49-cent donation to help with “logistics and military support.” It brought in an overwhelming U.S. $2.3 million in the first five days alone. The majority of the crowd-sourced war effort, though, has come from , many of which sprung up during the Maidan protests, then shifted focus to support the fight in eastern Ukraine. Reporting for in April, I spoke to a Halyna Tanay, 23, who had volunteered to create secret hospitals during the protests, and who already saw those skills as transferrable to the war effort. “Things the government couldn’t do in years, we did in weeks,” Tanay at the time. “It just shows that if you want to do something, you can do it. … Now we have a real war in East Ukraine, and we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. There, it’s still dangerous. That’s why we can’t relax. We are waiting for [the Russians] every day, and if [our troops] need help, we can help. … Of course, war is worse than revolution, but we understand what to do, and we are ready.” The range of these projects is impressive. Ukrainian civilians can’t buy military weapons like guns or tanks, so many projects focus on raising funds to provide soldiers with food, helmets, body armor, and warm clothing; some projects buy armed cars, and rumors even circulate about volunteers who have managed to restore an old cargo plane, proudly presenting it to the military. Eugene Levchenko, a man in his early 20s who is part of Ukraine’s reserve forces, tells me by email that his favorite volunteer is a little boy who cleaned out his piggy-bank, using his $13 to buy warm boots for a soldier. Fund-raising for drones is also an increasingly popular project, albeit an ambitious one. Good ones cost between U.S. $1,000 and $7,000 when equipped with a camera, says Vitalii Moroz, who volunteers with several initiatives, working especially with . “Drones are needed for understanding what is happening with an enemy, and it helps to investigative the enemy territories,” he tells me. “The cheaper the drones, the more accidents: The drones may fly away, they don’t follow the [control] of the operator.” The logistics of raising money and making purchases can be complicated, though, volunteers say. Crowd-sourcing websites have their pros and cons. It’s convenient, but some companies, like Kickstarter, require a project’s approval. Most are foreign, causing potential currency-transfer problems, though a few Ukrainian ones . Worse, almost all of them charge a service fee that gobbles a precious percentage of the funds raised. “In Ukraine, the technological solutions for fundraising are not so developed as in the States,” Moroz says. “We don’t have some particular platforms to collect money for Ukrainian soldiers, but [instead, we’re] sending money through [bank] terminals to card accounts. There are hundreds of volunteers, leaders of the volunteer groups, who post on Facebook the numbers of these accounts, and they encourage people to send money.” PrivatBank’s system is especially popular, offering both online payment and in-person money-transfer . The fee is also significantly lower than crowd-sourced websites. Volunteers also take big risks to get their supplies to the front lines, Levchenko, the reserve trooper, tells me. “They bring aid to the front, sometimes moving under enemy fire,” he says. “Sometimes they’ve been captured as hostages by terrorists and [the] Russian regular army.” For Ukrainians, the volunteer ethic of Maidan was inspiring and empowering—there’s a reason many refer to it as a “revolution of dignity.” The effort to support their defenders is a logical continuation of this fight, which volunteers say they hope restores a flourishing civil society and creates a free, Western-style nation that protects the rights of its citizenry. “Since the war with Russia is the worst-case scenario, many people do not care about their positions and their work,” Moroz says, noting that war volunteerism unites members of the “creative class” with businessmen and intelligentsia. “The just do all they can to fight for the independence.” But there’s also a darker side to crowd-sourced war. The basic need for it illustrates a fundamental shortcoming: Ukraine can’t sufficiently protect its citizens from foreign threats, one of the most fundamental responsibilities of government. And in a world where non-state actors, like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, have access to the same autonomous techniques to finance terrorism, that’s a disturbing development. |
UK Government Pushes IP-Matching In Latest Digital Counter-Terror Measure | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | ISPs and mobile operators will be forced to retain information linking IP addresses to individuals for 12 months under U.K. government counter-terrorism plans expected to be detailed next week. The IP-matching measure will be included in the government’s forthcoming Anti-Terrorism and Security Bill. This follows another failed attempt by the government last year to push through a so-called ‘Snoopers’ Charter’ — aka the Communications Data Bill. That legislation would have forced companies to retain data about people’s online conversations, social media activity, calls and texts for 12 months but the coalition’s junior partner, the Liberal Democrats, baulked at supporting what they dubbed an “illiberal” bill. However they are evidently comfortable with IP-matching — describing the measure as “good news”. The Lib Dems also supported — requiring Internet and phone companies to keep records of customer metadata — which was pushed through Parliament by the U.K. government this July, after the European Court of Justice struck down European data retention powers on the grounds that they were too broad. That (aka DRIP) was for being overly broad, vague and Draconian. It was also rushed through Parliament without proper scrutiny, despite the ECJ ruling being handed down months earlier, in April — leading to accusations of a ‘surveillance stitch-up’. Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr politics TV show today U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May described the new IP-matching measures coming down the pipe in the Anti-Terrorism and Security Bill as “a step” to helping the security services identify suspects. But added that, in her view, this requirement does not go far enough — arguing that police need the ability to retain communications data that was set out in the Communications Data bill. So again the U.K. government continues to drive a state digital surveillance agenda that’s . “It will still be the case, even with these IP addresses being within the legislation that the National Crime Agency… will still not be able to identify everybody who is accessing illegal content on the internet,” May told the . The Home Office claims IP-matching will help police and security services identify terror suspects and organized criminals who are using the Internet to communicate. It is also talking this up as a way to help identify other types of Internet users — including hackers, cyber bullies and even vulnerable individuals using social media to discuss taking their own life. That latter scenario is a rather odd inclusion, given the Conservative Party’s usual allergic reaction to anything that can be perceived as ‘nanny state-ish’. Beyond that sort of function creep, there is a huge can of worms being unboxed here, given the logical fallacy of equating an IP address with an individual. Politicians failing to grasp the intricacies of technology is, however, nothing new. Seems we need a reminder. 'I am not an IP address' — Graham Smith (@cyberleagle) |
SF Has An S&M Problem | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | It’s a Friday night, and I am on the prowl. I’m with my friend Edgar, and we are looking for evidence of the increasing S&M problem among the denizens of America’s startup capital. We all know the story the past few months: it’s really bad right now, but don’t worry, everything will get better in time. But it is not getting better, and it’s time to call out our collective dirty little secret. Our Sales and Marketing costs are killing us. For years, subscription-based pricing popularized by Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startups has been pitched to us as a way of reducing S&M costs. Traditionally, software was sold as a license along with a maintenance contract that ensured deep upfront revenues and a continuous stream of income. Unlike the complexity of that on-premise implemented and managed software, SaaS was supposed to be simpler for customers to use and pay for. That simplicity not only saves on maintenance costs for overburdened IT departments, but also theoretically lowers the sales touch required for a sale, generating revenue efficiency for the provider. By pricing software as a subscription, startups forego upfront revenue from a license fee in exchange for higher and more reliable renewable revenue. It hasn’t worked out that well. The evidence is strikingly poor for the subscription model when it comes to actual dollars and cents. My friend and wingman , the SEC filings database, has all the proof. Just take a look at some of the recent technology IPO filings from the past few months to get a hint of the problem. Hortonworks, the Hadoop provider, , and the losses are mounting. in total revenue in the first three quarters of 2014, but its S&M costs were $44.6 million in the same period. New Relic, the SaaS application monitoring startup, , and its earnings record is similar. The company had revenues of $63 million in the year before March 31, with $58 million in sales and marketing costs. These high ratios between revenues and sales and marketing expenses are certainly not new for companies heading to the public markets. , one component of that analysis was the companies’ high costs to sell a product to their customers. Box in particular had $124 million in revenue in the year ending January 31, . Now, I know the standard excuse here is that these subscription companies are “growing rapidly” and this is all just “an investment in the future.” With subscription pricing, the entire model follows from renewals, with the logic being that once you have acquired a customer, the profit margin will rapidly increase as active sales costs come down. The challenge is that low-touch sales never seem to be low cost. If a customer is shelling out a serious amount of money from its IT budget to pay for a service, there is going to have to be constant attention paid to that customer to ensure that they are happy with the service while ensuring that they don’t defect to a competitor. This goes far beyond a support subscription, which handles the day-to-day maintenance of ensuring performance of the service for the customer. The CIO needs to know the provider is listening to their concerns, and that means a sales infrastructure. Furthermore, gross margins for SaaS startups in particular are lower than for companies selling traditional software licenses, since these startups don’t just sell code, but also have to manage data centers and other infrastructure to maintain the software service. With less margin, startups should be more efficient with S&M spending. But we don’t see companies lowering their S&M costs post-IPO. More than a year after its public debut, FireEye, a security platform for enterprises, had . Even a company as massive as SalesForce has arguably not found its marketing scale yet. In its most recent quarter, , and more than 67% of gross profit. While the company is still expanding at a fast clip with year-over-year revenue growth of 28.5%, it seems hard to see the moment when its S&M costs will simply melt away with renewals continuing. This is particularly noticeable when we move away from the SaaS IPOs to other technology startups. OnDeck, the small business lending startup, announced its IPO a few weeks ago, and its operations appear much more reasonable. The company had about $107 million in gross revenue and $48 million in net revenue in the first nine months of this year, with “just” $21.8 million in sales and marketing expenses. Does SaaS still offer a compelling model for some startups? Sure, just take a look at Slack. Given its innate virality as a social tool in the workforce, it is entirely credible to believe that the company can have an off-the-shelf product with a subscription pricing model and avoid the S&M problems that plague others in the enterprise space. But it has an advantage with organic growth that few other B2B startups share. Frankly, one of the reasons for the popularity of subscription is that founders believe they can simply avoid sales by putting a price matrix online and waiting for customers to come to them. It might be time to admit that sales and marketing are crucial to startups from the day they are launched, and find better ways of building up efficient revenues earlier. That message needs to be heard particularly by technical founders, who should grapple and become comfortable hiring sales teams much earlier in their startup’s growth. SaaS is not an excuse to ignore higher-touch sales. For in this competitive world, where startups targeting enterprise are competing not just with entrenched players but also other startups, sales matters more than it ever has. The winner of these markets is going to be the company that figures out how to get revenue growth without breaking the S&M budget. While we may have an addiction to S&M spending as an industry, we also have the tools and know-how to fix it, and it starts by placing product development and sales on an equal level. |
Jolla’s ‘Open Source’ iPad Alternative Raises More Than $1M In Two Days’ Crowdfunding | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 23 | Late last week Finnish mobile startup running its open source Sailfish OS*, smashing past its initial funding goal of $380,000 in a couple of hours. It has since pushed past the $1 million mark, with around $1.18M now pledged from more than 7,370 backers of the campaign. Speaking in with TechCrunch prior to the campaign kicking off Jolla co-founder Marc Dillon was bullish. “I think we’re going to sell out,” he said. “I believe that we will quickly see the small initial targets, we will put up some stretch goals. I think that we’re going to sell a lot of tablets.” Well, Dillon certainly wasn’t underestimating the appetite for tablet device running open source software. Sailfish’s trump card is arguably compatibility with Android, meaning devices running the OS are not limited to the sub-set of native Sailfish apps, but can also run Android apps — greatly expanding the software ecosystem users are able to tap into. It’s a ‘cake and eat’ it type approach for a startup whose initial pitch was about building a different kind of mobile device — i.e. different to the dominant Android platform. But given on the mobile space, app compatibility is a savvy strategy for a mobile underdog. Since passing the $1 million funding mark, Jolla has expanded its tablet Indiegogo campaign to two more countries, with Australia and Canada now also able to pledge after a public vote. The tablet was already available to buyers in the European Union, plus Norway and Switzerland, and the U.S., China, Hong Kong, India and Russia. To celebrate passing the $1 million funding mark Jolla has also temporarily cut the price of its extant mobile device, , by €100 to European buyers purchasing it via its . The discount offer — of €249 for the smartphone — expires on or before next Tuesday. The phone went on sale this time last year, kicking off to buyers in Finland. Jolla’s Tablet, meanwhile, is due to ship to backers around the middle of next year. *NB: Sailfish has not yet been open sourced, although the is based on an open source project and has open source elements |
3 Reasons You Can’t Just Ask Customers What They Want | David Mierke | 2,014 | 11 | 15 | Do you like apples or bananas? Coffee or tea? Pepperoni or cheese pizza? Simple questions result in simple answers which, when researching and developing a product is every product owner’s dream. “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll make it.” Quick. Easy. Simple. But herein lies the problem; product development isn’t normally quick, easy or simple. Asking these types of questions, as tempting as they are to ask, bring about certain dangers that can result in skewed results, missing information, and, potentially, failed products. Listed below are the three primary reasons why asking customers direct questions can be a very dangerous endeavor. The first reason you can’t just ask customers what they want is that they aren’t always attuned to what they really need. Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Typically, it is easier for people to review and comment on something that is placed in front of them rather than asking to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist. This can mean anything from developing a fully functioning prototype to a clickable presentation, or even simple, hand-drawn “screens” to help customers get a sense of the experience. Additionally, it is also difficult for customers to articulate what it is they want or need, especially if it relates to a topic that is not something they often think about. People have a tendency to use what they know, which is why user adoption for certain products may take longer to catch on than others. The second danger in asking customers direct questions is the human desire to develop patterns and habits. Sigmund Freud called this phenomenon “repetition compulsion,” in that humans seek comfort in the familiar as well as a desire to return to an earlier known state of things. What is even more desirable than returning to an earlier state of things is the desire to certain habits. In the book , Charles Duhigg spends much of the book describing various examples of products and adjoining habits while using a simple “Cue –> Routine –> Reward” diagram that illustrates the psychology behind how habits are formed and maintained. These habits are sometimes formed over long periods of time, which makes trying to break or introduce new habits an extremely difficult and delicate process. During our user research phase, we try to avoid asking questions about potentially disrupting a customer’s current habit, instead asking questions that are related. For example, in attempting to understand how a person organizes a party or trip, we may ask them to tell us how they typically go grocery shopping. This way we can begin to understand from a contextual standpoint, whether they are more strictly organized (have a specific list of items written down and go directly for those specific items) or they are more casual and spontaneous (venturing up and down each aisle and choosing items as they go). Rather than asking individuals to “imagine a new world” that would alter the current habits of their lives resulting in potential resistance, we are able to gain a better understanding of their natural tendencies, current mentalities and preferences, which results in more rich and insightful information. The final risk is people’s overwhelming desire to be a part of something, to be well liked, and the need to please others. While this is a slightly easier peril to overcome than the others, it is still important to understand how this behavior can influence individuals and skew results or information. Often during interviews, customers will attempt to answer a question the way they think they should answer the question or provide an answer they think is “correct.” One of the primary causes is the asking of what are called “leading questions.” In other words, questions that are asked in such a way that there are only one or two answers that a person can respond with. Likewise, questions such as, “Do you like coffee or tea?” leaves little room for original thoughts or answers because the question is too rigid and the answers too pre-defined. These types of questions establish a barrier to discovering how people truly feel about a subject, which can be counter-productive and result in unusable information. Interviews are treated as more of a conversation than a survey or interrogation in order to build a rapport with customers so they feel comfortable enough to share the stories and events of their lives. It is through these stories that we uncover an individual’s thought processes, how they react in various situations, and additional insights that point to how they truly feel about certain products, applications and experiences. The dangers mentioned in this post are not to say that “this-or-that” questions are completely useless. In certain situations and settings, such as AB usability testing, these types of questions can be quite valuable and informative. It is during discovery research, when you are trying to understand customers’ needs, desires and pain points regarding a product, that these questions can be detrimental to a project. So when you’re looking to improve an existing product, develop a new experience or enter a new marketplace, remember there are no quick and simple answers when it comes to understanding what customers want or need. |
Managing Talent In A Networked Age, Part 2 | Jeff Markowitz | 2,014 | 11 | 15 | In , my colleague Reid Hoffman said that recognizing that top may someday want to leave can lead to more honest conversations at work that can even help with long-term retention. In this article I will discuss how to foster the relationships between your employees and other people in the industry. When top performers at our more mature Greylock portfolio companies (LinkedIn, for example) spend three years or more building their areas and are ready to move on, we do not see this as a crisis (i.e. “My superstar employee is on the move!”). Instead, we view this restlessness as an opportunity. We ask that employee, “What are you interested in, and how can we help you expand your ?” We then connect this individual with relevant employees from other startups within our portfolio so that she or he can gain exposure and insights from other startup entrepreneurs. We might even help the employee secure an advisory role in another company. Of course, sometimes it does make sense for an employee or exec at one of our companies to move on. Other times, by learning about other companies and networking with peers, the exec realizes that their current situation is best and that perhaps they just need to refine their current tour of duty. Either way, with an open, honest dialogue by all parties involved, everyone can work for maximum alignment between what matters to the company and what’s best for the employee’s career. There’s another benefit to both employee and company when we give highly people at our portfolio companies exposure to other great people in the industry: both sides learn and adapt faster. There’s no better way to discover best practices and important trends than to have execs talk to expert peers at other companies. Companies benefit from their employees’ diverse, global networks–a vast pool of readily accessible “ intelligence”—when trying to solve key business problems. And employees benefit in their long-term career by having stronger connections throughout the industry. Greylock regularly hosts in-person executive peer groups for small cohorts of executives. These informal working groups give executives an opportunity to share, brainstorm and gain unexpected insights from their peers who have parallel roles at different companies. I also leverage the kind of “ intelligence” that Reid describes in his book to advise entrepreneurs on how to hire. By introducing entrepreneurs to employees who are in the same role as the position they are hoping to fill, I get founders to zero in on the attributes they seek in the executive they need. Networking helps entrepreneurs calibrate the set of experiences they want, the type of background they want, and the kind of chemistry they’re looking for. By meeting with similar executives, entrepreneurs can get a sense of what a “great” candidate looks like and use this intelligence as a guide to conduct their own search. The Alliance notes that lifetime employment is over but a lifetime relationship can and should endure. At Greylock, we invest in creating lifetime networks that are great for founders and their employees. By investing a lifetime relationship, we can help these executives as they build throughout their entire careers. A mutually beneficial alliance offers employees powerful, transformative challenges that are in alignment with their personal values and goals — experiences that expand their human horizons as well. We’ve found that the secret to recruiting and retaining the best for our companies is to structure careers as exciting, satisfying tours of duty — and to give employees opportunities for intelligent networking that can transform both their careers and the company at large. |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 11 | 24 | null |
Kevin Rose Plots A Luxury Ecommerce Empire Starting With New App Watchville | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 11 | 15 | “I did not like watches my entire life,” Digg co-founder Kevin Rose tells me. That’s an odd admission for a man who just launched , an that aggregates news from top wristwatch blogs, and offers an atomic clock tool to help you set your timepiece and its moon phases. But Rose explains, “My father passed away and left me with one really nice watch. It was pretty much all he could afford so he spent a lot of time and care on it, a Rolex.” That inspired him to learn more about wristwatches. Yet when the looked for a way to keep up with his new hobby, “I realized in the luxury space, when you look for apps, there’s nothing.” Kevin Rose So Rose pushed his to build something luxury wristwatch enthusiasts would appreciate. It’s a far cry from , a much more traditional Silicon Valley invention that lets you share miniature photos and videos. is “interesting enough for us to build out the next few versions” Rose says with a bit of a sigh before acquiescing that it launched a little early. “I would say on scale of 1 to 10, I’d give it a 7.” That’s fine according to the North game plan, which aims to launch new apps every few months, give them time to sink or swim, and then abandon the failures to concentrate on ones with massive potential. Compared to typical startup fare, Watchville’s market might sound bland, but that’s why there’s such an opportunity. Other app developers never gave it the time of day. For the last year, Rose has travelled to watch events, met bloggers, and established relationships with the top brands. With their guiding hands, he built Watchville, which launched today. If your only experience with and are from Jay-Z lyrics, Rose’s app will school you. pulls in news stories from top watch blogs with cheeky names like Perpetuelle and Haute Time. That includes hands-on reviews, buyer’s guides, and feature posts that will titillate timekeepers, whether they consume through the app’s Reader Mode or view the original articles through Watchville’s internal browser. Collectors can synchronize their watches to the exact time using the app’s Atomic Clock. Little bell sounds count down the last five seconds of each minute so they can listen for just when to punch in the crown. And if their timepieces show the moon phase, they can set that too. If it all sounds wildly esoteric, that’s kind of the point. There’s a small, diehard, but very lucrative community that Watchville wants to appeal to. If it can build a loyal audience, there are plenty of ways to monetize. Watchville doesn’t plan to show ads or create its own content, but “There’s a bunch of things on the table when it comes to commerce or a marketplace”, Rose tells me, trying not to play all his cards right away. When pushed, he explains that traditional marketplaces like eBay aren’t adequately equipped for luxury goods. They need better reputation systems, he hints. Watchville could just be the start. If the template works, Rose says North could spawn luxury apps for “handbag collectors, vintage Air Jordans, comic books. Our strategy long-term is to bundle these under a single brand, or a couple of apps”, the part-time Google Ventures partner forecasts. “It’s a market that no one’s really touching. People are going after things more like Tiiny” Rose laughs. The trend in consumer apps of late is building for a mass audience, in hopes of squeezing a little money out of tens or hundreds of millions of people. But while it’s a more fractured and perhaps less sexy route to create something for just a handful of people to geek out on, apps like Watchville could become serious businesses if each user spends big bucks on their habit. There are a lot fewer ones and zeroes here than Rose is accustomed to, but he still beams “the luxury good space is massive.” |
Our South Park, Ourselves | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 11 | 15 | Last week’s episode of South Park was…very confusing. I’m still not sure if we were all inceptionized the entire time we’ve been watching the going on 18 seasons of the show, or if the ending was part of some weird dream or…really I have no idea what happened there. Spoiler alert – Stan ends up realizing he’s been stuck in virtual reality this whole time and takes off his Oculus Rift headset. The scene cuts to four real life foul-mouthed human boys standing around Stan’s computer. But this isn’t the only episode on tech culture the show has referenced this season. Last week South Park chartered into drones, privacy and “ ” territory. Before that an Uber-like car sharing service made up of handicapped people (Timmy!) called Handicar enters the “Wacky Races” – a global race including all taxi and other ride share services. The town goes nuts, grabbing up all the milk and cereal in the grocery store in preparation. Meanwhile, one of the leads of Handicar informs the public in an eerily familiar way that this race is just one more way corporations try to keep handicapped people from sharing their rides. Timmy races in his Handicar against Lyft, ZipCar, Elon Musk in his new Tesla D, a taxi “driven by an angry Russian” and some total banana villain up to no good named Dick Dastardly. Matthew McConaughey even becomes a Handicar driver and enters the race. The True Detective star pulls up in his Lincoln Continental and cooly states that he, “just likes the feel of it.” It’s clearly a reference to the Lincoln ads that went viral and sparked . It was possibly also alluding to Uber’s branded Black Car service. In “Go Fund Yourself” – – the gang decides to drop out of school and create a startup that gets funded on KickStarter. Cartman goes all-out Tim Cook mode as CEO of the “Washington Redskins,” the name of their startup. Best line in the episode is when Cartman shouts to a conference full of faithful fans, “Fuck you. Those words mean a great deal to us. They help us express as a company how we see things differently. And now our company is thrilled to show you all the latest innovations we’ve come up with. To begin with, we have moved the couch from the left side of the office, to the right side,” he says as he waddles back and forth across the stage, Cartman style. There was even an episode about freemium mobile games that entrap addiction-prone players into overspending. It’s considered so evil that the devil has to take over in order to help Stan break the cycle. There’s a lot going on here this season. Several episodes obviously pay homage to tech culture. It’s an admittance that the tech that comes out of Silicon Valley has infiltrated every corner of pop culture. It’s not clear what the next episode, which airs this Wed, Nov 19, will be about. Comedy Central only shows a black and white holder image and says the show is “TBD.” Show creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker will no doubt continue to satirize our livelihoods in the way they do best – with four crude grade-schoolers residing in the dysfunctional community of South Park, Colorado. |
The T Machine Swipes All The Tinders | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 15 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bboXc5oiVw] Human interaction is hard. Humans are weird animals, covered in hair and full of blood and stuff and getting to know one or two for the purposes of procreation or whatever is really hard. But not if you have ! It’s a dating app that lets you pick people based on appearance. But what if you really can’t tell if a human is pretty? That’s a stumper but finally, there’s a robot that can help you out. The T Machine by Julian Heden is a very powerful system for meeting humans. It consists of a Raspberry Pi connected to a motor that is, in turn, connected to a tablet pen. The robot then selects every face that appears, thereby ensuring maximum potential mate acquisition. It’s not very smart but it gets the job done and it saves wear and tear on your joints. Didn’t like the lady or man you swiped? Who cares. Humans are humans and they’re mostly all alike except for sports players. Now if there was only a robot that could help us make small talk and order from a restaurant menu… entrepreneurs? |
Universities Are Schooling Tech Companies In Video | Eric Burns | 2,014 | 11 | 15 | It’s no secret that the ivory towers of academia don’t get much respect from the tech industry. It’s become conventional wisdom that computer science degrees are out of date before graduates enter the workforce, and that MBA programs forgo developing practical leadership and entrepreneurship skills in favor of theory and rhetoric. Schools are chronically behind when it comes to developing the skills that graduates really need, it seems. Unless, of course, they’re 10 years ahead. Over the past decade, video technology has radically changed the way people communicate. Video conferencing and webcasting have been embraced by business to lower costs and shrink distances. But organizations that have realized the greatest business value from video aren’t businesses at all — they’re universities. In fact, the video solutions that universities have been using for over a decade are just now being adopted by their corporate counterparts. was spun out of academia as a project that began at Carnegie Mellon University over a decade ago. What was originally created as a tool for recording, managing and searching university lectures at scale has evolved into a general-purpose video platform for sharing ideas and information across a range of industries. Now, the innovations from higher education have spawned a fast-growing enterprise marketplace for video solutions, with businesses embracing video as a way to capture, organize and disseminate institutional knowledge. Off-the-shelf software like Camtasia, Brainshark, and KnowledgeVision are enabling companies to record multimedia presentations and on-screen demos, and share them internally from a centralized media library. Some companies have even developed their own home-grown video management solutions. Microsoft famously spent $6 million to build its own video knowledge sharing portal. In spite of its high cost, Microsoft reported that the platform yielded $14 million in cost avoidance and an ROI of 560 percent. One of the primary goals of higher education is to prepare individuals for the talent marketplace, helping students develop work-related skills while growing personally and intellectually. For most of the 2,300-year history of higher education, the Aristotelian lecture has been the standard — until recently, as new technologies have begun to offer models that produce better results. Today, universities are using video to record lectures and “flip” their classrooms for increased interactivity, improved student-teacher communications, scalable distance learning, and dozens of other applications. The effects have been noteworthy. In video-enabled classrooms, test scores are up, failure rates are down, and even traditionally underserved groups like non-native speakers and students with disabilities are better equipped for success. Meanwhile, 55 percent of employers are looking to hire tech talent — and are often struggling to find the right candidates, as unemployment in the technology sector is down to a growth-throttling 3 percent. For many companies, this technical skills gap is a crisis that strikes at their most valuable growth driver and sustainable competitive differentiator: the “tribal knowledge” and subject matter expertise of their employees. Rather than wait out the recruiting wars, businesses should look to the model already proven by universities. Video might just be the best tool organizations have to scale the knowledge of their experts, improve the flow of information, quickly ramp up new employees, and innovate more efficiently with their existing resources. Increasingly, organizations are starting to seize the opportunity. This year, 85 percent of companies expect to create more video content than they did just in 2013. In turn, this means employees are watching more video at work. Cisco reports 76% of executives watch business videos at least once a week, including 40% who view them daily. By 2016, Gartner Research predicts that large companies will stream more than 16 hours of video to the average worker per month, or 45 minutes per day that each employee will spend watching business videos. Driving that influx of enterprise video is a confluence of technology and simple human nature — video is simply more engaging and impactful than text, and people retain more of its information content. Video is able to activate more parts of our minds with visual content that can more easily hold our ever-shortening attention spans. And a new generation of smartphones, webcams, and simple video software has made creating, sharing and accessing video easier than ever. That might all sound cutting edge, but the truth is that it’s not. Universities have already been charting the course for video-based knowledge sharing for more than a decade. Today’s schools are veritable video production powerhouses: the University of Essex in the U.K., for example, produced 80,000 hours of video last school year. In the U.S., the University of Arizona produces 3,000 hours every week. The largest and most advanced corporations, on the other hand, struggle to produce even a thousand hours of high-value content each year. This is a missed opportunity. Colleges and universities aren’t just teaching businesses about the value of technology, they’re leading by example. At the core of their lesson is an essential technology: the video content management system. With it, universities are able to use low-cost computers and anything from high-end cameras to consumer webcams to record every lecture in every classroom across campus. Some go beyond recording, broadcasting live courses to remote learners around the world. Students are able to view these lectures on any device and even search inside the recordings for any word that was spoken or shown on-screen, turning video lectures into searchable reference material that helps them better prepare for exams. All of this comes at a fraction of the cost that corporations traditionally paid for specialized AV services and hardware. Now, as businesses begin to follow higher education’s lead, they find themselves using the video content management system for many of the same applications as universities. The names may be different, but the use cases are the same: Early enterprise adopters can reap real rewards. After designing its own e-learning program and moving half of its training courses to an online format, IBM saved $579 million in just two years. Siemens PLM Software slashed event production costs and time by using commodity hardware and video software to capture their employee conferences. Technology firms experiencing explosive growth are speeding new employee ramp-up through video-based onboarding, reducing training costs and time to productivity. And C-suite executives like Stanley Young, former CEO of NYSE Technologies, have begun to transform internal corporate communications from multi-page email updates to more engaging “micro-videos” that can capture and share instantly from any device. Knowledge workers at technology companies are lagging behind academia when it comes to using video, but that won’t be the case for long. Specialized AV hardware is giving way to the video-enabled laptops, tablets and smartphones that we all carry around. The software to capture, live stream, and search video is becoming as easy to use and ubiquitous as email or Skype. And each new graduating class is adding millions of new employees to the workforce who are more than comfortable using video — they expect to use it as a daily communication tool. For businesses looking to get ahead, then, taking the occasional lesson from the ivory tower may not be such a bad bet after all. |
The Samsung Gear S Is A Smartphone On Your Wrist | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 15 | Announced , the Samsung Gear S is the South Korean electronics company’s sixth attempt at making a smartwatch. It’s got the specs of a mid-range phone from a few years back and runs Tizen, Samsung’s own operating system. The intended appeal of the Gear S is that it can be used independently from the rest of your devices. Along with Bluetooth (standard on Android Wear devices and fitness trackers), Samsung’s newest watch also has radios for Wi-Fi, as well as 2G and 3G cellular connectivity. If you get a SIM card through a cell carrier (and Samsung is pushing this on all major US carriers), you can pair the Gear S to a set of wireless headphones and get a playlist for your jog from Samsung’s Milk streaming music service, no phone required. You’ll also be able to navigate using the built in maps application, as well as track your steps and check your heart rate when you pause for traffic when crossing the street. The Gear S is powered by , the operating system that would have run on the ill-fated and will be on Samsung’s smart TV’s next year. As is the case with most general-purpose computing devices not powered by Google’s Android or iOS, there aren’t many apps available for the Gear S at launch. Samsung gave one of these to a lot of developers at its conference this week, so hopefully that situation will change some in the months to come. Before dropping ~$400 on the device (as with smartphones, the price will vary depending on whether you want to sign a contract or pay in installments) and committing to spending $10 a month for data, go to a carrier or Best Buy and try the Gear S on. It’s huge. I switched from wearing a every day to wearing the Gear S, and the difference seemed ridiculous. The watch section of the Gear S is about twice as long as the Peak, in order to accommodate the curved 2-inch screen. It looks like a small, warped Galaxy S. The screen is pretty, though I have to say that I do not like most the default watch face, which looks like mechanical watch with notification indicators “behind” the hands. I much prefer the ones that show the time, steps, and notifications in straight numeric format. Unfortunately, the menu for switching between faces doesn’t let you preview, so you have to dig through the menu again and again while you find the one you like. Also odd: the inclusion of a very narrow QWERTY keyboard in the messaging app. Nobody will find this keyboard convenient. You have to try very hard to touch the right letters and often miss, with the autocorrect doing an “OK” job of preventing absolute frustration. When possible, you’re going to want to just use voice controls. Despite having all the radios you could ask for (with reasonable expectations for battery life) and a decent amount of storage, the Gear S is still tied to your phone — which has to be a Samsung. You need the phone to activate the watch, to get more apps, and to get a more detailed view of things like your health data. I’ve been using a friend’s old Galaxy S3 with the Gear S, so I’m glad to see that Samsung didn’t exclusively tie it to its current flagship devices. The Gear S is best for those who have a big phone like the Galaxy Note 4 and don’t want to reach into their bag or shimmy it out of their pocket all the time. If you’ve got a smaller phone, the fact that the Gear S do things independently doesn’t provide enough of a marginal convenience improvement to feel worth the investment in my day-to-day use. That could very well be different if your job doesn’t require you to be strapped to a computer and/or phone all day anyway. |
Adding The Easy Button To Conference Calls | Isabella Chiu | 2,014 | 11 | 15 | We’ve all experienced the painful execution of conference calls with the uncomfortable dialing of codes, never-ending instructions and announcements when you join. There are two approaches to modern conference calling: online conference calls or “modern” offline calls. Inside high-tech companies, internal calls are usually conducted by some sort of video conferencing tool like Google Hangouts or Skype. However, these same companies revert to using 20-year-old conference lines when dealing with customers and partners. Despite what we may want to believe, Internet connections can still be unreliable and set-up complicated; rather than wasting time trying to help clients through it, it’s more efficient just to use technology they already know. Finally, companies are starting to apply new technology to fix the plain old conference call. After all, the old method has more than its fair share of problems: fumbling for PINs, dropping participants when the host’s cell phone loses signal, and endless voice prompts so novices know to announce themselves. Modern entrants include , which seems to cover the “outside-the-company case.” Its conference lines dispense with PINs entirely – clients just call and they are instantly in the right phone room. Of course, the call doesn’t start until the host shows up, but HipDial cleverly uses the host’s caller ID to know when to start the call. Personal lines allow other features, such as automated text messages, to inform the host when guests arrive on the conference line before the host arrives. All of the “complicated” features of old conference lines are available directly to the host on HipDial’s web site – recording, seeing who enters and leaves the call in real time, etc. Busy executives, sales, consultants, or anyone who has a lot of calls outside the company will appreciate never having to worry about the pain of old conference lines. For those who have regularly scheduled calls, is another such startup focusing on integrating the easy button to conference calls. MobileDay is an Android and iOS app that syncs with a user’s mobile calendar and alerts them to press a button when it is time to call into a conference call. The app then uses programmable calling rules to route the call and dials all pin codes and # keys for the user to connect participants with ease. The programmable rules can cut call expenses dramatically if your company has varied calling plans based on toll-free, long distance and local calling. If you regularly assemble calls with people who don’t mind adding a new app, allows users with profiles to connect to people all over the world by using a website or mobile app. Essentially, utilizing the app or web link connects everyone without pins through data connections. However, if a non-profiled user wants to dial in with voice only, they can still do so by going through the dialing and pin hassles. Speek packs in some useful web features of screen and file sharing, in-conference chat and recording, along with local dial-in numbers for over 20 countries. While none of these solutions meet every user complaint with a 100 percent solution, each one makes it far easier for a particular group of users. Until everybody can instantly do Google Hangouts or Skype, the biggest teleconference needs today are simplicity and reliability. Tackling these problems first can help catapult a startup to being a conference call user’s easy button solution. |
Gillmor Gang: Silent Noise | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 11 | 15 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, November 14, 2014.
Topics include: Pono, Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Twitter Investor Day, @scobleizer’s Top Two Tips to Improve Facebook, Notification News, Amazon Echo. Time passes slowly up here in the mountains when you’re lost in a dream. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @Kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Can This Connected Toy Inspire The Next Generation Of Makers? | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 15 | Don’t doubt the commitment of MIT graduate and co-founder Krissa Watry. She used to work for the U.S. Airforce as a chief engineer designing and building aerospace hardware and helping launch satellites. But working on kit destined for space was a just stepping stone on the road to her real dream of becoming an entrepreneur. “Going to space is cool but I really feel like developing a consumer product that can change people’s lives — that’s what tugs at my heartstrings and gets me up everyday,” she says. “Opening Dynepic was really my lifelong dream. Developing consumer products as well.” In 2011 Watry quit working in the aerospace industry to set up her product design company. The initial focus for DynePic was fitness products, but it’s now spun off that business (as Dynepic Sports) and Watry and her co-founder have shifted fully to “hard charge” at connected toys. “I really think kids have an exciting future and I want to help give them all those enablers,” says Watry. “Toys to me were one of my big enablers for why I got into engineering. Probably unlike a lot of females I had a lot of different gender neutral, robotic style toys and it did really help influence what I liked.” Dynepic’s mission now is to build what Watry dubs the Internet of Toys (or IoToys). Aka an open platform allowing toys and various digital cloud services to be linked together via the power of open APIs. The emphasis for Dynepic and its IoToys grand plan is squarely on educational play — enabling learning of technology and engineering type skills through kids using physical toys linked to a tablet-based programming interface that lets them configure their function, and even pull content down from the web to extent their play. “I’ve been an early adopter of a lot of connected, Internet of Things technologies like Ninja Blocks and Smart Things. What always got me was this stuff existed but nobody had really embraced it,” says Watry. “Kids are really the early adopters of technology. They’ve less questioning and they’re more [curious]. And so we said what if we could teach through that adoption?” Watry’s co-founder has a background in early years education. The pair were able to secure a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $200,000 to work on their idea, back in 2012, as well as taking in $50,000 in match funding from the South Carolina Research Association. To get its IoToys vision going, Dynepic has been developing its own connected toy, called the DynePod, which it’s launching today on — looking to raise a further $30,000 in crowdfunds to turn the prototype into a connected toy that kids can get their hands on and use to build their own apps. The funds are needed to cover production costs, child safety testing and to pass muster with the FCC, as well as for finalizing its cloud APIs, says Watry. DynePod’s twist in being both a toy and a STEM skills focused learning tool is not unique. Indeed, we’ve seen an influx of kid-friendly coding initiatives in recent times, such as the recent , or the to name just two. Helping kids learn tech through playing with gadgets is already a well-ploughed furrow but then the mission of upskilling and inspiring the next generation of coders and engineers is a huge one. “There are a lot of people in this space,” concedes Watry when I point to others playing here. “A lot of people are more focusing on the coding itself, so Wonder Workshop, previously Play-i… Tinderbots, and even LittleBits. What we’re trying to do that’s a little bit different is one the DynePod itself is a self contained device… [But we’re also] working to build this whole open platform that’s going to allow toys to safely connect wirelessly to each other, and then also drive down this cloud content — so we’d be linked to not only other toys but cloud services, and so by doing that we can drive down relevant information that is of interest to the child and the parents for their child’s learning.” So what exactly is the DynePod? It’s a small Bluetooth connected box with an LED display on the top and a range of sensors inside so it can detect things like movement and the proximity of other DynePods. Feedback can be provided to the user by displaying a particular graphic on the screen, or vibrating, or buzzing. The DynePod can be combined with a slap band to make a kids’ wearable, or attached to other objects or toys — including Lego, via a clip with a dedicated Lego attachment. It uses includes Digital’s BLE chip which hosts the Arduino bootloader — so the DynePod is also Arduino programmable, offering additional tech learning potential. The device supports four basic modes of use, according to Watry: a standalone mode, so using the pod plus a tablet to create custom applications; or linked to other DynePods to communicate and play with other owners of DynePods; or it can be used as a controller for playing tablet games via the DynePod app; or there’s what she calls a fully connected play mode, which leverages open APIs to link the DynePod to all sorts of other cloud services. The last part is obviously mostly vision at this stage in the DynePod’s development. “It’s really just the first of many, many toys that we hope to be connected. Many of our toys, and many of other people’s toys. The goal is to try and create this open environment to connect toys and help drive smart content. That’s really where we would come in — as being a gatekeeper to make sure the play remains safe for our kids. And all those hooks are in there for parents. But there’s a lot of people developing really cool learning algorithms and stuff and our goal is not to do it all but to be an instrument to connect those cloud services and help them expand the play for kids,” says Watry. “Right now the number one toy for kids is tablets and a lot of parents complain that their kids are getting stuck behind it. A lot of that is because there’s a vast visual playground there that they can control. And so if we can give them more control of their three dimensional place we believe we can not only get them exploring their world again but using technology which they need to know in order to survive in the workforce that they’re going to be part of,” she adds. The DynePod is programmed using Dynepic’s If/then simplified language running on a tablet (initially it’s iPad only). This is designed to be far simpler than other graphical programming languages for kids, such as MIT’s Scratch, says Watry. “Our goal was this: to really try and hit the 95 per cent of kids that maybe aren’t completely drawn into the technical background. Get them into it so that it’s easy enough for all kids, and then easy enough for the parents, to be able to interface with it,” she says. “Our first creation for that language we’ve tested in the classroom and then out in public settings over a year ago and just constantly refining the interface to work as easily as it can, and be as intuitive as it can.” Using this If/then tablet interface a child could, for instance, build a program to make their DynePod sound an audible buzzer when it detects movement to protect their candy jar from their siblings. Or — in future, when other services are linked up to the platform — connect their DynePod to a digital weather service to display a visual notification if it’s going to rain tomorrow. While the original idea for the IoToys came to Watry back in 2011 she notes that the technology available to power it has changed a lot since then, with connectivity now focused on the Bluetooth Low Energy flavor instead of Zigbee, for instance, and lots of other developments allowing the DynePod to take shape. “The technology obviously greatly changed from when we looked at it in 2011. A lot of things were on Zigbee. And then there’s the mobile pairing with Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE coming out with the power consumption benefits and the size coming down, and then the Arduino operating system being hosted right on the BLE chip. It’s big enablers for us to package this up into a tight package,” she adds. If it achieves its funding target Dynepic is aiming to ship the first DynePods to backers next June. The earlybird Kickstarter price for the DynePod is $79 which also includes a universal mounting clip, a silicon slap bracelet, USB charger, and a 3D printable file to print additional accessories for the DynePod. |
Where I Went Wrong, Again | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 11 | 15 | Dear readers: can you believe I’ve been writing this weekly column for four years now? Me neither. But I have, and it’s time for my annual self-flagellation piece, in which I iterate over my opinions and predictions of the previous year, trumpet my triumphs, and confess all the things I got completely wrong. This year, though, my two biggest predictions remain stuck in no-man’s-land. The first is that technology is leading us into an in which a minority of people have extremely productive and lucrative jobs, while a majority have outside of occasional piecework . What’s more, despite , in the long run … but in the medium term, until we move to a and maybe even a , the transition will be wrenching and painful. Now, I could be wrong about all of this. It’s possible that technology will create good new jobs, available to anyone, as fast or faster than it destroys bad old ones. It’s even possible (though I think extremely unlikely) that we’re not moving into an Extremistan world after all. And it’s hard to tease out the effects of technology from the effects of outsourcing or economic cycles. All that said, I’m pretty confident that software will soon begin to eat away at the fundamental economic assumptions of our society. My other big call is that BitTorrent and Bitcoin are the vanguard of a slow transition to a much more decentralized Internet. Right now, the five companies that Bruce Sterling calls “the Stacks” — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft — control most of the online landscape. This is bad. We’re , and we . Bitcoin’s blockchain could help , which is why I’m about . I’ve also been writing about the tech industry bleeding into, and infecting, the larger culture around us. I argued that has made the language used by old media seem staid, boring, and untrustworthy. I observed that the , and suggested that this is infectious. And I claimed that technology has and turned us all into weirdos. Pretty happy to stand by all that. OK, let’s talk about a couple of bad calls. I suggested that , but the sad truth is that, while more and more such services exist (Oyster, Kindle Unlimited, etc.) as far as I can tell they’re not really getting traction. Books are not like songs, and it seems that one of the ways they’re different is that people like to own their books, not stream them. I also –twice!–that by June 2017, most Africans would have smartphones: the latest data indicates that’s looking excessively ambitious. There’s still time to turn the growth trend upwards, but right now it seems like 2019 is more likely. Not writing this off yet, though. On the other hand, I wrote about the shoddy state of online security, and even specifically called out the OpenSSL library that gave us the Heartbleed bug, Heartbleed erupted into the world. I’m pretty pleased about that one. I’ve also been writing about the abuses of technology, and the tech industry, by the powers that be: from to to to the to . Despite , though, I don’t think the USA will ever award Edward Snowden a medal of freedom, so that doesn’t count as a prediction. Alas. Let me finally just highlight my piece “ .” By day I write apps, sites, and services for startups, and this was a quick precis of things I’ve learned the hard way. I predict that many, many startup founders will go onto make those same mistakes again this year. Please don’t be one of them. Please go forth and make mistakes, instead. They’re way more fun. We won’t know for some time yet whether my two biggest predictions–a tech-driven transition to , and the decentralization of the Internet–were brilliantly prescient or horribly wrong … but hopefully we’ll have a significantly better idea come next November. In the interim, I promise to make more and bolder predictions. See all y’all next year! |
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